Chapter 700 - 643: Tidying Up
In the following days, three more bodies were unearthed from walls and kang beds, and were sent to the forensic autopsy room. The number of bodies in the Chen Wanjia case rose to eight.
Two of the bodies were the familiar foremen, and the third, discovered by police in the old house of Chen Wanjia’s aunt Wang Lihua’s kang bed, was a mummified corpse.
No one had expected this body, because Wang Lihua had disappeared years earlier, and there was a record of the disappearance. A search team had sent two people with a portable X-ray machine to scan the area. They didn’t find anything in the wall, but when they scanned the kang bed, they detected a human figure.
The Chen family had used this kang bed for several years for eating, drinking, sitting, and sleeping, but not a single person had uncovered its secret. When the kang was dug up and a mummy highly suspected to be Chen Wanjia’s aunt Wang Lihua appeared, everyone in the area was shocked.
Chen Wanjia had been raised by his aunt Wang Lihua for a long time; he ate at her house and was cared for by her. After she disappeared, no one suspected Chen Wanjia.
It was during the time Chen Wanjia’s uncle was building a new house, a sign that the family’s life was improving. Chen Wanjia had contributed greatly, and the uncle’s family had nothing but praise for him, no discontent.
Wang Lihua’s disappearance was treated as an isolated case.
When Jiang Yuan saw the body of Chen Wanjia’s aunt Wang Lihua, he was quite surprised. The body, baked over the years, had muscle and skin tissue that had metamorphosed into a layer of dark brown crust, and the bones were brittle, crumbling at the touch. The trauma to the remaining bones and tissue suggested the victim’s chest cavity had likely been cleaved open with an axe.
That was probably the cause of death. To use the words from a storytelling script, "When that axe came down, the heart, liver, and lungs poured out, and couldn’t be gathered up."
The term "extremely cruel" seemed quite appropriate here.