Baoyue pondered for a moment, her gaze resting in the lamplight at the corner of the desk, then slowly said:
"Perhaps there never was an informer, and Shen Yuan simply invented an excuse. If there really is one, then that person is either from the hall precincts or from among those around me. There can't be a problem among my own people. If there were, they wouldn't have waited until now, much less struck in this fashion. As for the people in the hall..."
Baoyue paused, tapping her fingertips lightly against the desktop:
"There are three possibilities. First, they're targeting Qian Ruo'er. If he's the target, it's almost certainly those junior Yellow Gate eunuchs. His promotion to supervisor stirred his colleagues' jealousy. They spied on him and discovered something suspicious, but because of me, they didn't dare report it to their superiors. So they brought it to the Censorate instead, hoping to catch him red-handed with the evidence.
"Second, they're targeting Shen Yuan. They understood exactly how his mind worked and baited their hook to fish him out, making enemies for him. I merely happened to be there and became the bait that lured Shen Yuan into the trap. Shen Yuan has many enemies. Quite a few have both the motive and the means to do this."
Xiao Luan watched his daughter with a hint of approval in his eyes. The greatest danger in analyzing a problem was confining oneself to a single corner, rigid and inflexible, with too narrow a view of the board. The more one thought, the further one strayed; the further one strayed, the more one thought, as though descending into a ravine ten thousand fathoms deep, unable to climb out, with no choice but to follow that one road into darkness. In the end, it