At that moment a draft swept through the temple. Qin Yuan was thinly dressed and couldn’t withstand the cold, and she suddenly broke into violent coughing.
She bent over and coughed for a while, then a flash of white light went through her mind, and she abruptly raised her head to look at Qin Yao. “Could it be that my sudden consumption is something you people engineered? Just so you could move me out of the palace and make it easier to deal with me?”
Qin Yao smiled and said shamelessly, “If we hadn’t drawn you out, how could we have set up tonight’s scheme? I might as well tell you—you don’t have consumption at all. You’ve been poisoned with a chronic poison that has no cure to this day. Anyone poisoned with it will die within half a year of the poison taking effect.”
The implication being: even if you, Qin Yuan, refuse to confess your crimes, it makes no difference—you won’t live much longer anyway.
In truth, Qin Yao’s words were only meant to frighten her. They had indeed tampered with Qin Yuan’s food, but it was neither a lethal poison nor consumption—rather a powder that induced coughing. The symptoms it produced were identical to consumption, looking dangerous, but in truth the victim would recover on their own within three months.
To make Qin Yuan’s illness appear more convincing, Lin Xiao had also sent people to dose the food of several palace maids with the powder, creating the false impression that the disease was contagious.
Qin Yuan was suspicious by nature, yet she believed this completely. Her complexion grew even paler, and she forced a cold smile as she held her ground. “You should remember that next year I am to be named Crown Princess. If I die like this, with no one able to say how or why, never mind anyone else—the Crown Prince will be the first one who won’t let you off!”
Lin Xiao stood to one side, watching her coldly. This woman’s cunning and scheming were truly the worst he had ever encountered in any woman in his life.
She had strategy, could endure hardship, and calculated every move down to the smallest detail—almost every step she took was already laying groundwork for the next. He suspected that from the very day she entered the palace, she had already set her sights on the Crown Prince.
Beyond that, there had been several occasions when he was on duty in the palace where, had he not generally been cautious in his dealings, he might already have fallen prey to this woman’s schemes and been dragged into trouble for no reason.
To say nothing of anything else, there was that time Xia Yuan had cornered him at the pavilion by the lotus pond. Had he not immediately retraced his steps, within moments his Seventh Brother would have caught him talking with Xia Yuan alone in the pavilion.
At such a late hour, with just the two of them, a man and an unmarried woman—even if he could explain himself however he liked, it would have planted a thorn in his Seventh Brother’s heart all the same. From this alone one could see just how skilled this woman was at scheming against people’s hearts.
Thinking on it now, if Qin Yao hadn’t been so meticulous as to notice something amiss about the trapdoor in the tunnel, planting the seed of doubt from the start, they would never have suspected this woman to this day.
“Do you recognize this pair of shoes?” He tossed the mud-stained shoes onto the ground and asked flatly.
Qin Yuan’s gaze froze. The lake-blue satin surface of the shoes was embroidered with lotus flowers; though filthy now, one could still tell the fabric was costly and exquisite—precisely the pair she had worn that day at Shouhuai Mountain.
But she had clearly discarded them on the way back to Chang’an. Why were they in his hands now?
She forced her gaze to move to Lin Xiao’s face, cold sweat breaking out across her back. Could he really have sent men to search the entire route from Shouhuai Mountain to Chang’an, inch by inch, just to find a pair of shoes? She hadn’t expected this man to be even more thorough and exacting than she had imagined.
“What’s the matter?” Qin Yao crouched down and picked up the shoes to examine them. “Don’t want to admit it? The material of these shoes is a tribute fabric from Jiangnan called Yanxia Brocade. There are only two bolts of it in the entire palace—one in lotus-purple, made into a robe for Consort Yi, and one in lake-blue, which the Crown Prince requested and gave to you. As you say, the Crown Prince truly favors you, so if we were to bring this pair of shoes before him, he would surely recognize at a glance that this fabric is from the very bolt he gave you.”
