JACKDAWS CROAKED, clinging to bare branches whipped by the wind. Over the heads of the long-neglected stone lions guarding the gates of the Lin estate, two lanterns clanged against the beams. The copper knockers rattled accompaniment, sending up a clamor that joined the wind's eerie howl.
The ghosts are knocking.
The words drifted through Pei Jingzhe's mind just as another chill gust whistled past, setting the lantern in his hand swaying.
The candle went out.
Pei Jingzhe took a breath. To be here in the dead of night with looming shadows as their only companion… It was enough to give anyone gooseflesh. He peered around Feng Xiao and Cui Buqu and looked through the gates.
More than fifty people at Yandang Mountain Estate had perished. The city's mortuary couldn't hold all the bodies, which had been temporarily laid out in the estate's courtyard. The corpses were arranged in neat rows, heads aligned with heads, feet with feet. Their faces were the white of death, and streaks of blood had stiffened into patches of dark brown. As he looked down the rows, Pei Jingzhe saw that some had died with their eyes wide open.
Pei Jingzhe considered himself well-acquainted with death. He'd seen his fair share and taken no few lives himself. Yet as he witnessed this scene, cold fear wrapped itself around his heart.
He instinctively quickened his pace to catch up with Feng Xiao and glanced at Cui Buqu.
The Zuoyue chief had squatted down, his hand stretched toward a corpse—the most mutilated one at that. Half its neck was missing, and mangled flesh splayed grotesquely around the wound. One eyeball had fallen out, tethered to its skull by only a thin strand of nerve as it dangled over the corpse's face.
Unfazed, Cui Buqu gently nudged the eyeball back into its socket.
Pei Jingzhe almost fell to his knees before Cui Buqu on the spot. He looked toward Feng Xiao.
Of course Deputy Chief Feng would never dirty his own hands. He held his sleeve over his nose and picked his way around the bloodstains on the ground. Eventually he pointed out a corpse to Qin Miaoyu, who did all the work as he hovered nearby, giving instructions. "Unfasten his upper garment; I want to see if there are any wounds on his torso. Yes, unfasten it completely. Loosen the belt as well. Check the abdomen and genitals!"
Qin Miaoyu, whose face was as lovely as a flower, sweated profusely as she turned the corpse this way and that. Pei Jingzhe felt a flicker of sympathy.
Feng Xiao shot him a look.
Pei Jingzhe blinked. In a commendable display of self-awareness, he scampered over to lend a hand.
Upon arriving in Luoyang, they'd first sought out the local officials and declared their identities, though they declined the county magistrate's enthusiastic attempts to accommodate them. They requested only the presence of two constables and a coroner familiar with the case while they examined the crime scene.
The wind howled again, funneling through the gaps in the doors and windows and tugging at the corpses' clothes. The freezing temperatures had kept the bodies from decaying. Every one of them lay frozen stiff, frost furring their temples and creeping along their eyelids. They looked as if they might rise up as zombies at any moment.
Cui Buqu brushed his fingers over the open eyes of an elderly man, drawing them shut.
After a moment, the corpse's eyes slowly opened once more. Cui Buqu closed them. They opened again. He closed them again, and again they opened.
Everyone stared.
The corners of Feng Xiao's mouth twitched. "All right, take a break. Stop working so hard."
"Such a terrible crime!" the old coroner said with a sigh. "Just terrible, terrible! My humble self has examined a lifetime of corpses, but I've never seen anything so cruel. An entire family massacred: servants, women, children—none of them spared! It's a horrible tragedy."
The Lin family had been a prominent one in Luoyang for generations. Lin Yong was the only son of the estate master, Lin Ling. The elderly Lin couple had no other children, and Lin Yong had yet to marry or take any concubines—this son was all they had. After he'd been detained by the Zuoyue Bureau, Lin Ling and his wife had run themselves ragged pleading for his release, but they had ultimately been forced to return empty-handed.
The Lin clan of Luoyang were martial artists, though the skills they passed down were mediocre at best. Even so, Lin Ling had made many friends in his business dealings and was a well-connected man. He wasn't the type to collect mortal enemies. If he'd accrued any grudges, they were more likely the result of business conflicts and unlikely to escalate to murder, let alone the massacre of an entire household.
This seemed to leave Lin Yong as the only variable.
Of course, it was not impossible Lin Ling himself had had questionable dealings or possessed critical information of the sort that would lead someone to silence him. But the leader of Yandang Mountain Estate had perished, so they couldn't ask him, and Lin Yong was currently held by the Zuoyue Bureau, too far away to summon for immediate questioning. All they could do was examine the victims and attempt to track down the murderer based on what evidence they gleaned.
A total of fifty-four corpses had been discovered, including Lin Ling, his wife, and the estate's staff. Also among the deceased were two undercover agents who'd been posing as servants: one from the Jiejian Bureau, and another from the Zuoyue Bureau. All of them had perished, without exception.
Pei Jingzhe approached the body of the Jiejian Bureau agent. In addition to the more obvious fatal wounds, ragged scratches, as from someone's nails, were etched into the man's flesh.
