Three Steps: From Assassin to Empress - Chapter 16
Chapter 16: An Assassin, Not a Scholar…
How dare a mere commoner from the Qiao gentry try to use the Court of Judicial Review, the Censorate, and the Ministry of Justice to pressure them?
The Commandant and the Prefect suppressed the cold sneer that almost escaped their throats and ordered the city guards stationed outside the hall, “What are you waiting for? Take down the suspect!”
The guards, as if waking from a dream, held their long spears and surrounded Ying Xiu.
The rain was a hazy mist, and the official boots stepping on the ground splashed up circles of water.
The boy in the golden robe held an umbrella in one hand and pulled up the hem of his robe with the other, avoiding the splashing raindrops.
With his robe flying, the slender boy moved lightly, nimbly bypassing the tightly packed circle of guards and gracefully entering the central hall.
He closed his umbrella, and the raindrops slid off it, scattering a crystal-clear spray.
Behind him, the guards finally reacted, turning around in shock to look at him. They were genuinely surprised by the boy’s superb and nimble footwork.
Bypassing the guards and closing his umbrella all happened in a single, short moment.
It was done with such effortless grace, like flowing water, the movements were as beautiful as a painting, sharp and swift.
Ignoring the shocked and surprised gazes in the hall, Ying Xiu calmly said, “My lords, you say I am a suspect. Do you have evidence?”
The Prefect did not speak, but looked at Wang Yu. Wang Yu signaled to the Wang clan clerk holding the documents with his eyes. The clerk hurriedly spread out the documents and read with a stiff demeanor:
“The scholar Ying Xiu, having a good relationship with the team leader Ah Hong, let Ah Hong act improperly and hire the commoners of the Jianxia district to repair the ferry. However, these commoners were habitually negligent and lazy in their work, which led to the collapse of the Baopingkou dam. The events of last night were all because of Ying Xiu.”
Ah Hong knelt on the ground, his words slurred as he repeatedly echoed that Ying Xiu made him do everything, and that Ying Xiu was biased toward the commoners of the Jianxia district, insisting that he hire that group of people.
The hall fell silent.
As Ah Hong knelt, he suddenly heard the sound of raindrops, as if they were slipping off a smooth silk surface. The sound was extremely close.
His voice caught in his throat. He turned his head and saw a closed silk umbrella, covered in rain and dew, held in a delicate, fair hand.
It was a boy in a golden robe, his posture somewhat like Ying Xiu’s, but his appearance was different. Who was he?
Ying Xiu slowly walked up to Ah Hong. “It is true that I recommended the commoners of the Jianxia district to you. This is not false,” he said, stopping two steps away. “But the dam collapse has nothing to do with them. They went home at dusk, but the Baopingkou dam collapsed around midnight.”
“Besides, it is not the flood season for the Yuan River. The reason the dam collapsed is probably—”
Ying Xiu looked around, his gaze stopping on the Commandant and the Prefect, and he finally slowly uttered two words: “Man-made.”
“Man-made?” The Commandant sneered. “Then tell us, who did it?”
“This humble commoner does not know, but I have some clues,” Ying Xiu said, showing no fear. He took a stack of papers from his sleeve. Before he came, he had specifically asked Xie Zhou’s surveyor to survey the topography of the Baopingkou dam. He had waited half an hour for this stack of papers, which recorded the breach in the Baopingkou dam.
The clerk took the papers and presented them to the adults. When the Commandant and the Prefect read them, their expressions changed from nonchalant to solemn.
The papers were clearly written and even had a drawing of the Baopingkou dam’s topography, with the breach drawn in unmistakable detail.
It was clearly a breach caused by human destruction, not because the dam itself was unable to withstand the flood.
“Who wrote this? Who drew this?” The Commandant questioned loudly.
He couldn’t believe that a small scholar would have such a skilled surveyor by his side. Someone must be helping him behind the scenes.
If that person came from a powerful gentry clan, they might be able to back down a little and let Ying Xiu go.
But if they were just a bunch of rabble-rousers causing trouble and acting mysteriously…
“I wrote the words, and I drew the pictures. They are all my own work,” Ying Xiu said with a firm voice.
“Lock him up,” the Commandant said, calming down. He didn’t want to get tangled up with Ying Xiu any further.
“The laws of the Southern Dynasty state that even a suspect has the right to defend himself,” Ying Xiu said. “Furthermore, I am not a suspect. Lord Commandant, by what right do you lock me up?”
The books he had secretly read in the taverns were finally coming in handy. Ying Xiu recalled the laws of the Southern Dynasty as he spoke.
The Commandant felt a tightness in his chest from all the talk of laws and rights. He couldn’t do anything to him in front of everyone in the court, so he turned his attention back to Wang Yu.
After all, Wang Yu was their target. As for this Ying Xiu, who was pushed out to take the blame, they could deal with him later.
“Assistant Governor, you are the one supervising the Grand Canal. Now that this has happened, you should give the court a reasonable explanation,” the Commandant said to Wang Yu.
