Chapter 549: New Intelligence from the Twilight Plains
Normally, people could reach out and touch it, even scribble or carve on it, and the barrier would never activate. It was remarkably tolerant, unless the design itself was in danger.
He Lingchuan then found a second war report.
This one was from after the fall of the State of Yuān. It listed the military achievements of the campaign, and among them was one brief line: the King of Yuān took his own life, Qianxing City fell, and no black flood dragon descended into the world to join the battle.
That line effectively proved that the black flood dragon was not some kind of “guardian beast of the state.” Otherwise, after receiving its state’s offerings, food, drink, and origin energy all that time, how could it possibly refuse to lift a claw when the kingdom was collapsing, and all was at stake?
He Lingchuan turned over a few more materials, and suddenly came upon a page stating that the State of Mou also had black flood dragon designs!
The State of Mou?
He Lingchuan’s heart stirred. The State of Mou still existed to this day, and it was quite large. It lay to the east of Beijia, separated from it by an inland sea and two small countries.
This was also the first and only connection he had yet seen between the black flood dragon design and the present age.
Fushan Yue had provided quite a bit of material, but after reading through it all, He Lingchuan realized that the State of Chiyan itself did not seem to have reached any convincing conclusion either.
If that was the state of Chiyan’s knowledge, then Beijia was probably no better.
Still, this thing seemed to have no effect on combat and no effect on enemies either. So while Chiyan found it puzzling, they likely had never treated it as especially urgent.
But then why had both the King of Yuān and Zhong Shengguang attached such importance to it?
They not only knew what it was, but they also knew what it was for.
Only after laying out all the documents did He Lingchuan notice that at the very bottom of the box, there was also a round roof tile end cap.
Its pattern was finely made.
A dragon head!
Fushan Yue was actually a decent fellow. He had even gotten him a physical artifact!
That was a pleasant surprise.
At the same time, He Lingchuan felt a burst of heat at his chest.
The divine bone amulet had made its position clear. It wanted it!
He Lingchuan picked up the roof tile and inspected it over and over again. After several careful checks, he confirmed that there was no mechanism, no hidden compartment. It was simply crafted with exceptional beauty, and its hardness far exceeded that of an ordinary roof tile.
He pinched the divine bone. “What exactly is it for?”
The divine bone only kept heating up.
“This isn’t the key to some ruin or treasure vault, is it?”
Naturally, the divine bone ignored him.
He Lingchuan did not indulge it either. He simply put the dragon head tile and all the letters back into the box, then stowed the whole thing inside his storage ring.
How could he casually feed away a clue this important?
By evening, Fushan Yue came to see him again, marveling aloud, “What a strange case, even Cheng Yu has turned into a living dead man now.”
“Oh?” He Lingchuan started. “Who did it? Even Deputy Cloud Envoy Bai couldn’t preserve his life?”
“Who knows? Deputy Cloud Envoy Bai is probably furious too.” Fushan Yue looked at him sidelong. “At least the killer did you the favor of avenging you.”
“It has nothing to do with me.” He Lingchuan raised both hands to show his innocence. “He ambushed me, I captured him, and brought him in. That makes us even. I’ve always been a fair-minded and magnanimous man!”
Anyone touched by the secret of the Generous Pot must die!
That had nothing to do with personal grudges.
Fushan Yue tilted his head back and looked at the sky, smiling. “Ah, who knows how many more people will die before this affair is over?”
The deeper the investigation went, the darker it became. The bigger the trouble grew, the wider it spread.
* * *
Over the next four or five days, Baishajue’s skies remained cloudless.
The embankments were crowded with strolling people, blossoms drifted all across the water city, and everyone was seizing the final brilliance of late summer.
No matter how many currents and undercurrents churned through the city, ordinary people’s lives continued as they always had.
With several days of peace in a row and no new deaths, even Bai Ziqi found it a little strange.
He had handled many bizarre incidents before, but for a case to begin with several important witnesses dying one after another on the very first night, this would certainly rank high among the elixir of youth cases.
