After getting her bearings, she found that this courtyard lay on the west side of the mansion. Three courtyards stood side by side, and hers was the northernmost. The gates to the other two opened with a push as well. Both had been swept clean, but no one lived there.
Li Piaoqing looked around, then headed straight for the main house.
It truly seemed like an empty residence. No one tended this place either. Li Piaoqing went around to the front of the hall and first saw two spirit tablets enshrined there. Incense smoke curled beneath them, and the sticks had only just burned down at the tips. The brother and sister who had just passed through must have replaced them.
Li Piaoqing stepped forward. The tablet on the left read, "Lotus seat in the Western Paradise of our late father, Lord Yi, taboo name Duanzhi," and the one on the right, "Lotus seat in the Western Paradise of our late mother, Lady Yang of the Yi family, maiden name Zhaoren."
Li Piaoqing committed the names Yi Duanzhi and Yang Zhaoren to memory, then went behind the hall, where she found a neatly arranged row of ancestral tablets. Without reading their inscriptions, she bent down and opened a cabinet. After rummaging through it briefly, she found a family genealogy, just as she had expected.
The young girl stood up and leafed through it. It was only a slim volume. A few pages in, she spotted Yi Duanzhi's name at once, but when her gaze traveled across the page, she was slightly bewildered.
Just as Yi Chengxin had said, she had no aunt. There was in fact only Yi Duanzhi in that generation, his name printed alone on the paper.
She scanned the preceding generation and still failed to find the