《Genius Detective》Chapter 18: On-site Reasoning
Advertisement
Lin Dongxue scowled, “Oi, why are you coming in? Shouldn’t we let the forensic team come and take samples and prints first? If we move the scene, my brother will punish me!”
Chen Shi responded, “What if there’s a living person in here?”
“Okay, I guess what you said makes sense!” Lin Dongxue turned into the house and felt goose bumps on her body. She gulped and carefully avoided the blood on the ground that was splattered like ink stains everywhere.
The furniture in the house was not too messy. It seems that the murderer made very swift and clean murders. The two went to the back of the sofa where a woman wearing home clothes was laying. She should be aged over 30, and her whole head was like a bloody paste.
Chen Shi was ready to test is the victim had a pulse when Lin Dongxue stopped him. “Wait, don't leave fingerprints.”
Chen Shi took out his mobile phone and placed the screen under the nose of the woman. After waiting for a few seconds silently, condensation still did not appear on the screen. “She’s dead,” he asserted.
The two went to the bedroom next. The bedroom and the living room were decorated in different styles. It was filled entirely with a set of old mahogany furniture and a wicker rocking chair. It was obviously the room of an old person. There was an old lady lying on the floor. Her neck had a hole torn through it, as if bitten by a beast. The blood stained a large piece of the solid wood flooring.
Chen Shi surveyed the area and found that a thick cleaver was thrown on the ground carelessly, covered with coagulated blood. “It seems that this was used as a weapon,” he deduced.
The two went into another bedroom. This was the room where the husband and wife slept. The couple’s wedding photos were hung on the wall in front of the bed. There was nobody in the bedroom. A bowl of soup was placed on the bedside table. Chen Shi went over and sniffed, “It’s snow tremella and lotus seed sweet soup.”
Chen Shi straightened up and looked at the small balcony that was attached to the bedroom. The balcony was semi-enclosed with windows on it. One of the windows were open and a small stool was placed on the floor. Chen Shi asked, “When you asked the locksmith to open the door, was it locked from the inside?”
Advertisement
“No!” Lin Dongxue replied.
Chen Shi looked down at the ground below. “It seems that the little boy jumped from here because he was too scared. Below is the flower bed. It has some buffering effect, but he was still injured pretty severely.”
“When he woke up and found that the whole family was dead. It must have been so pitiful,” Lin Dongxue sympathized.
“When he woke up?” Chen Shi looked at her with a puzzled look.
Lin Dongxue, who knew she must have made a mistake with her words, tried to explain, “I just talked about it casually. Do you have to be so picky with each and every word? We will wait for forensics to determine the time of death!”
“Let’s go to the kitchen and see.”
The two went to the kitchen. The kitchen and bathroom were connected together. A man was on the floor between the kitchen and the bathroom. It was the male owner of the wedding photo. His head was smashed to a pulp. “Hup!” Chen Shi bent down and checked. “The weapon used to kill this man is different from the other two.”
Chen Shi muttered to himself for a moment, then suddenly rushed into the kitchen. He rummaged through the cabinet and took a pair of rubber gloves from the cabinet. Lin Dongxue tried to stop him, “Oi! What are you doing?”
“I won’t rest easy until I take a look.”
“Don’t move the body right now! Wait for my brother, he’s coming...”
“When your brother is here, you think he will he let me look?”
“I thought you were afraid? Why aren’t you afraid now?” Lin Dongxue groaned softly.
Chen Shi bent down again and checked the man's head. He waved her over. “Look, there are some white broken pieces in the hair.”
Lin Dongxue followed suit to take a look. “Oh, it’s true!”
Chen Shi stood up and walked into the bathroom. Some white pieces were scattered on the tile floor. The lid on the toilet was gone. The amount of pieces on the floor would be just about the same as the ceramic cover.
Lin Dongxue tried to make an analysis. “I suspect that the murderer was hiding in the bathroom at first. The male owner immediately ran out upon discovering the man. The murderer was in a hurry, picked up the ceramic cover and slammed it on his head.”
