gnovel Chapter 008: Silencing
Chapter 008: Silencing
Zhao Bocong moved forward a few steps in the crowd and saw that the soldiers led by Qin Xi still had their hands on the hilts of their swords, but they could no longer pull them out.
The crowd was so dense that the scabbard was stuck and couldn't be drawn.
But the man in gray was nowhere to be found—not at the tea stall, not behind the pancake vendor's order, not under the eaves across the Imperial Street.
Zhao Bozong suddenly felt a chill down his spine. The gray-clad man was not a soldier from Lin'an Prefecture. The soldiers from Lin'an Prefecture wore uniform dark brown short tunics and moved in perfect unison.
But the man in gray was not; he was a secret agent of the Qin family, Qin Hui's own secret agent. His mission was not to stop the coffin, search the secret box, or check for contraband.
His task was to keep an eye on Zhao Bocong.
From the tea stall outside Dali Temple, to the standoff in the alley, to the prison cell outside Dali Temple, and then to Zhao Bozong coming out of the side door and leaning against the alley wall to wait for dawn this morning, he has been keeping a close eye on things.
But now he's gone.
Zhao Bozong's back was pressed against the edge of the tea stall table. He didn't turn back to look for the man in gray, but instead glanced around with his peripheral vision.
Yue Yinping was still standing next to the coffin, and had not moved an inch since Qin Xi pried it open.
Her face was expressionless. Not blank, but the quiet of someone waiting for the outcome after doing everything they could.
He finally spotted the man in gray at the edge of the crowd, in the shadow of the side gate of the Dali Temple.
In the spot where Kui Shun stood yesterday, the man in gray leaned against the door frame, a pipe still dangling from his mouth, unlit.
His gaze swept over the bustling crowd and landed on Zhao Bocong.
Their eyes met above the crowd.
Zhao Bozong suddenly understood. The man in gray hadn't disappeared; he had simply moved to a different location.
I moved from behind him to the shadows of the side door, a position from which I could clearly see Zhao Bozong's face, his every move, and approach him as quickly as possible the moment the crowd dispersed.
Zhao Bozong's heart skipped a beat, not out of fear, but because he had finally confirmed something.
From the moment Qin Hui sent him to the Dali Temple, he had no intention of letting him live.
The interrogation of Yue Yinping was merely a pretext—if the interrogation yielded results, Qin Hui would receive the information and kill him; if it failed, Qin Hui would kill him on charges of "having an affair with the daughter of a disgraced official." Either way, he was destined to die.
Yue Yinping knew this, so her plan did not include the safe departure of Zhao Bozong.
She arranged for him to stand in the crowd and shout the first word, to be the fuse that ignites the crowd—and then? She didn't say.
Zhao Bozong took the wooden bird out of his sleeve and held it in his palm, then turned his gaze away from the man in gray.
Qin Xi finally moved, and as he led his soldiers through the crowd, he glanced back at them.
He was looking at the side gate of the Dali Temple—the spot where the man in gray had stood. Then he turned around and quickly disappeared at the end of the Imperial Street.
Zhao Bozong's fingers tightened. Qin Xi recognized the man in gray and knew his mission.
The glance he gave back wasn't to confirm the gray-clad man's location; it was to tell him: "It's yours now."
The crowd began to disperse like the receding tide, wave after wave, from the edges. But a few people remained in the center, looking at the papers scattered on the snow, still discussing and cursing Qin Hui, and peering towards the coffin, but the number of people dwindled.
Yue Yinping stood beside the coffin, the hem of her mourning clothes fluttering in the wind. She bent down and picked up the scattered papers on the snow one by one, folding them neatly and stuffing them into the lining of her mourning clothes.
When she picked up the last one, she paused for a moment, then looked up at Zhao Bozong.
Through the dispersing crowd, her lips moved. But the distance was too great for Zhao Bozong to hear what she said, but he could read her lip movements.
"Walk."
Zhao Bozong didn't leave. He watched as the gray-clad man with a pipe in his mouth, who was in the shadows of the side gate of the Dali Temple, finally moved, taking the pipe out of his mouth and putting it into his sleeve.
When he pulled his hand out of his sleeve, he held something else—a bamboo whistle. He put the whistle in his mouth and blew it.
