Ever since the Azure-Robed Guest proclaimed at the Golden Wave Pavilion gathering that whoever could find the donkey-riding lady would receive Chen Shigu’s coveted legendary relic as a gift, this declaration had set all the major sects in Luoyang secretly competing against each other. Messages poured in one after another to this small courtyard by the Luo River.
However, though the messages were numerous, they weren’t necessarily true. Even if they were true, they didn’t necessarily relate to the donkey-riding lady’s disappearance—someone had to verify and investigate them. The people of Setting Sun Courtyard worked day and night to check each lead one by one. They solved countless suspicious cases along the way, but still hadn’t found the clue they sought.
As the saying goes: “One monk carries water to drink, two monks carry water together, but three monks have no water to drink.” In the martial world, cooperative groups of three people were extremely rare.
Zhou Zi’an, the master of Songyang Academy, enjoyed literary pursuits and often recorded strange tales and anecdotes from the martial world. He found a clue in his notes from over ten years ago: there had once been two bandit brothers from the same school, nicknamed the “Wind and Thunder Duo.” The elder brother, Wind Galloper Zhang, had exceptional lightness skills, while the younger brother, Thunder Hand Xu, had powerful fists and palms. These two had wreaked havoc in the Central Plains region, committing every evil imaginable. Their martial arts styles bore some resemblance to the evidence Wei Xun had provided, except they were missing one person.
Setting Sun Courtyard investigated based on this lead and learned from the Beggar Sect that these two had long ago been captured by government forces using crossbow ambushes and had their heads displayed in the Southern Market. But when asked about the appearance of the executed men, no one had actually seen Zhang and Xu, so naturally they couldn’t say for certain—they had just witnessed the heads being chopped off.
Crossbows had mechanical assistance, high accuracy, great power, and were easy to use, making them the ideal weapon for common soldiers to deal with martial arts masters. Though they had the disadvantages of complicated operation and inability to fire continuously, having many people could solve this problem. Therefore, according to legal regulations, civilians could use bows and arrows but were not permitted to possess crossbows.
Wei Xun relayed this clue to Yang Xingjian, who then asked Luoyang County Lieutenant Geng Changren to verify it. Sure enough, he found in dusty archives the record of executing bandits Zhang Gougou and Xu Shiyi at the Southern Market on a certain year, month, and day, complete with the criminals’ confessions and fingerprints.
Wei Xun refused to give up and wanted to dig up their corpses for confirmation, but Geng Changren awkwardly explained: According to regulations, executed criminals should be properly buried, but the subordinate officials were lazy. If no family members came to claim the bodies, they would simply dump them in the mass grave and let wild dogs handle the rest, so there were no actual graves. Moreover, this had happened during the previous Henan Prefecture Governor Cui Dongyang’s tenure—finding the case files was already fortunate.
The lead was cut off again.
The people of Setting Sun Courtyard gathered in the small courtyard to exchange intelligence, all feeling at a loss about how to continue the investigation. They wanted to persuade Wei Xun to give up, but seeing his obsessed, demonic appearance, he would certainly fight to the death.
After these days of rest, Shisan Lang’s injuries had greatly improved. When his senior brothers and sisters gathered to discuss matters, he tactfully brewed tea to serve them. As he went to the courtyard water tank to fetch water, the donkey tied under the tree saw him and once again reared up on its hind legs, stretching its throat to bray desperately.
Shisan Lang put down the water ladle and took out the last bit of bean cake from his pouch, pouring it all into the stone trough. But the ugly donkey didn’t even glance at it, continuing to jump and bray incessantly as if it had lost its mind, kicking up dust that filled the air.
Its voice was harsh and grating, making everyone irritable. Qiu Ren shouted from inside the house, “The lady is already lost—what’s the point of keeping this mount? Might as well slaughter it for meat and save us from its noise.”
Wei Xun was already exhausted to the extreme, able to fall asleep while standing, his mind a tangled mess. He immediately rose and went to the courtyard, drawing his Fish Intestine dagger to chop off the donkey’s head.
Seeing the danger, the donkey thrust its head into his embrace, whimpering and acting cute. Wei Xun immediately remembered how Bao Zhu used to stroke its head when she was here, and the dagger in his hand dropped. The donkey continued moving its hooves, pacing back and forth like a dancing horse. Only then did Wei Xun notice that it had been emotionally unstable this whole time, and its front hooves had trampled a shallow pit in the courtyard soil.
