A Literary Life Starting from the First Year of High School

Chapter 116 The Story of Astrology (Part 2) (Combined Story Chapter)

Did the terrifying prophecy come true so soon? On March 15th, twenty days after Mei Pingzhi's death, the Mei family received devastating news: six young girls living in the old house had all disappeared.

These six girls were the six children chosen by Mei Pingzhi in the Book of Asodo to be used to create Asodo. They lived together and were always together, with a harmonious relationship. That morning, the family found that the six girls had not gotten up as usual. They searched the main house, the courtyard, the storeroom, and the studio, looking everywhere inside and outside the house, but they could not find the six girls anywhere.

There were no signs of a struggle inside the house, no bloodstains left from the struggle, and the doors and windows were intact. It did not seem like a forced kidnapping. Six grown men had simply disappeared from the house without a word or a single witness.

Song Zhiping quickly went through the common "mass disappearance" tricks in detective novels in his mind: tunnels, secret passages, disguising themselves as others to sneak out, leaving in batches and then regrouping—but all of these require time and coordination, so how exactly did they disappear?

After the news spread, the entire city of Shanghai was in an uproar. Everyone subconsciously connected it to that crazy notebook and concluded that someone was carrying out Mei Pingzhi's plan to brutally murder six girls in order to complete the ritual of refining Asod.

Police deployed a large force, conducting a thorough search of the surrounding towns, stations, and roads centered on the Mei family's residence. They questioned residents, vendors, and station staff along the way and checked all means of transportation. However, after several days, they still could not find the six girls; it was as if they had vanished into thin air.

As the days went by, hope gradually faded, and the public's speculations became the conclusion. Everyone understood that the six teenage girls had most likely met with misfortune. What happened next pushed the case to its most terrifying peak.

Starting in late March, news of the discovery of an unidentified female corpse began to emerge from various parts of Shanghai. The locations happened to be the six mines marked in the Book of Asod: distributed in different areas of Shanghai: far apart from each other.

When Song Zhiping read this, his brows furrowed slightly.

The police and the public were firmly bound by the Book of Asod—they thought in the direction the diary contained. This is a typical "narrative trap": the murderer did not use the diary to guide the crime, but rather used the diary to define other people's perception of the crime.

If you believe the journal is real, you will interpret all subsequent events according to the logic of the journal, and once you accept this framework, it will be difficult for you to break free from it.

When the first body was discovered, people noticed something unusual. The deceased was a young girl whose body parts corresponding to her zodiac sign were missing, leaving only a mutilated body.

In the following period, the second, the third—a total of six mutilated female corpses—were unearthed in six different mines. Each corpse was in exactly the same condition: according to the rules of astrology, a specific part of the body had been cut off and the body buried in the soil of the mine corresponding to the metal.

Police meticulously compared the bodies with their clothing, personal accessories, and unique birthmarks, ultimately confirming that the six remains were those of the six missing girls from the Mei family. They were all murdered, and their deaths were identical to the steps described in Mei Pingzhi's notes regarding the creation of Asod.

The six bodies were buried at different depths; some were buried very shallowly and were quickly discovered by passersby, while others were buried deep in the soil and were not seen again for a long time.

In 1936, transportation was far less convenient than it is today. Transporting six bodies across multiple regions to mines far apart for burial in a short period of time would require immense physical strength and time, and would necessitate vehicles capable of long-distance travel.

Following the lead of "transporting the body," the police launched an investigation, sifting through everyone who owned a car and had connections to the Mei family. However, the results were still disheartening: everyone capable of driving long distances to dispose of the body had solid alibis.

Those without a driver's license and unable to travel long distances alone do not have the means to carry out large-scale body disposal.

At this point, all the cases in the Mei family serial murder case have been completed: the painter Mei Pingzhi was murdered in a locked room, the eldest daughter Yizhi was killed, and six girls were murdered. The three cases were linked together and perfectly replicated the contents of a mad notebook. However, the police could not answer any of the core questions: who was the murderer, what was the method of the crime, what was the motive, how was the locked room formed, and how was the cross-regional house-to-house smuggling carried out?