Now, at least the case had stopped producing fresh corpses, and Bai Ziqi had also interrogated the accomplice of Wu Kai whom Madame Cen had delivered to him.
Today, the message he had been waiting for had finally arrived.
At the moment, Bai Ziqi sat in his room at the inn, while two dusty subordinates knelt before him.
“You may rise.”
These two men had come from far away, from the Twilight Plains.
When Bai Ziqi left Lingxu City and headed south, he had brought a fair number of men with him, but he had left most of them scattered in various places to continue pursuing investigations.
“What new developments are there?” He had investigated the Twilight Plains for quite a long time, but there had been very few witnesses to the second illusion at the Qianxing City ruins, and they had all been passing merchants. Afterward, they dispersed in all directions, scattering to the far ends of the world. Bai Ziqi’s people could only gather secondhand news from nearby post stations, and that information was always watered down and never yielded anything useful.
Being frustrated was pointless. The Twilight Plains were vast and sparsely inhabited, with huge stretches of uninhabited land.
If the Generous Pot had stirred there, there might well have been no one at all to know it.
The two men exchanged glances. “After you left, your subordinates remained at the Twilight Plains for another five or six days, and then discovered that the grass around the ruins of Qianxing City had grown taller, with vines spreading wild over the ground, and many bamboo shoots had sprung up as well. Passing merchants reported that the mountain road was no longer as easy to travel as before.”
Bai Ziqi voiced his immediate thought, “The baleful qi has weakened.”
For years, the Twilight Plains had been a place where vegetation refused to grow and vitality was weak, precisely because baleful qi ran rampant there, making it hostile to life. Now that plants were sprouting one after another, that in itself showed that the baleful influence had diminished.
“Perhaps because imperial nectar has erupted twice recently, the world’s spirit qi has gradually grown denser, dissolving the baleful qi.”
The eruptions of imperial nectar had a tremendous effect on improving the spirit qi environment of the entire world. Most of it soaked down into the land, and the Twilight Plains had been even more saturated with baleful qi a hundred years ago. Each time imperial nectar descended, the place improved somewhat.
“Or perhaps because the disturbance of the Generous Pot that day, and the appearance of the second illusion at the Qianxing City ruins, consumed a great deal of baleful qi.” Bai Ziqi’s gaze shifted. “After all, the Generous Pot has deep ties to the State of Yuān.”
“Your subordinates also obtained a hidden piece of intelligence from the checkpoint on the border between the Twilight Plains and the State of Chiyan.”
“Oh?” Bai Ziqi liked secrets. “Speak.”
“According to a local clerk there, Crown Prince Fushan Yue of the State of Chiyan passed through that checkpoint more than forty days ago!”
“Mm? Fushan Yue?” Bai Ziqi’s eyes sharpened. “When we were investigating the Twilight Plains earlier, why didn’t we uncover this?”
“The checkpoint doesn’t register personal names,” the two men replied. “And Touring Commissioner Zhongsun Mou had also issued orders there, forbidding the officials from discussing the matter.”
Not just in Beijia, but at the border passes of all states, people entering and leaving were generally not recorded by name. At a place like the Twilight Plains checkpoint, the number of people passing through daily could be in the tens of thousands. If every single one had to be registered individually, how many volumes of records would that require?
And once written down, they would also need dedicated storage space.
There were many detailed systems people could imagine but not actually implement, simply because the cost of carrying them out was too high.
So the usual method was just to stamp the travel document and have the travelers move along.
“Touring Commissioner? Then how did you pry this out of them?”
“That little clerk liked liquor, but couldn’t hold it. We treated him to two cups, and he spilled everything.” The two men went on, “Three days after the Tianluo Star anomaly, a pariah slave reported to the clerk that the Crown Prince of Chiyan intended to bring a six-year-old pariah child through the checkpoint. The clerk ignored it, but Touring Commissioner Zhongsun Mou ordered the officials to secretly search the caravan and then deliberately make trouble for the Crown Prince when he crossed the next day.”
