Dead Man's Letter: Don't Trust Your Father!

"Let's go now."

Li Sanshun tucked away the half-piece of the blood token and did not press further.

Zhou Huai's residence was located in the West Courtyard of Law Enforcement Peak.

It had originally housed disciples tasked with investigations. Ever since Zhou Huai's incident, the courtyard gate had remained locked, yet the archives recorded him as having left to pursue a case, never to return.

When the two left the front courtyard, Gu Qinghe brought only Zhao Rui and four North Mountain disciples.

The investigation into the imperial capital's congratulatory gifts was still ongoing, and Bai Chongshan had not yet been thrown into the Cold Prison. No one could calculate how many people within the Law Enforcement Hall were passing messages for him.

The group bypassed the duty room and entered the old courtyard via a narrow path on the west side.

The courtyard had been abandoned for six years.

The door cracks were stuffed with withered leaves, and tattered spiderwebs hung beneath the eaves. Zhao Rui used the Major Case Order to unlock the sealing array; the moment the array patterns dissipated, Li Sanshun caught a whiff of old wood.

Mixed within it was the scent of pine resin.

He stopped before the door.

"It's been empty for six years, so where is the pine resin coming from?"

Gu Qinghe took out Zhou Huai's identity badge. "I come here once every year to check the seals on the house. It wasn't here last month."

Zhao Rui drew his short blade. "Someone has been here?"

"Don't go in yet."

Li Sanshun crouched down and took a sniff at the threshold.

[Residual pine resin detected.]

[Residual Grey Feather Talisman Paper detected.]

[Time of residue: within seven days.]

It was the Grey Feather Talisman Paper used by the imperial delegation again.

Someone had entered Zhou Huai's residence within the last seven days.

The time Bai Chongshan arrived at the Tai Xuan Sect was also within the last seven days.

"That old bastard moves fast."

Li Sanshun used his scabbard to push the door open.

A thin thread was pressed behind the door.

The thread connected to a roof beam, suspending a small ceramic bottle. If the door had opened another half-foot, the bottle would have smashed down.

Zhao Rui reached in from the window to snap the thread and retrieved the bottle.

The mouth of the bottle was sealed with wax. Inside was not poison, but a clump of burnt paper ash.

Gu Qinghe rubbed a small amount of the ash between her fingers. "Evidence-Destroying Powder. Once the bottle hit the ground, any footprints or scents left in the room would have been wiped away."

"The intruder was afraid of us finding something."

Li Sanshun looked into the room.

Zhou Huai's living quarters were simple.

A bed, a bookcase, and two wooden chests. Old Law Enforcement Hall robes hung on the wall, and the lamp oil on the table had long since dried up.

The four disciples checked the doors and windows first, then sealed the four corners of the house.

Zhao Rui opened the first wooden chest; it contained only spare clothes and a few sect statutes. The second chest was locked, with fresh scratches around the keyhole.

Someone had pried it open.

The lock clicked open, revealing over a dozen old case files inside.

Zhao Rui flipped through them one by one.

"The North Mountain medicine theft case, the outer sect disciple disappearance case, the West Mountain mine slave brawl... these are all old cases from six or seven years ago."

Gu Qinghe picked up the file at the very bottom.

The cover was labeled: West Mountain Cliff Fall Case.

Deceased: Zhou Huai.

Li Sanshun took the file.

The records stated that six years ago, while pursuing a disciple who had stolen ore, Zhou Huai had accidentally wandered into the West Mountain Abandoned Path at night and fallen to his death from a cliff.

The body was never found.

Three days later, when the life-flame on his identity badge extinguished, the Law Enforcement Hall closed the case as a death.

At the end of the file was an inspection seal.

Gu Changyue.

Li Sanshun looked up.

"Your father closed the case?"

"Back then, he was in charge of the law enforcement patrols for the West Mountain mining area."

"So you've been holding onto Zhou Huai's identity badge all this time, and you never made his death public."

Gu Qinghe closed the room door.

"The night before Zhou Huai's incident, he came to find me. He had discovered that someone was privately operating Earth Fire furnaces in West Mountain and had transported a batch of Black Iron out of the abandoned mines. He suspected that the matter involved my father."

Li Sanshun did not interrupt.

"The next day, he fell from the cliff at West Mountain. Three days later, his life-flame extinguished, but his body could not be found."

Gu Qinghe placed the identity badge on the table.

