Episode 231

The golden sunshine on the floor was scattered. A three-legged beast stood in a corner, incense smoke rising from its head. The fire in the burner burned brightly.

The atmosphere in the hall was quiet, accentuating the trembling of hearts. Even the sunshine seemed less intense.

Li Zhengzhi stood in the middle of the hall, his hands hidden in his sleeves as he stood up straight and calm. Both his expression and his body language showed that he was confident and unwavering. He was very steady in his explanations. Everything that happened 18 years ago had nothing to do with him. All evidence pointed to Zuo Xiuwen. He was at loggerheads with Zuo Xiuwen, so they couldn’t possibly trust each other and work together.

Zhao Zhi’s gaze flickered and he raised his chin slightly as he tapped a finger gently on the table. “But Mr. Li, it’s impossible for Zuo Xiuwen to have done this all by himself. He must have had an accomplice.”

“Oh?” Li Zhengzhi slowly took his hands out of his sleeves and seemed rather surprised. “There’s an accomplice?”

This man deserved an award for his acting chops.

Qi Yan raised an eyebrow and made a face at Song Caitang.

Song Caitang raised her teacup high in order to block her faint smile.

Zhao Zhi glanced at Li Zhengzhi from the corner of his eye. This was interesting.

“Both Lin Feizhou and Lv Mingyue were at Zhaoze Temple for the ritual and they were standing very close to each other. The monks started giving out blessed amulets, so the crowd started pushing from behind, which made sure that Zuo Xiuwen could stay close to the couple and he would be able to commit this crime… Surely this had to be prearranged somehow, right? Zuo Xiuwen was focusing on committing the murder, so he wouldn’t have been able to focus on anything else. And so, he would have needed a second person to make sure that the situation was going exactly the way he needed it.”

After striking the table hard with his knuckles, Zhao Zhi went on, “Lin Feizhou died, then Madam Gu suddenly appeared and insisted that she was the murderer, so Lv Mingyue got away. But she knew what really happened. She was very scared, very frightened, she went through great mental torture, so she could not sleep well and dared not even leave the house. How did she end up running back to Zhaoze Temple, write a suicide note, then leap off the pagoda to kill herself?”

After he found out about Lv Mingyue’s disappearance, he and Song Caitang had gone to the scene of the crime as well as Lv Mingyue’s home and bedroom. It was clear that she had planned to leave and took what she would have needed. The only mystery was how she left the house, since there were no traces of her getting through the gate or over the wall. How would she have left the house?

It would be difficult for a weak, young woman to leave her house so quietly but things would be completely different if she had a man who knew martial arts helping her.

Just like what Song Caitang had mentioned earlier, Li Zhengzhi was a man who had led troops before. Even if he wasn’t the best martial artist in the world, carrying a young woman out of a house that wasn’t all that well-guarded was a piece of cake.

Li Zhengzhi listened quietly, but still shrugged and smiled in the end. “What does any of that have to do with me? All of this is merely your conjecture. These two murder cases and these two people are all connected to the leader of the Beiqing Mountain from 18 years ago, who is now Zuo Xiuwen. He has clear motives for killing them both. It has nothing to do with me? Why do you insist on involving me? Do I look like someone very stupid to you?”

Qi Yan fanned himself, as though he wasn’t feeling cold at all. He sighed deeply and said, “Mr. Li, you’re not stupid at all. You’re too clever!”

Song Caitang added, “The leader of the bandits was already very impressive, since he had quickly swapped identities with Zuo Xiuwen and used this chance to gain prominence as a court official. But there’s always someone better out there – among the cleverest of people, even the mind of a bandit leader isn’t good enough. You’ve been able to take a step while seeing three steps ahead, so you’ve set up an escape route for yourself all this time. How does it feel, Mr. Li, to have controlled this fool into committing crimes for you, into taking the rap for you? It feels great, doesn’t it?”

Li Zhengzhi smiled warmly and placed a palm over his other fist politely to acknowledge what Song Caitang said. “Miss Song, thank you for those kind words. You’ve certainly overcomplimented me, so there are some parts I don’t quite understand.”

But everyone knew if he really didn’t understand what she was saying or he was just pretending not to understand while gloating inside.

Li Zhengzhi paused, glanced at Zuo Xiuwen, then added, “I feel so suffocated and annoyed by just being in the same room as my enemy, so what is this talk about working together? I wouldn’t care for such a thing.”

After he said that, the room was silent for a long time.

The silence accompanied by Li Zhengzhi’s confident and polite smile was aggravating.

Zhao Zhi turned to look at Zuo Xiuwen, his gaze and voice both mocking, “What do you say, Mr. Zuo?”

“AHHHHHH!”

