They had drawn close to the Censorate now. From a distance, a young clerk approached to pay his respects, but seeing Cheng Chang was with Yun Xi, he stood at a respectful distance to wait.
Cheng Chang glanced over, then asked Yun Xi, “When are you heading back to Xishan Camp?”
Yun Xi said, “Tomorrow morning.” She thought for a moment, then added, “On the day my father’s former troops arrive in Jinling, I’ll come back for it, and then leave two days after that.”
Cheng Chang nodded. “Good. Once you’ve met with your father’s former troops, I’ll come find you.”
Yun Xi paused, not quite sure what he meant by “come find you.”
Hadn’t he said before that he was worried about His Majesty forcing some marriage on him, and so it wasn’t proper for them to meet unless there was pressing business?
She asked, “There’s no more need to avoid suspicion?”
Cheng Chang said, “No more need.”
That made sense—now that Emperor Zhaoyuan’s intent to grant him a marriage was already plain for all to see, there was no avoiding it any longer. Once the decree came down, she’d simply defy it together with him.
The clerk waiting nearby seemed to have something urgent, his expression somewhat anxious. Yun Xi glanced at him and, not wanting to hold up Cheng Chang’s official business, said, “Third Young Master, I’ll take my leave first, then.”
With that, she turned and walked toward the crescent-moon gate at the end of the stone path.
Seeing this, the clerk hurried forward, about to speak, but noticed Cheng Chang was still standing where he was, watching Yun Xi’s retreating figure.
The clerk was puzzled, thinking to himself—since when did a princely heir stand at attention watching a general off like this? But he didn’t dare say anything, and simply stood hunched over to the side, waiting.
When Yun Xi reached the crescent-moon gate, she paused in her steps and turned to look back. Seeing Cheng Chang still standing there, she broke into a bright smile, waved at him, and then, her red robes folding into a scatter of flower shadows, walked briskly away.
Only then did Cheng Chang turn to the clerk. “What is it?”
The clerk said, “Reporting to Your Highness, word came from the Ministry of Justice—tomorrow morning, they need to submit the testimonies and confessions from the Marquis Zhongyong’s case to the imperial desk, and they’re asking whether you’ve finished reviewing them. They’d like to come collect them from you before three in the afternoon.”
Cheng Chang said, “I’ve already finished reviewing them. Tell them to come collect them.”
The clerk acknowledged this and walked back to the Censorate alongside Cheng Chang. Noticing his complexion still didn’t look quite right, and remembering how he’d nearly collapsed in the hall earlier, the clerk hurriedly poured a cup of tea and offered it to him with concern. “Your Highness, are you truly all right now?”
Cheng Chang shook his head.
The searing pain in his chest earlier now felt almost like it had been an illusion—by now, aside from a lingering unease, nothing else remained.
The old monk on the outskirts of Hangzhou had once told him he was born under an inauspicious star, that across three lifetimes he had been a good man, and that his fate ran along two parallel tracks at once.
But what exactly that meant, he still didn’t fully understand, even now.
Twice now, on the verge of death, he had crossed between worlds. He knew this couldn’t be mere coincidence. But now, hearing those voices from that distant world again, feeling that violent pain once more—was it because the version of him living in the twenty-first century was about to wake, or was it a sign that the version of him here was about to face mortal danger once again?
Cheng Chang didn’t know.
He steadied himself, thinking that the Ministry of Justice officials would be coming soon to collect the testimonies, and reorganized the documents on his desk once more.
In truth, these documents still weren’t complete. To convict Prince Yun and Yao Hangshan, they still needed the comparative documentation from the Ministry of Finance’s account audit, the replies from the post stations in the northwest, and beyond the testimony from the post-station officials in Huainan and Huaixi, all he had were the confessions of the two former Marquis Zhongyong commanders held at Qingfeng Cloister of Baiyun Temple.
Cheng Chang’s gaze landed on this last piece of testimony and suddenly froze.
How could the testimony from Qingfeng Cloister be here?
