Li Shubai resided in a place called the Jingyu Hall.
Huang Zixia was flipping through the imperial calendar while Li Shubai sat beside her, watching coldly. She turned from the seventeenth day of the first month to the twenty-first of the second month, then to the nineteenth of the third month, before finally reaching today. She moved quickly, barely glancing at each page before saying, “If the imperial guards patrol tonight, they should focus on the southeastern part of the city, especially households with pregnant women. Those are likely to be the targets.”
“Are you certain the fourth victim will be related to pregnancy?” Li Shubai raised his eyebrows and asked.
“Very likely,” Huang Zixia replied.
Li Shubai turned his head and called toward the outside, “Jingyou.”
A eunuch from outside responded and entered, his eyes curved in a cheerful and lovable expression: “Your Highness.”
“Go to the Court of Judicial Review and ask Cui Chunzhan to come here.”
“Yes,” Jingyou responded, not sparing a single glance at the disheveled Huang Zixia standing in the hall before bowing and preparing to leave. Li Shubai then pointed at Huang Zixia and said, “First take her away and arrange suitable quarters for her. Remember, she’s a junior eunuch.”
“Yes, Your Highness can rest assured.”
And just like that, Huang Zixia, a wanted criminal across all four seas, became a junior eunuch in the Prince of Kui’s mansion.
Along the way, Jingyou introduced her to several pathways within the prince’s mansion and instructed her on various matters requiring attention. He then led her to the Northern Quarter where the eunuchs resided, arranged a private room for her, and had someone deliver all daily necessities along with three sets of eunuch clothing. He told her, “Little公公, since you’ve just arrived, we won’t assign you any duties yet. Just remember to pay your respects to His Highness daily.”
After thanking him again, Huang Zixia inquired about daily routines from the eunuch next door, then went to the kitchen for some food. She drew two buckets of water and thoroughly washed herself and her hair. Exhausted from a day of travel and tumultuous changes, she fell asleep as soon as her head touched the pillow.
When she awoke, the sun was already high in the sky. While drawing water from the well, a eunuch sweeping the courtyard told her, “Eunuch Jingyou asked us to tell you to go to the Yubing Pavilion once you wake up.”
She quickly ate a bowl of porridge, asked for directions, changed into eunuch’s clothes, and hurried to the Yubing Pavilion. The pavilion served as the prince’s study, surrounded by elegant flowers and trees, with windows mostly covered in translucent gauze.
When Huang Zixia entered, she immediately spotted Li Shubai through the carved flower window, sitting inside studying a map of the capital.
Hearing her footsteps, he looked up with an impassive expression: “Come here.”
Huang Zixia walked to his side, and he pointed at the map, saying, “The killer didn’t appear last night. But according to your thinking, shouldn’t they appear in the northwest direction tonight?”
Huang Zixia looked up at him in slight surprise: “Your Highness already knows my method of judgment?”
“You can read the almanac, and so can I,” he said calmly, his fair, slender finger sliding across the twelve wards in the northwest area of the capital. “This morning, I’ve already had people inquire. In these twelve wards alone, there are quite a few women with visible pregnancies. In Xude Ward, there are two women seven months pregnant; in Puning Ward, there’s a woman at full term about to give birth; in Jude Ward, there are four pregnant women, all between six and eight months.”
“Puning Ward.” Her finger pointed to that particular ward with certainty.
Li Shubai tilted the map slightly toward himself, looking at the detailed layout of Puning Ward, and added, “That pregnant woman’s home is right next to Xu Maogong’s former residence.”
Huang Zixia looked at Puning Ward and suddenly remembered something. She hesitated for a moment but finally held back, planning to wait until after solving this case to mention it. However, Li Shubai seemed to have thought of it too, turned to look at her, and said, “Zhang Xingying’s home is also in Puning Ward.”
“Yes.” Since he brought it up, she continued the topic, saying, “If this case can be solved, would Your Highness consider letting Zhang Xingying return to the ceremonial guard?”
“Impossible,” he said without hesitation.
Huang Zixia argued, “Though it was improper for Zhang Xingying to let me impersonate him to enter the city with Your Highness’s ceremonial guard, he is truly a good person. Showing gratitude is also a virtue of a gentleman. Could Your Highness forgive him and let him help investigate this case with me first?”
“That’s impossible,” he flatly refused. “Though his actions are understandable, I don’t need someone who lets emotions guide their actions by my side.”
Huang Zixia bit her lower lip and said softly, “Please show mercy, Your Highness…”
He interrupted her: “If someone who commits a mistake can return unscathed after a few days, what’s the point of having disciplinary rules? How am I to command my subordinates in the future?”