"The case file was signed by my father, and the arrest warrant was issued by him as well. Zhou Huai had just discovered the Ding-Character Furnace when the incident occurred; I couldn't bring myself to treat his death as an accident."

"You suspected Gu Changyue of killing him to silence him?"

"I did."

Gu Qinghe took out a yellowed duty roster.

On the night Zhou Huai fell from the cliff six years ago, Gu Changyue was supposed to have remained at Law Enforcement Peak, but he had gone to West Mountain on short notice.

The duty roster noted it as an inspection of the mining area's sealing arrays.

The timing matched perfectly.

"I didn't send Zhou Huai's identity badge to the Death Registry because I wanted to see who would come looking for his belongings."

"You waited six years?"

"In the first two years, three people secretly checked his case file. One died during an outside mission, one was transferred to the imperial capital, and the last one was Yan Song."

Hearing this, Li Sanshun picked up the identity badge to examine it.

The life-flame on the badge was extinguished; it could not be faked.

Gu Qinghe hiding the news of his death was not about making a scene over Zhou Huai.

She was using a dead man to fish for the living.

"Fine, let's move past that."

Gu Qinghe paused. "Aren't you going to ask why I kept even you in the dark?"

"If you wanted to harm me, you wouldn't have needed to take the badge out just now."

Li Sanshun tossed the identity badge back onto the table.

"Besides, I've kept plenty of things from you, too. Investigation is one thing, but who doesn't keep an ace up their sleeve?"

Gu Qinghe put away the duty roster. "There is an extra scratch on the back of Zhou Huai's badge. When I checked it last month, it wasn't there."

The scratch was very short, landing exactly in the center of the badge's back.

Li Sanshun scraped it with his fingernail twice.

A bit of black wax fell off beside the scratch.

The identity badge had not been cast as a single piece.

There was a hidden compartment in the middle.

Zhao Rui brought over a thin blade and probed slowly along the side of the badge. The tip of the blade pushed in an inch before hitting something hard.

Click.

The identity badge split into two halves.

Pressed inside the compartment was a piece of oilpaper folded to the size of a fingernail.

Everyone crowded around.

The oilpaper had become brittle and was coated with moisture-proof wax. Gu Qinghe used silver tweezers to unfold it; the paper depicted over a dozen thin lines.

"A map of the West Mountain Old Mine tunnels."

The map marked abandoned mine shafts, ventilation shafts, and three Earth Fire vents. A square was drawn separately at the deepest point.

Ding-Character Furnace.

Beside the square was a red line that led all the way to the West Mountain cliff.

Li Sanshun took out the nameless congratulatory letter.

The iron filings from the Ding-Character Furnace on the corner of the paper were identical to the black filings stuck to the edge of the square on the map.

[Ding-Character Furnace iron filings detected.]

[Residual Spirit-Fixing Powder detected.]

[Map creation time: over six years ago.]

The map was left by Zhou Huai.

But the new scratch on the back had been added only recently.

Someone had broken into the room, pried open the chest, set up the evidence-destroying bottle, and deliberately left a mark on the identity badge to reveal the hidden compartment.

"The intruder ransacked the room but didn't take the map." Zhao Rui gripped his short blade tightly. "Did he want us to find it?"

"Not necessarily."

Li Sanshun flipped the map over.

There were two lines of small characters on the back of the oilpaper.

The first line had been scraped away by someone; only the character "Gu" was still visible.

The second line was perfectly preserved.

If I die, the ledger is beneath the cliff.

Gu Qinghe stared at it for a long time, then took out the cliff-fall case file signed by Gu Changyue.

Zhou Huai had suspected Gu Changyue.

And Gu Changyue had personally closed Zhou Huai's case.

Now, the map pointed to the cliff where Zhou Huai had fallen, and a ledger was hidden beneath it.

As long as the ledger still existed, it would be clear who had tampered with the Ding-Character Furnace six years ago.

A secret knocking signal suddenly came from outside the courtyard.

A North Mountain disciple passed an urgent report through the door.

"Deacon Gu, an imperial document official is missing from the Reception Courtyard. Before this person left, he had requisitioned a West Mountain Old Mine Access Token."

Li Sanshun put away the map and pushed open the door.

"Take Zhou Huai's case file and head to West Mountain immediately."

Gu Qinghe, however, pointed to the first line of text that had been scraped off the back of the map.

Beneath the mutilated characters, half of Gu Changyue's personal seal was pressed into the paper.

"Wait a moment. The last words Zhou Huai left behind say—go to the cliff, and don't trust my father."