The figures who had been nothing more than black ink strokes on paper leapt to life and became real, living people.
Old Liu would hobble about helping her tend the fields that Grandmother Ye had cultivated. Wang the night watchman would tirelessly recount the splendors of the city to her, telling them like stories.
Fate had shown these people no fairness whatsoever. Their lives had been hard to begin with, and then disabilities had befallen them besides — yet they had not given up. Those who could not farm wove bamboo baskets and containers instead; those whose eyes could no longer see felt their way along slowly with their hands.
Perhaps it took ten days or half a month to produce a single bamboo basket that sold for only twenty copper coins. Perhaps sometimes the baskets did not sell at all.
But they had kept on striving to live — and simply being alive was already something to be grateful for.
— Yet Lu Shouhuai had flooded the entire village without so much as a blink.
He had not even needed to raise a blade. He had only needed to block the road into the village in the dead of the night as the floodwaters rose, and every single one of those people had been condemned to die.
Zhang Zhixu’s eyes slowly reddened.
He finally understood why, when Chen Baoxiang had spoken of these people, it had felt as though his chest had been struck a vicious blow — why rage and indignation had boiled up like scalding water, only to be forcefully suppressed by her.
She hated Lu Shouhuai with a hatred so consuming that she had needed to pin him beneath the river’s waters with her own hands, in order to offer some solace to the three hundred and seventy souls of Guixiang Village.
Lu Shouhuai had deserved exactly that fate.
“Well?” Xie Lanting asked. “Do you find this testimony credible?”
Zhang Zhixu came back to himself, quietly set the scroll down, and after a long silence replied, “I’m not certain.”
The testimony had been provided by survivors to the county chief — one side of the story only, and inadmissible as evidence.
Besides, even if the motive were genuine, without a complete account of the act itself, it was not enough to convict Chen Baoxiang.
But he suddenly felt uneasy about her. If Xie Lanting could obtain something like this, then Cheng Huaili certainly could as well.
He set down his brush and ink, rose to his feet, and took his outer robe from the partition screen.
“Where are you going?” Xie Lanting called after him.
Zhang Zhixu didn’t look back. “Just going for a walk.”
“Just going for a walk, he says.” Xie Lanting put his hands on his hips. “Don’t tell me you’re walking all the way to Tianning Mountain. We’re civil officials — we don’t get involved in hunting excursions.”
The voice grew fainter and fainter, and was soon shut out beyond the carriage curtain.
Zhang Zhixu instructed Ningsu, “Move out.”
Ningsu gripped the reins with some discomfort. “Sir, it may not be easy to go there.”
“I have an urgent memorial to present to His Majesty. Why should it not be easy?”
“It’s not that, it’s more that…” Ningsu’s expression grew grave. “Word just came in — mountain bandits have risen up on Tianning Mountain and are causing trouble. Several garrison towns nearby have already dispatched their troops. Right now, all vehicles and horses are banned within fifty li of Tianning Mountain.”
Mountain bandits?
Zhang Zhixu, stunned, lifted the carriage curtain. “Didn’t they root out all the bandits on that mountain several years ago? The Holy One goes there every year for spring outings and hunting — how can there still be bandits?”
Ningsu looked at him in silence.
Slowly, the latter came to understand.
There could be no bandits. But if one needed to eliminate certain people, bandits were the only cover.
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