Zuo Xiuwen finally lost it. His eyes were wide as he pointed a finger at Li Zhengzhi. “It was him! He was the one who planned everything and did all this with me!”

“We’re not enemies at work at all! 18 years ago, I got the credit for wiping out the bandits and stole the limelight from him, so he hated me and went around investigating me, so he managed to find out who I really was. He could have taken his revenge by either attacking me or exposing my true identity, but he didn’t do that. Instead, he came to talk to me about working together.”

“Initially, I didn’t believe him and I thought my dreams of becoming a rich man had come to an end. But he really helped me out. He made some small changes to the report on that incident so that nobody would realize the identity swap, he taught me how to be an official, he taught me about the unwritten rules in dealing with others, how to handle my work, how to build relationships with my superiors and subordinates… Otherwise, did you think that a bandit like me would have climbed the ladder so smoothly? Not even the smartest or boldest bandit could have done that by himself!”

These words were truly from his heart. Qi Yan slapped his forehead. That’s right, why didn’t he think of that? No matter how impressive Zuo Xiuwen was, it wasn’t that easy to be an official!

Qi Yan stared at Zhao Zhi and Song Caitang with a sparkle in his eyes, but the two of them merely exchanged knowing glances, as though they already thought of that a long time ago and were just confirming their guess now.

Qi Yan didn’t know what to say. Was he really the dumbest of them all?

Zuo Xiuwen wasn’t done yet. “I pretended to be his enemy at work while secretly passing messages along. We planned together and moved up the ranks together all the way until now. After all we’ve been through, I trusted him more than anybody else and I thought it was the same for him. To my surprise, he’s decided to capsize my ship today! Now I finally see his true colors – he’s been making use of me all this time!”

Zuo Xiuwen clutched his chest, his lips trembling as he raised his voice. He was clearly very upset.

But Li Zhengzhi kept his hands back in his sleeves and raised his chin a little. His smile was still as confident as ever.

“Do you have proof?”

Those simple words made Zuo Xiuwen’s face pale instantly.

As he thought through what they did together in detail, he realized that there were no traces of anything they had done together. Every meeting with Li Zhengzhi, every project they secretly worked on together… No scribe had come along, no servant had passed any message on their behalf. They would merely reveal a little information as they pretended to argue at work, then meet in secret after that…

They always met somewhere very secluded, so there were no witnesses at all.

He… seriously had no evidence whatsoever!

Zuo Xiuwen glared at Li Zhengzhi. The more he stared at the other man, the colder his heart felt.

When did this man start becoming so wary of him? Or had he been wary of him all along, just that he had been too stupid to realize?

Zuo Xiuwen wasn’t that dumb either. He knew that by this point, there was enough evidence to charge him with his crimes. He couldn’t get out of it anymore. But he hadn’t worked alone, so he wasn’t going down alone either!

He narrowed his eyes, licked his lips and explained everything to Zhao Zhi, “I really didn’t know anything about Lin Feizhou. Lv Mingyue had found me somehow because she was hoping to get information about next year’s imperial examinations out of me by bribing me with some silver. I guessed that someone in her family, like a brother or something, was sitting for the exam, since a lot of people did this sort of thing. I didn’t intend to pay this naïve little girl any attention at all, but her words caught my attention.”

“She said that she felt a sense of closeness when she saw me, like she was looking at her own father. Of course, she might have done that just to endear me to her, but because of what I’d been through, I did feel a little guilty and couldn’t help but ask her a few more questions, only to find out that… she was the daughter of that Lv family.”

He wiped his tears away and went on, “After my wife gave birth to my children, I slowly stopped keeping tabs on that child I had so long ago, and I had no idea that the Lvs had brought her to Bianliang. Bianliang is a large city and I was always busy with work, so I’d never seen them around before. Finding out who she was came as a huge shock to me.”

And so, Song Caitang knew that her guess was right. Zuo Xiuwen had been keeping tabs on Lv Mingyue initially and knew that this girl was his daughter. And of course, he knew that her mother was Madam Gu.

But this was not a topic she wanted to expand on. The truth was clear, so any further questions would only serve to ruin Madam Gu’s reputation.

“Lv Mingyue knew that the Lvs were not her biological parents and she thought that the old friend of Lv Angui who went through a lot to find a doctor to cure her severe illness when she was a child was her real father.” Zuo Xiuwen pursed his lips for a moment. “She was very interested to find out who this person was and asked Lv Angui for a lot of details, and she remembered a lot of this person’s habits and preferences…”

Zhao Zhi tapped a finger on the table. “This ‘old friend’ was you, right?”

Zuo Xiuwen nodded. “Yes. After my wife gave birth to our first child, I felt that continuing to do this was inappropriate, so I pretended to have died so that this character would disappear… I never expected Lv Mingyue to come knocking on my door one day. And after she found out about some of my habits and hobbies, she was pleasantly surprised and became even more eager to get to know me.”

