Before long, the items Zhu Yu requested were brought back by Fu Lu, and seeing the amount of soot wrapped in paper, Zhu Yu couldn’t help but think that the bottoms of the local families’ pots must have been scraped shiny.

"Master, is this enough?" Fu Lu asked uncertainly, "I originally wanted to get more from several households for you, but some people felt unlucky seeing constables from the corpse room at their door, they wouldn’t even let us in. Getting more would require traveling further and we worried you might get anxious waiting."

Zhu Yu looked at the soot in her hand and waved to Fu Lu, "This is enough, you don’t need to get more. Just rest outside and wait."

With that, she took the soot inside and soon came back out to fetch water and a cloth towel.

The door was shut once again.

Quite a long time passed, long enough that Fu Lu was getting restless, worried that something might have happened to Madam inside, constantly glancing towards Lu Qing.

Fu Wen was initially more composed than Fu Lu, but later also felt uneasy, so he moved closer to Lu Qing and quietly spoke, "Master..."

Lu Qing knew what he was going to ask and gestured for him not to continue. Looking up at the sun in the sky, he said, "Second Master has been busy inside for quite a while, prepare some hot soup; when she comes out, it can warm her up."

Upon hearing this, Fu Wen quickly responded, hurried back to the carriage to grab a pair of veils, and left in a rush.

When he returned with a pot of hot soup in his arms, running in hastily from outside, he found that Zhu Yu had not yet come out. As he pondered whether to again consult Master, the door of the corpse room creaked open, and Zhu Yu walked out.

She looked very tired and, instead of walking far, sat down heavily on the stone steps at the door, signaling to Fu Lu to bring out the water bucket from inside and close the back door.

After all, the cold air inside couldn’t be let out; otherwise, the corpse would rot and become unbearably stinky, which would truly be a nightmare.

Fu Lu hurriedly complied, and by the time he brought out a bucket of dirty water, Fu Wen had already lit some rhizoma atractylodis, angelica dahurica, and ligusticum striatum in the courtyard to disperse the bad qi from examining the corpse for Zhu Yu, who had already wiped her hands and face with the liquor Lu Qing had instructed the two brothers to bring from Yunyin Pavilion. She was now sitting there drinking hot soup.

Lu Qing seemed to have overthought something; what Zhu Yu needed most after coming out was not warmth. On the contrary, she was sweating all over. However, the hot soup still proved useful, replenishing her strength perfectly.

The old constable had been waiting in the courtyard all along. To say he was very invested in finding out the cause of the He Family daughter’s death might be an exaggeration. Mainly, his curiosity was piqued about what this "young person" could uncover from a corpse that had eluded even the experienced forensic doctors from the county government for decades.

"Why is this water...so black?" the old constable asked, glancing at the dark water in Fu Lu’s bucket, startled. "Could the woman have been poisoned by something extraordinary?"

"Don’t worry, it’s just soot," Zhu Yu waved her hand at him, then turned to Lu Qing. "I initially found no signs of injury on the woman’s body. However, after applying the soot and examining carefully, I noticed her body was covered in tiny wounds, like someone had pricked her all over with a needle. 𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚

The small holes are so fine that you can’t see them on the surface, but once the soot is evenly applied, they become very apparent. I suspect she died from exhaustion and deficiency due to these numerous needle-like marks on her body.

Remember the spiders I encountered before?"

With this, Lu Qing immediately understood, nodding his head knowingly.

"How did you get so exhausted?" he asked. If it weren’t for other people being present, he would have helped Zhu Yu fix her hair and wipe her sweat.

"It’s not the autopsy itself that’s tiring, but after it’s done, I have to clean the poor girl’s body of all that filthy soot," Zhu Yu sighed. "Though dead, the deceased deserves dignity, and finding the truth sometimes necessitates doing such things. But afterward, you want to restore a semblance of decency to the body.

There’s a saying about something being ’dead weight’; a dead body really is heavier than a boulder!

Though she seemed so frail, turning her over felt like moving a mountain. Applying that soot was exhausting, and cleaning and wiping afterward was another ordeal altogether."

At this point, Zhu Yu suddenly seemed to remember something. She turned to the old constable who was watching with intrigue, "Go and tell your County Magistrate that those two hunters, regardless of who they appear to be, definitely didn’t die from an attack by wild beasts."

"What?!" The old constable had been eagerly eavesdropping on details about the He Family daughter’s death. Hearing this unexpected remark from Zhu Yu left him momentarily stunned, "Then, how did they end up so mangled?"

"Both men’s faces were smashed in by a heavy object, only afterward were they devoured; one could see from the skull fractures that they were likely bludgeoned to death with something like this," Zhu Yu sized up an object with her hands, "The bite marks from wild animals came post-mortem, probably they were thrown on a mountain and subsequently gnawed by wild dogs.

Besides, although they wore hunter’s clothes, their hands were completely clean, devoid of any calluses. Forget drawing a bow, they likely had little experience with any laborious work. They might have been killed and then dressed in hunter’s garb to deceive others.

One of them had a distinct arch on the sole of his foot, while the other’s arch was flat; one’s toenails were smooth, the other’s rough and irregular. There’s quite an age gap between them. You should ask if any father and son pair went missing simultaneously; there might be a lead."

On hearing this, the old constable was dumbfounded but quickly committed it all to memory, afraid he might forget later, and rushed back to report everything to the County Magistrate.

After the old constable left, no outsiders remained. Lu Qing took out a handkerchief and wiped the sweat from Zhu Yu’s forehead. "Autopsies are already exhausting, why bother with other matters?"

"After applying the soot and checking, I was too tired, so I sat down to rest. Being idle anyways, I looked at the other two bodies to see what the situation was.

In doing so, luckily, I took a look because if they were searched for as hunters killed by beasts, they’d never be identified even once the bodies completely decomposed," Zhu Yu sighed helplessly and shook her head.