“Zhongsun Mou?” Bai Ziqi laughed. “That little merman has always had a petty temperament and never got along with Fushan Yue. This time, he clearly wanted to use public business to settle a private grudge. Mm, in the end, did Zhongsun Mou catch that pariah child?”
“No. There was no such child in the Crown Prince of Chiyan’s caravan. But they did uncover several prohibited items, and Commissioner Zhongsun fined them several thousand taels of silver.”
Bai Ziqi rubbed the tail ring on his left pinky, a habit he had whenever he thought deeply. “So, a frame-up.”
A state that had existed for several hundred years, yet these monsters still handled things too crudely, too openly.
Then again, thinking of Fushan Yue’s temper, Zhongsun Mou really had not died unjustly in the end.
“As for the several constables who later went missing in the town,” the subordinates continued, “the office has mostly been saying that Crown Prince Fushan Yue came back in retaliation. But there’s no hard proof of that, and at the time Zhongsun Mou had already left, so in the end the matter was dropped.”
“So when the Tianluo Star anomaly occurred, Crown Prince Fushan Yue was also on the Twilight Plains.” Bai Ziqi pondered. “And what about his special envoy, He Xiao? Was there any mention of him?”
“No.” They answered, “The Crown Prince of Chiyan’s entourage was very large.”
“And the pariah child?”
“Died in a back alley. No one knows where the body was disposed of afterward.”
“As expected, when the Tianluo Star stirs, strange things abound.” Bai Ziqi made a low sound of acknowledgment. “Fushan Yue’s younger brother, Fushan Ji, also died under very strange circumstances.”
His subordinates did not dare respond.
“The State of Chiyan claims publicly that he died of illness.” Bai Ziqi shook his head and laughed softly. “A ba dying of illness? They couldn’t even be bothered to make up a convincing reason. And Fushan Ji’s time of death also coincided with the Tianluo Star anomaly. With so many things in the State of Chiyan tangled together, it really does warrant a proper investigation.”
That, too, was the Lord Emperor’s will.
One subordinate reminded him, “My lord, during the Tianluo Star’s second anomaly, the Crown Prince of Chiyan had not yet reached the six northern counties of Chiyan.”
“Had not yet reached them?” Bai Ziqi glanced at him and frowned slightly. “Are you certain?”
“Uh...”
“Less than two hours after Zhongsun Mou was killed, Fushan Yue appeared in Baishajue and caught Cen Boqing completely off guard. Can you say with certainty exactly when he arrived in northern Chiyan?”
Fushan Yue had certainly departed the capital of Chiyan long before. But as for exactly when he set out, and exactly when he reached northern Chiyan, only he and He Xiao would know.
The subordinate lowered his head. “This subordinate spoke rashly. From where should we begin the next phase of investigation, please instruct us, my lord.”
“First, find out the true cause of Fushan Ji’s death. Second, investigate the background and origins of Special Envoy He Xiao. Third, go near the source regions that supply self-heal herbs, find witnesses who have seen the snail toad, and determine where it is hiding.” Bai Ziqi then added slowly, “And one more thing, pull most of our people over here. Investigate the six northern counties of Chiyan—that is, the region north of Zhitian Township and south of Mount Xiang—and find out what strange events occurred there on the second night that Tianluo flared. No matter how minor, I want them all.”
“My lord, we may not have enough manpower.” Every one of those investigations would cost people and time.
“Then begin with the six northern counties of Chiyan. I’ll request more personnel to be transferred over.” Bai Ziqi was very clear on priorities.
That night, Bai Ziqi knelt facing east and prayed to the gods.
This was part of the daily discipline required of every cloud envoy.
But tonight, when he was only halfway through, the candlelight suddenly wavered, stretched upward to about fifteen centimeters, then returned to normal.
The candle spirit appeared and silently said something to Bai Ziqi.
Bai Ziqi’s expression turned even more devout. “My lord is truly wise! In that case, this subordinate will depart tomorrow and return to Lingxu. I’ll leave men behind here in the six northern counties of Chiyan to continue the investigation.”
