Netherworld Investigator

Grandpa tapped his back with his fist over and over again, trying to massage the pain away.

“Let’s go home,” he said. “This place is too gloomy, and my arthritis is acting up again because of the chill. We’ll talk when we’re back home, okay?”

An hour later, we were both safe and warm at home. Grandpa brewed a pot of ginger tea to warm himself up.

“You must be curious, my boy,” he said. “We, the Song family, have always been coroners for generations, so why is there such a rule against becoming a police officer or a judge? Well, there is a very concrete reason.”

During the Southern Song dynasty in the thirteenth century, there was an outstanding official who served as a presiding judge in criminal courts whose name was Song Ci. All his life, he efficiently solved many difficult cases and he was a talented official who surpassed all his predecessors.

Song Ci was determined in avoiding miscarriages of justices. When he served as a presiding judge, he solved countless cases of wrongly punished crimes and got the right perpetrator. He solved many cases that seemed to have dead end and managed to capture more than two hundred criminals in just eight months. There were no complaints of misjustice after his tenure, and his achievements astounded both the court officials and the common folk.

But no matter how great Song Ci was, he understood that the power of one person was limited — he couldn’t make lasting changes if he worked alone. He knew that there were still many other Coroners who never cared for a fair investigation and trial, but instead relied on using violence to extort a confession out of the suspects with utter disregard for human lives. It was just as the ancient saying went — a drop of ink on an official document can cost a sea of blood.

Hence, Song Ci recorded everything he learnt from his studies and experiments in the Collected Cases of Injustices Rectified. To call this book revolutionary would be an understatement — with this book, Song Ci single-handedly founded the science of forensics, three hundred years before the scientific advances that happened in the west. Because of this, he was now globally acknowledged as the forefather of forensics.

After Song Ci, members of the Song family had always served the Imperial Ministry of Justice and the Dali Temple[1] generation after generation. Gradually, the contents of the Collected Cases of Injustices Rectified  kept expanding and the body of knowledge in crime solving and detection grew larger and larger, until it was all recorded in the Chronicles of Grand Magistrates.

But when you were as outstanding as the Song family back then, you could just as easily fall into a precarious position where you became the target for vengeance from the criminals or the family of the punished murderers. Our profound knowledge turned out to be a double-edged sword. Not only that, our out-of-this-world skills became an attractive thing to be used by other people. In the Ming dynasty, a member of the Song family investigated a strange case involving a nine-tailed fox, but eventually he sniffed out a plan for a coup d'etat. He was eventually used as a scapegoat and was punished to death together with the nine generations of his family.

Then there was a member of Song family later who was proficient in numerology. He theorized that the knowledge the family wielded was simply too profound that it disrupted the balance of good and evil in nature, tempting the wrath of the gods and the spirits. Therefore, any member of the Song family who became a judge, a police officer, or a coroner would all be met with calamities! From then on, the rule was set: no member of Song family should ever dabble into those professions in order to preserve their lives.

This account frustrated me for a bit. I was slightly incredulous too.

“But Grandpa,” I protested, “aren’t you co-operating with the police yourself even now?”

Grandpa sighed.

“When I was young,” he said, “I loved solving crimes, just like you. I helped the police break many cases that shocked the whole country, and earned reputation and fame in the process. I had no idea that calamity would soon fall upon me. Not long after solving a big case, someone informed me saying that my method of dead body examination was a superstition left over from the feudal society. I was immediately thrown into a labour camp where I had to live and work in the stables for three long, bitter years. If I had been exonerated and released any later than that, I would’ve ended up a completely broken man.”

Grandpa turned stonily silent for a moment after recounting this part of his life. He then took a sip of the ginger tea and continued.

“I was too eager to show off my talents at a young age,” he said, “and I completely ignored the warnings of our ancestors because I was too set in my own ways, just as iron is brittle because it is too hard and can’t be bent. I decided to just hide at home after that and heed our ancestors’ warning, but my reputation had spread too far. Every few years I would get an invitation to work with the authorities. I had to refuse them, not because it was my wish, but for our own good. In the end, I had to compromise and start co-operating with the police secretly. I thought that our family would finally be safe after my generation, but now it turns out that you are trying to walk down the very same path that I did. Perhaps it is a cruel game that fate is playing with us, perhaps it is a curse our family has to endure, but perhaps it is also our mission and purpose!”