The marks were deep, as if inflicted with his assailant's entire strength; a layer of flesh had been completely removed. The attack had been relentless and without mercy—the mastermind hadn't only aimed to kill his victims but to torture them as well. Who had such intense loathing for the estate's residents?
Pei Jingzhe lifted one of the agent's hands and saw something black and sticky beneath his nails. A bit of flesh clung to one of his fingers, evidently ripped off his attacker. A horrific image of his colleagues clawing and biting each other in their final moments rose in his mind.
"All the people from Yandang Mountain Estate are here?" asked Pei Jingzhe. "No one is missing?"
"They're all here!" replied the young constable who had accompanied them. "I was on duty at the magistrate's office yesterday morning when someone came to report a murder. I informed my superiors and rushed over with some men right away—"
"So you were the first to discover the bodies?" Pei Jingzhe cut in. "Who reported it? Have you detained them?"
"Yes, yes," the constable replied. "The one who reported it is a man named Zheng. He's been delivering vegetables to Yandang Mountain Estate for over twenty years. Everyone around here knows him! Lao-Zheng goes to the back door of the estate every day at dawn to deliver fresh vegetables to the kitchen. But when he arrived yesterday, he knocked for a long time, but no one answered. So he pushed the door open and looked inside."
According to Old Zheng, the weather was cold and the wind was strong, so he hadn't smelled the blood. On first entering, the kitchen seemed totally empty. He continued until he stumbled upon three bodies; his legs nearly gave out in fright. Worried the murderer might still be inside, he didn't dare cry for help. He scrambled back outside and rushed to the county office to report the incident.
Yandang Mountain Estate was in a remote area, but still within the city limits. As soon as the county magistrate heard how grave the situation was, he instructed Constable Song to take everyone from the office and set out at once.
Nothing had prepared them for the scene they found. It wasn't just the three bodies Old Zheng had discovered. Corpses were strewn everywhere. Everyone in the estate had been killed, including the estate master and his wife, who were found dead outside their bedroom.
When the constable finished his tale, the coroner picked up where he'd left off. He'd been part of the second group to arrive.
After witnessing the sheer scale of the crime scene, the constable had sent a runner back to summon him and ask for further instructions. He'd examined the bodies and determined they'd been dead for at least two hours. Lin Ling was a martial artist, and while the family's Yandang Thirteen Styles weren't exactly famous within the jianghu, Lin Ling's skills were certainly beyond what any petty robbers could handle. On top of that, the estate had over a dozen guards.
"This is the estate master." Constable Song pointed to a middle-aged man laid out in one of the rows. "By the time we found him, Madam Lin and her two maids were already dead, stabbed through the heart with the master's own sword. Estate Master Lin then turned the blade on himself. When we arrived, he was breathing his last."
Constable Song had rushed to ask him about the murderer, but it was as if Lin Ling couldn't see him at all. His eyes had been wide open, face contorted as he stared into the empty space before him. Horrifyingly, he'd been smiling.
"Smiling?" Pei Jingzhe asked, baffled.
Constable Song nodded, obviously still shaken. "A chilling smile. When I asked him about the murderer, he didn't respond. 'So beautiful,' he kept saying. He muttered it several times before he passed away."
"Could it be a person's name? So beautiful—Hao Mei?" Pei Jingzhe looked to Bing Xian, who had followed them to the estate. "Bing Xian-guniang. I don't suppose there was anyone at the contest by that name?"
Bing Xian thought for a moment. "Not that I know of."
"If that were the name of the murderer," Cui Buqu said, "Lin Ling wouldn't have been smiling. He was likely hallucinating; who knows what he was seeing? Perhaps it was some beautiful illusion."
"There's an issue here," Feng Xiao interjected. "Even if the murderer was a demonic practitioner using some version of Demonic Persuasion, controlling such a large number of people would require profound inner cultivation. Even the most skilled masters would have trouble dominating so many minds at once, and anyone trained in martial arts would be likely to break free and flee. To take control of more than fifty people, they must have done more than just modulate their voice with internal energy to compel obedience. They must have used some external aid."
Pei Jingzhe looked puzzled, but Cui Buqu saw at once where he was going: "The food."
Everyone in the estate, down to their very own undercover agents, collected their daily meals from the kitchen. Food prepared there was the one thing everyone, from the master to the servants, came in contact with.
Understanding at once, Qin Miaoyu rushed to the kitchen.
Feng Xiao sidled up to Cui Buqu and nudged him with an elbow. "How many men did the Zuoyue Bureau plant here?"
Cui Buqu shot him a glance. "Two."
"There were two from the Jiejian Bureau as well."
But there'd been only one corpse each from the Jiejian and Zuoyue Bureaus. Two men were missing.
Perhaps their agents had realized something was amiss and escaped before the tragedy. Or perhaps they'd gone after the murderer. In any case, seeing as they'd yet to make an appearance, they had likely met with disaster.
Feng Xiao turned to Constable Song. "Go ask the nearby villages if they heard anything unusual last night. Check with the night watchmen as well." He turned to Pei Jingzhe next: "Fetch me a basin of clean water."
