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The Ruthless Female Forensic Doctor's Husband-Destroying Story
Author: Qingge Yipian
Chapter 1
The 1930s.
It was late at night. Xu Shirong lay on her bed in her studio apartment, using the neon light reflected from the window to stare at a skull, a human skull, placed high on a cabinet on the opposite wall.
The skull appears jade-colored in natural daylight, but at this moment it changes color constantly with the neon lights outside, sometimes red, sometimes green. The only constant is the two huge eye sockets, which remain dark and bottomless, silently staring at Xu Shirong.
This is a souvenir she kept after becoming a forensic pathologist and handling her first case involving an unidentified female corpse.
Xu Shirong stopped staring at the skull, suddenly sat up in bed, quickly dressed, grabbed her toolbox, and slipped out of her apartment.
As she went downstairs, the drowsy gatekeeper in the gatehouse looked up at her lazily, then lowered his head again to doze off.
Xu Shirong had an ordinary appearance. Apart from a pair of eyes that sparkled with a bit of liveliness, she had nothing particularly eye-catching about her. So, even though she had been living here for over a year since returning from England, the doorman still couldn't remember her name or know what she did for a living.
It's probably better that he doesn't know. If he knew what she was going to do, the doorman would probably get goosebumps whenever he saw her.
She was going to the morgue at St. Mary's Hospital to perform an autopsy on a body that would be cremated the next morning.
She is a forensic pathologist, a forensic pathologist who can understand the whispers of corpses. Her hands hold not only scalpels, but also saws, chisels, and all the tools that allow her to better decipher the hidden secrets of the body.
Xu Shirong's father is a doctor who returned from studying abroad and is now the director of St. Mary's Hospital, which was funded by the British. Among her ancestors, the one she admires most is the one from the Daoguang era of the Qing Dynasty.
That ancestor was a Jinshi (a successful candidate in the highest imperial examinations) during the Daoguang era. He was not only well-versed in literature and medicine, but also renowned for his keen political acumen and skill in resolving difficult cases. The drawing depicting the full skeletal structure of the human body, both front and back, which her family still treasures, was created by her ancestor when she brought a painter with her to meticulously copy the bones she collected during her investigations.
Born into such a prestigious family, though dynasties have changed and the family's former glory has long since faded, Xu Shirong was not only cultivated to be proficient in poetry and painting, but also developed a love for medicine from a young age. Although her father did not want his daughter to follow in this footsteps, he could not resist her pleading and sent her to study in England when she was fifteen. When she returned eight years later, he was dumbfounded to find that his daughter had secretly switched to studying forensic medicine, a branch of anthropology. He was furious, but she retorted with, "Our ancestors also did this work. If you stop me, you are disrespecting our ancestors," leaving him with no choice but to give in.
When Xu Shirong arrived at the hospital, she was a familiar face there, and no one stopped her.
Unbeknownst to her, just as she stepped out of her apartment building, a figure had already emerged from the alleyway beside her and quietly followed her.
The police station's morgue, located within the hospital, was at the end of the passageway ahead. The wall lamps at the top of the passageway emitted a dim white light, and all around was deathly silent.
She walked towards the morgue, but what came to mind was the words of her superior, the blue-eyed, high-nosed Englishman, who had rushed over earlier that day when she took over the case: "Miss Xu, this deceased woman was a famous socialite who associated with many political figures. Her accidental drowning while swimming has attracted much attention from all sectors of society. We've arranged for her to be cremated early tomorrow morning. I will be responsible for submitting a case report; you just need to sign it."
Her boss usually treated her fairly well.
She understood what he meant.
However, she couldn't control her curiosity. And also, she felt a sense of responsibility as a forensic pathologist.
She wanted to know how this famous socialite, whose photo of her smiling as she danced with the mayor had been published in the newspaper just days before, had died.
The closer you get to the morgue, the stronger the peculiar smell becomes. It comes from the preservatives, cleaning agents, and the smell of the corpse.
She took out her key, opened the door, went inside, and walked toward the mortuary bed she had seen once during the day.
Her footsteps were light, as if afraid of disturbing the sleeping souls around her.
She arrived at the mortuary, turned on the large-beam flashlight she had brought, adjusted the angle, and then lifted the white sheet covering the body.
The woman's body lay there, her hair still slightly damp, her skin milky white, appearing almost translucent under the light. Her long, slender legs were spread wide, in a seductive, waiting pose.
If the environment were different, and if she weren't a corpse, she would be the kind of woman who could easily captivate any man.
But now, she just lies there in this shameful position, like a frog waiting to be disemboweled.
Xu Shirong quickly put on thin leather gloves and touched the lower jaw of the corpse. It was still somewhat stiff, indicating that the time of death should be within thirty-six hours. After that period, the stiffness of the corpse would disappear.
She opened the woman's jaw and found her mouth to be clean, without any foreign objects. She then examined her genitals and found no semen. However, the absence of male bodily fluids does not necessarily mean the woman had not engaged in sexual activity or been violated before her death.
She opened the woman's abdomen. The abdominal cavity, pierced by a scalpel, had a certain smell, a smell that didn't change because she was a beautiful woman. Xu Shirong had long been accustomed to all sorts of smells.
She saw the woman's lungs and the trachea connected to them.
It looked perfectly fresh, with normal tissue, showing no signs of drowning.
She opened the female corpse's stomach again.
The woman was a severe stomach ulcer patient, with signs of perforation. There was no food in her stomach, only a small amount of liquid, and a faint, slightly sour smell of alcohol, which she still detected. Clearly, this woman's stomach had been severely ravaged by alcohol throughout her life. If she hadn't died now, these perforated ulcers might have taken her life in the near future.
She quickly cut off parts of the stomach and liver tissue, placed them into a collection bottle she had brought beforehand with tweezers, nimbly sutured the abdominal incision, and helped her put her clothes back on.
After finishing all this, Xu Shirong sighed, glanced at the woman with her eyes closed with some pity, left the morgue, and went to another room in the building, the police station's autopsy laboratory located in the hospital.
The laboratory was filled with rows of bottles of various sizes used to store tissues and slices of dissected corpses. In the center of the room stood a stainless steel autopsy table, next to which were dissection boards, dissection tools, and specimen bottles containing formalin. The dissection tools, compared to normal hospital tools, appeared large and somewhat gruesome, looking more like those from a slaughterhouse.
Without even glancing at it, she went to her workbench and skillfully began examining the organ slides she had brought.
Before long, she easily came to a conclusion.
In addition to male bodily fluids, the deceased's stomach also contained residues of high concentrations of opioid morphine.
Clearly, this was not the case, as her boss claimed, that the deceased had accidentally drowned while swimming.
No one can swim after taking such a high concentration of morphine with alcohol.
Xu Shirong was gradually piecing together the scene of the woman's last moments before her death in his mind.
She must have first engaged in inappropriate sexual activity with a man, then been forced or unknowingly given a fatal dose of opioid morphine. Alcohol was the catalyst that accele
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