After Ming Huashang finished speaking, she felt a little embarrassed herself. She had not a single shred of evidence — only a “feeling” — and yet she was asking Ming Huazhang to abandon his own plans and follow her on what might amount to foolishness. That really was presumptuous of her.
To her surprise, Ming Huazhang turned around and looked at her with genuine, unhurried attention. “Is that the only reason you insisted on coming along?” he asked.
Ming Huashang felt even more self-conscious. She gave a small nod, her dark, grape-like eyes blinking softly at him — fragile and pitiable on the surface, yet somehow entirely unabashed.
As it turned out, Ming Huazhang was not surprised in the least. He had already sensed that something about Ming Huashang’s behavior over the past few days was a little unusual — not that she seemed suspicious, but rather that the angle from which she viewed the world appeared different from other people’s.
He still remembered the first time they had seen Wei Zi’s corpse. When Ming Huashang had sorted through the rumors about the Snake Ghost, she had imagined herself into the Snake Ghost’s position.
A strange angle — and yet it was not without value as a new way of thinking. Since he had already come this far, Ming Huazhang had no intention of going back early. He didn’t mind the trouble. He nodded. “All right.”
He was also curious: what did she want to do?
Ming Huazhang’s answer was simple and clean, without extra conditions, reasons, or questions. Ming Huashang blinked, then broke into a delighted smile. “Thank you, Second Elder Brother! You really are the best!”
Ming Huazhang was a little worried she might fling herself at him again. Fortunately, Ming Huashang was bundled so thoroughly in her thick cloak that her joy could only be contained. She could do nothing more than express her gratitude in words — lavishing him with compliments as freely as if they cost nothing — and then she remembered to point out their direction. “Second Elder Brother, I want to go over there first.”
Ming Huazhang was not entirely used to the way she expressed affection. The friendship of gentlemen is as pure as water; the intimacy of lesser folk is as sweet as wine. Ming Huashang’s coaxing and clinging were rather too sweet for his taste. But she was his only younger sister, and he feared that saying something would hurt her dignity, so he simply let her be.
With someone beside her, Ming Huashang’s courage surged at once, and even her walk acquired a certain swagger. Following her memory, she went first to the banquet hall where the Fourteenth-day feast had been held.
Ming Huazhang glanced at the surrounding path and understood her intent immediately. “You’re suspicious about the banquet on the Fourteenth?”
“Exactly.” Ming Huashang stood beneath the covered walkway. Snow crystals had settled on her white cloak, and she looked like a figure swept in by a swirling winter wind, gazing steadily at the dark expanse of the palace buildings ahead. In her eyes, it was as though time itself had reversed — the lanterns along the corridor blazed to life, the halls burned with charcoal warmth, voices filled the air, and beautifully dressed women moved and laughed through the shifting lamplight. Noble young ladies leaned against the railings and chatted, dressed in thin, barely-there garments, as though the mountain winds could not touch them at all. Many maidservants were among them too — women of humble birth, yet dressed like the daughters of princes and lords.
Ming Huashang’s gaze drifted out of focus, fixed on something in the distance — not the cold and darkened space before her, but the warmth and fragrance of the banquet, the clink of cups, the press of bodies. She was still herself, and yet in that moment she was not herself at all.
Ming Huazhang stood behind her and watched her in silence.
Ming Huashang continued forward. Everywhere else was so dark, so cold — what was it that had drawn him away from the banquet hall’s light? Because he had seen a woman. She wore a crimson dress, and the lamplight rendered her silhouette exquisitely graceful — captivating and lovely.
In the deep of night, the mountain estate was dark and silent, the wind and snow moaning through it, the corridor black and empty of any soul — but in Ming Huashang’s eyes, ahead of her walked a maidservant carrying a lantern, her figure slender and willowy, her movements so delicate it seemed a single blow could knock her over.
So why hadn’t he struck? Possibly because she was carrying something, or going to meet someone important — if he killed her now, he would startle his prey into fleeing. Better to wait until she had delivered whatever she was carrying and act on her return. Such a long walk back: opportunities would be plentiful.
But along the way, several irritating interruptions arose. First, near the ornamental rockery, the maidservant had bumped into Ren Yao — a young lady from a noble house. She stopped and exchanged a few pleasantries with Ren Yao. At last she continued on her way. With some difficulty she moved out of the noble girl’s line of sight — only to encounter another uninvited obstacle.
A female guest named Ming Huashang, also of an aristocratic family. The two women had startled each other. By then, he must have been growing anxious — and so the moment Chi Lan left Ming Huashang, he waited no longer. Almost as though unable to help himself, he lunged forward, looped the cord he had long since prepared around her neck, and fixed his gaze on her eyes, watching until all focus drained from them.
