The nights in the jungle can be beautiful and moving, or full of hidden dangers.
Jian Jing occupied the lazy person's sofa, her bare feet resting on the back of the dog - taking advantage of someone when they need it most. She yawned as she watched Plague of the Pythons.
Kang Mu Cheng sat next to her, replying to emails while watching the movie with her.
"Go back if you're sleepy. I'll be fine here." Kang Mu Cheng knew very well that she was worried something would happen, which was why she insisted on staying with him.
But the Paris incident had happened a long time ago. How often did a person experience similar incidents in their lifetime? He didn't think anything unusual would happen.
Although they had mostly been on the boat today, they had also done some walking. His mother was already too tired and had gone to bed. It would be too tiring for Jian Jing to wait until the others got back.
Kang Mu Cheng urged her to leave, "I'm going to sleep soon too. You should go back."
Jian Jing thought for a moment and asked, "Let Knight stay with you."
"If anything happens, won't it be faster for it to come find you?" he retorted.
That made sense to her, so she accepted it. She grabbed the German Shepherd's big ears, "Then we're going back to sleep."
Knight: "Whine." Having big ears wasn't for the owner to pull.
"Good boy," Jian Jing rubbed the dog's head and took it back to the room with her.
It was already ten o'clock by this point. Professor Lao and the others had left around seven, over two hours ago. She lowered the curtains and saw that the lights were still on in the rooms of both Li Journalist and Cha Li Doctor.
Maybe I'm overthinking this.
That unknown animal they saw was probably injured after losing a fight, and they rushed over to treat it.
Jian Jing yawned and went to bed.
Knight: "Woof~"
Reluctantly, she asked, "Where's the towel?"
Knight brought over his own Superman beach towel.
Jian Jing spread it on the floor next to the bed and allowed the dog to come up and sleep there for the night.
Half an hour later, she kicked the dog off the bed.
Knight: "Whine~"
Jian Jing turned over and pretended not to hear - sleeping next to a person was still very different from sleeping next to a dog.
At eleven, just as she was starting to drift off, Knight suddenly sat up and put his nose against her hand, poking her awake.
Jian Jing was jolted fully awake.
Knight would never bother her while she was sleeping unless he was hungry. For him to wake her now, something must have happened.
She listened carefully.
In the distance, she could hear hurried footsteps, then not long after, Fei Na came running over crying, yelling, "Doctor Cha Li!"
On the other side, Cha Li Doctor rushed out in his clothes, "What happened?"
"My dad..." Tears streamed down Fei Na's face. "Hurry, look at my dad!"
Jian Jing also went over. She saw that Chen was carrying a bloody corpse on his back, drenched in sweat. "Save him!"
Cha Li Doctor quickly examined the situation, but almost instantly determined the outcome. "I'm sorry..." He said with difficulty, "The professor is already dead."
"Oh my god." Fei Na collapsed to her knees, covering her face as she wept bitterly.
[System: New mission released]
[Mission name: Murder in the Jungle]
[Content description: In the primordial jungle millions of years ago, humans shared the land with wild animals and plants. The blistering sun, lakes, forests, hunting - the bloody dangers lurking beneath the surface. Please uncover the truth and defend the dignity of life.]
[Rewards and penalties: To be determined based on completion of the mission]
It had been a long time since there was a new mission.
Jian Jing snapped to attention and asked, "What's the situation? How did he die?" Without waiting for them to answer, the blood on the corpse had already explained everything, so her third question became, "Who fired the shot?"
Fei Na shook her head and said tearfully, "I don't know. God, I thought it was my dad who shot someone. Why was it him??"
She was too distraught to calmly answer. Jian Jing had no choice but to look to Mrs. Lao.
"I'm not clear either," she said, her complexion also very pale. "We didn't find the shooter, he ran away."
Jian Jing frowned, "What kind of person was it? Should we call the police?"
Chen shook his head, "Don't know if it was a poacher or smuggler. Let me make some calls to ask."
"First take him back to the room," said Jian Jing. "Let me examine him."
Mrs. Lao looked shocked. "Examine what?"
"I want to figure out what caused his death. That could help us understand how many people there were and what guns they had."
Her reasoning was sound, but Mrs. Lao knew Jian Jing was just a writer. She gently said, "Doctor Cha would be more suitable for this."
"We can do it together," Jian Jing said, turning to the doctor. "What do you think?"
Doctor Cha had no objections.
The body was temporarily moved to the medical room and placed on the only bed.
The medical room didn't have much equipment, but it had the basic tools so Jian Jing didn't need to dig through her own makeup bag. She put on rubber gloves and turned on voice input to begin the autopsy.
She cut open the deceased's clothes to observe the wounds on the body.
"There are three wounds total. Two on the left arm, one on the chest. The skin edges have a circular pattern, and there is a circular contusion ring around the wounds. Some subcutaneous bleeding, no smoke halo or particulate burns..." She muttered to herself, "This was a long distance shot."
The shooting distance could be determined from the wound markings.
If the gun was pressed right against the body when fired, the smoke, gunpowder residues and metal fragments spraying out of the barrel would be driven into the subcutaneous tissue under the wound, causing burnt and charred markings around the injury.
This was called a contact shot, with a distance of 0.
If the muzzle was partially in contact with the skin and partly away, this would be a relative contact shot. The distribution of smoke and gunpowder particles on the skin would be elliptical rather than star-shaped, generally 1-6cm.
There were also close range shots where the muzzle did not touch the skin but was very near, so the gases and gunpowder from the muzzle could still adhere to the skin's surface.
