Wang Ruo, who had walked into the left pavilion under everyone’s watchful eyes just moments ago, had vanished without a sound in that brief instant, like a wisp of blue smoke dissipating in the air.
While others stood stunned behind her, Huang Zixia had already stepped forward, opened the wardrobe for a look, bent to check under the bed, and finally turned to the couch, opening the tightly closed window to look outside, where she saw two guards standing straight at attention.
She looked up and saw Li Shubai in the front hall, speaking with someone beside him. Seeming to notice the commotion in her direction from the corner of his eye, he turned to look at her.
She waved to him, indicating something was wrong.
Li Shubai quickly crossed the courtyard and came over, looked at the empty pavilion, and immediately ordered everyone to search the main hall and side pavilions. However, Yongchun Hall was only so big, and in a short while, every corner had been searched, with no trace of Wang Ruo.
Hurried footsteps were heard outside as Yan Ling, the Empress’s lady-in-waiting, rushed in with Su Qi, asking: “What’s happened?”
Seeing Li Shubai in the hall, she quickly bowed, her gaze questioning Su Qi, who hurriedly said quietly: “Lady Wang… we don’t know where she’s gone.”
Yan Ling was shocked and said: “I was just following the Empress’s orders to bring palace flowers and clothing for Lady Wang with Su Qi… how… in such a short time, with so many people, how could she just…”
Li Shubai said: “You go report to the Empress first. We’ll search the hall again, and if we find her, we’ll inform the Empress immediately.”
“Leave a few people to help search, I must hurry back to Penglai Hall,” Yan Ling said, gesturing for the palace maids carrying clothes behind her to quickly set down their things, taking only two or three people back with her.
Under Li Shubai’s orders, the many people in Yongchun Hall searched every blade of grass, every blue brick, and every piece of wood more than ten times over, but found no trace whatsoever.
Just as the prophecy had foretold, Wang Ruo disappeared before her grand wedding, and she vanished from within the Great Ming Palace itself, under heavy guard.
Soon after, Yongji, one of the Empress’s chief eunuchs, also arrived. The hall became so crowded with eunuchs, palace maids, Imperial Guards, and Prince’s Guards that people could barely move without bumping shoulders. Li Shubai, growing irritated, raised his hand to dismiss everyone, keeping only Wang Yun and about ten others to carefully search the inner hall for any traces.
Li Shubai and Huang Zixia walked to the hall entrance, carefully examining their surroundings.
Yongchun Hall, now restored to silence, looked no different from any other palace building in the night. Its somewhat rigid design consisted of seven outer halls and seven inner halls connected by corridors on both sides, forming a standard square layout. To break this flatness, craftsmen had laid a blue brick path in the courtyard, with artificial mountains arranged on both sides. But these mountains weren’t tall—only one or two rocks rose above head height, while the rest were medium and small stones arranged artistically—so one could see between the front and back halls.
“We were standing under the eaves of the outer hall, near the corridor, watching Wang Ruo walk along the blue brick path toward the inner hall. Since she was staying in the left pavilion, she rounded the artificial mountain about a quarter of the way there, but we could still see her from the outer hall. We watched her enter the left pavilion and never come out.”
Li Shubai nodded in confirmation.
“Then, after she entered, Xian Yun immediately took the food box to the kitchen. Afterward, Su Qi and Ran Yun came out with lanterns to look for the dewdrop-veined leaf hairpin.”
“There’s a question that needs to be asked here—at such a tense time, why would both Su Qi and Ran Yun come out together? Why didn’t they think to leave someone with Wang Ruo?”
Huang Zixia spoke while walking to the table and sitting down. Out of habit, she reached up to remove her hairpin to draw a diagram, but her hand touched the eunuch’s gauze cap on her head. She paused briefly, then grabbed the dewdrop-veined leaf hairpin from the table and began sketching Yongchun Hall’s front hall and layout.
Seeing her casual sketching, Li Shubai slightly furrowed his brows. Huang Zixia ignored him and calmly continued recounting everything: “Then I called out to ask, and they told me about searching for the leaf hairpin, I found it behind the artificial mountain and brought it to them, and Xian Yun had just returned with walnut pastries.”
On the table’s barely visible etchings, she drew a line from the inner hall to the corner kitchen: “Yongchun Hall’s small kitchen is in the southwest corner, near the wall, and the kitchen maids had already been sent away for safety. Xian Yun was in the palace for the first time, yet she could so quickly find pastries in the unmanned kitchen—was it good luck, or does she have a special sense for food?”
Li Shubai glanced at the hairpin she was unconsciously drawing on the table and asked casually, “I imagine you have other suspicions?”
“Also, the inner hall consists of three parts, from left to right: left pavilion, main hall, and right pavilion. It’s essentially a seven-room great hall, with two rooms each on the left and right converted into pavilions, and three rooms in the middle serving as the main hall. The left pavilion is designed as a warm chamber with thick walls all around, and only one window, which is on the same side as the main hall’s door, facing the courtyard and outer hall. So, if one wanted to enter or leave the left pavilion, the only path would be through the main hall. While the four of us—myself, Su Qi, Xian Yun, and Ran Yun—were all standing at the main hall’s entrance, unless she could pass through walls, her only way out would have been through the window.”
“But not only were two people constantly watching outside the window, there were also people constantly watching from under the outer hall’s corridor, and I was standing there myself. If that window had opened, I and others would have seen it immediately.”
“There’s another possibility—that there’s a secret passage in the hall.” Huang Zixia tossed aside the hairpin and returned to the left pavilion with Li Shubai, looking at this small chamber with only one door and one window, which had nowhere to hide anyone.
“An underground passage is possible.” Li Shubai sat down at the low table and poured himself some tea. Seeing that this master wasn’t going to help her, Huang Zixia resigned herself to tapping the walls inch by inch, even moving the wardrobe to tap the wall behind it for quite some time.