Ming Huashang reached this point in her imaginings and was suddenly expelled from that state of shared sensation.
No. That doesn’t add up.
She turned around. Behind her, the covered corridor stretched long and deep, and the wind and snow swept through the courtyard between them, making the silence all the more profound. This moment, this scene — how achingly similar it was to that night of the Fourteenth, when she had stumbled upon Chi Lan. She was the same: no lantern in hand, wandering through the courtyard. The only difference was that this time, three steps behind her, Ming Huazhang stood quietly.
Ming Huazhang had been watching her unobtrusively all along. Seeing her stop, he asked, “What is it?”
“It doesn’t add up to me,” Ming Huashang said with a furrowed brow, troubled. “The killer followed Chi Lan from the warm inner chamber all the way here. While Chi Lan and I were talking, he must have been close by. He tracked her for so long and came prepared with a weapon — clearly this was premeditated. But if it was premeditated, why would he choose to act at a banquet, where there are crowds and prying eyes everywhere? That kind of place is precisely where unexpected complications are most likely to occur.”
Chi Lan’s neck bore bruising, and although she had been suspended from a rafter, the ligature marks ran from her throat sideways toward the back of her ear — that angle could never have come from self-hanging. She had unmistakably been strangled to death by another person.
And after killing her, he had gone further and gouged out her eyes — the depth of his hatred was plain. If it was revenge, why not choose a quiet and isolated place? If it was an impulsive killing, then how could he have tracked her for so long with such patience?
Ming Huashang’s mind was a tangle. Because she could not work through this one point, she could not re-enter that state of shared feeling with the killer. Yet she had a premonition: if she could unravel this knot, the case would be solved.
Ming Huazhang raised an eyebrow. “When the killer murdered Chi Lan, you were close by?”
He had known only that she had seen Chi Lan; he had not realized the two locations had been so near each other. Only now did Ming Huashang realize how close she had come to death.
All at once a light flashed through Ming Huashang’s mind, and she understood something with sudden clarity. “I may know why he left the body in our courtyard.”
Ming Huazhang looked at her without committing to anything. Ming Huashang walked quickly ahead and stopped before a pillar, tilting her head back to look at the rafters above.
Princess Taiping had wanted to hush the matter up and had already had the traces cleared away — the blood characters on the ground, the blood spatters on the pillars, all scrubbed clean. When Ming Huashang had come running from behind that night and looked up to find a suspended corpse, she had thought nothing of it at the time. But thinking now — this was the rear hall of the banquet building. By ordinary reckoning, the front, facing the banquet hall, would be the natural direction.
Then why had Chi Lan’s gouged-out eyes not been facing toward the way she had come — but instead directed squarely toward the rear?
It was as though the killer had known that Ming Huashang and Ren Yao were behind him, and had deliberately wanted them to see this sight. He had not expected another young lady and her maidservant to happen by and find the body before them.
Ming Huashang’s mind broke wide open; the blocked flow of thought suddenly ran free.
Ming Huazhang had been observing her expression all the while. “What is it?” he asked.
“Second Elder Brother, I understand now!” Ming Huashang was flushed with excitement. Forgetting all propriety, she seized Ming Huazhang’s arm. “Look at where the maidservant was hanging — doesn’t it look like a flag?”
A flag? Ming Huazhang, unbothered by her proximity, looked in the direction she was pointing. He still held the corpse’s proportions, angle, and posture in mind. Previously he had always been searching for details; now, stepping back from the particulars and seeing the whole, he found a great deal he had missed.
As a murder scene, the fact that the killer had displayed the body in such a conspicuous location was itself deeply abnormal. Unless — the killer had done it deliberately. He had wanted as many people as possible to see it.
Ming Huazhang furrowed his brow. “But why would he do that? The sooner the body is discovered, the greater his risk of being found out. Why would he bring that trouble upon himself?”
An ordinary person acting out of self-preservation would conceal every trace of a killing — so why would anyone make such an ostentatious display of it? Ming Huashang tried to project herself into the killer’s state of mind at the time. “When people do something wrong, they’re afraid — they would never broadcast it far and wide. Unless they’re not afraid. What gives him that confidence? Why is he not afraid?”
Ming Huashang’s gaze went distant and unfocused. She seemed to return to the day of the murder — watching Chi Lan lose her breath before “her” very eyes. Then he gouged out Chi Lan’s eyes. With people approaching from both directions, he grew slightly flustered: he hurriedly strung Chi Lan up, wrote something on the ground in blood, and fled in disarray, not even having time to clean up the blood.
