"You're saying it was Zhang He?"
Gu Ren didn't understand at first.
He asked again to make sure.
"Sixth Brother, you mean Zhang Yongqing? No one else?"
"No one else. It was him. He was the former Imperial Physician of Xin Country's Medical Bureau." Sixth Brother nodded with absolute certainty. "I couldn't possibly mistake him. But—if that's the case, doesn't Zhang Yongqing have an undeniable connection to the Gu Worm inside Thirteen?"
Gu Ren's eyes seemed to say—
Do you think that's possible?
Sixth Brother fell suspiciously silent for a long while.
Gu Ren wasn't the only one who thought it absurd. Sixth Brother also thought it impossible. Zhang He might have been unknown elsewhere, with no records to be found, but in Lingzhou, he was a household name, practically "the people's choice"! He was truly "loved and cherished by the common folk"! Just how good was his reputation?
So good that if a son said a single bad word about Zhang He, his elderly parents would disown him the very next day!
That wasn't an exaggeration!
It had really happened!
Several of Gu Ren's brothers had witnessed it themselves.
The old father had beaten his son while weeping, then repeatedly kowtowed in the direction of Zhang He's residence, as though a sinner of a believer were confessing to his faith—repenting that he had raised such an ungrateful whelp!
At first, Gu Ren and the others had thought it was over the top.
The people of Lingzhou were practically putting Zhang He on a pedestal!
They had even suspected that Zhang He had staged the whole thing, hiring people to act it out in order to promote his reputation. But after investigating in secret, they discovered that they had judged a gentleman by the standards of a villain. His reputation