As Mu Mian passed by Fang Rui's office, she noticed his light was still on.
He was indeed working overtime, as expected.
Mu Mian knocked on the door and then walked in.
"This is for you!" Mu Mian handed him the lunchbox.
Fang Rui was somewhat surprised. He hadn't expected Mu Mian to bring him food.
"Thank you."
Fang Rui opened the lunchbox to find a seafood rice dish, generously filled with shrimp and carrots.
"Dr. Mu, what about me? I'm sitting right here, and you don't even say hello?" Zhang looked at Mu Mian with a hurt expression.
He noticed that Mu Mian had completely different attitudes towards him and Fang Rui.
"Officer Zhang, good evening!"
"Mu Mian, you've wounded me. We're such close friends, yet when you bring food, you only bring it for the boss and not for me. Tsk tsk, you're not being a good friend at all!"
Mu Mian was already accustomed to Zhang's exaggerated way of speaking. She explained, "Because you've already eaten!"
Unable to refute! Zhang had just returned from fieldwork and had already eaten a hearty meal outside.
"But I could eat another portion!"
"You're allergic to seafood. Even if I had brought you seafood rice, you couldn't eat it."
Zhang felt a bit touched that Mu Mian remembered his seafood allergy.
But still—
"So that restaurant doesn't have any other dishes? They only serve seafood rice?"
"Of course not. But if you don't eat seafood, I wouldn't be able to pick out the shrimp and carrots I don't like and put them in the lunchbox."
"Haha, that's so like you!" Zhang immediately felt better.
Fang Rui was speechless. So Mu Mian had put all the food she didn't like into his bowl? No wonder it was so full!
He had felt touched for nothing!
While listening to Zhang's gossip, Mu Mian kept sneaking glances at Fang Rui eating.
Her actions were so obvious that Zhang first gaped in surprise for a moment, then quietly asked Mu Mian, "Dr. Mu, have you finally realized how handsome our boss is?"
"..."
Fang Rui closed the lunchbox and said to Mu Mian, "Let's go!"
"Where to?"
"Didn't you want me to help you?"
Mu Mian was a bit surprised but nodded, "Yes, I need a brave assistant right now!"
"Assistant? I can do that too! Dr. Mu, why didn't you ask me for help? I'm free right now!"
Fang Rui and Mu Mian both looked at Zhang. Fang Rui said helplessly, "Aren't you afraid of having nightmares tonight?"
Zhang watched their retreating figures, feeling that something was off. Something flashed through his mind, but regrettably, it passed too quickly for him to grasp.
Mu Mian and Fang Rui placed the body parts one by one on the autopsy table. The upper half was mostly reassembled, but the lower half was more severely fragmented, with many parts missing.
Fang Rui noticed that Mu Mian was indeed skilled at puzzles. She could tell where many small body fragments should be placed with just a glance.
Mu Mian frowned as she looked at the body, "It's strange, this body is too easy to reassemble!"
"Is it easy? I've been looking for a while and still don't know where this piece should go," Fang Rui said, holding a small piece of flesh. He suppressed his nausea and handed it to Mu Mian.
"I once reconstructed a body that had been run over by a train. That time, I spent a very long time on it, a full five hours."
"You've been working on this for quite a while too. Look, it's already past 2 AM. That's about five hours as well."
Mu Mian glanced at Fang Rui's watch, realizing it had indeed been a long time. She was a bit surprised, "Has my perception of time gone wrong? I thought it hadn't been that long. Well, let's go home and sleep for now, and continue tomorrow!"
"First, tell me what's different about this body?"
"This body seems like a ceramic sculpture that fell to the ground and shattered into this state."
"Isn't it normal for a body to be blown apart by an explosion?"
"Explosion injuries are mainly caused by shock waves, high temperatures, or explosive projectiles. From what we can see of this body, the most obvious injury pattern is blast injury.
The explosion's shock wave would create multiple blast and stretching forces that would tear the body apart.
Because the force is uneven, the severed ends should be very irregular, and there should be a large amount of soft tissue separation. But the severed ends of this body are very neat. Even the victim's clothing is strange; it doesn't look like it was torn by impact force, but more like it shattered.
Fearing Fang Rui might not understand, Mu Mian gave another example: "This body should have been torn apart like a piece of cloth, but instead, it shattered like a piece of glass."
"You suspect the body's fragmentation wasn't caused by the explosion?"
"No, it should have been caused by the explosion. It's just that this body gives me the feeling that at the time of the explosion, it was in a very brittle state."
"How can a body be brittle?"
"I've never encountered this situation before. I need to research it further."
At this moment, Mu Mian noticed that the victim's left hand was tightly clenched, seemingly hiding something inside.
"There's a piece of paper in the victim's hand."
Mu Mian had to use considerable force to extract a small piece of paper from the hand. The paper was very small, about the size of a thumb, with its edges burned away.
On the paper was written:
Unrecorded 18:9
The text was handwritten in black ink, with very neat handwriting.
"Is this a message the victim left for us? It looks like some kind of code."
Fang Rui looked at it for a while, unable to understand the information on the note. He put the paper into an evidence bag: "What was the victim trying to tell us?"
Mu Mian corrected him: "It could also be something the killer left for us. This seems to be a page number and chapter from a book. However, it doesn't seem that such a book exists."
Fang Rui took off his gloves and searched for this string of text on his phone, but found no results. There was also no book called "Unrecorded."
"There's another strange thing. We haven't found the victim's genitals at the crime scene yet. According to the direction of the shock wave's force, it should have appeared on the lawn, but we haven't found it."
Fang Rui remembered Ye Zeming's complicated romantic relationships and couldn't help but form a hypothesis: "Could this be a crime of passion?"
"A crime of passion?"
Mu Mian suddenly remembered something. She found the severed finger and handed it to Fang Rui to look at.
"The victim was wearing a ring with a special shape. This shape looks very much like a Möbius strip, which could symbolize eternal time. Could this be a couple's ring?"
Fang Rui took off the ring and found two letters engraved on the inside:
M&L
M stands for Ye Zeming, but who does L represent?