As she spoke, Qin Yao rose slowly and looked at Qin Yuan. “After you pushed me off the cliff, you assumed I was certainly dead. Who would have known I survived through sheer chance. Fearing the young lord might trace the matter back to you through some clue, and knowing things would be far less convenient to manage once back in the palace, you seized the chance to switch shoes the moment you returned from the cliff, intending to find a moment to discard them. Unfortunately there were too many eyes and ears about, and the mountain demons caused chaos besides—you could barely keep yourself alive, let alone find time to dispose of the shoes. Only after the demons were cleared away, when you came down the mountain with everyone else, did you finally find the chance to throw the shoes away along the road. Am I right?”
Perhaps knowing her life was nearly at its end, or perhaps knowing that once outside this desolate temple there would be no proof against her, Qin Yuan didn’t bother arguing further and merely sneered. “Just because you suspect I pushed you off the cliff, you and your husband poisoned me? And here you go on about benevolence and righteousness every day—does what you’ve done live up to your Daoist title?”
Qin Yao raised her elegant brows—was this woman trying to pin a grand label on her? Fortunately, she herself had a clear conscience, and besides, she had never been naively kind. This woman had already once tried to kill her—did she expect Qin Yao to offer her neck for a second attempt?
She changed her mind and didn’t rush to refute, instead feigning a heavy sigh as she looked at Qin Yuan. “Actually, whether Daoist or Buddhist, both speak of cause and karma, of retribution above all. That is precisely why those of the Dao have so many restrictions on their conduct. Do you know why your father met the end he did? It was nothing more than his slaughter of the innocent, his accumulation of too much sin—so much that in the end even the Six Paths of Reincarnation would not take him. Looking at it now, truly Heaven’s net is vast and its mesh is fine, missing nothing. Your father has been dead such a short time, and already it has come around to you.”
She decided to bluff a little.
Qin Yao secretly cast a talisman, summoning a gust of cold wind, then snapped her fingers, driving several wandering spirits hidden in the shadows to let out shrill, ghostly wails. The sound rose and fell, unbroken, exactly like the cries of innocence from the women who had died horribly in this very temple—remarkably convincing.
Qin Yuan already had a guilty conscience, and hearing these sounds, she immediately recalled the gruesome sight of those women with their ears and noses gouged out. She shuddered violently but forced a smile. “Such lowly women, no different from pigs and dogs—even dead, they probably don’t have the right to become ghosts. Why should I be afraid? Even if it happened again, I would still help my father carve out those women’s facial features to use for the formation. As it stands, I only regret that killing those women took too much time, letting you trace the clues back to us, ruining our plan for nothing. Otherwise the formation would have succeeded long ago, my mother would already be revived, and our family of three would be reunited—who knows how happy we’d be? How could things have come to this point of ruin for our whole family?”
Qin Yao’s expression gradually turned cold. She looked at Qin Yuan with a heavy gaze and said, word by word, “You’re just like your father—both madwomen with no conscience at all.”
“Madwoman?” Qin Yuan seemed somewhat surprised by this name. “Apart from scolding me with your mouth, do you have a single piece of real evidence? The embroidered shoes? Ha, fine, I did lose a pair of embroidered shoes, but I could just as easily claim I lost them on the way up the mountain. There were so many people on that mountain—anyone could have stolen the shoes to frame me. As for this tunnel, yes, I came here with my father a few times, but does that alone prove I was involved in those murders in Pingkang Ward?” She looked at Qin Yao with great satisfaction. “You have no way to prove anything! You can only watch helplessly as I walk free. All this talk of cause and karma and inescapable retribution—it’s nothing but a trick you use to fool the ignorant. You just said I’ve already been poisoned with a deadly toxin? Isn’t there still half a year left? Since it’s a poison, there must surely be an antidote, and I will always find a way to cure it. Don’t forget the Crown Prince personally petitioned the Emperor to grant our marriage—if he learns I’ve been framed by the two of you, he will surely stand up for me.”
“Is that so?” A cold voice suddenly rang out in the empty hall. “And what if I’ve changed my mind?”
Hearing this voice, Qin Yuan’s expression changed drastically. She turned, horrified, to see the Crown Prince striding out from behind the curtain, his face plainly filled with the resentment and fury of a man who had been deceived. He walked up to her, seized her collar, and said through clenched teeth, “I must have been blind to let a woman like you lead me around by the nose!”