“I am dealing with something right now. Even if I could find Dave now he’s not going to be at the inn for a few hours.” Jianmen refused to come over when Caroline called him: “Unless you are in urgent trouble or you find something serious, I cannot come right away. ”

“Okay, Boss, but we’ll really need your help here soon. We could use your pointers and guidance.”

“Yeah, I’m still not an expert on necromancy.” Jianmen said after a short pause: “Just send me pictures or any other question you have. You are a cultivator now, trust your instincts and your abilities.”

“Yeah, I know that Boss, thanks for the encouragement.” Caroline sighed: “It’s just… I have a really bad feeling about the body here - maybe because I am over paranoid because of the cultists.”

“Nonono, trust your guts.” Jianmen said, after another short pause: “If you feel something is not right, then be extra cautious and careful. ”

“Thanks Boss, but you’ll be here if I called?”

“Yeah. And tell you what, since you just had experiences where your phone doesn’t work. So I already blessed our phone connection - you can always reach me whenever and wherever.”

“What? You can do that? How?”

“Simple trick. You will be able to do it when you’re at the 4th layer.”

“Ok, thanks Boss.” Caroline hung up the phone.

“So… your teacher’s not coming?” Jeremy asked: “Is he ... a paranormal expert or something?”

“He’s not really an expert. But he knows a lot.” Caroline shrugged and rolled her eyes.

“Okay, while we wait, let’s update you on the Dr.Nguyen situation.” Erika sighed and scratched her brows.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

“Erika, you don’t have to do this. I can give her the update.” Jeremy said.

“Yeah, don’t worry about me. I want justice for Dr. Nguyen, just like the rest of the people in this precinct.” Erika took a deep breath and stood up and looked at Caroline: “And this is where we actually need your help.”

“Okay. Lay it on me and spare no detail. ” Caroline nodded.

“You already know, that the hand your friend found in the dumpster belongs to Dr. Nguyen.” Erika pointed at Jeremy, telling Jeremy to put something else on the TV in the lab: “People from SJPD ran some tests on it already, and they shared their reports with us.”

At the same moment, Jeremy projected parts of a document on the TV, with highlights and gruesome pictures of a rotten severed hand on the side.

“Holy crap, this looks gross - I mean bad.” Caroline was somewhat disgusted by what she saw.

“Yeah it was gross and really bad.” Erika shook her head and continued: “Believe it or not, the SJPD was under the impression that the hand had been dead for around a month - which is quite impossible, since Dr. Nguyen was not missing for that long - even if it is true - she had to be dead immediately after she disappeared.”

“Not to mention that the garbage container was collected three days before your friend found it.” Jeremy said: “And this is where we are really confused: if she’s been dead that long, any normal killer would have abandoned it a long time ago. And if there’s no foul play, why would a single hand show up there? And here’s something disturbing: there was no apparent wound on the bones. It looked like it just kinda… fell off.”

“Yeah. And we did some scraping tests on the bones, because we noticed that the hand looked really strange.” Erika said: “The bones were really really brittle, and almost completely hollow without any bone marrow.”

“And I assume this is where you want my help.” Caroline rubbed her forehead and said: “Yeah unfortunately I cannot tell you anything about that. The only thing I can tell you - and please don’t tell anyone else just yet - is that my theory is that she was possessed by a powerful unclean being. ”

“Possessed? Did you say possessed?” Jeremy hesitated and then scoffed: “And… unclean being? What does that even mean?”

“Ghosts, evil spirits. ” Caroline explained: “Yeah, Jeremy, don’t dismiss it right away, you saw what Dr. Nguyen looked like when she took out that coin from the corpses’ mouth. She was influenced by something and you know it.”

“Also, do you remember, we found freshly shed hair and teeth from her sink when we got to her apartment? That is what happens when someone is possessed by a strong evil spirit - the vessel cannot contain or even endure the corruptive power of the spirit and it starts to die the instant the possession takes place and its vitality starts being consumed.” Caroline tried to recite what she heard when she casually asked Jianmen about possession before during lunch: “Therefore, the hair, the teeth, and now the hand, are all symptoms of the decay of Dr. Nguyen’s body.”

“Okay.” Erika and Jeremy both went silent for a short while with concerned looks on their faces, then Erika asked: “Assuming that you’re right on this, what should we do? What will you and your friend do?”

“First of all, we need to take a look at the corpse when Jason gets here. Can you show me some pictures?”

“Yeah, give me a second, we took quite a lot of pictures.” Jeremey got back to his laptop, and it did not take him too long to find some pictures to project onto the TV.

“Wait, those chains, looks like there are symbols etched on them?” Caroline pointed her phone to the TV screen and snapped a few shots of the screen: “Can you zoom in on those?”

When Jeremy made the TV display zoom in on the metal chains around the corpse, and Caroline got to see some of the symbols clearly up close - and some of the symbols looked kinda familiar to her.