At the same time, gray-clad figures emerged from the alleys at both ends of the Imperial Street. Three, five, seven.
They were all dressed in the same gray short-sleeved browns, with their hands tucked into their sleeves, and they came out from different alley entrances. Including the one who came out from the side door, there were eight gray-clad men.
They surrounded him and Yue Yinping.
The crowd had mostly dispersed, and the few remaining onlookers, seeing the gray-clad men's imposing presence, lowered their heads and quickly walked away.
The tea stall owner didn't even bother to put away the stove; he slammed the copper kettle on the table and ran off. Only Zhao Bocong, Yue Yinping, eight men in gray, and the coffin remained on Imperial Street.
The gray-clad man at the head of the group stopped three steps in front of Zhao Bozong. He was the same man whose identity Zhao Bozong had revealed in the alley yesterday.
He had already put his pipe back in his sleeve, and his right hand was inside the cuff, which was slightly bulging, revealing a knife.
"Duke Jian Guo." His voice was flat, devoid of much emotion. "Prime Minister Qin sent word: the contents of the secret box were placed there by you."
Zhao Bozong did not answer. His hands were tucked into his sleeves, his fingertips touching the wooden bird's wings.
When Yue Yinping knelt at the entrance of Dali Temple, she knew she might not be able to leave Dali Temple; she knew this from the very beginning.
"Prime Minister Qin also said," the man in gray pulled his right hand from his sleeve, revealing the blade inch by inch, "that the Duke of Jian Guo had an affair with the daughter of a disgraced official, fabricated evidence, and framed a minister. He should be executed on the spot."
Zhao Bozong looked at him and suddenly smiled. He had suddenly realized something.
He transmigrated, and from the moment he woke up, he kept asking himself: Why did he transmigrate? Was it a coincidence? Or was some unknown cosmic mechanism malfunctioning?
He thought about it for a long time but had no answer. But now he has.
He transmigrated not because he was Lin Yue, but because he had read "The Complete Collection of the Golden Scriptures of the State of E" and knew all the details of the Shaoxing Peace Treaty.
It was because nine years ago—in the second year of Shaoxing—a man named Yue Fei stuffed a wooden bird into the clothes of a seven-year-old child.
The wooden bird waited nine years, waiting for the child to grow up, waiting for him to stand at the gate of Dali Temple and see Yue Yinping kneeling in the snow, waiting for him to walk through the black lacquered gate, grasp the wax pill, and stand in the crowd to shout out for the first time.
Perhaps the person the wooden bird is waiting for is not the original owner, Zhao Bocong. The original owner was just a vessel. The person the wooden bird is waiting for is the one who transmigrated here—the one who knew Yue Fei would die, knew Qin Hui would win, knew how history would be written, yet still chose to enter the Dali Temple.
The man in gray raised his knife.
Zhao Bozong didn't hide, nor was he even afraid. From the moment he knew he had become Zhao Bozong, life and death no longer mattered.
He took the wooden bird out of his sleeve and held it in front of him.
"Go back and tell Prime Minister Qin." His voice wasn't loud, but every word was clear, "This wooden bird was left to me by Yue Fei. I put the things inside the wooden bird. Every word on the paper is true."
The gray-clad man's knife froze in mid-air.
"The evidence is already clear to the world. Even if Prime Minister Qin kills me, the evidence will not disappear. If you kill me, the people of Lin'an will remember Yue Yinping tomorrow, those papers the day after tomorrow, and the first line Qin Xi read the day after that. You can't kill them all."
The man in gray did not speak; his knife was still raised, but the tip had dipped slightly downwards by an inch.
Yue Yinping walked over from beside the coffin, stood next to Zhao Bozong, and stood side by side with him.
"My father wrote two letters the night before he left for Fengbo Pavilion." Her voice was very soft.
"One letter was for me, and one was for him. The one for me read—'My daughter, Yinping: If you ever meet a benevolent man, you can entrust her with important matters.'"
She paused.
"I found it."
After she finished speaking, she unfolded the last piece of paper in her hand, the one stained with fragments of cinnabar seal clay, and held it up in front of her.
The gray-clad man lowered the tip of his knife by another inch.