"An Zhiyuan? How did he die?"
Jiang Xiaobai looked at the corpse, then raised his head and stared at Pei Shen in disbelief. "You killed him?"
Indeed, Pei Shen had just said that if he had come a little earlier, he could have seen a living man.
The meaning spoke for itself!
"I killed him!"
Pei Shen answered so bluntly that even Jiang Xiaobai froze for a moment.
"An Zhiyuan turned himself in two days ago."
As Pei Shen spoke, he leisurely wiped his fingers, then looked at Jiang Xiaobai and said calmly, "He claimed he was responsible for everything involving the Imperial Civil Service Examination fraud."
"And he stuck to that story like a dog clamping down on a bone."
"Then... surely you didn't have to kill him?"
Jiang Xiaobai's eyelids twitched violently. "With him dead, isn't the trail completely cut off?"
After all, An Zhiyuan was the vice minister of rites.
He was also the man who had induced the former owner of Jiang Xiaobai's body to buy an official post.
Jiang Xiaobai believed that if they dug deeper into An Zhiyuan, even if they could not uncover the mastermind outright, they could at least unearth a usable lead.
But now?
The man was dead!
That trail had been severed with a single stroke.
"Ah, I didn't want to either."
Pei Shen sighed softly at that. "An Zhiyuan had poison clenched in his mouth."
"I only did it to keep him from being poisoned to death!"
"..."
Dark lines instantly clouded Jiang Xiaobai's forehead.
Wait!
To keep him from being poisoned to death, Pei Shen had killed him first?
Was that something a normal person could say?
"Heir Jiang, there's no need to look at me like that."
Seeing Jiang Xiaobai's expression, Pei Shen smiled faintly. "My rule