The people of Chizhou placed deep faith in the divine, believing that all things possessed a spiritual essence — that whatever was taken must be returned in kind, so that breath could be renewed and life perpetuated through the ages.
If someone only ever took without giving back, sooner or later retribution would come for them.
That was precisely what people said when word slipped out from the Huichun Clinic that Zou Sifang had fallen ill.
As they say, fortune’s wheel turns for everyone — how could all the good things in the world keep falling to one family? Take enough advantages for long enough, and eventually something else must be given in return.
The Zou family’s wealth, in particular, was built on blood and flesh. The “Lingqianxue” was so rare that even a hundred deer might not yield a few taels of it, and however vast the swampland, it was impossible to harvest it year after year.
Shepherds had long since spotted it themselves — the servants of the Xiong Family and the herb-gatherers of the Zou Family riding on horseback, driving herds of deer, deliberately chasing them deep into the marshes. The deer trapped in the swamp cried out night after night; people passing along the marsh’s edge could hear those sounds for three consecutive days — wailing like weeping children — before they finally faded into the ever-present mist, leaving behind a silence as deep as death.
This was the Xiong Family’s source of wealth: a road to fortune paved in blood.
And now, the toll for that road was the life of the Zou Family’s master.
To make it easier for servants to tend to him around the clock, Zou Sifang’s bedchamber had been moved from the northern wing to the western annex. Fire basins were lit throughout the room to drive out the damp, and layer upon layer of curtains were drawn, as though terrified the man inside might catch the slightest chill.
Zhao Shi lifted the final gauze curtain and at last revealed the figure lying within.
Zou Sifang’s face had taken on a greenish pallor; his eyes were clamped shut, his cracked lips parted slightly, like a fish that had been thrown ashore and left to dehydrate. The air was thick with a foul, rank stench — the smell that comes from a bedridden person long past controlling their bodily functions.
Even Zhao Shi herself could not suppress the revulsion that rose to her face at the sight. She had spent considerable silver hiring close-mouthed people to tend to Zou Sifang, precisely to avoid being trapped day after day in this room saturated with the aura of death.
Hao Bai, young as he was, showed little visible disgust. He simply advised, “Madam, this room needs far more ventilation. Keeping it sealed up like this is not necessarily doing him any good.”
Zhao Shi pressed her handkerchief over her nose and mouth, and simply waved at him to get on with the examination.
Hao Bai sighed and began to take Zou Sifang’s pulse.
For a moment no one in the room spoke; only the sound of breathing gnawed at Zhao Shi’s nerves.
The time Hao Bai spent taking the pulse seemed to equal the combined time of every physician who had come before him. Zou Sifang’s somewhat withered wrist was pressed and turned beneath his fingers, leaving several indentations.
Just as Zhao Shi was nearly out of patience, Hao Bai suddenly turned to the maidservant standing nearby with her head lowered and asked, “Is there a candle?”
The maid glanced at Zhao Shi’s expression, then nodded and went to the corner cabinet to fetch one. Hao Bai lit it and brought it close to the master’s face, then gently pried open his eyelids with his other hand.
Zou Sifang’s eyes were cloudy, yet one could still see that his pupils — which ought to have been round — had become horizontal slits, contracting almost imperceptibly as the light struck them.
Understanding settled in his mind. He blew out the candle, then extended three fingers and pressed and probed across the master’s face, neck, shoulders, and arms.
Zhao Shi, who had been watching with anxious eyes, finally could not hold back. “What is the doctor doing? Has he not already taken the pulse?”
Hao Bai did not reply. When he reached Zou Sifang’s right index finger, he finally stopped. He then took out a small mirror he carried with him and examined the finger carefully. At the very tip of the index finger was an inconspicuous black dot that looked as though a needle had been pushed through it. Scrutinizing it further, one would find that the dot appeared to be a thorn standing straight up inside the flesh — yet there was no sensation of any foreign body beneath the skin; it was smooth as usual.
He laid the master’s hand back beneath the quilt and gave Zhao Shi a slight bow. “Madam, your husband is not ill. He has been poisoned.”
“What?!” Zhao Shi’s face drained of all color, her beauty crumpling with shock.
