Seizing the opportunity, Chen Baoxiang cleaved through a thick tree trunk with her axe.

She pointed toward the cave ahead and said, “Pay attention — this is the best shelter. If danger arises, the wounded are to retreat here.”

“And those high slopes we passed earlier — all excellent defensive positions. If there’s fighting, those must be seized first.”

Fenghua and the others walking behind listened carefully and dutifully committed everything to memory, then puzzled aloud: “Why are we scouting these spots? It’s not like we’re going to war.”

Chen Baoxiang moved aside a boulder blocking the path and continued forward. “Better safe than sorry. Why do you think we’re patrolling the mountain, if not to prepare for every possible emergency?”

“If I’m overthinking it, then this whole trip was for nothing,” she murmured quietly. “But what if I’m not?”

Earlier, when she had been at the garrison assigning personnel for the mountain patrol, she had spotted Cheng Huaili.

This man despised being seen in a disheveled state by others, yet here he was, willingly letting people carry him up the mountain on a palanquin.

Recalling what this man had done on Tianning Mountain before, Chen Baoxiang narrowed her eyes slightly.

Using her command token, she had reassigned all the military officers who had previously served under her. These men were obedient and fiercely loyal to her. While ordinary soldiers grew too exhausted after one hour of patrolling and had to return to camp, these men had been running with her all day without a single complaint.

“Commander.” Wang Wu ran over with his men, gesturing toward the southeast. “There are a great many Imperial Guards on the mountainside over there — they won’t let us approach.”

“That’s normal. How could the Holy One travel without Imperial Guards?” Chen Baoxiang took a few steps forward, then stopped and turned back to ask Wang Wu, “Are they the Imperial Guards normally stationed around the Holy One and Princess Rouyi?”

Wang Wu scratched his head. “I couldn’t tell. There were just masses of them — too many to count.”

Chen Baoxiang went to make a round of the camp.

Without drawing attention to herself, she counted the guards around Rouyi, then used a shift change as cover to sweep her gaze toward the direction of the Holy One’s tent.

Imperial Guards on the inner perimeter, regular patrol soldiers on the outer ring — layer upon layer of checkpoints. On the surface, nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

Which made those Imperial Guards appearing on the mountainside distinctly out of the ordinary.

She stood among the trees and looked up. Branches and leaves blotted out the sky all around her, and she felt impossibly small standing beneath them — as though nothing she could do would change anything.

·

Zhang Zhixu sat with a cold expression, revising a document, when Xie Lanting suddenly burst in through the door, so out of breath he could barely speak. “Feng — Fengqing.”

Zhang Zhixu didn’t look up. “How much are you borrowing this time.”

“No, who comes looking for money in broad daylight?” Xie Lanting strode up to his desk and dumped everything he was carrying onto it in one heap. “I found Chen Baoxiang’s motive for the killing.”

Zhang Zhixu’s brush tip paused.

He looked up. “What are you bringing this to me for? If it’s conclusive, it should go to the Court of Judicial Review to open a case.”

“It’s all witness testimony — no physical evidence. No case can be opened.” Xie Lanting waved his hand. “But I think you understand her so well that you ought to be able to tell whether it’s true or false.”

Chen Baoxiang had suddenly gone to Tianning Mountain without so much as mentioning it to him — he knew even less about it than Ningsu did. What understanding.

Feeling vexed, he picked up a long scroll and unrolled it.

Seven years ago, torrential rains had fallen across the Jingzhou region for months on end. The court, seeking to relieve the flooding, decided to blow up a dam and redirect the flow, and dispatched a nearby military unit to evacuate the villagers in the settlements downstream.

The task had been completed without incident, stirring no grievances among the people, and the registrar in charge of the evacuation had even earned praise from the late Emperor.

Zhang Zhixu had heard of this matter — but what did it have to do with Chen Baoxiang?

He read on, and saw the name of the registrar who had received the commendation.

Lu Shouhuai.

His eyelid twitched. Zhang Zhixu flipped through the pages quickly.

Among the dense list of downstream village names, Yuexian Sanxiang and Yuexian Guixiang stood out plainly —

The year I was twelve, Sanxiang Village was struck by a tremendous flood.

Recalling what Chen Baoxiang had said at the time, he asked, “You think Lu Shouhuai nursed a grudge against her over this matter?”

“A grudge? That’s far too mild a word.” Xie Lanting searched through the pages and pointed to a particular piece of testimony for him to read. “This is an enmity unto death.”

Zhang Zhixu followed his finger and read. His pupils contracted sharply.

— Lu Shouhuai, acting out of personal vendetta, had concealed news of the upstream dam demolition, resulting in the flooding of Guixiang Village, which drowned eighty-two households — three hundred and seventy people in total.

Lu Shouhuai had been responsible for evacuating the villagers, yet he had deliberately failed to notify Guixiang Village?

Had the man lost his mind? Wasn’t Guixiang Village his own hometown?

Zhang Zhixu recalled the full sentence Chen Baoxiang had spoken —

The year I was twelve, Sanxiang Village was struck by a tremendous flood. Many people died. I was lucky enough to escape, and went with Grandmother Ye and the surviving neighbors to make a living at the frontier garrison.

— He had found it strange at the time. Ordinary farming families typically returned home once floodwaters receded, so why had she and Grandmother Ye insisted on going somewhere as far away as the frontier? Now he understood: it had not been a natural disaster. It had been an act of human malice.

Reading further, he found that most of the dead in Guixiang were the elderly, the sick, and the disabled — an old man with a broken leg, a blind man bedridden with paralysis.

Anyone else reading this would simply sigh at the tragedy, lamenting so many innocent lives lost just like that.

But Zhang Zhixu remembered these people. Chen Baoxiang had mentioned them long ago —

Old Liu next door had his leg broken by a powerful man and wailed in agony for three days and nights without receiving any medical care. It was a terrible thing.

In our Sanxiang Village there was a man who had been blind in one eye since childhood. No one would hire him for work — he had no way to survive. But he was hardworking and resilient. He went to the city to collect slop water, keep night watch, sweep streets — whatever work there was to do. Finally, when he was around twenty, he had saved up a little money and was planning to return to the village to pay for his mother’s medical treatment.

……

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.