Chương 199: 28.Autopsy Report 1

The moment I stepped into the harbor district command headquarters, I nearly convinced myself I'd taken a wrong turn into some specialized nightmare processing facility—or perhaps an abattoir that had recently diversified its operations. Sobbing, screaming, the violent percussion of furniture meeting its demise—sound slammed through the corridors, ricocheted off the ceiling, and crashed back down to rattle around inside my skull like dice in a tin cup.

The air reeked of charred flesh, laced with that particular bitter stench of damp timber pushed past its breaking point, as if someone had gathered all the panic from the entire harbor, stuffed it into an iron cauldron, and left it to simmer over a low flame. I hadn't even managed to regulate my breathing when I spotted Ignicia.

"Princess, I'm back."

"Oh, Cedric. You're back." She didn't bother turning around. She acknowledged me with the same casual indifference you'd show the weather, while gently breathing across the branding iron in her hand. The next second, the iron—which had been a dull, unremarkable black—ignited from within, flaring into a brilliant, searing red that made my back teeth ache just from looking at it. What followed was a soul-tearing shriek and a fresh contribution to the room's already impressive collection of burnt-meat aromas.

My steps faltered. It wasn't that I was sheltered. It was the simple, inescapable truth that witnessing something like this once doesn't magically grant you immunity the second time around—especially when the person doing it maintains the serene expression of someone arranging flowers for Sunday tea. I quietly extended the signet I'd retrieved from the Wyvern Tower.

"The seal. The tower has dispatched word to the royal capital per your instructions and notified the delegation. The port closure order has been issued, and they've doubled the aerial patrols around the tower." Only then did Ignicia turn halfway toward me. She took the seal with a glance so casual you'd think I'd just popped next door to fetch her a bread roll, rather than sprinting across half the harbor district on a high-stakes errand.

"Not bad. At least you didn't come back empty-handed."

"I wasn't under the impression I'd gone for a leisurely stroll."

"If you dare tell me you went eloping—""Wasn't that what it was?" She finally looked me dead in the eye. Her golden-red pupils blazed in the firelight like molten metal, and the still-glowing branding iron in her hand lifted—slowly, almost contemplatively.

"Say one more word and I'll burn you alive."

"…I was merely trying to lighten the mood."

"Half the people in this headquarters are about to be cooked well-done. We don't need you lightening anything." I shut my mouth. There are times when knowing when to fold isn't a virtue—it's a survival skill. Just then, the unhurried drag of boots echoed from the doorway.

"Well, well. Everyone's looking busy." One-Eyed Maro sauntered in with the loose, unbothered gait of someone who'd just woken from a tavern nap. His stride was entirely incongruous with a room where people were screaming, where the air tasted of scorched things, and where at least two individuals looked one bad second away from losing bladder control. He surveyed the inhumane interrogation scene without so much as twitching an eyebrow, treating it like someone had merely burned the fish stew.

"Princess, the coroner found something interesting." He flashed that grin—the kind that had never once in its life been associated with good news.

"Bit disgusting, though. Heh-heh." Heh-heh my ass. If it's disgusting, keep it to yourself. I finished that thought internally. Before I could voice it, someone else cut through the air with ice-cold precision.

"Every time you say something is 'interesting,' it usually means everyone else is about to lose their appetite." Lei Lian stood in the shadows by the window—I had no idea when she'd arrived. She wasn't wearing her helmet today; her dark hair was tied at the nape of her neck, the edges of her pauldrons still dusted with grime from the Wyvern Tower's outer walls.

That Eastern face of hers should have looked gentle in the dim lighting, but the moment she spoke, the temperature of the entire room seemed to drop several degrees. Maro tilted his head toward her, lazy amusement dancing in his single eye.

"The General's words are as charming as ever."

"Likewise," Lei Lian replied flatly.

"At least I don't turn corpses into punchlines."

"Wouldn't dare." Maro spread his hands in theatrical innocence.

"I'm just giving everyone fair warning. No one wants to vomit on the coroner's boots—makes his job considerably harder." That sentence produced a very specific, very unpleasant premonition in my gut. Ignicia clearly had no intention of letting these two waste another breath trading barbs. She dropped the branding iron into a nearby bucket. Sharp hiss. Plume of white steam.