At this point, Grandpa’s words started to confuse me. Did he wish that I would follow his footsteps and become a Traditional Coroner, or was that still out of the question?

“Now that you’ve passed the test,” he continued, “from this day onwards I will pass on everything I’ve learnt all my life to you. Do you want to learn them, my boy?”

“Of course I do, Grandpa!” I answered, all fired up.

“Now, now,” he said, “don’t get carried away. I’m only doing this because you’ve been solely relying on those two books when in fact, they are only the tip of the iceberg compared to the mountain of knowledge our Song family has accumulated over generations. You are like a toddler with a sharp sword in his hand — sooner or later you will injure someone, if not yourself! I don’t want you to die young, my boy, but I’m too old to watch over you for the rest of your life. All I can do now is to teach you how to wield this ‘sword’ properly and let that protect you as you walk your own path.”

“Besides,” he continued, “the knowledge in forensic techniques has always been our family’s most treasured inheritance for centuries. If I die as the last person to learn or to know of them, I wouldn’t be able to face our ancestors in my afterlife. But with you as the successor, I can finally die in peace…”

Grandpa’s last sentence rubbed me the wrong way. I didn’t like the sound of it at all. It felt as if he was telling me his last wishes — his will, so to speak.

Nevertheless, I shook off this thought and just nodded at Grandpa.

From then on, any free time I had was spent with Grandpa, learning how to examine dead bodies, learning how to deal with crime scenes – these were all mysterious and fascinating skills, and it would be hard to describe them in words. Of course, it was quite a challenge for a teenager to learn all of this, but I gritted my teeth and fought on with determination, and like a sponge, I soaked up all the knowledge from Grandpa with enthusiasm.

In a blink of an eye, three years had gone by. My high school grades weren’t spectacular, so I doubted if I should even attempt to apply for the Polytechnic University of the province. But Grandpa convinced me to just give it a try, and he assured me that I would get accepted.

I believe that it was due to his influence and machinations that I was eventually accepted into the polytechnic university of my first choice. For a man like him, this was probably an easy task that didn’t require him to do more than lift a finger or make a few phone calls.

My aunt wanted me to study economics so I could help her with her business in the future, but to be blunt, that although crimes and dead bodies fascinated me to my very core, matters of commerce and business completely and utterly bored me. Perhaps it was Grandpa’s genes in me.

After much consideration, I finally decided on applied electronics. I heard that it was an honest profession with good demand and a decent job market, so I thought that it was a sensible choice. What I didn’t anticipate was that on the first day in college, I realized that out of all the students in my faculty there were only three girls in total. But alas, it was too late to do anything about it.

After the university entrance exam there was a long holiday when I spent all the time doing nothing at home, maybe I would surf the net or watch the television sometimes, or sometimes I would be playing chess with Grandpa. Even to this day, I look back on this period of time as the most carefree and happy period of my life.

One day, I went to a party at a friend’s house. We probably downed barrels full worth of beer that day. We were all childhood friends who’d been together all our lives till then, but now we were all at a crossroads where everyone would be separating and each of us would be walking our separate paths, moving to different parts of the country and doing different things, so we decided that since it could be our last party together in a long time, we might as well party hard.

After the party at my friend’s house, we decided that the night was still young and went into town to sing karaoke. In the end, it was already eleven o’clock when we finally parted ways and went home.

As I approached my house, I noticed that the light in Grandpa’s study was still on. That surprised me, because in our town everyone went to bed early in the evening, the only reason the lights would still be on at this hour would be if something terrible had happened, like for example when an elderly person had died… 

I sobered up in an instant and began to hasten my footsteps. I pushed open the front door, anticipating and dreading what I would see, but all I saw was an empty house without a soul in it.

I rushed to Grandpa’s study, but only found an envelope on his desk. There were no stamps on the letter, only a hand-drawn picture of a blood-red dagger on the bottom corner. 

I could feel that there was something in the envelope.

Curious, I picked up the envelope when something sticky fell out of it and onto my hand – it was an eyeball!

1. Not an actual temple but the name for the Supreme Court in Imperial China.