After the Imperial Guards sealed off the Imperial Garden, Crown Prince Qi Ling's men turned over every inch of the Winding Stream Banquet grounds. They moved the rocks beside the stream, dug up the loose soil beneath the peach trees, and even fished out the koi floating belly-up in the water to examine them one by one. The Imperial Medical Bureau took the shards of the porcelain vial found on the suicide operative to test the remaining liquid. It was unquestionably Gelsemium. Gelsemium was no common poison. It came from the Southern Borderlands, took years to mature, and cost more than gold. A menial eunuch transferred from an estate could neither afford nor obtain such a thing.
Qi Ling stood beside the stream, watching the Imperial Guards move the last rock. Xie Chen approached from the side, holding a stack of records just retrieved from the Imperial Household Department. He said they had investigated the estate where the suicide operative had lived before entering the palace. The deed was indeed in the name of Zhou Wenhan's distant uncle, but the Zhou family did not control the estate's finances. A fixed sum of silver was remitted from the Capital City every month. They had traced the business handling the remittances to the Tongbao Money Shop. The depositor had used a false name, but an old clerk at the counter remembered what he looked like: around forty, with a goatee and a mole at the outer end of his left eyebrow.
Qi Ling took the records and leafed through them, then closed them and handed them back to Xie Chen, telling him to continue. Xie Chen said the owner of the Tongbao Money Shop was surnamed Sun, and the Old Madam of the Sun Family was Consort Jing's maternal aunt. Qi Ling