Not long after I fell asleep, I was woken up by a roar outside the door of the sleeper compartment. It turned out that there was someone quarreling outside the door.
The train ticket Wanli bought was for a soft sleeper box. There were four beds in the box, which looked very much like the bunk beds in our dormitory.
Chujiu and I, who have only ever sat on hard seats, found that trains can be so comfortable.
After asking about the Wanli fare, Chujiu shook his head and muttered that hard seats were still more cost-effective. After all, they all arrived at the finish line at the same time. Young people should exercise more.
I was about to close my eyes and go back to sleep when Chujiu called me softly and asked me to listen carefully to the quarrel outside. The content was very exciting.
I listened for a while, it was just a normal quarrel between a man and a woman. Chujiu rolled his eyes at me and said that he didn’t have the spirit of gossip at all. If Zhang Feng was here, he would definitely be happy.
"The two people outside the door were not husband and wife. The woman sneaked out to have a private meeting with others and had a dispute about where to go first after arriving at the destination. The woman should be young and beautiful, otherwise she would not dare to be so messy. The man sounded five
About ten years old, rich."
Wan Li, who was snoring just a second ago, suddenly made a sound, which really startled me.
"Is this the king of soldiers in the secret service company? Isn't it too scary?"
Chujiu stared at Wanli with his eyes wide open, feeling equally incredible.
"Who taught you Chinese? What is a special agent company? It sounds so ugly, why not call it a reconnaissance company? Your brother said before that you are good at everything except English."
Wan Li corrected Chujiu angrily, and Chujiu rolled his eyes, knowing that he was very good at Chinese.
Wan Li, who was no longer sleepy, simply started chatting with Chu Jiu on the topic of Chinese.
"As for the quarrel outside the door just now, if you can describe it in Lu Xun's style, I will believe you."
"Boring! Keep your voice down, don't disturb me when I sleep."
I turned over and faced the wall. As soon as I covered my head with the quilt, I heard Chujiu's deep voice.
"I'm probably green,
I can't sleep anyway.
I sat up and lit a cigarette,
There is no reason for this sadness.
Looking sadly at the two children on the bedside,
One is not mine,
The other one is probably not mine either."
As soon as Chujiu finished speaking, Wan Li started laughing uncontrollably, causing the person in the next box to slap him hard on the partition wall.
The two of them immediately covered their mouths, not daring to make any more noise.
"Chujiu, you are amazing! If I tell Mr. Xu back home, Mr. Xu will definitely be amused by you for a long time."
At this time, I no longer felt sleepy at all. I lost half of my sleepiness due to the literary laughter on the ninth day of the Lunar New Year, and the remaining sleepiness was completely taken away by a heavy punch from the next door box.
"Brother Wanli, you'd better show me the mission information. I can't sleep at all now." I turned over and turned on the reading light on the bedside.
"Uh, are you sure you want to watch it? Aren't you afraid that you won't be able to sleep?"
In fact, after getting acquainted with each other, Wan Li is completely the same person as before. He is no longer cold and cold. Instead, he is very talkative and even a little cute.
After confirming with me many times, Wan Li finally threw the mission information and the document bag to me.
The document bag contains a dozen thick pieces of letter paper and several photos.
When I saw the top photo, my heart suddenly skipped a beat, and my breathing started to become heavier.
The photo showed a whole yak skeleton. Apart from the skeleton and hair, there were no other organs in the photo. I could even clearly see a huge blowfly lying in the eye socket of the skull.
I handed the photo to Chujiu. Chujiu just glanced at it and frowned, as if he thought of something bad.
After just one glance at the second photo, I couldn't hold back my stomach and made a sound of retching.
The photo shows a human corpse, just like the yak in the previous photo. Apart from the outer clothes, only the skeleton remains.
The skeleton exposed outside the clothes was covered with flies. I couldn't guess how many flies there were at the scene. When the forensic doctor took photos, the skull was completely covered.
When Chujiu got this photo and looked at it, he suppressed his inner discomfort and frowned even deeper.
"You don't need to look at the photos. The rest of them are in the same situation. What I saw was a black and white fax. The situation is not much better than yours. I didn't expect that I would be in such a bad condition after walking out of the battlefield in a hail of bullets."
Wanli suggested that I skip the photos and go straight to the case.
The corpse itself did not scare me. When I was very young, I followed my grandfather and witnessed several grave removals and coffin openings, and I became immune to corpses and no longer feared them.
What makes me feel frightened and uneasy in my heart is that there is a line of small words at the bottom of the photo, which says the time of the crime, which is less than half a month from now.
In half a month, it is impossible for the body to decompose until only the skeleton is left.
I once followed my grandfather to help the head of the family in the next village move his ancestral grave. After opening the coffin, the corpse of my ancestor who had died more than 40 years ago was still intact, with only the epidermis shriveled due to dehydration.
My first reaction was that the victim was attacked by a wild animal, but I quickly rejected this inference. The well-preserved skeleton is the basis. If it was a wild animal, there would definitely be traces of gnawing teeth.
Then I thought about voodoo. According to what Grandma Jian Shu told me later, if I had not received treatment in time, most of the internal organs would have been eaten by the voodoo worms in my stomach.