Advertisement
“Don't make assumptions just yet. Let’s collect some evidence first. “
Chen Shi went into the bathroom and closed the door. The door of the bathroom was made of frosted glass. He asked while he was standing inside, “Can you see my figure?”
“Can't see.”
“Turn on the light.”
After Lin Dongxue opened the bathroom lamp from the outside, Chen Shi’s shadow was blurred on the frosted glass. She said, “It can be seen, but it’s not very clear.”
“But I can see you from the inside.” Chen Shi came out and pointed out that the bathroom door faces the kitchen window. “The window is facing east, so the light is very strong and your figure is clearly reflected on it.”
“Then my reasoning is correct?” Lin Dongxue said confidently.
Chen Shi stated seriously, “Reasoning cannot be correct and incorrect, only reasonable and unreasonable.”
“Wow, would you die if you were to compliment someone?”
Chen Shi just smiled and didn’t reply. He then went back to check the male body. He opened the eyelids of the deceased, pinched his muscles, and moved his arms around. He concluded that “There is slight corneal clouding. The corpse has undergone rigor mortis and is relatively stiff. There is color blanching on the skin and livor mortis can be shown when the skin has pressure put on it; the fingers and joints are already stiff. The temperature last night was 10 to 15 degrees. According to this, it can be assumed that time of death should be around 12 o'clock last night, and the margin of error is within two hours.”
Lin Dongxue looked at Chen Shi like he was a monster. Chen Shi explained, “These are all basic knowledge. You can learn by simply buying books on forensic medicine.”
“I have nothing to say!”
Chen Shi slowly retracted his smile and stared at the man's body. He muttered, “No, it’s wrong. Something’s wrong. The two female bodies are both wearing home clothes. Why is the man wearing a jacket?”
“It may be that he just returned from a night shift.” Lin Dongxue guessed.
Chen Shi shook his head. “But he wore slippers on his feet. In the place where he just entered the door, there was a set of men's home clothes on the hooks on the wall. This house was clean and tidy. Going home and changing clothes is the family's living habits. The power of habit is very powerful. Why does he have such an abnormal behaviour?”
Lin Dongxue muttered to herself for a moment. Suddenly, she had an epiphany and exclaimed, “I know! He had a bathroom emergency! Maybe he needed to go to the bathroom before changing his clothes.”
Chen Shi shook his head again. “This is not called reasoning, it’s just guessing randomly!”
Lin Dongxue pouted. “You have double standards! Why isn't mine reasoning but yours is?”
“Reasoning is when you deduce something after rounding up all the clues. What you said just now can only be regarded as a hypothesis. After the hypothesis is made, it must be verified. After verification, it can then be regarded as reasoning. You have come to see this.” Chen Shi bent down and turned the body to the side. Lin Dongxue was confused, “What do you want me to see?”
“He has no incontinence. If it was really urgent, in the case of a strong hit on the back of the head, the sphincter will lose its bondage and there should be urine all over his trousers. However, the trousers of the deceased are very clean... Perhaps a bit too clean.”
Speaking of this, Chen Shi suddenly stood up, went into the bathroom, opened the toilet lid and looked at it. A scent of urine wafted out. Chen Shi looked as though he had found treasure and proclaimed loudly, “The urine in the toilet has not been washed away. The deceased went to the toilet before he died!”
Advertisement
- In Serial57 Chapters
The Beautiful Jade
Portals are opening and the planes of cultivation are changing. Monsters that have long been sealed are breaking free. In the midst of these changes, a young girl named Jia Lin is sent to the Flowing Rivers Sect by her father in order to protect her from the eyes of a greedy prince. In the bloody and murder filled world of cultivators, she must figure out how to come to terms with the death and the destruction surrounding her. Releasing a chapter a week on Tuesdays.
