Miss Truth
Chapter 113 - 71 Wei Niang

Chapter 113: Chapter 71 Wei Niang

These bones mostly still had soft tissue attached, not merely bare, and thus they looked horrifying, especially the skulls, some of which still had hair and flesh that hadn’t fully fallen off, giving Wan Lu waves of nausea.

After a while, Wan Lu managed to steady her emotions and sneakily glanced at Inspector Liu. Seeing him standing in a corner with a frown and a look of disgust on his face, a surge of anger rose within her. She thought, "You find this disgusting too, yet you dragged our wife here to identify them!"

Though she was angry, she didn’t let her emotions get the best of her and lash out at Inspector Liu. She snatched a pair of gloves from the hands of a government official nearby, put them on nimbly, and squatted next to Ran Yan, "Wife, how do we identify this? Let me help divide it!"

Ran Yan was observing the degree of wear on the teeth of a skull. Hearing Wan Lu’s slightly irritated voice, she couldn’t help but turn her head, smile slightly, and turned the skull around, saying, "Before adulthood, there’s a piece of cartilage called the basilar suture between the body of the sphenoid and the base of the occipital bone. The closure of this gap occurs between 21 and 23 years of age. After the age of forty, this suture will completely disappear."

Ran Yan pointed out that seam to Wan Lu, "Look at this one, it’s closed well but not gone, indicating that at the very least, it’s above 21 years old and under forty. Then we deduce further from the degree of wear on the teeth."

Although she was explaining, Ran Yan didn’t actually let Wan Lu do the identification. She just felt that Wan Lu had courage and potential.

"Wear refers to the gradual erosion of the tips and biting surfaces of the teeth as they chew food during the growth period," Ran Yan said as she pushed away the lower jaw of the skull she was holding, allowing Wan Lu to clearly see the side profile of the teeth, "For instance, most of the cusps of the teeth on this skull are worn, the dentin is exposed in a dot-like manner, meaning you can see a dot on the side profile of the tooth where the outer layer has been worn away, exposing the underlying dentin. We can determine that the age of this skull is approximately 36 to 45 years old."

Wan Lu asked, "Then this skull is also between 36 and 40 years old?"

"Correct," Ran Yan nodded in satisfaction and continued to inspect other parts of the skull for healing, "Once we find the other bones, we can narrow the range of age error to within two years."

Feng Sanxun, seeing Ran Yan narrowing the age range step by step, leaned in and asked, "What if the teeth have not worn at all, or are overly worn?"

Ran Yan didn’t hide her expertise and explained the different conditions of each skull as she went through them, "If you want to understand thoroughly, you must first know the internal structure of the teeth. When you have time, you can dissect a tooth to observe it. Generally, we classify wear on the teeth into six stages, the first stage is when the tips and edges of the cusps are slightly worn, which occurs around 15 to 25 years old, the second stage is when the cusps are worn flat or the central biting surface is indented, which appears between 26 and 35 years old..."

As she spoke, Ran Yan quickly discarded the excluded bone fragments to the side.

These skeletal remains, because they had been wrapped in mats when buried, were not without pattern, and luckily, the soft tissue had not completely disappeared, allowing many of the bones to remain connected by it.

Two corpses of women of matching ages were gradually pieced together under Ran Yan’s hands.

Liu Pinrang’s frown relaxed somewhat, when suddenly, a team leader ran over and saluted Liu Pinrang with hands clasped, "Inspector, I was ordered to capture Yin Sanniang. We searched Yin’s residence for a quarter of an hour but did not find the person, and no one in the Yin household knows of her whereabouts!"

"Unaccounted for?" Liu Pinrang’s recently relaxed brow furrowed again, "Issue my command, search the whole city!"

"Wait." Ran Yan stood up and said, "Inspector Liu might consider deploying more people by the Pingjiang River."

Liu Pinrang immediately connected this suggestion to the death of Yin Wanwan and ordered, "Dispatch half of the force to the Pingjiang River! Enough, I shall go myself, postpone the court hearing by one day!"

Ran Yan lowered her gaze to the two female corpses, and then hastened her steps to catch up with Liu Pinrang, "Inspector Liu, let me accompany you too, I might be able to help narrow down the search."

With the Pingjiang River spanning over five miles, even if all the government soldiers from Suzhou City were dispatched, it would take several hours to search. Liu Pinrang kept walking without a second thought and nodded, "Good."

Ran Yan and Wan Lu quickly followed Liu Pinrang to the stables. As they turned a corner, they encountered several government officials escorting a middle-aged woman. Her hands and feet were shackled, yet she was dressed neatly and appropriately, her hair and makeup were not at all disheveled, her faint eyebrows and eyes spread like ink in the misty rain, her delicate waist swaying as gracefully as willows in the breeze. Dressed in a white cicada-wing blouse and light-grey skirt, she seemed the epitome of grace and serenity, as if walking through Suzhou’s cobblestone alleys on a rainy day in June.

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