Evil Cult? (Part 1)

Winding dirt roads, uneven doorways.

Though their construction could hardly be called identical, everything in sight was mottled and desolate.

Sun Shaozong had not visited this slum near West Bian Gate for a full two years. Now that he had returned to this old place, he truly could not see any changes.

It seemed that Jia Yucun's much-praised political achievements had not benefited this area.

That was understandable. Jia Yucun's primary concern had been the city's middle and upper classes, while his secondary concern had been the utterly destitute drifters with nowhere to settle.

By comparison, the slum dwellers who were close to the bottom yet could barely support their families had instead become a neglected group.

"My lord!"

Just as he was evaluating Jia Yucun's achievements, the Dragon Forbidden Guard leading the way looked around from horseback for a long while before finally pointing at one of the alleys and calling, "It's here!"

Sun Shaozong looked out through the carriage window and saw that a tiny stone stele, barely an inch high, stood at the entrance to the alley, which was less than ten feet wide.

Tsk.

It was even the former residence of a Recommended Man.

This was a popular custom in the capital. If a poor family produced a distinguished son, when the whole family moved away, they would erect a stele before their door to commemorate it.

This was not deliberately showing off, but to nail down the family's scholarly aura, lest it wander off at random to someone else's home when no one was there to watch over it.

Ordinarily, such a "former residence of a notable" would not be rented out or sold to others—and the murderer was unlikely to have deliberately chosen his own ancestral home as the site of a crime.

But