8 425 - In Serial20 Chapters
Sword System Academia
2/17 NOTICE: I'm putting this on hiatus, possibly permanently. I didn't want to spam with an "update chapter", so hopefully here and in the story blurb will get enough eyeballs. There are a couple reasons for ending SSA for now. 1) I wrote the next chapter but wasn't happy with it. I've been less and less satisfied with SSA's quality the more I thought about it. Part of the reason is... 2) I am seriously thinking about trying to publish some novels to help pay the bills, since I don't have my other source of income anymore. I have never asked for anything from SSA readers, no money, not even a review or rating. SSA is written for fun to amuse myself, primarily, and I would kind of feel bad actually charging someone money for something as unserious as that. I don't think it is good enough to ask anything in return. To use an analogy from music, SSA is more like a jam session with a bunch of friends. You're just chiling and having fun playing some music. I mean, if you are Mozart or even Eminem, your jam session is good enough to sell, but for an amateur beginner like myself, haha, no. If I want to publish something, I feel like I need to go the proper route of practice and rehearsals, which might be more similar to a classical concert performance. With SSA, I work from worldbuilding notes and a loose outline, but what you are essentially getting is the first draft with lots of so-called pantsing. Pushing out a web novel like this also means it is very difficult to go back and improve things without breaking everything else downstream. I wanted to try this "jamming" approach, as it was a good way to teach me about another aspect of writing, but to move forward, I think I need to hone my "classical" techniques, which emphasize rewriting, or at least, revising outlines. 3) While I intend to try to make $$$, my actual current goal is to "get gud". I've spent a lot of time recently trying to understand the self-publishing industry, and I'm pretty sure I can make some money by using short-term strategies with my current amateur skill level. But I've seen too many authors come and go/burnout, and really, the only way that I think I can enjoy writing and still make money on a long-term basis is to become a better writer. And the next step for me, which I haven't done much before, is to spend more time on rewriting and outlines. That is pretty much antithetical to the way SSA is developing. I've always been kind of 20/80 plotting/pantsing, but I want to spend a lot more time outlining before I even start writing. SSA jam sessions don't really fit my goal anymore. If you're curious about what's next, read on... Among other regrets, I regret not finishing SSA. It's the first story I've dropped, but then again, it's the first web novel I've attempted, so I suppose that's not a surprise. I don't think traditional web novel formats suit me that well. The whole SSA story I had loosely planned (beyond a first book or major arc) is way too large as well. Big story = good for neverending webnovel with Patreons, bad for penniless and fickle writer like me. I am currently outlining a complete trilogy to another story in great detail. I want the story to end concisely, and I also want the chance to really spend a lot of time on the full outline to spot pacing problems, character issues, lost themes, and so on. I'll still share this story on RR. What I intend to do is finish book 1, flash-publish the whole thing here for a few weeks, then publish on the big Zon. Repeat for books 2 and 3. The upcoming story will be about crafting heroes. The backdrop is an isekai-like setting, where elves will summon humans to their world as heroes, but the whole hero crafting business is still in its infancy. The elven mage researchers are figuring out how to imbue heroes with power, while the heroes are trying to figure out how to use the powers that they gain. Humans are the best hero templates because they are blank and have no intrinsic magic. Or at least that what the elves thought. The human MC has his own secrets... There will be some similarities with litrpgs, but I would call it more a progression fantasy or gamelit story. For example, the stats are very low, at least initially. Say we have a stat called Str. Going from Str = 1 to Str = 2 is a huge deal. Also, going from Dex = 0 to Dex = 1 is an even bigger deal. I guess you could call it a "low-stat litrpg", haha. Also, the heroes won't be gaining stats simply by killing things or leveling up. You can't increase stats arbitrarily, either. There will be rules to how stats can increase, and how they work with each other. The elven mages will be figuring out these rules in order to craft stronger and stronger heroes. Some inspiration will be from cultivation magic systems, but there won't be overt cultivation, at least for now. A theme I really want to explore is the idea of interactions. That includes things like hero crafter vs hero, tactics vs strategy, skill