He wasn’t sure if the pain in his chest earlier, feeling almost like a hallucination, had left him unusually jumpy—but he clearly remembered that on the very day he’d been ambushed outside Qingfeng Cloister, the two Marquis Zhongyong commanders held within the cloister had also been killed not long afterward.
If they were dead, how could their testimony have survived?
Cheng Chang leaned back against his chair, closing his eyes and rubbing his temples.
The last time, the “Noble One” had used the Marquis Zhongyong’s case as bait—while Cheng Chang was interrogating Luo Shu in the Ministry of Justice’s prison, he’d had her reveal, seemingly on her own initiative, that the Marquis had been wrongfully convicted. Cheng Chang had then sent people to investigate, learning that two witnesses who could prove the Marquis’s innocence were being held at Qingfeng Cloister of Baiyun Temple. Using the temple’s summer solstice ritual as cover, he had gone to question the witnesses there.
But the entire thing had been a trap set by the “Noble One.”
It was the “Noble One” who had arranged for Luo Shu to tell him about the Marquis’s wrongful conviction; it was the “Noble One” who had somehow planted the two witnesses within Qingfeng Cloister.
The whole purpose of this elaborate scheme had been to lay a trap outside Qingfeng Cloister and take Cheng Chang’s life.
But if the “Noble One” was indeed Prince Yun—if he’d dared go so far as to “kill” Cheng Chang and murder the two witnesses—why would he have left behind this piece of testimony, so damning to himself?
Wasn’t the entire purpose of all this to cover up his crime of diverting the Marquis Zhongyong’s stockpiled grain?
Granted, Baiyun Temple was an imperial temple, and the guards and monks stationed at Qingfeng Cloister couldn’t possibly all have been Prince Yun’s men—it wasn’t impossible that after Cheng Chang left, someone there had preserved a copy of the testimony on their own.
Cheng Chang understood all this. What he couldn’t understand was—if Prince Yun had already dared to do something as brazen as sending men to hunt down and kill the Young Prince, why would he leave such a sloppy loose end behind? Why would there be an oversight like this at all?
He rose to his feet, gathered up the documents on his desk, instructed the clerk to hand them over to the Ministry of Justice officials, and set off toward the Imperial City Bureau.
Cheng Chang went to the Imperial City Bureau looking for Wei Jie, but upon reaching the office gate, the guard on duty outside said, “Your Highness has come looking for Lord Wei? Lord Wei is out handling a case—he’s not in the office today.”
Cheng Chang paid him no mind and walked straight in, pushing open the door to the duty office himself.
Wei Jie lay sprawled on a bamboo couch inside, arms pillowed behind his head, one leg crossed over the other, snoring away.
Cheng Chang walked over and rapped his knuckles against the small table nearby. “Get up.”
Wei Jie smacked his lips in his sleep, apparently having heard nothing at all, still sleeping soundly.
Cheng Chang said, “You’ve got a few jars of wine buried under that old tree outside your office woodshed—should I dig them up and send them straight to His Majesty’s desk?”
Wei Jie’s snoring gradually stopped. After a moment, he stretched, sat up groggily, and upon seeing Cheng Chang, rubbed his eyes in surprise. “Oh-ho, Young Prince, what brings you here? Didn’t those useless fools out front tell you I was out?”
“They told me,” Cheng Chang said. “But His Majesty doesn’t trust you right now, so where else would you be if not holed up in your own office?”
Wei Jie clicked his tongue, then asked, “How’d you know about the wine buried under the old tree by the woodshed?”
Cheng Chang said, “Last time I came to the Imperial City Bureau, I wandered around a bit and happened to see one of your men bringing back a few jars of wine and burying them under that tree.”
Wei Jie loved wine like his own life, and Emperor Zhaoyuan, worried it would interfere with his duties, had expressly forbidden him from drinking in the office.
Wei Jie sighed. “Guess calling them useless was giving them too much credit.”
He stood up, pulled over a chair for Cheng Chang, and settled lazily into another seat across from him. “All right, out with it. What did you come to see me about?”
