The Ghost Case Forensic

The Ghost Case Forensic is a supernatural suspense novel by the web author Yi Tianzi, first published on Motie Chinese and completed around 2014, totaling about 660,000 characters. The work is narrated in the first person and opens with a premise: most professions in this world can be placed in the sunlight, but some can only hide in the shadows. For doctors who save lives and heal the wounded, people usually know only Chinese medicine and Western medicine; in fact there is a third, rarely mentioned kind—the "ghost doctor." The narrator is precisely such a ghost doctor, recruited into a special task force because of a supernatural case that conventional criminal investigation methods could not solve; since the ghost doctor is a profession inconvenient to reveal publicly, his public identity in the task force is that of a forensic examiner. The book links cases together in units of "volumes." Volume One, "The Blood-Crying Ghost Infant," begins with Old Huang, a barefoot doctor in a small village in the Daba Mountains, and through a series of eerie clues—a night visit to the grave hill, bloody footprints, a red-clad female ghost, small paper figures, the ghost infant case, coffins and the stench of corpses—draws out a chain of interconnected mysteries involving the ghost infant, then introduces the task force, the deadly water tower, the white-robed man, the black cat robbing graves, the fire paper figures, the knockout smoke and infant theft, the mountain god temple, and the corpse hidden in the ancient tomb, all interlocking. The novel interweaves folk funeral customs, talisman paper and paper figures, ghost markets and temple fairs, and other supernatural elements with the criminal investigation process of forensic examination, crime-scene inspection, and interrogation and reasoning; the protagonist uses silver needles, pharmacology, and a unique perception of "ghost qi" as his methods of solving cases, tracing human-made murders amid supernatural appearances that are hard to tell true from false. The story is fast-paced with a high density of cases, in a style leaning toward folk legend and urban ghost stories, suitable for readers who like supernatural suspense and forensic themes.