A flurry of possibilities flashed through her mind; she had turned suspicion on everyone around her — and in the end she gritted her teeth savagely. “To think the Zou Family has handed out so many favors over the years, and all those people who surrounded my husband calling him brother — so it turns out they had their eyes on our money and would resort to such methods to harm him?”
Hao Bai clearly did not share this view. “The poison afflicting the master is exceedingly ancient — unlikely to be easily obtained in this day and age. If someone with ill intent wished to cause harm, they would simply kill the man outright. That he’s been left with a single breath still in him is, frankly, peculiar.”
Zhao Shi gradually calmed herself, though her hands still trembled uncontrollably. “You mean he won’t die anytime soon?”
“This poison is at least a century old. It was once used on sacrificial cattle and sheep during ritual ceremonies — its purpose was to render the poisoned animal motionless on the altar while still keeping it alive, so that the gods might receive the offering. Such ceremonies typically lasted nineteen days, and the poison’s effects lasted exactly nineteen days as well. After those nineteen days, medicine becomes useless and even the gods cannot save him.”
Zhao Shi listened to all of this, and the only word that penetrated was “death.” Her complexion went somewhat pale. “Can the doctor cure this poison?”
Hao Bai lowered his eyes, his expression clearly somewhat unnatural. “To be candid, I do know the formula for the antidote, but one of the necessary medicinal catalysts is so extraordinarily difficult to obtain that I fear—”
Zhao Shi, upon hearing there was still hope, immediately declared, “Please write out the prescription without hesitation, Doctor. Even if it requires something as rare as a thousand-year-old ganoderma mushroom, the Zou Family will never begrudge the silver.”
Knowing further words were useless, he picked up the brush from the table and wrote several characters on a sheet of paper.
Zhao Shi picked it up — and stood there, utterly stunned.
In the old northern quarter of the city, diagonally across from the Zou Mansion, an inconspicuous horse carriage came to a stop before a run-down tea house. The driver, wearing a rather striking long blade at his side, was sizing up the tea house’s door curtain with a measured look.
The tea house’s facade had long been weathered beyond recognition by wind and sun; the signboard that had once hung from the beam had vanished without a trace. Only two lines of poetry carved into the pillars at the entrance still hinted at the tea house it had once been:
On a clear and breezy day, flower petals float atop the brew in the stone cauldron; On a rainy night, a spring platter holds the cool jade-green noodles.
Tea house it was called, but it barely qualified as one, for there was not even a proprietor selling tea — only a stream of impoverished tea drinkers coming and going.
Rumor had it that this had once been the finest tea house in all of Chizhou. The proprietor was not only supremely skilled in the art of brewing tea but also a reclusive man of great cultivation; scholars and Taoist monks who admired his reputation often came to seek him out. Over time, his fame and the fragrance of his tea drifted thousands of li beyond these walls, bringing him a moment of renown.
Then one day the proprietor died of illness, and the place gradually fell into ruin. The tea house no longer operated as such, yet those scholars and men of letters who had loved fine tea still gathered here day and night to debate and discourse — criticizing affairs of state, seeking enlightenment in the Tao. Participants took turns bringing fresh tea, each man providing his own cup. Today might be Xiangjun Lanxue; tomorrow, Lüquan Yugua. Though the surroundings were decrepit and everyone present dressed in rags, there was nonetheless a certain ease about it — a sense of having left the mundane world behind.
“Master, this should be the place.”
The person in the carriage gave a low hum of assent. A hand adorned with prayer beads gently lifted the curtain, revealing half a face that held a look of slight weariness. Those narrow, elongated eyes carried a hint of languor; they skimmed over the tea house facade, and then came a faint, unhurried voice: “Then let us go in.”
Dusk was already settling, and small oil lamps sat on each broken table inside the tea house, their light dim and murky — enough to make every figure speaking in low murmurs seem faintly mysterious.
A sound came from the doorway, and two more people walked in.
By long habit, not many people came to the tea house at this hour. Mornings were when it was liveliest; at this time of day it was the wine houses that did their best business.
But no one inside the tea house looked up to observe the two newcomers. Every person was absorbed in their own small world at their tea table, chasing the last threads of fading light, dreaming of forgetting the dust of the world.