The investigation lasted for several years, with leads constantly coming to an end, suspects being eliminated one by one, and no new information being found from the physical evidence at the scene. In the end, the police officially designated this series of cases as a major unsolved case, and the case files were sealed. This bizarre and bloody astrological murder case thus sank into history, becoming an indelible shadow in the hearts of a generation.

After finishing reading this chapter, Song Zhiping let out a long breath.

The three cases unfold layer by layer, each more chilling than the last: a locked-room murder, an apartment murder, six missing persons, and dismemberment and disposal of bodies. The author doesn't use any gory adjectives, but the oppressive feeling of "what is happening" slowly tightens around the reader's heart like a hand.

He noticed a detail: the six bodies were buried at different depths, some were discovered quickly, and some were not seen again until much later.

This shouldn't be considered a mistake by the murderer; it was intentional. If all six bodies had been discovered simultaneously, the police would have been able to establish connections more quickly and begin a large-scale investigation sooner. However, the bodies were discovered at different times and by different people, which diluted the impact of the case and disrupted the pace of the investigation. The murderer even anticipated this.

Song Zhiping shook his head and continued scrolling down.

Time passed, and forty years went by in the blink of an eye. In 1976, after Wang Yu and Shi Gang had sorted out all the official files and folk rumors, they began to carefully study the diary left by Li Zhuwen. This private diary was an important breakthrough in the case forty years ago.

The diary, written in the first person by Li Zhuwen, records his decades-long inner struggle starting from the crime in 1936. The diary candidly recounts everything that happened to him that year: he did indeed meet with Yizhi on the night of the incident and have a relationship with her; Yizhi was safe when he left. But he never imagined that after he left, Yizhi would be murdered.

After the murder, the real culprit found him and used this as leverage to blackmail him. The other party had evidence of his secret meeting with Yizhi and threatened to expose the matter to the public if Li Zhuwen refused to cooperate.

The killer's demand was to assist in transporting and burying the bodies. The real killer handed over the six mutilated bodies to Li Zhuwen in batches, forcing him to use his identity and connections to drive to various places and bury the bodies in six mines according to the locations marked in the notes.

Song Zhiping's eyes widened suddenly.

So that's how it is. The mystery of the cross-regional body disposal wasn't solved by the murderer alone. The murderer coerced someone—the least likely person to be suspected—to carry out the most dangerous part.

The murderer never showed his face, only issuing orders through letters and messages. Li Zhuwen was kept in the dark the whole time, only knowing that she was helping a murderer cover up his crimes, but she never knew who the other party was.

After the deed was done, the murderer disappeared completely and never contacted him again. Li Zhuwen kept this secret and dared not tell anyone. He continued to work at the police station, suffering greatly every day as he faced the unsolved case he had been involved in.

For forty years, he lived in the shadow of evil, not daring to utter a single word. It wasn't until his old age, before his death, that he wrote all the truth in his diary, hoping that one day someone would discover it and restore the whole story.

After reading this passage, Song Zhiping remained silent for a few seconds. Li Zhuwen was the most pitiful character in the entire case. He was not the murderer, but he was turned into an accomplice by the murderer.

He wasn't a bad person, but he lived his whole life in guilt. The author didn't portray him as a pure victim or an accomplice, but rather as an ordinary person crushed by fate. This grayness adds a touch of heaviness to the whole story.

After reading the diary, Wang Yu and Shi Gang understood how the mystery of the cross-regional body disposal was solved, and also confirmed that Li Zhuwen was merely a coerced accomplice, not the mastermind. The real killer was someone else, meticulous, audacious, and ruthless, who planned every step meticulously, from plotting the murder, creating the locked room, killing Yizhi, to coercing others to dispose of the body, and using the astrological diary to mislead everyone.