synergies, racial interactions (dwarves, elves, etc), and son. Yeah, so hero crafting. I'm super excited about this project and venturing into publishing. If you want to check out the upcoming story, you can follow my RR author profile to see when it drops here. Finally... THANK YOU TO EVERYONE! I'm very sorry that SSA is stopping, but I hope at least some of you will find the next story at least as enjoyable, if not more. Thanks to all the readers who gave SSA a shot. Big hug or solid fistbump to all of you, whichever you prefer! I hope this message is not a downer but an upper, because I am psyched!! -purlcray -------------- BLURB: Talen, youngest Master of the Koroi, makes his way to the Empire's capital to salvage his clan's fate. But the bustling city has few opportunities for the traditionalist. For the old sword clans are fading. With the rise of alchemy, gold can purchase strength that ordinarily took years of training to cultivate. Sword artists, once rare and accomplished, are quickly growing in number, especially among the wealthy noble class. Even with such alchemy, though, no one has advanced to the rank of Grandmaster in countless years. Talen's true dream is to walk the path of a sword artist to the very end while fulfilling his clan duties. And then the Swordgeists return, fabled founders of all sword arts, gods who had touched the world long ago and vanished. These myths turned into reality warn of a coming threat. Alongside this warning, they issue an invitation to the Sword System Academy, a path to power beyond the mortal realm. But first, they will hold an entrance exam... Story notes:Sword System Academia blends elements of western and asian fantasy such as xianxia and litrpg. I took parts from different genres I enjoyed and twisted them into my own creation. There will be an explicit system, both of the litrpg kind and the hard(ish) magic kind, but it is embedded within an academic structure that will develop over the course of the story. This is my attempt to design a unique type of system, the System Academia.
8 153 - In Serial11 Chapters
THE ETERNAL LAW
Aarav V frost, the 2nd young master Is only a master in name, an unfavoured son of the Frost family from the town of Berifall, at the age of 14 he awakens the memory of the past life, where he used to live in a county India and the planet known as Earth, he was a 22 year old College student, while he was on his rooftop he got caught up in some kind of space distortion, after regaining his old memories he was confused but when he gets back to his senses he realises his situation where he is highly despised and bullied by his own family due to his broken meridians and is considered a waste as all these years he had not made any advancement in his cultivation, with the memory of his past life he also acquires something which goes beyond common sense and thus he embarks on the journey to reach at the peak of whatever there is.. [martial arts, wuxia/Xianxia, fantasy] thers more to come, atm keeping it simple to maintain a flow, also i will be using a lot of Indian-Mythology references soon enjoy ;D
8 170 - In Serial8 Chapters
Restless Night, Pleasant Dreams
I lived my life as a dream. Waking up to attend parties with those of my elk, sleeping with the bright and pretty, leaving behind many promises and lies. I woke up from all of that nonsense. No... it is better to say that I was— shock awake.. I watched my father die like a dog trying to protect my mother. I watch my mother take her own life after my father died. I clearly remember sitting in the steam carriage, nursing a hangover. Praying for this trip to be over. I clearly remember the amber eyes and twelve foot wing span. I clearly remember the sound of iron doors being ripped open as if it was paper wall. I clearly remember other drivers screaming and the sound of collisions and explosions as people rekt in panic of escaping. I remember the death around me and the fear that gripped me. The soul stirring feeling that sent me fleeing while my parents were suck clean of blood. I remember thinking, berating myself hours later. Gripping my hair, slapping my palms into my forehead, questioning why I didn't carry my tools. Weeks pass since that time.. My guilt is gnawing at me and this pain isn't something I like. I almost feel like the man in the mirror isn't me. The me I used to be. Maybe, if I take revenge. I can put these demons to rest? Maybe, if I put these bastard in a grave. I can be someone new? Maybe, after they all die. This mirror won't haunt me with their faces?
8 175 - In Serial33 Chapters
honey | taekook
a honey-toned vocalist with a drinking problem and a daughter gets a house keeper who has a talent for playing the viola and involving himself in things he shouldn't...
8 446 - In Serial22 Chapters
Harmony and Discord
Follow a young man as he attains Superpowers, shifting his life to force him into finding a difficult balance, alongside multiple threats on his life and the lives of those he cares for.
8 217

