Where Immortals Once Walked

Chapter 536: Mislead Him!

He Lingchuan shook his head. “That’s not a fair comparison. I pulled out every trick I had, but Deputy Commander Fan still hadn’t unleashed his final trump card.”Bai Ziqi stroked the spirit deer’s mane. “You’re a modest child, but also far too bold. You opened with a wager of fifty thousand taels. There were over a hundred teams in the lotus contest. How could you be so sure you’d find the Overlord Lotus and take first place?”

He Lingchuan gave him a sly grin. “Naturally, I have a few low-grade methods of my own. Over the years, how many people do you think really won by relying on their own eyes and absurdly good luck?”

Only later had he learned that a winner several years ago had taken first place by releasing a swarm of more than two thousand bees to search the Lotus Palace for the Overlord Lotus.

How could an ordinary person possibly compete with that kind of efficiency?

So after that year, Baishajue amended the rules and explicitly forbade the use of swarming pets.

But the old saying still held true:

For every foot the Dao rises, the Demon rises ten.[1]

Perfect fairness? That was simply impossible.

Both men understood that Bai Ziqi had left one sentence unspoken: Zhongsun Mou just happened to die at precisely that moment.

But neither of them brought it up, because even if they did, nothing would come of it.

Bai Ziqi said leisurely, “You’ve had the most contact with Mai Xuewen. What sort of person do you think he is?”

He Lingchuan shook his head repeatedly. “I merely followed a few clues he left behind. That hardly counts as dealing with him. Wu Kai should be the one who knows him better than I do.”

But Wu Kai had only ever seen the false image Mai Xuewen had built.

Of course, Bai Ziqi understood the implication as well: even someone as cautious and meticulous as Wu Kai had been fooled by the man, so what could He Lingchuan possibly claim to know about him?

Still, He Lingchuan added, “But the fact that Mai Xuewen exposed his own former superior so relentlessly, and even abducted the Touring Commissioner in full public view, goes beyond mere madness. When pursuing him, we need to bear in mind that he may not care about the consequences at all.”

“And yet the man isn’t mad in the least. He acts in a very orderly fashion.”

He Lingchuan shrugged. “A madman can still be orderly, can’t he? Deputy Cloud Envoy Bai has handled so many cases. What do you think?”

“This case is very complicated. I fear the part still submerged under the water is far larger.” Cen Boqing’s status alone was already enough to make both Fushan Yue and Bai Ziqi feel the difficulty of it.

“Oh, right. I saw in the case records that the snail toad aberrant creature Mai Xuewen controlled once attacked someone on the southern border of the State of Chiyan?”

“Yes.” At that time, it had nearly carried off his bighorn cliff ram too.

“When?”

“About forty days ago.” He Lingchuan’s heart stirred with caution, and he deliberately avoided mentioning that both he and Fushan Yue had been there in person. “A merchant caravan lost two monsters, namely a cat monster and a hedgehog monster, and after waiting in place for two days with no sign of them, they reported it to the authorities.”

When Fushan Yue killed his younger brother in the Qianxing City ruins, the King of Chiyan had actually issued an order suppressing all discussion of the matter. No Chiyan citizen present at the time was allowed to mention it, let alone spread it. Naturally, that order had been sent to the Stone Gate Merchant Guild as well, and Second Boss Shi had assured everyone he would comply.

“About forty days ago…” Bai Ziqi seemed to be calculating something. “How did such a small matter draw your attention?”

“The Crown Prince ordered every local authority to report any disappearances of monsterfolk. At the time, we had already discovered that the snail toad often appeared on rainy nights, and this case happened right after a violent rainstorm. Also, the locals said that on rainy nights outside town, monsters occasionally disappeared on the outskirts. But first, the numbers were small, and second, it was a border checkpoint region, so no one could be sure whether those monsters had vanished or simply crossed the border on their own. The local authorities didn’t take it seriously.”

“No eyewitnesses?” Bai Ziqi frowned slightly.

Then it was only a suspected case.

After all, humans and monsters alike could disappear for all sorts of reasons.

“Even if there had been eyewitnesses, they were probably eaten too.” He Lingchuan gave a bitter smile. “I’ve seen that aberrant creature with my own eyes. It attacks from underground, and it’s almost impossible to guard against.”

“In other words, if this really was Mai Xuewen’s doing, then his monster-hunting and bead-harvesting trail ran northward from Chiyan’s southern border. Mm…” Bai Ziqi seemed to be thinking. “From south to north. That matches up.”

“Huh? What matches up?”

“Nothing.” Bai Ziqi smiled faintly. “By the way, while you were gathering cases of missing monsters, did you happen to notice that several constables also disappeared around the same time at the border checkpoint between the Twilight Plains and southern Chiyan?”

He Lingchuan’s heart skipped.

How could he not remember? Those constables had assisted Zhongsun Mou in making life difficult for Fushan Yue, using the search for the cursed child as an excuse to tear apart and smash up the Stone Gate Merchant Guild’s goods. How could Fushan Yue tolerate that sort of crap? A few days after entering Chiyan, he had secretly gone back and killed every constable involved, along with Zhongsun Mou’s guards, leaving only Zhongsun Mou himself untouched.

Zhongsun Mou had later been sentenced to death by He Lingchuan anyway, which more or less settled the score for Fushan Yue too.

He Lingchuan had asked about it back then, and Fushan Yue had said he had not drunk their blood. He had simply killed the constables and dragged their bodies out into the wilderness to bury them.

After a brief moment of thought, He Lingchuan shook his head. “That case wasn’t included in the files the Crown Prince gave me, probably because the dead were human.”

Every single word in that sentence was true.

