I Solved Cases Through Portraits and Became a Treasure of the Police Force [Criminal Investigation]

Li Shumei is a twenty-year-old trainee officer at the Qindong City Public Security Bureau, assigned to the Second Team under Captain Qu Qingchuan. Despite being the daughter of Bureau Chief Xia Zude, she hides her lineage to prove her worth, as she is widely regarded by her colleagues as the "useless beauty" due to her physical frailty and tendency to faint or vomit at crime scenes. Her only ally is Qi Zishan, a detective with a hearing impairment, while her mentor, Fei Jianghe, is a stern veteran who initially opposes her presence in the field. The story begins when Li Shumei accompanies Fei Jianghe to a gruesome dismemberment case by a riverside, where the victim’s head has been destroyed by sulfuric acid to prevent identification. During the examination, Li Shumei experiences a strange supernatural phenomenon: faint golden lines of light appear over corpses and body parts, allowing her to mentally reconstruct facial features and instantly perceive precise measurements of limbs.

The core conflict arises from the team’s struggle to identify the victim, Jiang Qinyu, a young woman whose body was cut into fourteen pieces and dumped in a remote area. While the team’s official forensic artist, Xu Wenzheng, fails to produce a usable reconstruction due to the severe damage to the skull, Li Shumei uses her unique ability to visualize the victim’s face. She spends the night sketching the reconstructed portrait, creating a drawing that captures the victim’s true appearance despite her amateur artistic skills. The next morning, her sketch is panned by senior officers Ma Guangping and Fei Jianghe, who criticize its roughness and question her authority to submit it. However, Li Shumei insists on having her drawing posted alongside the official portraits, leading to a tense confrontation where Fei Jianghe surprisingly supports her, ordering the prints to be made larger.

A key turning point occurs when a coworker of the victim recognizes Li Shumei’s sketch and reports it, leading to the identification of the victim as Jiang Qinyu. This success forces the bureau to officially retain Li Shumei in the Second Team, granting her a work phone and ending her status as a temporary clerk. The investigation reveals that Jiang Qinyu had resigned from her factory job on September 26, one day after her estimated time of death, suggesting that someone else may have used her identity or that her death was concealed to allow for a fake resignation. This anomaly deepens the mystery, indicating that the killer had intimate knowledge of the victim’s life and took deliberate steps to obscure her identity while retaining her torso, which likely contains critical evidence.

As the story progresses, Li Shumei must navigate the hostile environment of the detective team while mastering her uncanny ability. She faces skepticism from Ma Guangping, who suspects she copied the expert’s work, and ongoing tension with Fei Jianghe, whose harsh exterior hides a protective nature reminiscent of a father figure. The narrative establishes a trajectory where Li Shumei’s unique gift becomes the team’s most valuable asset in solving the dismemberment case. The missing torso and the killer’s meticulous destruction of identity clues suggest a personal connection between the murderer and the victim, setting the stage for a deeper investigation into Jiang Qinyu’s final days and the hidden secrets of those around her.

The political dynamics within the bureau also come into play, as Chief Xia Zude uses the case’s breakthrough to assert authority over his subordinates, particularly Qu Qingchuan and Ma Guangping. He warns them to treat Li Shumei well, revealing that he is aware of the prejudice she faces. Meanwhile, Li Shumei’s personal life is marked by her close relationship with her adoptive mother, Li Xinfeng, and the trauma of a past bus explosion that left her with a leg scar and a determination to become a police officer. The summary concludes with the team poised to dig deeper into Jiang Qinyu’s background, with Li Shumei’s supernatural perception serving as the pivotal tool that will likely uncover the truth behind the killer’s identity and motive.