In such cases, the compression and shearing action of the bullet would drive the skin inward into a funnel shape, with the edges rolled inward. Afterwards, as the bullet entered the tissue, the soot it carried would stick to the wound edges as a seared, abraded rim. This was called an abrasion rim.
These situations could be further divided - close range was 6-30cm, intermediate range was 30-60cm. The specifics could be determined by examining the diameter and color intensity of the soot, but there was no need to go into more detail now.
Looking at Professor Lao's wounds, there was no smoke halo or particulate burns, so the shooting distance was over 60cm. This was called a distant shot.
Jian Jing carefully examined the three wounds on the corpse again.
The two wounds on his left arm were one inward curling and one everted, almost in a straight line - these were likely perforating bullet wounds where the bullet passed straight through the arm.
The fatal wound on the chest was a blind bullet wound, where the bullet slowed down after entering the body and remained lodged inside.
Jian Jing dug out the bullet that was stuck in the body.
She measured it.
"For a bullet of this type, what guns are they usually used with?" Jian Jing asked humbly.
Cha Li Doctor had gone from leading in the beginning to cooperating in the back, and was now completely lying down on the job: "I'm a doctor, how would I know?"
"Uh, okay, I'll look it up."
That wasn't a problem as long as she had internet access.
Jian Jing quickly searched and found that 7.62mm bullets were most commonly used in the Type 56 semi-automatic rifle.
She verified this with Chen.
He definitively told Jian Jing that the most commonly used gun around here was the Type 56 semi-automatic rifle and the Type 97 assault rifle.
So if there were no surprises, it would be the Type 56.
The Type 56 semi-automatic rifle was Chinese made and had flooded Southeast Asia in large quantities at the end of the last century. The gun was 1,025mm long with an effective shooting range of 400m, and a magazine capacity of 10 rounds.
Jian Jing asked again, "Earlier you said you were going to call someone. Did you? What's the situation?"
Chen stiffly answered, "I asked the border guards and police stations. They all said they haven't seen any suspicious people recently. The only ones who escaped last time were two people. One was arrested half a month ago, and the other one might still be hiding somewhere. I don't know if it was him."
Jian Jing fell silent in contemplation.
Slowly, her gaze shifted to the cabinet next to them where Chen had casually left a Type 56.
She said, "If you don't mind, could you please go through everything that happened tonight from the beginning?"
Chen agreed and gave a simple English account: "We went into the forest, following the GPS navigation, halfway through, the signal was lost, but we split up to look around. After some time, I heard gunshots and went to check it out. The professor was already dead."
Jian Jing: "Could you...be a bit more specific?"
"Let me tell you," Fei Na walked into the room, her eyes as red as a rabbit's, "at dinner, my father suddenly said there was a problem with Number 21..."
Jian Jing interrupted her: "What is Number 21?"
"It's an ID number," Fei Na hesitated for a moment, and probably felt there was no point hiding it anymore. She told her, "pseudoryxnghetinhensis, hmm, let me think of the Chinese translation, yes, the Chinese mid-saiga antelope."
Jian Jing immediately searched for it.
The Chinese mid-saiga antelope, also known as the Saiga tatarica, and called the Asian unicorn, is a critically endangered species, rare and precious. Since its discovery in 1992 until now, it has only appeared a few times.
No wonder they were so anxious back then.
Fei Na said: "Number 21 is extremely precious. Three years ago, my father cooperated with the local government and hired professional hunters to find it before catching Number 21 and putting a tracking device on it. We never made this public, afraid that poachers would find out and come to hunt it."
"Today, a little after 7pm, my father noticed Number 21's GPS had stayed still for a long time. He was worried it had fallen into a trap or gotten stuck somewhere, so he hurried to go find it."
"I see. What happened next?"
"At first, we followed the GPS. The route was familiar, no problems. But halfway there (Jian Jing: Around what time was this?), 9pm? Sorry, I didn't check the time. The signal disappeared. This was a very bad situation. We didn't know what happened and lost our direction."
At this point, Fei Na's tone suddenly became somber.
"We were all very nervous, but my father said it was probably just an accidental malfunction of the tracking device, and insisted we go to the original location. But when we got there, we only found this."
She handed Jian Jing a silver tracking device. There was a dent on it. "I'm not sure how this got damaged, but it definitely can't be used anymore."
Jian Jing wasn't very knowledgeable about electronics either. She checked it briefly then set it aside.
"What happened next?"
"My father suggested we split up to search, and meet back at Spot 3 in an hour." Fei Na said, "Spot 3 is one of the observation points we set up in the woods. Sometimes we observe animals there."
"Is that where the body was found?"
Fei Na nodded, looking grieved. "I heard gunshots and thought my dad found them. But when I rushed over, he was already..."
"From when you split up to when you found the body, how much time passed total?"
Fei Na hesitated. "40-50 minutes, but definitely less than an hour."
Jian Jing nodded and probed as if inadvertently. "Speaking of which, you all brought guns, right? What guns?"
Still immersed in grief, Fei Na didn't notice the implication and absentmindedly answered her: She had a revolver, Professor Lao and Chen had Type 56 rifles, and Mrs. Lao used a [blank].
Jian Jing said, "I saw another Type 56 hanging outside."
"Type 56s are most common. My dad and Chen know how to use them, and we'd sometimes prepare a spare at the observation points too."
"Was there one at Spot 3?"
Fei Na thought about it, uncertain. "Probably, I think."
Jian Jing wanted to go to the crime scene even more now.