He was an outsider with no power or influence in Chiyan. How could he possibly collect cases from all over the region on his own? Whatever the Crown Prince gave him, that was what he got to see.

Bai Ziqi clearly thought of the same thing and did not pursue it further.

He Lingchuan immediately steadied internally.

Whatever conflict there had been between Fushan Yue and Zhongsun Mou at the checkpoint, a touring commissioner abusing his authority was the sort of thing that would certainly never be entered into the official records. The local officials had likely acted as if they had seen nothing, and may even have been instructed not to spread a word.

The checkpoint itself did not record the passage of every caravan in detail. Bai Ziqi might not be able to trace the fact that he and Fushan Yue had passed through Chiyan’s southern border nearly forty days ago.

At that moment, Bai Ziqi pointed ahead. “Wu Kai’s private estate, that should be it over there, yes?”

“East of Yao Lake, mostly white buildings, with a large stone over three meters tall standing at the entrance.” He Lingchuan recalled Wu Kai’s description. “Yeah, that should be it.”

It lay ten kilometers from Baishajue, and land in the wilderness was plentiful. This private estate occupied a considerable area, even encompassing several ponds and an entire small hill.

Most of the estate buildings had been constructed on the hill. There were two storehouses and several residences.

Naturally, to save labor, a few large warehouses had also been built down on the flat ground.

Years ago, when He Lingchuan had followed his father from Heishui City to Xia Province, he had seen many rural estates like this along the way. In an age when banditry and famine were common, these hilltop estates were worth fighting over. All one had to do was build thick walls, set up some chevaux-de-frise, and hire some dependable men to guard them. At that point, such an estate became little different from a fortified stockade—easy to defend, hard to attack, and in troubled times, one could simply shut the gates and go on living in comfort.

Of course, no one in the State of Chiyan actually needed things to be that extreme.

As they passed one of the small outbuildings, the gatekeeper came charging out with an axe in hand and shouted, “Who goes there?!”

One of the constables behind He Lingchuan raised a token, faint yellow light shimmering in the darkness. “I’m from the Baishajue County Office, accompanying an imperial envoy from Lingxu City to apprehend Cen Boqing! Is he here?”

“Huh?” The gatekeeper froze. In ten days or half a month, he might not see a single outsider here, so how had constables and some imperial envoy suddenly arrived? “Th-this lowly one doesn’t know.”

“Useless!” The constable brushed past him and escorted Bai Ziqi and He Lingchuan up the hill.

The crops in the fields were not yet ready for harvest, but the cherry trees all over the slopes had already finished their early-summer picking, so this was the slack season for farm work.

Bai Ziqi and the others rushed up the slope. Along the way, they ran into only a handful of people, and every one of them claimed to know nothing.

But there was one bad sign: all around the hill, the terrain was flat farmland. From atop the hill, the activity below could be seen at a glance.

The path up the hill had been built fairly level, obviously for ease of transporting supplies up and down. It was also rather narrow, clearly by design of the estate’s owner.

When they reached the top, there were four or five buildings, and only one of them still had a light burning.

At a wave of Bai Ziqi’s hand, the constables rushed forward to search every building.

No one.

There was not a single person in any of the structures.

But the lit building did contain some discoveries.

Bai Ziqi and the others stepped inside and found the windows shut tight, the door half open, a candle on the table burned only halfway down, and two wooden cups set beside it.

Bai Ziqi touched one of the cups. “Still warm.”

Whoever had been in this room had left only moments ago.

“They likely noticed us coming.” If Cen Boqing had fled here, then he would without question have remained on guard at all times. He Lingchuan pointed to the floor. “Doesn’t this look like the site of a curse ritual?”

There were a few bird feathers on the ground, a bundle of straw, and some yellowish grease of unknown origin mixed with faint reddish threads, all of it looking greasy and unpleasant.

The floor bricks also bore traces of burning.

At a glance, He Lingchuan recognized the feathers as magpie feathers. At his home in Panlong City, magpie feathers constantly turned up because a certain sparrowhawk was always killing them there.

Oddly enough, the lingering burnt smell in the room carried a sweet note as well. If you breathed it for too long, your head began to swim…

He Lingchuan hurried to open the window.

Meanwhile, Bai Ziqi took a straw stem, dipped it into some of the greasy residue, and lifted it beneath his nose.

“Corpse oil, and it looks to be of rather high purity at that.” Everyone present showed disgust. He Lingchuan’s heart tightened slightly. “So they really were hiding here just now?”

Bai Ziqi nodded. “Cen Boqing is cautious too. If that constable Zhou Tailai was captured and interrogated, his whereabouts might well be exposed. So after leaving the city, he deliberately took a detour and slipped west.” He then added, “Also, it’s windy tonight. This kind of curse must be cast in a quiet, sealed, windless environment.”

So that was why the two fugitives had come here.

“But they only just fled. We can still catch them.”

The constables who had gone to search the surrounding area came back to report, “There’s no path at the back, but the slope isn’t steep. It’s possible to climb down.”

Then Bai Ziqi took another candle from his robes.

The others were baffled. The room already had light, so they were confused as to why the imperial envoy had brought out a candle.

He Lingchuan stood close enough, and his eyesight was good enough, to see that the white candle Bai Ziqi had taken out held tiny flecks of gold in it, giving it an absurdly expensive aura.

Once lit, the flame shone pure white through and through.

Bai Ziqi pinched the wick, and the little flame remained standing steadily on his fingertip.

Only then did everyone see clearly that the flame had already taken shape, with a head, a body, and two arms. From the waist down, however, it was still only a mass of light.

1. Note that this is a way more literal translation for the phrase, which I believe is more fitting for this novel. However, the best translation of the saying should still be: “As virtue rises one foot, vice rises ten.” ☜