Combining the anonymous confession letter, Li Zhuwen's diary, and clues from the scene forty years ago, Wang Yu began to dissect the logic of the entire case, overturning the police's original judgment one by one.

Song Zhiping turned to the next page. He knew the real deduction was about to begin; all the previous setup—the locked room mystery, the blood-stained words—was about to be revealed.

The diary, the disappearance, the body disposal, the coercion—all were preparations for this moment. The detective was about to unravel the mystery, and as the reader, he felt both anticipation and trepidation. He was anticipating seeing the truth, but trepidation because he feared he might be wrong.

Wang Yu first pointed the finger at the core physical evidence—the Book of Asod.

He himself was an expert in astrology, and after repeatedly studying the notes, he discovered a large number of basic errors. Mei Pingzhi was an astrology enthusiast who had studied astrology for decades and had a thorough understanding of constellations, planets, correspondences, and mystical rituals. It was impossible for him to have made so many fundamental mistakes in the notes.

Therefore, it can be concluded that the notebook used as the source of the case was not written by Mei Pingzhi at all, but was a smokescreen deliberately fabricated by the real culprit.

Song Zhiping tapped his finger heavily on the table.

This reasoning was so brilliant that everyone's attention was drawn to the contents of the journal, analyzing the meanings of the constellations, the divisions, and Asodes. But no one stopped to ask the most basic question: Was this journal really written by Mei Pingzhi? Because the journal was found on Mei Pingzhi's bedside table, the police assumed it was Mei Pingzhi's, but "on Mei Pingzhi's bedside table" does not equal "written by Mei Pingzhi".

The killer's purpose in forging the notes was very clear: to use the absurd and terrifying plan of "refining Asod" to guide everyone's thinking, so that the public and the police would believe that the whole case was to fulfill Mei Pingzhi's last wish, and to characterize the case as a tragedy caused by astrological superstition, thereby covering up the real motive and method of the murder.

Secondly, there are the core questions surrounding the murder of the six girls. At the time, everyone assumed that the six girls were murdered simultaneously, which was the basis for most suspects' alibis. Wang Yu proposed a bold hypothesis: the six girls did not die at the same time; their deaths occurred at different times, and the so-called "mass disappearance" was a deliberate illusion created by the killer.

Furthermore, there is the issue of the bodies themselves. When the identities of the six bodies were confirmed forty years ago, they relied on external features such as clothing, jewelry, birthmarks, and teeth. Because the bodies had already decomposed to varying degrees when they were discovered, and due to the limitations of the technology available at the time, no accurate identity verification was conducted, which became the biggest flaw in the entire case.

When Song Zhiping read the sentence "no accurate identity verification was conducted," his heart skipped a beat. In detective novels, identity misidentification is one of the most classic types of tricks. However, if the body is so decomposed that the face cannot be recognized, then the judgment of "who this body is" depends entirely on clothing, accessories, and other things that can be deliberately arranged by the murderer. In other words, the murderer can make the police "misidentify" the body.

Following this clue, Wang Yu continued to deduce, and all the previously inexplicable mysteries began to have reasonable answers one by one: the locked room, alibi, dismemberment, body disposal, motive. All the seemingly unsolvable barriers crumbled under the new logic of reasoning.

Ishioka assisted in organizing clues and interviewing relevant surviving individuals. Following the direction of their reasoning, the two gradually narrowed down the scope, eventually focusing their suspicions on someone no one had investigated thoroughly before—Tokiko, the daughter of Umehira and his ex-wife Tae.

In the case investigation at the time, Shizi was one of the six murdered girls, and the headless corpse identified as her was proof of that. However, Wang Yu deduced that the corpse was not Shizi herself, that Shizi was not dead, and that she was the real culprit who planned the entire series of murders.

As the investigation deepened, the shocking method of the crime was fully revealed.

Of the six girls who went missing and were presumed dead, only five were actually murdered.