Huang Zixia lowered her head silently, having to abandon the thought, and asked, “Then what should I do next?”
“Go back to sleep, and tonight you’ll come with me to Puning Ward.”
In the northwest of the capital, Puning Ward.
By custom, after the second watch of the night, all wards in Chang’an City were closed, and no one was allowed to walk on the main streets. Therefore, Li Shubai disguised himself as a traveling scholar, with Huang Zixia as his page boy. They wore ordinary clothes and went there in the evening, staying at an inn in Puning Ward.
One was a graceful young master in a turbid world, the other a clean and transcendent youth – even men turned their heads to look several times as they passed. At the inn, the innkeeper’s wife found excuses to deliver water four times, while the innkeeper, concerned about his wife, came five times.
“Never mind, I’ll contact the Ministry of Justice people and go out tonight,” Huang Zixia said, tying up her hair and preparing to leave. “As for you, you’ll probably be trapped in the room by the innkeeper and his wife.”
Li Shubai coldly replied, “If I can’t find peace, do you think you can leave?”
Huang Zixia was about to speak when she saw the innkeeper’s wife gracefully approaching again with a teapot outside the window.
She turned to look at Li Shubai, who was also looking at her, his face showing that half-smiling expression again as he said, “I’ll give you a quarter hour to send her away.”
A quarter-hour wasn’t enough time unless she used drastic measures to make the innkeeper’s wife give up so quickly. And for a woman whose heart was aflutter, the most drastic measure would of course be—
Huang Zixia stood in front of Li Shubai, took his hand and held it hovering over her waist, then said in a voice just loud enough to be heard through the window, “Oh, young master, we’re in public, we must be mindful of others! Don’t, don’t touch there! Ah, that place is even more forbidden! How naughty, we’re both men, what would people say if they saw?”
The innkeeper’s wife’s graceful figure indeed froze.
Li Shubai’s hand, which was being held hovering over her waist, also froze for an instant. But it was only for a moment before he calmly removed her hand and turned his face away to drink tea: “Fine, I’ll let you off for now. The innkeeper’s wife here is quite annoying, always staring. Could she have discovered that I only like men?”
Outside the window, the innkeeper’s wife ran away with her teapot, and Huang Zixia thought she could hear the sound of her heart shattering all along the way.
She said with some sympathy, “Was it necessary to add the words ‘quite annoying’?”
“To help you complete your task more quickly,” he said expressionlessly as he put down his teacup.
Huang Zixia latched the door, then opened the window to check the back, before jumping out and beckoning to him: “Let’s go.”
The Wei family lived in the sixth house of the second alley next to Xu Maogong’s former residence, with pomegranate flowers in their courtyard.
Land in the capital was extremely valuable, so the Wei residence wasn’t very large. The so-called courtyard was just a ten-foot square space, with two single-story rooms at the back of the garden, and surrounding walls that only reached up to Huang Zixia’s chest. They quietly crouched in the bridge-tunnel across the street, concealing themselves behind several clumps of peonies.
The second watch had passed, and the street was silent, with all lights extinguished without a sound.
Tonight, clouds obscured the moon, its hazy light dim. After crouching with her for a while, Li Shubai simply sat down under the peonies and began admiring the moon’s reflection in the water.
Huang Zixia lowered her voice: “Why did you come? Where are the people from the Court of Judicial Review and the Ministry of Justice?”
“Didn’t notify them,” he said leisurely, pulling down a budding peony nearby to examine it thoughtfully. “The weather is warm this year. The peonies haven’t bloomed yet, but the herbaceous peonies are already budding.”
Huang Zixia suddenly understood that she had come to catch this perverted, cruel, and mysteriously elusive killer, but her only companion was this seemingly completely oblivious person before her. She had to ask helplessly, “Why didn’t you notify the Court of Judicial Review and the Ministry of Justice?”
“Cui Chunzhan from the Court of Judicial Review earnestly advised me that we must strictly guard the eastern city, saying the key to this case lies in the direction of Si Fang. I felt that since he was so adamant, we should respect his opinion—so he’s now setting up an extensive net in the east of the city.”
“What about the Ministry of Justice?”
“The person in charge of this case at the Ministry of Justice is Minister Wang Lin, your former fiancé Wang Yun’s father, your former father-in-law-to-be—do you want to face him?”
The moonlight rippling on the water beneath the bridge reflected on her face, and for an instant, Li Shubai saw her expression fluctuate slightly, like the water surface at that moment, but it disappeared in the blink of an eye, as if it were just an illusion cast by the moonlight on her face. She spoke softly, all emotions vanishing silently into the air: “Never mind, let them stay in the east then.”