In the pit was a strand of yellow material, nearly covered by dirt. Wei Xun bent down and picked it up from the soil, discovering it was just a bundle of ordinary straw. This was generally used to feed livestock. Donkeys could handle coarse feed and weren’t picky eaters—grass and fodder could meet their needs, but required long periods of chewing and digestion. To save time traveling, Wei Xun had always purchased concentrated feed like bean cake and bean meal for the donkey.
He turned to ask Shisan Lang, “When we weren’t here, did you go out to buy straw to feed the donkey?”
Shisan Lang shook his head, “After you all left, I just meditated and practiced to heal my injuries. I didn’t go out wandering.”
Wei Xun wondered: Then where did this strand of straw come from? Had it already existed in the courtyard when they rented it? If so, the donkey should have eaten it long ago.
When the incident occurred, Yang Xingjian was pushed into the well, Shisan Lang was beaten nearly to death, and no one else was at the scene—but there was one living creature in the courtyard that witnessed everything.
“When she was kidnapped, there was another witness present,” Wei Xun stared down at the golden straw and murmured to himself. “The donkey is a witness… the donkey saw the culprit…”
Tuoba Sanniang watched him from inside the house, saying quietly, “He’s gone completely mad.”
Xu Baozhen said wearily, “Any normal person would be driven crazy after not sleeping for so long.”
Qiu Ren said, “Don’t you think his martial arts have actually improved since he went mad?”
Everyone remained silent, all thinking: Could it be that the profound techniques passed down by their crazy master could only unleash their full power when one became insane?
Wei Xun held the straw, didn’t speak to anyone, and drifted out the door with a dazed expression, swaying unsteadily.
Luo Tuotuo said, “Let’s disperse. I need to find a place to catch up on sleep. No matter how advanced the martial arts, I don’t want to lose my sanity for it.”
The other three remained wordlessly silent, then scattered like birds and beasts.
The road Wei Xun walked was exactly the route he had taken when pursuing the kidnapper carrying the felt. He had traveled this path dozens of times back and forth, repeatedly questioning every passerby multiple times, to the point that vendors and shop owners along the roadside would hide when they saw him, and even beggars had long since moved elsewhere to beg.
Bao Zhu had been missing for twelve days, and in this busy residential district, the footprint traces on the road had long been trampled beyond recognition. When the gray-clothed man who kidnapped her passed through, though his appearance was unremarkable, because he had his face covered and carried a large roll of felt on his shoulder, his appearance was particularly conspicuous. There were eight witnesses total. These were all permanent residents of the district, their testimonies were nearly identical and could corroborate each other.
But after the kidnapper entered the donkey rental shop at the end of the alley with Bao Zhu, the two seemed to have vanished from the earth. At the time, they thought there might be secret doors or passages in the shop, but the disciples of Setting Sun Courtyard were most skilled at underground work. Not to mention digging three feet deep—even thirty feet wouldn’t be a problem. They had practically dismantled the entire shop but found nothing suspicious.
Beyond the donkey rental shop was the bustling Southern Market, with thriving businesses and many transient people all around—completely different from the familiar environment within the residential district. They couldn’t find a single person who had seen the felt-carrying man pass by.
After the gray-clothed man fled into the shop, he killed the shop owner with one palm strike and stripped off Bao Zhu’s clothing. This should logically have taken considerable time. But the kidnapper completed three tasks—killing, undressing, and escaping with Bao Zhu—in an extremely short time, doing it cleanly and efficiently without leaving a trace. This was particularly suspicious.
Since the shop owner was dead, his relatives had closed the business and led away all the donkeys in the courtyard, leaving only worthless miscellaneous items.
Wei Xun once again climbed over the wall to enter the scene. This time, he noticed some things he hadn’t paid attention to before. To keep costs down, the donkey rental shop was reluctant to buy expensive concentrated feed for the animals, instead using alfalfa, bran, wheat stalks, and other roughage, including straw. This pile of fodder was heaped against the wall with other miscellaneous items, completely inconspicuous.
He looked down at the bundle of golden straw in his hand and suddenly understood something. He turned and leaped over the wall, rushing back to the small courtyard.
Because of Bao Zhu’s disappearance and the fact that multiple eyewitnesses had seen the strange man carrying felt along the escape route, plus Bao Zhu’s clothing found in the donkey rental shop, Wei Xun had always assumed the felt must contain the kidnapped Bao Zhu. But what if the felt didn’t contain a living person?
