Wang Jue nudged my arm, and only then did I realize I had drifted off into thought. Officer Wu stared at us with a grave expression. "Yesterday, a female body was pulled from the Yuncheng River. We still haven't identified her. Would you two like to come take a look?"

Identifying a body? I refused to believe anything had happened to my older sister. We were connected by blood; if anything happened to her, I would surely feel it. When we were kids, every time I got into trouble and hurt myself, she would have a premonition and show up right away. Now, with absolutely no warning, I wouldn't believe for a second that some unidentified corpse dredged from a river could have any connection to her.

I said I didn't want to go, but Wang Jue interjected, urging me, "Just come and see. It might put your mind at ease; at least we’ll know she’s still alive and well."

I hesitated for a long time, but couldn't resist his persuasion, and finally decided I would go.

The body was being held at the funeral home. We agreed to meet at the main entrance at 9:00 the next morning.

Considering I was alone at home, Wang Jue and I went back to his place. I expected a night without sleep, but somehow I drifted off. These past few days had been exhausting.

The next morning, Wang Jue was the one who woke me. We quickly dressed, grabbed some breakfast, and headed to the funeral home.

It was my first time at a funeral home. The courtyard was bursting with flowers and offered an expansive view. If it weren't for the cloying, greasy scent hanging in the air, one might easily mistake it for some kind of landscaped villa. Apparently, that odor is unique to the process of cremation, often causing nausea and vomiting in those who smell it.

Officer Wu was already waiting for us at the main gate. After we met up, the three of us proceeded directly toward the morgue.

I’d heard old stories that funeral homes harbor the thickest yin energy. Sure enough, take a hallway for instance: in any other building, walking down it might feel normal, but here it often seemed exceptionally dark, empty, and interminably long, as if it connected two different spaces, and walking through it transported you to another world.

We turned corners, went downstairs, traversed the corridor, passed door after door, and finally stopped before a particular room. Officer Wu pushed the door open without hesitation, and Wang Jue and I filed in behind him.

Inside, a row of refrigerated cabinets lined the base of the walls, each about two meters deep and sixty centimeters wide and long. Each cabinet resembled a drawer, complete with a handle at the opening end. Officer Wu approached one, gripped the handle, and pulled the drawer out, revealing a female corpse.

It wasn't the first time I had seen a dead body, but a wave of intense nausea still washed over me. The body was horribly decomposed. Half the facial skin had peeled away, the lips were ripped open, exposing the teeth, and both arms were covered in deep wounds—near the wrists, one could even see the bare white bone. The feet were hidden inside the cabinet, unseen for now. However, one could vaguely make out that most of the muscle tissue near the root of the thighs had been completely stripped away. With such a highly decomposed and mutilated body, let alone identifying it, even determining the cause of death would likely be incredibly difficult!

Wang Jue stood quietly to the side, watching, not saying a word.

I truly couldn't bear to look anymore and asked Officer Wu to close the drawer. But he insisted that I examine it more closely.

Resigned, I stepped forward, forced myself to peer into the freezer, pretending to identify the body, ready to turn away quickly.

Just at the instant I was about to pull back, my wrist was suddenly seized by an ice-cold hand. I looked back to see that the hand belonged to the female corpse herself. Lying supine in the cabinet, she was grinning terrifyingly and sinisterly at me with only half a mouth intact.