“I knew that she was just projecting her image of her father on me and was hoping to find her father, not really because she wanted to confirm if I was that man or not. But I became afraid. I had to make sure that nobody found out about what happened 18 years ago. So… I began to sound her out. I wanted to know how much she knew, whether she was hiding anything from me, and whether she had told anyone else about our conversations.”

“She’s my daughter and I didn’t want to kill her, but she refused to take a hint and kept talking about the past. She kept asking questions. Why couldn’t she just let it go and live her own life? I couldn’t let her keep going. I could have settled this myself, but I was afraid of unnecessary trouble. I didn’t want anything about what happened 18 years ago to surface at all. The only person I could discuss this with was Li Zhengzhi.”

At this point, Zuo Xiuwen threw Li Zhengzhi a really dirty stare.

Zhao Zhi said slowly, “He promised to think of a perfect plan, a plan that could help you get rid of the person you wanted without looking suspicious at all?”

“That’s right,” Zuo Xiuwen nodded, “he said that there was someone he wanted to kill as well, so why don’t we get him involved with Lv Mingyue, then create the perfect situation for a murder. There would be a motive and a weapon, and it would look like Lv Mingyue had killed this man. She would be arrested and sentenced to death.”

“In order to make sure that neither of us got implicated, he made all the arrangements, he created the situation we needed, and he was going to settle what happened after the whole incident. I was only in charge of waiting, then at the right time and right place, I would follow his instructions to kill Lin Feizhou and stuff the knife in Lv Mingyue’s hands.”

“That way, even though I was at the scene of the crime, I had no motive to kill and I really wouldn’t know anything. He might have come into contact with the victim when he was making preparations, but when I committed the murder, he wasn’t there. Everything was perfect, but unfortunately…”

Zuo Xiuwen wiped his tears away. “Madam Gu suddenly appeared out of nowhere and said she was the killer.”

His guess was that Madam Gu had suddenly discovered something and found out that Lv Mingyue was her daughter. But it didn’t matter, since Madam Gu didn’t know who he was. Even if she took the rap, he would not be implicated.

“Madam Gu is from a prominent family and cannot be sentenced just like that. Thankfully, she’s not smart enough and doesn’t know anything else, so it didn’t affect our overall plan. But Lv Mingyue still had to die. I went to beg Li Zhengzhi, l lowered myself and I even said a lot of nice things to him. Initially, he was also very frustrated, but he was magnanimous enough to agree. He had no prior interaction with Lv Mingyue and no feud with her, so nobody would imagine that he would kill her. Making Lv Mingyue’s death look like a suicide along with a suicide note would help to put our original plan back on track. The case would close itself again.”

“To show my sincerity, I even went to get those special embroidered shoes made. And in order to avoid becoming a suspect, I deliberately made sure I had plenty of alibis on the day he was going to kill her. I had no idea how he was going to do this. In any case, everything went smoothly. He managed to get Lv Mingyue out of her house without anybody noticing and threw her down from the pagoda.”

As Zuo Xiuwen spoke, he suddenly started trembling. “Who would have thought! This man had already ensured he would not be implicated right from the start, and everything would be blamed on me! I realize it now – he knew this day would come, so he made sure that he didn’t leave a single trace behind. He even purposely bought the weapon from a place that could be traced to me without telling me so that he could push all the blame to me if anything happened!”

“I’m now sure that he’s interacted with Lv Mingyue before all of this. He probably got close to her right from the start of the plan and met with her at least two or three times. That’s why Lv Mingyue was willing to listen to what he said, and that’s also how he was able to kill her so easily!”

Zuo Xiuwen’s eyes were bulging as he shouted, “My lord, if you investigate this matter, I’m sure you’ll find something!”

Zhao Zhi raised an eyebrow and looked at Li Zhengzhi.

Li Zhengzhi smiled faintly. “The old saying that any words that those on the brink of death speak are kind words only apply to ordinary people. It doesn’t apply to wicked criminals. A killer with ill intentions who is filthy all over would think of every way possible to drag someone down with them. These baseless accusations – Commandery Prince Zhao, do you really believe him?”

He looked so confident, he made it seem as though anyone who believed Zuo Xiuwen must be an idiot.

But Zhao Zhi sat comfortably in his seat and smiled back. “Lv Mingyue’s last meal before she died was drunken crabs.”

Li Zhengzhi kept the same smile on his face.

“Drunken crabs are very rare and difficult to get during this time of the year, so you’ve got to be of fairly high social standing to get the chance to eat any. That night, your family happened to eat drunken crabs.”

Li Zhengzhi’s expression shifted slightly and he narrowed his eyes. “Is… that so?”