As night fell, Li Si slowly walked to Old Yu’s beef noodle shop. Old Yu must have already gone to bed. Li Si quietly sat in a corner, habitually looking toward the counter position, smiling toward the darkness and saying: “No need to hide, I saw you long ago.”
Xuan Yuanshan slowly emerged, saying indifferently: “I saw you slip out alone in the dead of night and didn’t know what you were doing, so I followed to take a look.”
“Heh, no need for nonsense. If you have questions to ask, just ask.” Li Si said, lying on the table.
“Fine.” Xuan Yuanshan also asked cleanly and decisively: “I want to know the truth of the matter. How did Feng Cheng kill a master like Ge Chong?”
Li Si slowly recounted everything he had experienced. Xuan Yuanshan’s expression changed repeatedly as he listened. Finally, upon hearing that Feng Cheng—that is, Shen Ao—died together with Xue Yan, he couldn’t help but sigh and say regretfully: “Even so, An City has consecutively lost two of the Crown Prince’s favorites—Ge Chong and Zhan Xin. I’m afraid neither you nor I can escape the Crown Prince’s investigation.”
“I’m not afraid. Heaven is high and the Emperor is far away—he can’t control me. But you’d better be careful. Our Crown Prince has always been temperamental, and the masters under his command are countless.”
“I’ll be careful on my own. By the way, you had me stay behind just to retrieve these incriminating evidence from the back of that black bird in the sky? These were also placed there by you, right?” Xuan Yuanshan recalled the moment when that soaring black bird suddenly dove toward him—it still felt somewhat incredible. Li Si smiled and nodded: “I already felt something was wrong with the people around me, so to be safe, I hid this evidence early. Before entering the black door, I was also worried that if I couldn’t come out, this evidence couldn’t just be lost like that, so I had you stay behind.”
“It’s fortunate you could think of that, but at this moment these things are no longer so important.”
Li Si took out the needle, paper, and fan. His mind recalled various things. Suddenly his eyes flashed. He moved the table to the window. Borrowing the moonlight, Li Si vaguely saw blurred black characters on both the silver needle and the fan surface. After carefully distinguishing them, Li Si trembled slightly and read aloud: “Mo Lian…”
“Mo Lian again? Could it be that Shen Ao deliberately left it there?” Xuan Yuanshan said.
The paper slip also had the two characters “Mo Lian,” plus the “Mo Lian” characters on the needle and fan. Could it be that Shen Ao only wanted to indicate he killed because of the Mo Lian ruins? But what if it wasn’t just that? Li Si stared at the Mo Lian on the three objects. His eyes became dazed for a moment. The three pairs of Mo Lian characters were beginning to move, intertwining with each other, twisting, stretching, extending flat, curling. Finally they came to rest. Li Si watched in amazement—the six characters had actually fused together into a strange pattern.
Xuan Yuanshan also saw this change. He stared at the pattern and suddenly said: “This is—this is a map!”
“A map of the Mo Lian ruins!” Li Si finally understood everything.
“Whoosh!” A strong gust of wind blew. Li Si’s body swayed. A figure quickly swept in from the noodle shop entrance. Li Si turned his gaze and discovered it was an An City runner. The runner said with a distracted expression: “Catcher Li Si, we’ve discovered Lord Huai Cheng’s corpse, and beneath Lord Huai Cheng’s body is another bloody corpse…”
“Another one?”
Li Si looked at the two corpses in pools of blood. Both had been stripped of their face skin, and the clothes on their bodies had also been removed. But according to the identification of the Huai residence’s family members, one corpse was Huai Cheng’s. As for the other corpse, no one could recognize it. Li Si stared at the corpse for a long time, then suddenly blurted out: “I can see it now—this corpse is… Feng Cheng’s!”
If Feng Cheng was already dead, then how to explain Feng Cheng beneath the mask? Could it be that beneath the mask, Shen Ao was wearing another human skin mask? But if Feng Cheng wasn’t Shen Ao, then who was Shen Ao? Li Si’s mind spun rapidly like a top. Finally, the fulcrum beneath the top gradually became clear. Li Si suddenly turned around, gazing at the heavy night colors outside. In his heart he couldn’t help but sigh: Could it truly be him?
To guard here for an entire lifetime, until…
Dawn was about to arrive. A donkey and cart slowly traveled westward. The morning breeze blew, opening the cart curtain. Behind the curtain, an old man tightly embraced a young girl, softly humming a song. The old man’s face was full of weathered years. The girl’s complexion was deathly pale and bloodless, unmoving for a long time, as if she were merely a woman in a painting. The old man caressed the girl’s ice-cold cheeks, his eyes full of longing. He slowly said: “Yan’er, I will forever be with you, regardless of life or death, with you…”