After being dragged to the Criminal Constables Bureau at noon, Xie Jinhuan spent the day buried in the archives with young Jiang Xian, combing through no fewer than several hundred case files, only to discover that the Red Witch Cult was even more mysterious than he had imagined.
The Red Witch Cult had probably first surfaced twenty or thirty years earlier, around the time of Northern Zhou's Witchcraft Calamity. Both the emperor and the crown prince who succeeded him had been killed by witchcraft, making the Witch Cult's Blessing and Sacrifice Faction, the state religion, the target of universal condemnation, while court and country became a tangled mess.
Then Empress Dowager Guo had appeared, taken charge of the government, and purged threats within and without. Afterward, the saying "The nation shall perish by red; demons shall descend upon Zhou's soil" began circulating among the people, with covert disturbances cropping up everywhere. Investigations had pointed to Empress Dowager Guo and the Guo Clan, but the trail ended there, with little progress made in over a decade.
Xie Jinhuan could not work out where these people had come from either. What he could establish for now was that they targeted Empress Dowager Guo and the Guo Clan, so they were certainly not merely troublemaking practitioners of the Demon Path. More likely, they were a force with conflicting interests, such as powerful aristocratic clans, vassal kings, or even those among the Daoist, Martial, and Buddhist Paths who took issue with the Blessing and Sacrifice Faction.
The range of suspects was too broad, and Xie Jinhuan had no leads yet. Jiang Xian said she would patrol the streets for clues and notify him if she found anything, so he took his leave and returned to Duanli Street.
At dusk, lights gradually began to glow