Li Shubai sat at ease, drinking tea and watching her as if observing a play that had nothing to do with him. Just as Huang Zixia felt her fingers swelling and was about to massage them, Li Shubai tossed something to her.
She caught and examined it—half a silver ingot, square and thick, weighing about ten taels as if a whole ingot had been cut in half.
She lay on the ground, using the silver piece to tap the floor tiles, listening intently to the sounds beneath, but found nothing. She even lifted the carpet to tap each blue brick underneath.
Li Shubai remained unmoved; when she reached his feet, he simply picked up his teacup and moved to sit on the brocade cushion opposite, ignoring her completely.
Exhausted and still finding nothing, Huang Zixia had to stand up and sit before Li Shubai, placing the half ingot back on the table, asking, “Why would My Lord carry silver ingots when going out, and a half one at that?”
“Of course, I wouldn’t carry it,” Li Shubai said casually, pointing to three overturned teacups on the table. “It was right here on the low table, covered by the teacups. I found it when I picked one up to drink.”
“Strange, who would put half a silver ingot on the table?” She turned the ingot over and over. On the back, as was customary, there were cast characters reading “Vice Commissioner Liang Weidong… Treasury Commissioner Zhang Junyi, Cast Silver Two” and several other characters.
Li Shubai took the ingot and turned the side with the makers’ names toward her: “To prevent shortcuts and insufficient weight, regulations require one commissioner and three vice commissioners to have their names engraved on silver ingots for accountability.”
“I know, so the missing half should have had the names of the other two vice commissioners, plus the characters for ‘ten taels’—this must have been a twenty-tael ingot cast by the inner treasury,” Huang Zixia said, weighing the ingot in her hand.
Li Shubai’s finger pointed to the two names and said, “However, neither of these names belongs to anyone responsible for casting gold and silver ingots in the inner court.”
“There are so many people responsible for inner treasury casting in this dynasty—how could you know them all?”
“As it happens, there was once an embezzlement case in the inner treasury, and I was ordered to lead several dozen Ministry of Revenue accountants into the palace to audit the inner court’s accounts over the years. I also reviewed all the records of gold, silver, and copper coin casting since the founding of our dynasty. I remember the list of all casters, and I’m even clear about the officials in charge of local treasuries.”
She was deeply familiar with this person’s terrifying ability to remember everything he saw, so she held the half ingot in her hand, examining it while muttering to herself: “Could this be a privately cast ingot?”
But immediately, she shook her head, rejecting this hypothesis: “If it were privately cast, it would surely bear the owner’s name, not falsely use inner treasury commissioners’ names—unless it’s one of those lead-filled fake ingots from the marketplace.”
“It’s not—this ingot was split down the middle, and the break shows it’s undoubtedly pure silver. The weight shows no discrepancy either.” Li Shubai watched her expression of deep thought and held up four fingers. “It seems this is another point worth noting—a half-ingot of unknown origin.”
“Why half?” Huang Zixia muttered to herself, feeling that a breakthrough in this direction seemed rather unlikely for now, so she placed the silver ingot beside the gold leaf hairpin and looked up at him again. “What do you plan to do next?”
“Speaking of that, I do have something to prepare for. Tomorrow, a group of Tibetan envoys will arrive in the capital, and the Ministry of Rites has asked me to help receive them.” He stood up, casually brushing his robes. “I said from the beginning that this matter would be entirely your responsibility. Now that we’ve indeed reached the worst scenario we had anticipated, you need to resolve this properly—at least, find out how the person disappeared.”
Huang Zixia stood up with him: “Just me alone?”
“The inner court and the Court of Judicial Review will certainly be involved. I’ll speak with them then to ensure you’re always included—oh, and if you find a body or anything, go to Zhou Ziqin.”
Huang Zixia’s mouth twitched slightly—his future princess consort, who was to marry him in seven days, vanished in an instant before him, yet he was more concerned about the possibility of finding a body. What kind of person was he?
What lay before her seemed like a tangled mess without any clear thread, with loose ends everywhere yet also impenetrable barriers, leaving no obvious place to start.
Huang Zixia returned to Yongchun Hall, searched every corner again, and imagined countless ways someone might have secretly slipped out through the window or hall door. She went over the sequence of events several more times but still found nothing.
The mysterious disappearance of the Empress’s cousin and Prince Qi’s bride-to-be from within the palace left the inner court at a loss. Under Empress Wang’s direction, the rear palace conducted a thorough search not only of Yongchun Hall but throughout the Great Ming Palace, though the fruitless result seemed predetermined. Dismantling Yongchun Hall was impossible, but after removing all furniture and decorations and combing through everything meticulously, they still found nothing. Soon, Vice Director Cui Chunzhan of the Court of Judicial Review also entered the Great Ming Palace with various officials and investigators to begin a thorough investigation.
Following Li Shubai’s instructions, Huang Zixia went to see Vice Director Cui Chunzhan.
She had seen Cui Chunzhan before at the Four Directions Court. Only in his thirties, he was from the Cui clan of Boling, an aristocratic family. Having achieved success at a young age, he carried himself with natural vigor and confidence. When Huang Zixia saw him, she couldn’t help but think of Wang Yun, feeling the two seemed somewhat similar.
Because she was from Prince Qi’s residence and had previously solved a difficult case, Cui Chunzhan was quite courteous to her, even inviting her to sit before him, saying with a smile: “Though you are young, Public Secretary, your ability to solve cases and deduce matters is truly convincing. Now that Prince Qi has asked you to participate in this case, I hope you can provide your full assistance.”
Huang Zixia quickly replied, “If there’s any way I can be of use, I will certainly do my utmost.”