Cheng Chang got straight to the point. “Last year, around the Chushu solar term, someone tried to kill me outside Qingfeng Cloister at Baiyun Temple. After you investigated, did you confirm it was Prince Yun’s men?”
Wei Jie looked genuinely confused. “Investigate what? What are you talking about? I don’t know anything about this.”
Cheng Chang simply looked at him and said nothing.
The last time he’d been chased to the edge of a cliff outside Qingfeng Cloister, even if Emperor Zhaoyuan had brushed it off on the surface, there was no way he hadn’t quietly ordered an investigation behind the scenes.
Among his two imperial guard corps, the Imperial City Bureau and the Palace Front Bureau, the two commanders had very different styles—Wei Jie was unconventional, while Xuan Zhi was strictly by-the-book. For a matter like this, Emperor Zhaoyuan would most likely have entrusted it to Wei Jie.
Moreover, Wei Jie’s dislike of both Prince Ling and Prince Yun wasn’t without reason—he must have dug up plenty of dirt on the two of them privately to have developed such contempt.
Under Cheng Chang’s steady gaze, Wei Jie grew uneasy and said irritably, “You’ve got some nerve, coming to ask me anything. I nearly got buried alive because of you—I don’t want anything more to do with you.”
Cheng Chang said, “It’s too late for you to try cutting ties with me now. Right now everyone already assumes you and I are in this together. It’ll do you no harm to tell me the truth early—but if something happens to me, you’ll go down with me too.”
The more reasonable Cheng Chang’s words sounded, the more it set Wei Jie’s teeth on edge.
Though he disliked both Prince Ling and Prince Yun, when he’d first approached Cheng Chang, he genuinely hadn’t intended to form any kind of alliance with him—at most, he’d found him interesting enough to be worth befriending.
The whole Mingyin Temple affair had left him thoroughly used, and at first he’d been quite resentful over it. But these past few days he’d come to terms with it, figuring that if the old fox didn’t trust him, so be it—worst case, he’d get stripped of his post and prosecuted. The throne would change hands eventually one way or another anyway; if either Prince Ling or Prince Yun ended up on it, he wouldn’t want the job anymore regardless, and could just wander off into the world instead.
So Wei Jie said, “Fine, I looked into it. The ones who tried to kill you outside Qingfeng Cloister really were Prince Yun’s covert guards.”
Cheng Chang asked, “You’re certain?”
Wei Jie nodded. “Certain.”
He thought for a moment, then added, “And that time at the Pei family’s water pavilion, during the Old Matriarch’s birthday celebration, when someone tried to assassinate you there too—that was also Prince Yun’s doing.”
Hearing this, Cheng Chang furrowed his brow, deep in thought.
Wei Jie asked, “Something wrong?”
Cheng Chang shook his head. “Can’t quite put my finger on it.”
He said, “At the time, I was lured to Qingfeng Cloister at Baiyun Temple because two witnesses who could prove the Marquis Zhongyong’s wrongful conviction were being held there. If Prince Yun arranged for those witnesses to be there, then after sending men to kill me, he should have disposed of them too.”
“Wasn’t he?” Wei Jie said. “The day you went missing, those two witnesses died.”
Cheng Chang said, “They were disposed of, yes. But their testimony survived.”
Wei Jie paused, then said, “What’s strange about that? Baiyun Temple is an imperial temple—even if Qingfeng Cloister is a bit out of the way, it’s still within Baiyun Temple’s grounds. The guards stationed there couldn’t possibly all be Prince Yun’s men. If they were, wouldn’t it have made more sense to just kill you right there in the cloister? Why wait until you’d left to make their move? So it’s not that strange for the witnesses’ testimony to have survived—they had imperial guards protecting them, after all.”
Cheng Chang fell silent at this for a moment.
After a while, he asked Wei Jie, “How have you been lately?”
“You’re asking me that? The old fox has completely lost trust in me now—how do you think I’ve been?”
Wei Jie flopped back down onto the bamboo couch, crossing his legs again. “Though honestly, it’s not so bad. Nice and quiet, no more running errands for him. Except he’s still got me chasing down that Mingyin Temple business.”
