Chapter 1 – The Profile Of The Members In Perak

(This is Wu Xie’s POV)

People in the Zhang family always acted in a secretive manner. It was rare for them to have someone like Little Brother Zhang who had his own legends in the South Sea. It was because of how he acted in the South Sea that many legends about the plague god were all related to his behaviors.

According to his own personal account, Zhang Haiyan had worked on sixty-eight cases during his thirty years in the South Sea. At that time, his only partner in Malacca was another man named Zhang Haixia. All sixty-eight cases had been solved perfectly and became known in history as the “Sixty-Eight Winning Streak”.

Little Brother Zhang was clearly much more reliable back then compared to how he was now.

Based on his performance when acting alone, I couldn’t imagine what kind of change would enable him to have such a steady output given his unpredictable character.

Later, I focused on finding information about his partner, Zhang Haixia. He was an unknown figure, but he played a very important role.

I carefully collected any information about that person. Even though things had happened a long time ago, I was able to piece together the scattered information and figure out that the person behind Zhang Haiyan had a huge mysterious charm.

Zhang Haiyan acted like a completely different person when he was with Zhang Haixia.

Later, I suspected that the hidden key to the Sixty-Eight Winning Streak was Zhang Haixia.

According to the remaining volume records, I’ve collected eleven major cases, four of which were related to Dingwu Qihuang. They were called the “Four Cases of Qihuang”. The other cases were relatively independent.

The time it took to close these eleven cases varied. The shortest time was about ten days, while the longest one lasted for more than five years.

Most of these cases were interesting, but I prefer to talk about a smaller, more South-Sea-style case first. This one had a cheesy name called “Perak Stilt Houses”.

The incident took place in Perak and the beginning of the story is very interesting. The corpse of an eleven-year-old girl named Nuruhuda was cut into pieces. The murderer was considered a lunatic because her body parts were repeatedly thrown away sixty times after he cut her corpse up.

I need to clarify that the little girl was cut into fourteen parts. Theoretically, the body parts could be thrown away fourteen times at most. But according to witnesses and the murderer’s own confession, there were sixty places where he dumped the body parts. This didn’t add up. What had he been throwing away those other forty-six times?

Zhang Haiyan and Zhang Haixia searched the places where the body parts had been thrown away. In addition to the human limbs, they found that there were many house components packed into the same sacks. 

At that time, the stilted houses in Malaysia were very simple thatched houses that used roughly processed tree branches to elevate the houses.

The sacks they found were filled with thatch, wooden boards, and parts of wooden pillars. Zhang Haiyan and Zhang Haixia found it very strange.

When they asked the murderer about it, he insisted that the house components and the little girl were the same thing, so when he mutilated the little girl, he also mutilated parts of the house.

Everyone thought he was crazy, but when Zhang Haixia was sorting out the house components, he found that the cracks were leaking grease.

Zhang Haixia put all of the components together and found that they formed a quarter section of a house. It was a corner of a thatched house near the roof. In the process of doing this, he noticed that there was a lot of hair in the thatch of this house. The hair and the thatch appeared to have grown together.

He thought about it carefully and realized that the house components weren’t fixed with ropes or nesting structures, but completely merged. The hair was growing in the folds of these wooden structures. The hair was yellow, which was the same color as that of the little girl’s hair.

There were countless pieces of evidence and various speculations.

Zhang Haiyan believed that the final possibility was that parts of the thatched house grew out of the little girl’s body. For unknown reasons, parts of the house grew out of the little girl’s body, which corroded the original house’s components and replaced parts of the house.

But after Zhang Haixia studied and thought about it, he felt that things might be the opposite. This little girl grew out of the house like some kind of mimicry of evil.

The two people argued for three days.

If that was the case, the location of that house was very important.

According to the murderer, the house was in a very large village instead of in the depths of the rainforest like we might have thought. But the murder couldn’t remember where the house was, nor could he remember why he suddenly cut the girl into pieces.

After Zhang Haiyan and Zhang Haixia reconciled, the two people began to look for that thatched house in Perak.

I don’t know if this story has been exaggerated, and the way they dealt with this incident later is unclear, but I can always write about it in detail later.

The stories that took place in the South Sea were very strange, unusual, and very interesting.

I don’t know where Zhang Haixia went since there weren’t any records of him in the end. When I asked Zhang Haiyan about it, he seemed to be at a total loss. He only said that the incidents happened a long time ago, so he couldn’t remember them clearly.

Zhang Haixia is like a black hole, and the only person who can help me understand things about him is Zhang Haiyan.

For some reason, I feel that Zhang Haixia and I have some things in common. What happened to him in the end?

I’m very curious about whether his ending has any reference to my own ending.

<Spin-Off Case: The Map In The Dream Chapter 10><Table of Contents><Chapter 2>