Afterward — perhaps because no one had identified him, perhaps because the fear on the faces of those wealthy aristocrats gratified him, perhaps because someone had encouraged him — his arrogance swelled again. The second time, he set his sights on Wei Zi: far more beautiful than Chi Lan, and more importantly of much higher station, being the favored personal maidservant of Princess Taiping herself.
His sense of satisfaction deepened, and so did his confidence. This time, he made the scene far more refined than the first — almost no bloodstains on the ground, a great deal of attention paid to detail, even requiring Wei Zi to write the blood characters herself.
He drew pleasure from the terror in Wei Zi’s eyes. She believed that if she complied, he would spare her, and so she wrote obediently. Then he killed her as she watched him in disbelief.
He experienced a supreme, intoxicating pleasure — the power of controlling another person’s fate entirely. He dressed her in a crimson skirt; Wei Zi, who carried herself with the manner of a princess or a noble lady, had no choice but to obey him, to wear the clothes he chose. Then he gouged out her eyes.
Ming Huashang registered a feeling of unease. Yes — unease. When the killer had dressed Wei Zi in that red skirt and then proceeded to gouge out her eyes, he must have felt displeased. These were his women — his exquisite collection pieces. Gouging out their eyes destroyed all their beauty entirely. And yet, he could not help himself.
Without noticing when, Ming Huashang had already arrived at the second crime scene. She stopped before the trees. Not long ago, a line of blood characters had been inscribed here; now only bare trunks remained, the bark having been stripped away on someone’s order.
Ming Huashang’s fingertips brushed the smooth wood. The height was just right for her; Ming Huazhang would need to stoop. Her fingertips were ice cold. Across the endless dark of night, she seemed to feel the temperature of Wei Zi’s trembling fingers as she had written there, just one day ago.
Ming Huashang said, without warning: “Second Elder Brother, gouging out the eyes and the killing itself — those are two separate acts.”
Ming Huazhang kept his distance and did not disturb her, but followed close behind. At her words, he tilted his head slightly in question. “Mm?”
“Killing — or more precisely, controlling those beautiful and privileged women — that is what he wanted to do. Gouging out the eyes was someone else’s idea. In fact, I even think that killing Chi Lan was not something he wanted either.”
Chi Lan’s murder scene, compared to Wei Zi’s, was far too crude. And in terms of appearance, Chi Lan was also far less striking than Wei Zi.
This might simply have been because by the second killing, the perpetrator had more experience and was calmer — but Ming Huashang felt instead that the two women were simply not the same kind of target to him at all.
Wei Zi was the prey that matched his taste. Chi Lan had been an accident, a compulsion — perhaps even an assignment.
Ming Huazhang raised an eyebrow. His cool eyes rested on her in silent attention. “Your reasoning?”
“I can’t say.” Ming Huashang exhaled. She was not lying — she genuinely could not articulate it. “It’s just a feeling.”
Ming Huazhang recognized that Ming Huashang’s perception of psychological states was extraordinarily sharp — uncannily so. He did not press her. “What else?”
What happened next? Ming Huashang reconstructed the morning’s events in her mind.
Wei Zi, like Chi Lan, had been suspended high up — but this time the killer’s satisfaction was far more pronounced. He urgently wanted others to see, to have every last person come and appreciate his “masterpiece.”
Everything had gone as he wished. Those nobles and aristocrats were more frightened than ever. Everyone’s attention was on him — talking about him, fearing him — and this made him feel supremely, rapturously alive. But then several people had ruined his feast.
Those young men and women were not afraid of him at all. They scoffed at the Snake Ghost theory. They stole his moment and then began searching boldly through the estate, as though they didn’t take him seriously in the slightest.
How could he endure such an affront? He had to teach them a lesson.
The wind swept past and dislodged a clump of snow from a tree branch; it fell and struck Ming Huashang’s hand. She gave no reaction whatsoever. Ming Huazhang noticed that her fingers had gone red with cold, and quietly frowned. He took her hand and covered it with his cloak.
Ming Huashang paid no attention whatsoever to what Ming Huazhang was doing with her hand. She lifted her eyes and looked at him, brilliant with excitement, her gaze blazing like a torch. “Second Elder Brother, I think I’ve worked out a piece of it. We’ve very likely already met this person.”
Ming Huazhang neither affirmed nor denied this. He only asked: “In your judgment — who is it?”
Ming Huashang shook her head. Her gaze was candid, though the words she spoke were startling. “I don’t know exactly who he is. But I know what kind of person he is.”