The sky was still dark when Pan Long hurried back to Xiangping Prefecture, only to find that he had come far too late.
The two constables on duty at the yamen gate when Yang An killed herself had only hazy memories of what happened. All they remembered was the woman wailing and the blood spreading across the ground.
At first glance, it seemed they had simply been frightened out of their wits. But how could men trusted to guard the yamen gate be so timid that one dead person scared them this badly?
Even if she had stood up after killing herself and danced the samba, dripping blood, she still would not have frightened them!
This world had demons and ghosts. Which of those seasoned constables had never helped subdue a demon or catch a ghost?
A bout of wailing, followed by stabbing herself with a pair of scissors—and that was supposed to scare them?
Hah. Under normal circumstances, they would probably have thought, Damn, how boring.
Without a doubt, someone had tampered with their memories!
Pan Long wanted to contact Cang Yuan at once, but he looked at the sky and figured Cang Yuan had probably only just fallen asleep. He decided against doing something that might make Bai Yingxuan stick pins in a straw doll of him.
Instead, he quietly took out his teacher's paper crane, contacted her, and asked whether she knew a way to restore the two men's memories.
"Once memories have been damaged this badly, they're very hard to restore," Bi Lingkong replied. "Even I have little confidence I could return them to their original state."
"What?"
"As the saying goes, spilled water is hard to gather, and a broken mirror is hard to make whole. Restoring something that's been destroyed without making a new