Befuddled, Pei Jingzhe went off for the water. Qin Miaoyu passed him as she returned, an odd expression on her face.
"Chief, Cui-xiansheng. The kitchen is empty."
It wasn't just leftovers from the estate's last meal that had gone missing. Other staples and surplus ingredients, even the firewood for cooking—all of it was gone. No wealthy household would lack such things; someone had taken them.
Far from clearing the case up, their investigation had only made it murkier. The murderer's motives were unknown, their methods brutal, and they'd left no trace. When it came to controlling people with sound, the demonic practitioners of the Fajing Sect were unrivaled. As sect leader, Feng Xiao's own skills in this art were not unimpressive, yet even he was at a loss.
Pei Jingzhe returned with the water, and Feng Xiao gestured for Cui Buqu to wash his hands. He hadn't missed Cui Buqu pressing that corpse's eye back into its socket.
Cui Buqu knew Feng Xiao was recalling the corpse he'd examined on their previous adventures, as well as how he'd made a point of touching Feng Xiao afterward to antagonize him. He must have been terrified of a repeat. Cui Buqu scoffed to himself—but he washed his hands clean in the basin.
Catching the charged glances between the two, Pei Jingzhe looked to Qin Miaoyu, as if hoping she would give him a hint.
Qin Miaoyu looked here and there; anywhere but at Pei Jingzhe.
The old coroner had mostly finished examining the bodies; at this point, there was nothing more to be learned. Meanwhile, Bing Xian wandered around the estate, and Feng Xiao made no move to stop her.
The name Yandang Mountain Estate brought to mind a grand mountain villa, but in truth, the estate was merely a large residence near the mountains in Luoyang. Moving quickly, Bing Xian flitted from the front to the back yard and arrived outside the Lin couple's quarters in a blink.
The door was wide open, revealing blood splattered across the floor and walls. Bing Xian was unbothered as she stepped through the mess, pacing around both the inside and outside of the house until she found what she was looking for on a table in the inner room: a bowl of lotus seed and lily soup, partially eaten.
Qin Miaoyu had been unable to find anything in the kitchen, yet here sat a cold bowl of soup. Madam Lin had most likely been in the middle of drinking it when the massacre began.
Bing Xian picked up the bowl and sniffed, but didn't detect anything suspicious. She lifted her nose from the bowl. There was a faint fragrance within the room, not incense but something else.
"It's aromatic cypress." Cui Buqu stepped through the door just in time to see her sniffing one of the wooden pillars supporting the walls. "All the wood here is aromatic cypress, hence the strong fragrance."
Bing Xian was confused. "As far as I know, Luoyang doesn't produce aromatic cypress."
"You're correct," said Cui Buqu. "They must have imported this wood from the southwest."
Bing Xian sighed. "A wealthy family, these Lins!"
Indeed, it was their wealth that had allowed them to serve as the treasury for the Thirteen Floors of Yunhai in the north.
Qin Miaoyu, arriving a few steps behind Cui Buqu, caught the end of this friendly exchange. She glanced at Pei Jingzhe, who was wandering the courtyard oblivious, and hesitated. Should she intervene?
A glimpse of Feng Xiao's approaching figure solidified her decision. She slipped smoothly between Bing Xian and Cui Buqu. "Cui-xiansheng, I'm worried I missed something in the kitchen. Why don't you take a look as well? I'd feel more at ease with your eyes on it."
Cui Buqu nodded, completely unsuspecting. "Take this bowl of lotus seed and lily soup back for further investigation."
Qin Miaoyu smiled brightly and took the bowl from Bing Xian.
The group circled the estate once more but made no new discoveries.
"My lords," Constable Song began, a bit awkward. "How should we deal with these corpses? They'll start decomposing in a couple of days."
"If it stays this cold, they'll keep for another day or two. If we don't discover anything more within that time, give them all proper burials."
"Yes sir," the constable agreed.
Since encountering Bing Xian, they'd been working nonstop, first traveling, then investigating the scene of the crime. By now it was well past midnight. The wind was biting, the dew heavy. Despite wearing several layers, Cui Buqu was thoroughly chilled; one cough followed another, harsh and loud in the lifeless estate.
Feng Xiao yawned. "Look how late it's gotten; it's time I went back to rest. Think how my complexion will suffer in the morning."
Cui Buqu's lips twitched as he resisted the urge to mock Feng Xiao—he knew Feng Xiao had said it for his benefit.
Seeing that remaining would yield no further discoveries, Cui Buqu climbed into the carriage, then pulled back the curtain to peer out. "Please join me, Bing Xian-guniang. I wish to speak with you."
Pei Jingzhe had been listening to the howling wind so long he'd grown jumpy. The instant he heard they were going back, relief swelled in him. He thought of the warm soup and hot water waiting at the relay station and felt his spirits lift.
Thus he was completely blindsided by Feng Xiao's next remark: "Double Qin Miaoyu's salary for this month. Reduce Pei Jingzhe's by one-tenth."