Dusk was nearly upon them. The two head constables stood at the edge of that bamboo grove for quite a while before Chief Chen finally muttered those words.
“What’s wrong?”
“That person… he sat here…”
As if putting himself into something, Chief Chen took an uncomfortable deep breath, crouched down, and picked up a branch from beside him. This whole small area was mostly bamboo; the branch in front of him had clearly been broken off from elsewhere, its leaves already slightly wilted.
“He must have been waiting here for someone to arrive… sitting right here… whatever bench or chair there was must have burned already… he waited quite a while, and he’d been injured, badly injured — but he still didn’t plan to leave, kept waiting here regardless. By this point, he might already have killed off the entire Yang Yi and Yang Heng family…”
He said this while looking over at the wreckage on the riverbank, then picked a leaf, considered it a moment, and put it in his mouth. His brow immediately furrowed.
“That’s not right — this doesn’t fit the female assassin’s style at all. If it were really some martial arts expert, they wouldn’t have taken such serious injuries…”
Deputy Head Constable Xu, beside him, frowned as well. “You’re saying Gu Yanzhen’s case was done by someone else entirely?”
“Very likely — extremely likely. That person…” Chief Chen paused. “That person, for some reason, killed off the Yang Yi and Yang Heng family. He… was injured, badly injured… and still stayed here waiting, and then when Gu Yanzhen and his servants arrived, killed them too. Look at the ground here…”
Chief Chen pointed at the forest floor ahead of them, mostly covered in fallen bamboo leaves, with a few subtle things hidden among them, not very clear in the dusk light.
“He was chewing on this kind of leaf — it’s bitter, and he kept chewing it. Why would he do that? Because here, and here… he vomited twice. Not much came up, but he didn’t manage to cover up the traces before he left… Why stay here the whole time? And why vomit? Why chew this particular leaf? It’s hardly some special hobby, is it…”
Chief Chen paused. “He was injured — badly injured — and needed this leaf to stay alert. An injury that bad even made him vomit twice, and yet he sat here waiting. Maybe it wasn’t that he was confident he could kill whoever came — maybe he simply had to see for himself who it was…”
Deputy Head Constable Xu looked at the chewed leaf remnants and the vomit. “Well, this complicates things.”
“I’m well aware it complicates things.” Chief Chen spat out the leaf in his mouth and tossed away the branch in his hand. “I really don’t want to chew a second one… The Yang Yi and Yang Heng brothers have spent years in the business of kidnapping — sometimes fattening people up for ransom, sometimes as revenge killings, sometimes taking commissions from wealthy families to abduct women they fancied. Gu Yanzhen coming out here at night suggests he wasn’t up to any good either — probably commissioned them to kidnap someone… As for whoever sat here — I don’t know if it was a family member of his who’d been kidnapped, or if he himself had been kidnapped, but that’s why he had to wait here, waiting for whoever was pulling the strings to show up…”
“Whoever could kill off the entire Yang Yi and Yang Heng family must be a formidable, ruthless character in their own right — probably not someone who’d been kidnapped themselves.”
“So ruthless…” Chief Chen sighed. “After killing off the Yang family, badly injured, and still able to sit quietly here, holding on until the mastermind arrived, then killing Gu Yanzhen and his servants too… Old Xu, we’ve been constables for so many years — of all the desperate criminals who’ve passed through our hands, how many could have managed something like this?”
“Could it still be the female assassin after all, badly injured though she was, still able to kill Gu Yanzhen and his servants afterward? Suppose someone important to her was kidnapped, the Yang brothers using it as leverage, leaving her badly wounded, but she still killed the entire Yang family in the end. Then, bold in her skill, she waited here for Gu Yanzhen and his servants to appear, and killed them…”
“That’s not an unreasonable theory. But the next day, when she showed up to kill those two Gu family servants, she was still full of life and vigor…” Chief Chen shook his head. “This person might not even know martial arts at all, but is ruthless to an extreme degree — ruthless toward others, ruthless toward himself, willing to stake his own life just to see the mastermind behind it all with his own eyes, because he couldn’t stand the thought of someone watching him from the shadows without his knowledge. A person like that is truly frightening…”
“So… the case has changed. How do we report it now?” Deputy Head Constable Xu asked cautiously.
