"Once upon a time, in a place called Shangyu, there lived a young woman named Zhu Yingtai. She was blessed with such grace and beauty that she was like a freshly blossomed spring flower, radiating a fresh, youthful charm. The Zhu family was one of the wealthiest in the area..."
Chen Jin sat crouched beside the water vat, telling the Shark Person a tragic love story.
He had already given up trying to wheedle information about the person behind the Shark Person out of it.
After all, the other party had sent a Shark Person to kill him. The assassin hadn't returned, which meant the assassination had failed.
If the other party wasn't a fool, they would send someone else to investigate. Once they saw this little Shark Person, they should understand what had happened.
Chen Jin was looking forward to that.
From the few hints the little Shark Person had let slip, its organization seemed quite wealthy and ambitious. If he could get in touch with them, he might gain quite a lot.
To leave the Shark Person's organization with a good impression, he couldn't resort to physical punishment to make the Shark Person cry.
He had no choice but to use a tragic story. Fortunately, he had plenty of those at his disposal.
The little Shark Person wept buckets as it listened to Butterfly Lovers. Round, lustrous shark pearls fell one after another, piling up at the bottom of the vat. Even as it cried, it deftly twisted thread and wove.
It didn't let the crying interfere with its work at all.
Chen Jin rubbed his chin, pondering. Should I tell the story of Meng Jiangnu crying down the Great Wall next? Would that conflict with what actually happened?
Rain pattered against the eaves, gathering into rivulets that trickled steadily beyond the window.
A slender figure, almost indistinguishable from the shadows, lay silently beneath the window outside Chen Jin's room. Patient as a spider, she waited for the moment her prey let its guard down.
She was Xi, sent by the organization to investigate why Xi's mission had failed and act as the situation required.
She had been lying in wait for half an hour, listening to the man inside recount a story about humans that she had never heard before, his voice low and gentle.
She listened intently, trying to analyze the target's weaknesses.
She heard the faint swishing of water from the vat and the soft rasp of thread being woven. Xi was still alive—and working.
That reassured her a little.
Hmm? Working?
Then, without realizing it, her attention was captured by the story.
"...Zhu Yingtai disguised herself as a man and went to Hang City to study, where she met her fellow student, Liang Shanbo... The two hit it off at first sight and became sworn brothers. They studied together for three years, growing deeply attached..."
Xi frowned slightly.
A woman disguised as a man? Fellow students?
Human emotions were always so strange and complicated.
The story unfolded slowly: the eighteen-mile farewell, the reunion at the tower...
The man's voice seemed to possess a kind of magic, vividly sketching out a distant love, full of restraint, regret, and struggle.
"...In the end, Liang Shanbo died of sorrow. Wearing her wedding gown, Zhu Yingtai resolutely entered his tomb... Heaven and earth were moved; wind and rain swept across the land, and the tomb split open... The two became a pair of colorful butterflies, fluttering away together, never to be parted again..."
Turned into butterflies?
Xi's heartstrings seemed to be plucked violently by something.
An indescribable ache and tenderness surged up inside her. Her eyes grew hot and misted over, beyond her control.
She thought of the couples among her people who could never be together, and of those helpless partings in the depths of the sea...
She tried desperately to hold back, but the story's impact was too powerful. The exquisite romance and tragedy of longing for someone you could never have, then dying to be together, surged like the strongest undercurrent and swept away the psychological defenses she had built as an infiltrator.
Plip.
A round, lustrous shark pearl, shimmering with a soft glow, slipped uncontrollably from the corner of her eye and struck the stone slab beneath the window with an unusually crisp sound.
Plip... plip...
This was bad!
Alarm bells rang in Xi's mind. She tried desperately to stop, but her emotions had already burst their banks. A second and then a third shark pearl rolled down, and one even struck the paper window with a muffled thump.
The story inside came to an abrupt halt.
A deathly silence fell over the inside and outside of the room.
Xi's whole body stiffened. She even held her breath, desperately praying that the other person hadn't noticed.
But the next moment—
Creak.
The wooden window she had been peering through for so long swung open from within. Yellow lamplight spilled out, illuminating Xi beneath the eaves, tears still clinging to her face and several shark pearls scattered at her feet.
Chen Jin's face appeared in the window, a remarkably friendly smile on his lips.
His tone was gentle.
"Little sister, did you like the story? Don't stand out in the rain. Come in and warm up. There's room in the vat—come listen with us. The next part is even better."
Xi: "!!!"
Night had deepened. The clamor of Xianyang had long since faded, and only one room deep within the Minister of Justice's offices remained brightly lit.
Minister of Justice was the title of an official in charge of the Qin State's judicial system.
As one of the Nine Ministers, he headed the highest judicial authority in the central government, compiled national criminal case records, oversaw imperial prison cases, and handled matters related to revising the laws.
He was also a high-ranking authority holder beneath the First Emperor, among the countless Law Eyes suspended high above the world.
At present, the post of Minister of Justice in the Qin State was held by the "loyal and trustworthy minister," Meng Yi.
The oil lamp flickered, casting Meng Yi's sturdy, mountain-like figure onto the wall behind him.
He wore a dark robe cinched at the waist with a leather belt. Though fatigue showed on his face, his tiger-like eyes remained sharp as an eagle's, sweeping over the mountain of bamboo slips piled on his desk.
His brush moved across the slips, marking them in vermilion as he made decisions on matters of every kind—matters concerning the authority of Qin Law, life and death, and the granting or withholding of power.
After finishing another cumbersome case file, he set down his brush and raised a hand to knead the tight crease between his brows, trying to dispel the fatigue brought on by several nights of staying up late.
In that brief silence, a thought stirred in his mind. A trace of spiritual awareness rippled out like a pebble cast into a still lake.
The conclusion of the day's case—the attempted murder of the broker and the merchant—came to mind.
The killer had drowned. No body had been recovered.
Meng Yi's stern face showed no surprise at the outcome, as though he had expected it all along.
On a rainy night like that, in the crisscrossing waterways of Langya County, who could possibly catch a Shark Person born to live in the water?
It would have been stranger if they had managed to catch one.
However, in his view, whether they could catch the killer was a matter of ability; whether they pursued the killer at all was a matter of attitude.
A lack of ability could still be honed and improved. But if they were careless in their attitude and lost their reverence for Qin Law and their resolve to enforce it, then their foundations had already rotted. There would be no saving them.
That was precisely why the guard who had immediately and without hesitation stepped forward to request "law-enforcement" authority to pursue the criminal had left such a different and lasting impression on him.
That decisiveness to act first, regardless of success or failure, and that instinct to uphold the dignity of the law—those were the qualities expected of a Great Qin Elite Soldier.
"Fu..."
Meng Yi lightly tapped his fingertips against the desk and murmured the ordinary, even somewhat crude, name. Then he committed it to memory.
This man might be worth keeping an eye on.