The murderer, Tokiko, cut and disassembled the bodies of the five girls according to different parts, and then reassembled the disassembled bodies. Using the five complete bodies, she pieced together six incomplete remains. Each pieced-together body was deliberately missing the corresponding parts marked in the notes, perfectly fitting the setting of "refining Asod".

Song Zhiping put down the manuscript.

He needs a few seconds to process this information.

Six corpses from five people—this is a mathematical problem, and also a logical one.

Five people were killed, but six bodies were found at the scene. Who was the extra body? The answer is—there was no extra one.

The murderer disassembled and reassembled the five corpses. Each reassembled corpse was missing a part, and these missing parts corresponded to the coordinates of the six constellations. Each corpse was incomplete, but each corpse "existed". The five corpses were disassembled into six "people". This was a magic trick of corpses.

To create the illusion that "all six people are dead," Tokiko chose a headless body, dressed it in her usual clothes and accessories, and faked her own decapitation. Everyone who saw the headless corpse and combined it with the clothing features naturally assumed that Tokiko had been murdered.

In this way, she used a cleverly crafted scheme of piecing together corpses to transform herself from a victim into a "dead person," thus disappearing from the Mei family openly and successfully escaping unscathed.

By tracing the timeline and sequence of events in the entire case, all the details are pieced together to form a complete story:

Tokiko lived with her mother, Tae, from a young age. The two were abandoned by Mei Pingzhi and lived in poverty. Tokiko harbored resentment towards her father's heartlessness and ungratefulness for many years. She also learned by chance that Mei Pingzhi, who was obsessed with crazy fantasies, really planned to sacrifice his six daughters, including her, to create Asod according to the idea in the astrological journal.

Long-standing resentment, the fear of death, and a protective instinct towards her mother fueled Tokiko's desire for revenge. She began secretly plotting a perfect crime.

Her first step was to target Mei Heiji. Using her identity as a daughter, she entered her father's studio under the pretext of being a painting model. Taking advantage of Heiji's unpreparedness, she beat him to death with a blunt object. Afterward, she forged the entire "Book of Asodo" and placed it at the scene, attributing the murder motive to Mei Heiji's own insane delusions.

Her second move was to target her aunt, Ichie, who lived alone. Ichie knew a lot about the Mei family and had always looked down on Shiko and her daughter. She may have also noticed Shiko's unusual behavior. In order to eliminate any potential threat, Shiko went to Ichie's apartment and murdered her.

Third, she returned to the Mei family and used methods to poison the other five girls. Then she began to dismember and reassemble the bodies, creating six mutilated corpses to make it appear as if all six had been murdered.

The entire plan was meticulously planned, with each step carefully calculated. Astrology, Asod, the locked room, dismemberment, and disposing of the body in a different location—all the seemingly fantastical and unsolvable appearances were just disguises used by Tokiko to deceive the world. After the case occurred, she completely changed her name, abandoned the identity of "Ume Tokiko," and disappeared into the crowd.

After reading the last word, Song Zhiping placed the manuscript on the table.

He stared at the stack of manuscripts for a long time without saying a word or moving.

Then he stood up, walked to the window, and pushed it open completely. The cold April wind rushed in, and he just stood there, letting the wind blow on him.

His mind was racing.

The trick of turning five corpses into six is ​​mathematically and logically sound, but it relies on a premise: autopsy technology cannot perform DNA comparisons and can only identify individuals by external features and clothing. The author glosses over this premise with the phrase "technical conditions in 1936," but it is precisely this premise that gives the entire trick room to exist.

If this happened today, Tokiko's plan would be impossible to succeed, but in 1936, in an era when the cause of death could only be determined by the naked eye and simple tools, this trick was flawless.

"What's Old Song doing? Why aren't you leaving?" The new editor at the company asked curiously when he saw Song Zhiping standing by the window.

"Where to?"

The young editor was stunned. "Where else could you be? It's time to go home!"

Song Zhiping was stunned when he heard this. He glanced at the clock and it was already seven o'clock in the evening.