"Enough." She tucked the seal into her belt, her voice carrying that particular calm that made arguing feel physically dangerous.

"Lead the way." Maro shrugged and turned on his heel. I was about to mention that I might benefit from approximately thirty seconds of uninterrupted breathing when Ignicia's gaze swept over me.

"You're coming too."

"Me?"

"Who else?" The question arrived with the natural authority of someone who had never once considered that the answer might be anyone but you.

"You're already back. You can't just stand around looking decorative." For the record, I thought, I am exceptionally good at standing around looking decorative. I have refined it to an art form. I didn't say any of that. Because she was already walking, and Lei Lian had silently fallen in behind her, and at moments like this the calculus was simple: protesting had no return value. Keeping up, at minimum, meant I wouldn't be left behind in a room currently producing screaming.

The morgue sat at the rear of the headquarters, separated from the chaos of the interrogation wing by a silence so complete it felt accusatory. The door swung open. The first thing that hit me wasn't blood—it was cold. Not metaphorical cold, but actual, aggressive, physical cold that reached up through my boot soles and began methodically stealing my body heat. Enormous blocks of ice lined the walls, and the chill bled across the floor like invisible water, slow and relentless.

The copper lanterns burned pale and compressed, their light bleached colorless by the frost. The whole room looked like someone had taken meticulous care to lay down a proper carpet of ice for death to rest upon. If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. Haerding lay on the iron slab at the center. A half-sheet of white cloth covered him from the chest down.

The face above it had gone the ashen gray of something soaked in seawater and left to dry, a faint dark smear still clinging to the corner of his mouth. The man who had managed to prop up his official dignity in front of crowds just hours ago was now simply meat on a slab, his expression frozen in something bordering on the absurd. The coroner stood beside the table, organizing his instruments. When we entered, he offered Ignicia a single, economical nod. Ignicia crossed to the slab without slowing.

The cold didn't appear to affect her stride in the slightest.

"Tell Her Highness what you told me." The coroner straightened and turned toward her.

"Your Highness." He offered a brief, minimal bow.

"Haerding was compelled to take his own life." Ignicia's eyebrow rose a fraction.

"Explain."

"If Your Highness would observe." The coroner stepped forward. With practiced, unsettling efficiency—the kind that made it clear this wasn't his first time—he used a metal instrument to pry Haerding's jaw open. Then he produced a pair of long, slender forceps and, with careful precision, drew the tongue outward.

"There, Your Highness. On the underside of the tongue." I leaned forward half a step on instinct, and my stomach immediately filed a formal complaint. There was a mark. Not a wound, not a simple bruise, but an intricate sigil of twisting, labyrinthine lines so densely woven they made my eyes ache just trying to follow them. It looked like someone had taken a magic circle and carved it directly into living flesh.

Hidden beneath the tongue where nothing short of prying the mouth open would reveal it—deliberate, patient, and deeply unpleasant in the way only things designed to evade detection could be.

"What the hell is that?" I asked, frowning.

"While I confess no expertise in the arcane arts," the coroner said, setting down the forceps and retrieving a glass jar from the side table, placing it steadily on the edge of the slab, "my assessment would be curse work or sorcery of some kind." Inside the glass jar floated the preserved corpse of something that calling a "bug" felt charitable. It bore only passing resemblance to the small, harmless creatures you might find navigating bread corners.

This thing was elongated, unnaturally slender, its translucent carapace harboring what looked like shadows that refused to disperse. Its segmented limbs were so fine they looked architecturally wrong. Curled in the preserving fluid, motionless, it nonetheless radiated the distinct impression that it was simply waiting for the right moment to stop being motionless. A chill raced down my spine that had nothing to do with the ice.

"You found that inside him?"

"Strictly speaking, inside his brain." The coroner indicated the scale beside the slab with a slight lift of his chin. I looked. I immediately wished I hadn't. Haerding's brain sat on the weighing pan—a gray-white, glistening mass settling into the dish with the dense, resigned weight of something that had never asked to be there. The coroner's voice, describing this anatomical horror, maintained exactly the same measured, professional register he'd used for everything else.

"I was in the process of recording tissue weight when the specimen simply… emerged." He glanced at the jar.