He turned to look at Cheng Chang, puzzled. “What is that old fox even thinking? He wants me to help find his fifth son, but aside from his age and three red moles on his back, he won’t tell me anything else—just that this fifth son went missing after some bloody incident at Mingyin Temple over a decade ago. But what actually happened in that incident? Could you at least give me a hint? I’m stumbling around like a blind cat trying to find this person, and I can’t even ask around too openly for fear of touching some imperial taboo.”
“Oh, right—around the New Year, I also went and asked that Second Miss Yu from the Yu family—what’s her name, oh, Yu Ling, the one the old fox wants to marry you off to—and also young master Zhou, Zhou Hongguang’s fifth son. Neither of them knew anything either.”
Having said this, Wei Jie sat up and asked Cheng Chang, “By the way, when I asked that Second Miss Yu about you afterward, she said she hadn’t seen much of you in the past half month, didn’t know how you were doing. I told her you were avoiding her—wouldn’t happen to be because of that little Yun girl, would it? You like her that much? Planning to defy the decree for her?”
Cheng Chang didn’t answer that. Instead, he said to Wei Jie, “I’m still not entirely at ease about that testimony from Qingfeng Cloister. Have someone look into exactly how it was found.”
Wei Jie put on airs again. “You think I’ll help you investigate? Not a chance.”
Cheng Chang glanced at the sky—it was nearly the end of the shen hour. He rose to leave, saying to Wei Jie as he went, “If I have my own men look into it, it’ll take half a month to a month to get anywhere. You’re better suited to this kind of thing. Once you’ve got it figured out, just send someone to let me know.”
Wei Jie chased after him, reiterating once more, “I still haven’t settled the score with you for last time—and now you want to order me around again? Forget it. I’m definitely not helping you investigate this. Figure it out yourself.”
With that, he straightened his robes and turned back into the duty office to go back to sleep.
Though Cheng Chang had entrusted the matter to Wei Jie, his mind remained troubled. Back at the princely residence, he instructed his own men to continue investigating the witnesses from Qingfeng Cloister as well. A few days later, someone from the Imperial City Bureau arrived first, telling him, “Your Highness, the matter you asked Lord Wei to look into—he’s finished.”
Cheng Chang raised an eyebrow—that was surprisingly quick.
He asked, “And?”
The Imperial City Bureau guard said, “On the day you were attacked, Your Highness, the Palace Front Bureau’s guards arrived at Qingfeng Cloister after nightfall and found the entire place had already been slaughtered. Afterward, when the temple monks were cleaning up the grounds, that piece of testimony was found by a young novice monk, tucked away in a corner behind the Buddha altar—it seems it had either been dropped there or deliberately hidden, and wouldn’t have been noticed without a thorough cleaning. That novice monk later went missing. Lord Wei sent people to look for him, but they haven’t found him yet.”
Cheng Chang nodded. “I understand. My thanks to you all.”
The guard said, “Your Highness is too kind.” With that, he cupped his hands in a bow and took his leave.
Cheng Chang stood at the gate of the princely residence, brow furrowed in deep thought.
He had thought that the Marquis Zhongyong’s case, and the reason behind the attempts on his own life, had already been laid out clearly, cause and effect fully understood. But this testimony from Qingfeng Cloister was like a drop of ink falling into water that had already been cleared to perfect transparency, muddying everything all over again.
Cheng Chang couldn’t tell where exactly things had gone wrong.
Wei Jie wouldn’t lie to him. The men who had attacked him at the Pei family’s water pavilion, and again outside Qingfeng Cloister, were clearly Prince Yun’s men. But if they were Prince Yun’s men, why would there be such a careless, almost amateurish oversight?
As Cheng Chang stood there turning the matter over carefully in his mind, something soft suddenly brushed against his foot. He glanced down—it was Snowball.
Snowball had apparently followed him out of the residence without his noticing, and upon seeing him look down, let out two happy meows.