The innermost part of the tea room had grown so dark it seemed to have reached its end — and it was there that Zhongli Jing’s footsteps came to a halt.
“Weixiang, over here.”
An elder whose beard was already half white was engaged in a brushwork competition with someone by the light of an oil lamp. His peripheral gaze caught the two arrivals, and he spoke up abruptly: “Young man, that area is sealed off — you cannot enter.”
Zhongli Jing slowly turned around. A smile appeared on his face — yet that smile went no further than the corners of his mouth, giving it a slightly unsettling quality. “Many thanks for the reminder, elder. We shall take care.” With that, he gestured to the person at his side.
Ding Weixiang stepped forward and lightly closed his left hand around his blade’s hilt.
There was a single flash of white light within the tea room.
Before anyone could process what had just happened, the wooden planks nailed to the tea room wall splintered apart with a crack, revealing a narrow door leading to the rear courtyard.
How he had brought down his blade, no one could say — he had severed only the door’s seal while leaving the door plank itself completely unscathed.
The young man who had spoken moments before did not linger on the room full of astonished faces. He walked with unhurried composure through the narrow doorway draped in cobwebs and dust, his attendant following close behind, who reached back and propped the fallen plank back across the entrance.
Silence returned to the tea room. Had it not been for the scattered fragments of wood on the floor, one might genuinely wonder whether two people had just passed through at all. The onlookers exchanged glances, then plunged back into a fresh round of debate, putting the strange visitors and their stranger doings entirely out of mind.
In the rear courtyard of the tea house, Zhongli Jing walked across broken stones, seeming utterly indifferent to the desolation on all sides.
The courtyard had once been planted with bamboo, but years of neglect had left it choked with weeds and littered with dead branches. The path of crushed stone led to the end of the courtyard, where a small stone cottage stood with its door hanging wide open, revealing a somewhat disordered interior floor — as though the owner had left in a hurry and the room still bore the shape of that departure.
Ding Weixiang set down a few simple pieces of hand luggage on the dust-covered table and could not help but frown. “This place is truly dilapidated and crude — are you certain you wish to lodge here, Master?”
“It doesn’t matter. Convenient is best.” He walked directly toward the room’s only bed — which could barely be called a bed at all, as the headboard and footboard had both disappeared, leaving only two wooden bed planks that still lay flush and flat in place. “Besides, I’ve stayed in far worse. There’s no point in minding it.”
With that, he extended a hand and rapped lightly on the bed planks. The planks gave a hollow sound that echoed through the empty stone room.
Ding Weixiang saw this and stepped forward, carefully shifting one of the planks aside. A black void of unfathomable depth was exposed, from which a stale, thick breath of air faintly seeped.
Zhongli Jing seemed to have expected as much. He wrapped his fur-lined robe around himself and sat down beside the opening. He half-closed his eyes, as though lost in thought, his fingers slowly working over the heavy string of prayer beads at his wrist — which now held exactly twenty-one beads, no more, no less.
Looking closely, one could see that the beads were strung on a slender golden thread and were not the uniformly rounded spheres of typical prayer beads. Each one differed slightly from the next — some longer, some shorter; some round, some flat; their colors ranging from vermilion to deep amber. Yet each bead had a warm, jade-like quality to its surface, and it was plain that the string had existed for a long time and had always been worn close to someone’s skin.
After a long while, he finally opened his eyes and stretched out his left wrist, indicating to Ding Weixiang who stood to one side.
“Take one off.”
Ding Weixiang did not respond immediately; his face was full of misgiving. He rarely questioned the other man’s orders, yet he could not hold back now. “Zou Sifang’s illness may be nothing more than rumor. Why must you take this risk, Master?”
“If he has no connection to the matter of the secret seal, this will not be needed. But if he does, it is unavoidable — we will reach this point regardless. Better to prepare sooner than later.”
“But—”
“It’s just one bead. It’s nothing of consequence.”
A rare note of dissatisfaction crept into Ding Weixiang’s voice. “Perhaps that one bead is precisely what makes the difference.”