He ran into the house and pulled out a bedsheet. Under Shisan Lang’s puzzled gaze, he rolled bedding into the sheet, shouldered it, and ran back to the donkey rental shop. Entering the courtyard, he dumped the bedding by the wall, folded the sheet and tucked it into his shirt, then walked empty-handed through the shop into the Southern Market without attracting any attention.
So that was it! Bao Zhu wasn’t in the felt at all!
Besides the peach-selling peddler, this gray-clothed man was also a decoy. He had pre-rolled straw tightly in the felt, and after the attack ended, he shouldered this large bundle and ran toward the donkey rental shop, deliberately allowing many people to witness him along the way.
Once at the shop, he scattered the straw from the felt onto the fodder pile, hiding leaves in the forest where outsiders would see nothing strange. Then he killed the shop owner, left Bao Zhu’s clothing in the house as misdirection, rolled up the felt and tucked it into his shirt, then swaggered into the Southern Market crowd—both convenient and fast without attracting attention.
There was only one flaw: straw wasn’t as sturdy as bedding and had scattered slightly in the courtyard, witnessed by the donkey, which had been trying to alert them all these days.
Both roads from the courtyard gate were maze-like deceptions, so through what route was Bao Zhu actually taken away?
Wei Xun returned once more to the primary scene. The kidnapper’s conflict with Bao Zhu and Shisan Lang had occurred in the first-floor main hall, with furniture and chairs overturned and arrows scattered across the floor. After Shisan Lang was knocked unconscious, seeing this chaos, everyone would assume Bao Zhu had been kidnapped right there.
But what if she hadn’t been?
Wei Xun rushed upstairs, with Shisan Lang calling from behind, “Senior Brother, what are you doing?”
After the kidnapping incident, he had also come to the second-floor bedroom looking for clues, but everything here was exactly as it had been before Bao Zhu’s disappearance. Having been carefully attended to since childhood and lacking any maids, she lacked self-care abilities and never folded her quilts. The cosmetics and makeup she had bought were scattered messily on the dressing table, and the last rouge box she had used was left uncapped, its color still vivid.
Wei Xun couldn’t help but ponder: what if downstairs wasn’t the primary scene, but here was? Bao Zhu had considerable strength—to subdue her, one would either have to knock her unconscious or dislocate her shoulder joints. If this process had been completed downstairs, then bringing her to the second floor afterward wouldn’t involve violent struggle or disturb the room’s arrangement.
The third person had stripped off her clothing on the carpet and given it to the gray-clothed man as a decoy, while personally taking Bao Zhu away by another route.
Wei Xun had found it suspicious at the time—the kidnappers knew that forcibly abducting someone would certainly be noticed by him, so why risk their lives and waste precious escape time to remove Bao Zhu’s clothing and arrange a scene resembling “ascension to immortality”?
This action wasn’t meant to humiliate Bao Zhu or break his spirit. Its true purpose was to mislead him into believing the donkey rental shop was the route the kidnappers had used to escape with their captive.
The windows in the room were tightly closed. Wei Xun walked to the window and pushed it open, revealing the scenery along both banks of the Luo River.
He couldn’t help but recall that night when Bao Zhu was hazily drunk and had cupped his face to demand a kiss. Wei Xun leaped out the window and stood in that same position, trying to relive that moment of tenderness.
But looking from here, there was a mark on the window frame that shouldn’t have been there. Three red finger marks adhered to the outside of the window frame, positioned where they couldn’t be seen from inside the room.
Wei Xun reached out to touch them and brought his hand to his nose to smell. In that instant, his heart began beating violently. He immediately leaped back into the room, took the rouge box with its open lid in his hand, and carefully compared it with the three-finger prints on the window frame. There was no color difference whatsoever—this was exactly the rouge color she had used that day.
Imagining the critical moment of being kidnapped, Bao Zhu had no strength left to resist and was completely naked, with no personal items she could drop. In desperation, she had dipped her fingers in the rouge on her lips and smeared it here as a marker.
Wei Xun looked out at the broad Luo River, where merchant and cargo boats constantly shuttled back and forth, leaving trails of sparkling ripples on the water’s surface. The people of Setting Sun Courtyard were accustomed to operating on land and underground—none had ever dealt with water. Moreover, since the gray-clothed man had fled toward the Southern Market, they had never considered the Luo River.
After luring the tiger from the mountain, the enemy had carefully arranged a double deception of attacking in the east while striking in the west. Both routes on land were diversionary tactics to confuse people—she had been taken away by water.