I once again deny the conclusion of removing the poison. Based on the knowledge of the poison I learned from Grandma Jian Shu and Xiao Yu in the previous month.
The poisonous insects I was infected with at that time are among the most vicious today. I am afraid that there are not many of these poisonous insects left today, not to mention that these poisonous insects will not eat human skin.
As for homicide, that is not certain. Ordinary homicide cases will certainly not alert the department, and all the evidence does not point to homicide.
I started to look through the comprehensive files of the case. The crime occurred in a barren mountain far away from the village. The four victims were all forest rangers. The person who reported the crime was a geological exploration team. They needed to find a forest ranger to lead the way to the forest farm.
In the accommodation area, I saw such a scene.
After the county police inspected the scene on the ninth day of the lunar month, they urgently reported it to the city. After the city sent criminal police and forensic doctors to conduct an investigation, it was classified as an unsolved case on the surface, but in fact it was classified as a special case and transferred to the relevant departments of the provincial public security department.
In the end, the case was reported to the department. Mr. Xu studied the faxed information all night, and initially determined that the threat to society was level A, and then sent Wan Li to contact me and Chujiu for on-site investigation.
Wan Li told us that for cases of this level, he did not need to go there in previous years. If his uncle is still in Sichuan, he can just communicate it to his uncle through special channels.
"What? You mean that Guo Guo and I don't have the guts to do it? That's why you bother to take us there? Get off the car and we'll fight!"
Chujiu was just about to take the opportunity to pounce on Wan Li, but Wan Li saw through it and gave Chujiu a fierce look, saying that if he wanted to fight in a one-on-one battle, he would wait until the business was over.
"How did you know the whereabouts of grandpa and uncle?"
I raised my finger and pointed at the car next door. Chujiu thought I wanted to slap him on the forehead again, so he swerved to the side and hit the partition board, causing the neighbor to slap the wall fiercely again. Chujiu calmed down in embarrassment.
"Master Qin and the others arrived in the capital as their first stop. They talked with Mr. Xu until midnight and then left. As for what they talked about, I don't know."
Wan Li's explanation for coming to Sichuan for a mission must have been arranged by Mr. Xu for his own purposes. You can just carry it out yourself without thinking too much.
When Wan Li said this, I happened to see the color change in his face, and I quickly understood the meaning of Mr. Xu sending him to Sichuan. Mr. Xu had indeed thought far enough.
"Brother Wanli, what level does the A-level you just mentioned belong to?"
Chujiu changed his playful attitude before and seriously asked for information about Wanli's case.
For special cases, the department first determines the degree of harm to society.
No level is the smallest, meaning it will have almost no harmful impact on society.
Secondly, a, small areas will have dangerous effects.
The highest level is Five-A. Wan Li has never participated in a mission of this level. According to the department's confidential documents he knows, the information about the ancient Miao Village is classified as Five-A.
Most of the common cases are A-level or double-A level. The mission when Wan Li first entered the department, the battle between two companies at the border, was only a three-a-level mission.
According to Wan Li's deduction, the threat of Four-A is at least about the same as that of small mushroom bombs.
As for the five-a level, there may be other qualitative conditions. Wan Li doesn't think that a village in a deep mountain and old forest can be more harmful than a mushroom bomb.
"It turns out that ghost place is so scary, Guo Guo, we must be careful about that place in the future, especially the long-haired men. I have good eyesight, so I will first look to see if there are any long-haired men when I go out."
Although Chujiu said this, there was no trace of worry about the ancient Miao village in his expression. He took the information I had read and began to read it seriously.
The end of the comprehensive case file is the handling of the scene and the explanation to society.
The remains of the four corpses and the bones of the yak were dug on the spot, disinfected and burned.
The family members of the deceased said they were infected with the plague. In order to prevent the re-infection of the disease, the bones could not be brought back and the funeral arrangements were kept as simple as possible. The township committee applied for welfare benefits from the Women's Federation and took care of orphans and widows.
As for the evidence column, there is one word written: "None".
"The purpose of the department sending us there is to once again determine whether there are still potential dangers, that is, to conduct a more detailed investigation. This is a relatively easy task."
Wan Li tried his best to supplement the results of our analysis. It wasn't until he finished reading the last page of the case summary that he stared at us and asked if he had any thoughts.
I shook my head and said that this was beyond my capabilities.
Chujiu lowered his head and stared at the document bag for a long time, then closed his eyes and frowned deeper and deeper.
"Chujiu, what did you think of?"
Seeing Chujiu's strange behavior, Wan Li guessed that Chujiu might have thought of some important clues, and nervously asked Chujiu.
"Guo Guo, I can think of only one possibility for eating and meeting."
Chujiu didn't answer Wan Li directly, raised his head and stared at me, but asked me to think about it carefully, on the train back to the village years ago.
"Hungry ghost?"
I remembered that on the train, Chujiu told me about the realm of hungry ghosts that was not among the six realms. His belly was as big as a basin and his throat was as thin as a pinhole. He could not eat food for many years and would pounce on food when he saw it.