The man finally looked at Ding Weixiang, his tone as unhurried as ever. “Has following me made Weixiang afraid of death?”
His voice was lower than before, its quality no longer clear but carrying a trace of hoarseness; the sense of detached transcendence he had projected a moment ago vanished entirely, replaced by the unspoken authority of one who commands.
Ding Weixiang startled, suddenly aware that he had said far too much today. He dropped to his knees with a thud, hastily saying, “Your subordinate would die ten thousand deaths for your sake — how could I be afraid of death? I only felt it was not worth it on your behalf, Master. If that man proves useless after all—”
Zhongli Jing’s lips curved in something that looked more like mockery than a smile. “Then let us call it a good deed for the day. Perhaps the Buddha will see fit to record it as a merit to my name.”
Ding Weixiang knew that further words were useless and finally let his gaze fall on that string of prayer beads.
“Yes.”
At that same moment, in a side room at the rear of Wangchen Tower, Xiao Nanhui was lighting an oil lamp. The room had been uninhabited for a long time, and a pervasive smell of mildew clung to every corner; even the wick soaking in the lamp oil had somewhat rotted, and it took her considerable effort before she managed to coax it out.
Outside the window, night had fallen completely. The faint sounds of string instruments and lively chatter drifted over from the direction of the front courtyard.
Bolao rummaged through the luggage and produced a bamboo tube, then carefully drew out a folded map and spread it on the table.
“It got wet on the river just now — not sure whether it’s still usable.”
Xiao Nanhui said nothing. She picked up the oil lamp and carried it carefully over; the flame, no bigger than a soybean, illuminated a small patch of the world around it.
It appeared to be a floor plan of a residential compound. In the center, over the main courtyard, a faded red seal was stamped — faintly in the shape of an archaic character that read “Hu.” Because water had seeped into the bamboo tube, the lower-left third of the map had been soaked through; the ink had bled and spread, obscuring the original layout of that section.
Xiao Nanhui’s brow creased.
This map had cost her no small effort to obtain — she had borrowed it through Yaoyi — precisely for situations where the plan might change and she would need to slip into the Zou Mansion. Now that Zou Sifang had sealed himself indoors, she was fortunate to have held this card in reserve.
The Zou Family’s grand residence was a well-known ancient estate in Huozhou, prized not only for its location but also for its meticulously designed chambers and courtyards. Yet prime real estate came at a steep price, and the house had sat vacant for no fewer than thirty or forty years before the Zou Family moved in.
In a manor house this old, navigating without a floor plan was a reliable path to getting hopelessly lost.
Bolao tilted her head and examined the map, then pointed at the ink-stained lower-left corner. “What a shame — when I looked at it earlier, I’m pretty sure there was a hidden passage here, and now it’s been smeared into nothing by the water.”
Xiao Nanhui thought it over and concluded it was not quite as bad as it seemed. “Even if the passage is still there, if we cannot know where it leads, it is of no use to us.” She paused, then pointed to several of the main courtyards at the center of the map. “Zou Sifang bought a compound this large; he certainly wasn’t planning to live in some cramped corner of it. We focus our search on these courtyards, and we’ll be close enough.”
Bolao was picking peanuts out of a dry fruit dish that had been sitting on the table for who knows how many years. “So we’re already breaking into someone’s home? How exciting.”
Though Xiao Nanhui herself felt the pull of it, the teachings of Xiao Zhun that had been drilled into her over the years made her somewhat uncomfortable with the phrase “breaking in,” so she dressed it up politely: “We’re simply going to have a look. Don’t make it sound so unseemly.”
Bolao curled her lip. “I make it sound unseemly? If you actually find that imperial seal, are you really not going to steal it—”
Xiao Nanhui clapped a hand over her mouth. “Keep your voice down. Walls have ears.”
Bolao smacked her hand away. “I don’t believe it. Is this thing really still a secret? If you ask me, half the outsiders in this city of Mu Er He came for exactly that.”
“All the more reason to be careful.”
Xiao Nanhui studied the map once more before putting it away. She then turned and rummaged through the luggage for a moment before a thought occurred to her — rather belatedly.
“Bolao, does anywhere in Mu Er He sell night-raid clothes?”