“How can we report it? The magistrate’s already said what he’s said — are we supposed to go back and tell him this might be a separate case? Besides, what does this little bit of evidence even prove? It’s hardly solid proof. Once this rain comes down, there won’t be anything left of it anyway.” Chief Chen patted the bamboo beside him and shook his head. “Merge the cases. Confirm it was all the female assassin’s doing, issue the wanted notice. The Yang Yi and Yang Heng brothers likely have a dozen-odd lives on their hands already, and that Gu Yanzhen who came to commission the kidnapping was no good either. If it were my own family kidnapped, I’d want to kill the whole family responsible too! Until things are made clear, you and I will just quietly look into it on our own.”
In many folk tales and stage dramas, there’s always some upright, selfless official praised by the common people. But in reality, even being upright requires knowing how to pick one’s battles — being stubborn over small matters is one thing, but if a man’s temper stays hard as an ox’s no matter the situation, he’d never have reached this position in the first place, especially when it came to matters that could get his superior scolded and dock his performance review — dare to recklessly push back on something like that, and don’t be surprised the next day when they make life difficult for you in return. Only once things were fully clarified could this be reported in a way that satisfied everyone.
As Chief Chen finished speaking, old Xu beside him nodded as well. “That’s how it should be.”
Not long after, the storm began to pour down.
…
Time passed into mid-June, and the effects of the flooding upstream on the Yangtze began to show.
By the time Ning Yi returned to Jiangning, refugees had already begun trickling in from the west — still only the beginning of it, and the mood in the city had grown only slightly tense, not yet obviously so. But anyone with experience of such things could more or less guess what was coming.
He met with old Qin and old Kang, and reconnected with Li Pin and the others as well; everyone offered their concern over his burned left hand, and when asked how it happened, Ning Yi naturally fobbed them off with the same story he’d given the Su family. Su Chonghua had originally told him to rest for a good while longer, but there was no way to justify half a year of rest outright, so after a few days he went back to teaching at Yushan Academy.
The distillation experiment for high-proof liquor had essentially been settled by now, and with Lu Hongti no longer staying at the small courtyard, Ning Yi had no more reason to go there daily for experiments. So in the afternoons, he mostly went down to the Qinhuai riverside to play chess and chat with old Qin. During the time he’d been away from Jiangning, Li Pin had been substituting for him teaching that group of children, so once back, he treated Li Pin to a meal as thanks. Li Pin, much like old Qin and old Kang, had recently been preoccupied with the matter of the refugees.
“…By now, four regions upstream have already flooded, and the Yellow River has breached its banks besides. Come July, the refugees will come pouring in like a tide — I fear the four city gates might have to be sealed shut again. Grain prices are already soaring today. Alas, who knows how many will die this autumn…”
That many would die this autumn had already become something of a shared certainty among everyone. Of course, within the city of Jiangning itself, there was as yet little sign of upheaval — daily life carried on, business at the pleasure houses and painted pleasure boats remained brisk, and the officials and scholars still spent their nights in revelry, occasionally producing some rather fine verses expressing deep concern for the fate of the nation.
These past days, grain carts had been seen coming and going at the Su residence’s gate — following the usual pattern whenever such disasters struck, many wealthy households had already begun stockpiling grain. Su Tan’er, too, had her worries, though her concerns pointed in a somewhat different direction.
“Business everywhere has already started dropping lately, and once they seal the city gates in mid-to-late July, we’ll probably have to close the shops inside the city too… We’ll need to hand out congee and rice both inside and outside the city, and donate a large batch to the authorities as well. We don’t have many carrier pigeons ready, and if one’s shot down and eaten while flying out, that’ll be even more trouble — hiring messengers and fast horses to go in and out during a time like this will cost even more. A few months of this, and I fear everything will be delayed…”
That evening, she and Ning Yi talked on the second-floor corridor, eating a snack as she went on about all this. She’d been quite busy lately, but despite all the complaining, her spirits actually seemed good — likely the matter involving the imperial merchant status had made some good progress.
