Finished the third watch.
According to Tanchun, she had been short of money and could only barely scrape together four taels of loose silver. When she arrived at the Bamboo Forest around the Hai Hour, Jia Huan took it as an insult.
He first sneeringly urged her to borrow money from Baoyu. When she refused, he began hurling vicious abuse at her.
Tanchun was no meek, pliant sort either. Seeing that he still refused to mend his ways even at such a moment, she angrily turned to leave.
Jia Huan rushed up to stop her, and the siblings began tugging and shoving each other.
"At the time, he was bent on tearing the hairpin from my head. How could he have known that, to settle his rotten debts last time, I had already pawned all my jewelry and replaced it with gilded imitations?"
"My heart was broken then, so I pulled out my hairpin and pretended to give it to him. Taking the chance, I stabbed him in the arm, then threw both the hairpin and the silver by the roadside and ran from the Bamboo Forest without looking back."
More than four taels of loose silver?
When Sun Shaozong had examined the corpse earlier, Jia Huan's pockets had seemed cleaner than his face.
So where had the silver gone?
Had the killer picked it up?
Or...
"Don't just stand around, everyone!"
Sun Shaozong suddenly called out, "Pair up, take lanterns, and search around nearby—see if you can find any other clues!"
Sun Shaozong had originally intended to wait until dawn before expanding the search if they still had not found the killer. The night was simply too dark to search effectively.
But silver was reflective metal. Even at night, they ought to be able to find it.
As for