As they spoke, it was already midnight when suddenly there was movement in the Wei household. A light was lit in the east room, and soon the kitchen also had someone boiling water, with the whole family bustling about anxiously. A man put on his clothes and opened the door, walking out of the courtyard, with someone calling after him: “The midwife Liu lives in the fourth house of Chouhua Lane, don’t go to the wrong place!”
“Don’t worry, mother!” Though the man walked hurriedly, his voice carried thick joy.
Huang Zixia stared motionlessly at the upper floor, while Li Shubai also released the peony branch and said, “Looks like it’s time for the birth.”
“Mm.” She responded, her gaze fixed on the courtyard wall. In the darkness, they saw a figure slowly approaching, stopping by the pomegranate tree, and making two low calls over the wall: “Hoo, hoo—”
In the night, this sharp and ominous sound mixed with the groans of the woman in labor, making anyone who heard it feel their hair stand on end.
“An owl,” Li Shubai mused thoughtfully. “Truly inauspicious.”
The owl was considered an ill omen; ancient people believed that when an owl hooted outside windows at night, it was counting people’s eyebrows, and when it finished counting, it would take a life. Since giving birth was commonly referred to as somersaulting a coffin, upon hearing the bird’s call, the people inside immediately jumped up. An elderly woman ran out from the kitchen, shouting: “I’ll go over my daughter-in-law’s eyebrows first, father, you hurry and boil the water!”
The father-in-law hurried to the kitchen, while the elderly woman covered her daughter-in-law’s eyebrows. Hearing the owl hoot twice more outside the window, she quickly grabbed a nearby clothes pole and ran to the courtyard, randomly swinging at the pomegranate tree, trying to drive the owl away.
But in the instant she went out, that person had already circled to the back of the house.
Huang Zixia jumped up, but Li Shubai was even faster. While pulling her hand, he leaped over the peony bushes. Huang Zixia only felt the wind rushing past her ears, and within a few steps, they reached the back of the house, where the dark figure had already slipped in through the back door.
Li Shubai kicked open the door and pushed Huang Zixia inside, yet surprisingly didn’t enter himself.
Huang Zixia saw the killer’s dagger raised high, about to stab down at the pregnant woman’s belly. In her shock, and being pushed by Li Shubai, she stumbled forward several steps, heavily crashing into the killer’s side, violently knocking him aside.
Seeing that he was exposed, the killer grabbed the dagger and attempted to flee. Huang Zixia, lying on the ground and unable to stop him directly, immediately grabbed a nearby flower stand and swept it toward the killer’s feet.
The flowerpots on the stand crashed to the ground with a huge bang, and the killer was tripped, falling face-first into the dirt. Before he could get up, Huang Zixia had already risen and kicked hard at his wrist joint. The killer cried out in pain, instantly losing his grip on the dagger, which Huang Zixia snatched up and pressed against his lower back: “Don’t move!”
Meanwhile, Li Shubai had been standing at the doorway the whole time, watching her leisurely until she subdued the killer, then said: “Not bad, quite nimble moves, though lacking in technique.”
Huang Zixia was speechless: “Couldn’t you have come in to help me?” She had been in a life-or-death situation, yet he just stood by watching, not even moving a hair in the moonlight, bathed in the moon’s radiance like an immortal about to ascend.
“There’s a woman giving birth inside, how could I, a man, enter?” His single sentence silenced her retort as he leisurely looked up at the moon in the sky, “How is the pregnant woman’s condition now?”
Before Huang Zixia could answer, a baby’s cry rang throughout the room. The grandmother, who had heard the commotion from the courtyard, finally came trembling over. She saw that the room, which had previously contained only her daughter-in-law, now had a young page boy, a black-clothed person being held at dagger-point by the page boy, her weak daughter-in-law, a squirming crying baby on her daughter-in-law’s bed, and a man standing outside the back door watching the moon, plus one broken flowerpot and one smashed flower stand. She was dumbfounded and extremely frightened: “Oh my heavens, what… what’s happening?”
The neighbors, hearing the baby’s cry, had already started opening their windows to inquire, and the father-in-law had also arrived at the door with hot water. Amidst the chaos, Huang Zixia could only helplessly force a smile at them and say, “Sorry, we’re here to catch a bandit.”
The elderly couple looked at the dagger in her hand, then at each other, before turning to shout outside: “Help! Murder! There’s a bandit here trying to kill people—”