At the end of June, while eating at the Zhuji main shop, he ran into Yuan Jin’er. She’d apparently come by out of boredom to visit her Sister Yunzhu, and seeing Ning Yi arrive, volunteered to bring out a bowl of century-egg-and-lean-pork congee, plunking it down on the table in front of Ning Yi with a bang that startled him. But upon recognizing the somewhat familiar figure, he laughed. “Waiter, that’s hardly professional — watch out for complaints.”
“Go ahead and complain, then!” Yuan Jin’er put her hands on her hips, stuck out her tongue in an obnoxious face, and turned to walk back inside. Before long, Nie Yunzhu came out smiling, and Jin’er followed her back out, sitting down at the table beside her. She put on a stern face for a while, then said, “Talented Master Ning, write me a poem, would you?”
Ning Yi, eating his congee, nodded. “Sure.”
“Huh?”
His blunt answer startled her, and after a stunned pause, she said, “You’ll really help me with it?”
“You helped promote the century eggs for me last time — now that you’ve asked, there’s no reason to refuse.”
“Hmph, that time I was helping Sister Yunzhu.” Yuan Jin’er rested her chin on her hand, thinking for a moment, tapping her fingers against her cheek. “But wasn’t it that Daoist priest who only wrote you two poems?”
“This time we’ll just say it was a monk who wrote it.”
Yuan Jin’er held back a laugh. “But I really will go out and sing it around, you know — I’ll say Ning Liheng wrote it, I’ll say Ning Liheng wrote it ‘especially’ for me!”
Ning Yi spread his hands.
Yuan Jin’er looked him over for a good while, then glanced at Nie Yunzhu. “You’re not so bad, but I still don’t like you. Sister Yunzhu, let’s go — I don’t want his poem, and I’m not talking to him!”
She grabbed Nie Yunzhu’s hand and started off, Nie Yunzhu calling out “Jin’er, Jin’er” a few times, but was still dragged off bodily in the end.
Ning Yi had already heard from Nie Yunzhu some time ago about Jin’er’s resentment toward him, largely stemming from his having backed Qilan in the courtesan pageant — not something that could be reasoned with, and no particular need to try.
Though the end of June hadn’t yet reached the hottest stretch of summer, the weather was already scorching. Yet with the flooding and disaster spreading upstream, even Jiangning’s atmosphere had grown somewhat heavy and desolate.
Amid talk of the water situation, the refugees, and the students at the academy, along with the occasional discussion with Li Pin, Ning Yi kept half an eye on developments within the local government as well. After Gu Yanzhen’s death, it seemed people had gone around asking Li Pin and Nie Yunzhu for information too. Business at Zhuji was already doing quite well, while over at the Su household, everyone was busy preparing to cope with the coming disaster. Su Tan’er continued with her own plans, and one day brought home a small, palm-sized swatch of brilliantly colored silk, secretly showing it to Ning Yi that night. “Isn’t it pretty?”
That day, after having porridge at noon, he went down to the Qinhuai riverside to play chess in the afternoon and ran into both old Qin and old Kang there. The flood season was actually nearing its end, though there might still be one final surge of high water; the two old men had been discussing methods of post-disaster relief and recovery.
“Shaohe is over in Jiangzhou — he’s likely to have his hands full soon. Disaster relief isn’t like other matters; it’s urgent business, and Siyuan ought to give him plenty of guidance.” What Kang Xian meant was Qin Siyuan’s eldest son, Qin Shaohe, currently serving as an official around Jiangzhou. Qin Siyuan nodded at this. “I’ve already sent a few letters these past two months, saying what needed saying. As for the situation over there, I’ve mostly learned of it through his letters back.”
The two old men mostly carried the conversation from there, while Ning Yi turned some thoughts over in his mind. Before long, old Qin asked him something, and he replied with a smile: “Just a few thoughts… hm, I’ll organize them tonight and bring them by tomorrow to take a look — if they turn out useful, well, I suppose I’ll be giving old Qin two gifts.”