"Fortunately, my reflexes proved adequate." I became acutely aware that I might be about to vomit. This wasn't hyperbole—this was physiological assessment. My throat had tightened, my stomach had begun a slow, deliberate ascent toward my esophagus, and even the air in front of me had developed a sourness that was definitely psychosomatic and absolutely real.

The only thing keeping me upright was the thin, increasingly strained awareness that I was, technically, a diplomatic envoy with certain standards of national representation to maintain. The coroner glanced at me, his voice shifting perhaps two degrees toward something that might be called considerate.

"Young man, please refrain from vomiting on the floor. There's a basin in the back."

"…That is the least comforting thing anyone has ever said to me." Maro, meanwhile, had leaned toward the glass jar with focused appreciation.

"Now that is a specimen," he said, clicking his tongue with what could only be described as admiration.

"Take this down to the docks, flash it at the drunks—guaranteed sobriety on the spot."

"Or guaranteed they quit breathing," I muttered, one hand pressed to my stomach. Ignicia paid neither of us any attention. Her gaze remained locked on the mark beneath Haerding's tongue.

"So—a parasitic organism combined with dark sorcery." Her question was direct, stripped of preamble.

"Is it possible he was controlled? Coerced or manipulated without his knowledge?" The coroner was silent for half a beat—the particular silence of someone carefully editing their response for royal ears.

"Your Highness," he said with admirable diplomacy, "I am a medical examiner, not a spiritual medium." I nearly laughed out loud. Not because it was funny, but because in a room full of ice blocks and exposed brains and eldritch parasites, that sentence was so relentlessly, stubbornly normal it produced something close to emotional vertigo. The coroner added, without changing his tone: "I speak only to the evidence before me. I do not speculate beyond it." Ignicia studied him for a moment, then nodded.

"Understood. Thank you." Getting a thank you out of this particular princess while standing next to a mutilated corpse represented professional achievement of the highest order. We were preparing to leave when Lei Lian, who had remained silent, took one step forward. She bent slightly, studying the mark on Haerding's tongue. When she straightened, her expression had darkened.

"This pattern…" she murmured. Ignicia turned her head.

"You recognize it?"

"Not exactly." Lei Lian didn't commit immediately, keeping her eyes on the mark for another moment.

"But in the Eastern Reaches, certain forbidden arts hide curse-marks in places that don't invite casual inspection. Under the tongue, behind the ear, between fingers, or in more… intimate locations. Not for aesthetics—for operational security. So the mark goes undetected until the moment it needs to activate." Maro raised an eyebrow.

"Charming lack of taste."

"Sorcery was never designed for your aesthetic pleasure," Lei Lian returned, flat as stone. She looked back at the coroner.

"This doesn't read as something applied hastily before death. It reads as something planted well in advance." The coroner nodded agreement.

"My assessment as well. The tissue response is inconsistent with formation in the final moments of life." Something shifted in my gut—something separate from the nausea and considerably worse. This meant Haerding hadn't been silenced at the last minute. It meant someone had threaded the noose around his neck long before he'd known to be afraid of it, and had simply waited—with the patience of someone who'd already decided how the story ended—for him to walk into it. Ignicia's eyes went cold.

She said nothing, but that silence was more frightening than her anger had ever been. It was the silence of a hunter who had crouched down to examine tracks and realized they weren't fresh—who had understood, with perfect clarity, that someone had laid this trap in the woods long ago and had been waiting ever since for the right prey to step into it. The coroner cleared his throat, wearing the expression of someone who recognized his next sentence was going to land badly.

"This is my inference," he said carefully.

"The probability of this organism entering via external means is extremely low. The most likely mechanism is internal incubation." Ignicia's response was immediate.

"Ingested?"

"That is one possibility. Concealed in food or drinking water—both are viable vectors." He paused. Looked at Ignicia. It was the look of someone who had something left to say and was taking a private moment to decide exactly how much he wanted to say it. Every alarm bell in my head started ringing.

"There is," the coroner continued with the careful tone of someone defusing something volatile, "one additional transmission method." A pause.

"Via the… lower route." The room went quiet for exactly one second. I stood very still as my brain slowly, reluctantly completed the translation.

"Lower route meaning… sexual intercourse?" The coroner nodded with complete professional composure.

"Correct."