This was Yao Susu’s cat. The Imperial Noble Consort had originally gifted it to Yao Susu, saying the cat had a gift for recognizing beauty, that it was unusually perceptive. And sure enough, the cat had indeed proven to have an eye for beauty—it had once darted straight to Cheng Chang’s feet at a palace banquet.
On the night of the Autumn Festival, Yao Susu had brought Snowball to Zhuque Street, and after quarreling with Luo Shu over Pei Lan, the cat had wandered off during the argument. Yao Susu had gone after it and never returned. By the time she was found again, she was already a corpse by the banks of the Qinhuai.
The thought brought Cheng Chang’s mind suddenly back to the earring of Luo Shu’s that had been found lodged in Yao Susu’s jaw.
It was that very earring that had gotten Luo Shu imprisoned, that had given him reason to go interrogate her in the Ministry of Justice’s cells, which in turn had led him to be lured to Qingfeng Cloister and nearly killed off a cliff.
If everything had started with that earring, then who exactly had placed it in Yao Susu’s mouth?
In other words—who had actually killed Yao Susu?
Cheng Chang found this baffling. Yao Susu had been dead for nearly half a year now, and even her case had become an unsolved mystery.
He had thought all the truths had already come to light, but tracing things back to their source, everything seemed to circle back to that same murky, unresolved beginning.
Sun Haiping drove the carriage up and asked Cheng Chang, “Young Prince, off to the office?”
Cheng Chang thought for a moment, then bent down, scooped up Snowball, lifted the curtain, and climbed into the carriage, saying to Sun Haiping, “The banks of the Qinhuai first.”
Back when Luo Shu had already been betrothed to Pei Lan, Pei Lan had been secretly meeting Yao Susu at a Taoist temple near the Qinhuai, and Luo Shu had stumbled upon them by chance. Afterward, Yao Susu had come to find Luo Shu, urging her to break off her engagement with Pei Lan. The two of them had quarreled over this, and it was during that quarrel that Snowball had wandered off.
According to Luo Shu’s account, the moment Yao Susu noticed the cat had wandered off, she’d gone after it and never come back.
But anyone who’s kept a cat or dog knows these small pets are remarkably perceptive—unless badly frightened, they typically don’t stray far from their owners, and even if they do run off, they’ll usually find their way back by scent before long. Unless… they happened to encounter someone else along the way—someone familiar, or someone they took a liking to.
So had Snowball run into someone while it was missing?
The carriage stopped by the banks of the Qinhuai. Starting from the Taoist temple where Yao Susu and Pei Lan had first met in secret, Cheng Chang, carrying Snowball, walked along the Qinhuai, circling past Tongzi Lane and heading toward Zhuque Street, retracing with the cat the very path Yao Susu had walked on the night of the Autumn Festival.
He knew this method was clumsy at best, little better than a gamble, unlikely to actually uncover who had truly killed Yao Susu.
But too much time had already passed. All that was left to do was try his luck.
Noon was approaching, the spring sunlight blazing bright. Snowball clung close to him the entire way, following right at his heels, barely glancing anywhere else.
When they reached the fork near Zhuque Street, the apothecary shop that Fang Furan frequented for her treatments wasn’t far off.
Cheng Chang remembered that on that night, Luo Shu had gone out together with Fang Furan and Yun Xi. After stumbling upon Yao Susu and Pei Lan’s secret meeting at the temple, she had gone back with Yun Xi to the apothecary, to keep Fang Furan company during her treatment.
It was after this that Yao Susu had come looking for Luo Shu at the apothecary, and the two of them had gone together to the small pavilion by the Qinhuai afterward.
Cheng Chang, with Snowball in tow, paused briefly outside the apothecary shop, just about to head toward the small pavilion, when he suddenly heard Snowball let out a sharp “Meow—” and dart off toward the apothecary at full speed.
Snowball had an eye for beauty.
Cheng Chang’s gaze followed the cat, watching as it came to a stop in front of the apothecary shop, circling around a woman of stunning beauty who had just stepped out of the shop, then lowering its head to nuzzle affectionately against her ankle.