"Who knows-I heard something else, too."
"What?"
"Just at noon today, the Taiping Transport Gang's Grand Dragon Head, Qiu Tianyu, the 'Taiping Partridge,' laid out a Ten-Day Feast at Flying Mirror Tower by West Pool. Three hundred guests a day, for ten days straight, he said, to entertain the gang's friends."
"..."
Pei Ye leafed through the files on the desk, once again reading closely through the robbery of Zhang Mengyuan and his wife. In truth, nothing in this case appeared connected to the Taiping Transport Gang. Its name never appeared anywhere in the account.
Yet a sense of something out of joint kept drawing him back, and as he reread it, he noticed something wrong again-the autopsy reports for all three were very vague. The couple had each had their throat slit, while Zhang Mingqin had been beaten to death. No other details were given.
A simple cause of death was no problem, but if the causes were so simple, why, when the crime had occurred on the eighteenth of the ninth month, had Zhang Mingqin's autopsy report only been completed on the twenty-third, and her parents' on the twenty-sixth?
Had the coroner been busy those days?
Pei Ye frowned slightly. Just then, the instructor finally approached the front with his book, and the students gradually stopped talking and returned to their seats.
Today's lesson was on Spring and Autumn. The great scholar Li Mingqiu had no cultivation and was already over sixty. His face remained upright and dignified, but the white at his temples could no longer be concealed. Only he and Xu Chuo taught Spring and Autumn at the Four Gates Academy. Reportedly, he had begun as an erudite at the Imperial College in his youth and risen all the way to Minister of Rites before retiring.