Wang Yu gestured with his eyes to the documents in the clerk’s hands. “This humble minister has already investigated the matter. It was caused by Ying Xiu. As for these papers—” he said slowly. “Verbal testimony is not evidence.”
He had also sent people to survey the dam last night. Everything written on the papers Ying Xiu had sent was true. The dam collapse was man-made; someone had used large timber to break the Baopingkou dam.
But so what?
It was too late to investigate now. At this point, the most important thing was to find a scapegoat to take all the blame.
It seemed they were back to where they started.
Ying Xiu said softly, “The surveyor who went to survey the river has already sent this topographical map to the post station, on its way to Jiankang.” Although his voice was not loud, it made everyone in the room tremble. “By then, the entire capital will know that someone in Jiangzhou deliberately destroyed the canal and that the local officials were derelict in their duties and concealed the truth.”
Without waiting for him to finish, the Commandant immediately gave a look to the clerk next to him. The clerk understood and hurriedly walked out from the shadows.
It was imperative to intercept all letters going to the capital of Jiankang to prevent the matter from reaching the ears of the Emperor.
Throughout all this, the wealthy gentry of Jiangzhou remained silent, watching the show.
Ying Xiu glanced at them and chuckled softly. “I wonder if any of you have any insights?”
The boy’s smile was charming, graceful, and unique, yet it inexplicably made the hearts of those gentry tremble.
They smelled killing intent and the glint of a sword from this seemingly ordinary boy. This boy’s hands had definitely been stained with bl00d.
“As this humble commoner knows, the river within fifty miles of Baopingkou was guarded by all of you, my lords. That night, you even invited fifteen scholars to a discussion on a boat on the Yuan River.”
“If those fifteen scholars had not been stopped halfway, they might have become corpses floating in the water now.”
The boy’s tone was calm, showing no emotion, as if he were just narrating something unrelated to him.
“What are you trying to say?” A gentry member couldn’t help but slam the tea table. “I invited those scholars to a discussion because I felt for them, who had studied for years but had no way to become officials. I intended to discuss national affairs with them and help them a little. And you? A small scholar, you dare to use such petty thoughts to judge a gentleman’s actions!”
“Whether you are petty or a gentleman,” a voice suddenly came from the side room, “we can tell the difference.”
The bailiff guarding the side room no longer dared to knock on the window to remind them. He just wanted to curl up into a ball, or perhaps crawl into a hole, to avoid being resented by the gentry.
Those were not ordinary gentry. They were the Weisheng clan, who shared the same ancestry as the Governor of Jiangzhou. They were once second only to the Xiangli clan. They were not people that ordinary commoners could afford to offend.
The scholars in this side room, who were all from commoner backgrounds, dared to talk back to the nobles in the central hall.
They were not afraid of death, truly not afraid of death.
The bailiff caught a glimpse of the boy in the golden robe standing tall in his peripheral vision and muttered to himself, He is the one who is most not afraid of death here.
“Enough!”
How could they be allowed to cause such a commotion in the court? It was not a vegetable market!
The Commandant was about to say something when someone walked up quickly behind him and whispered a few words in his ear. The Commandant’s face changed drastically.
—The Governor of Jiangzhou had claimed to be ill since midnight last night and was now bedridden.
In other words, the pressure to handle this case was all pushed onto him and the Prefect.
Who didn’t know that the Emperor in Jiankang valued this Grand Canal that ran through four prefectures the most? If anything went wrong, their heads might not be safe.
How dare you, Governor of Jiangzhou!
Urgent footsteps sounded from the corridor. The bailiff in charge of criminal law came with the confessions of the people involved in the case.
Ying Xiu was all too familiar with the cold, metallic smell. It was bl00d. He followed the sound and looked.
The bailiff’s robe was still stained with bl00d. The splashed bl00d had soaked the black fabric. A smile hung on his face as he respectfully presented the confessions to the ebony table.
“My two lords, two commoners from the Jianxia district have confessed. They said… that it was the Assistant Governor of Jiangzhou, Wang Yu, who wanted them to destroy the dam to frame the gentry who were guarding the nearby river.”
“You are torturing them for a confession!” Ying Xiu’s face changed slightly as he questioned the bailiff.
“Torturing them for a confession?” Weisheng Min, a gentry member from the Weisheng clan, smiled and interjected. “Did you see it with your own eyes in the prison?”
From a distance, Ying Xiu saw it clearly.
The confessions on the table were written in bl00d, and the words were so smudged they were barely recognizable.
Wang Yu was silent for a moment, then said a few words in a low voice. The gentry from the southern clans all raised their sleeves and pretended to drink tea.
Others might not have known what he was alluding to, but Ying Xiu knew that Wang Yu was talking about the dirty secrets of the wealthy gentry of Jiangzhou.
He had personally investigated these matters and was very clear about them.
The Commandant and the Prefect also lost their composure. Looking at the stack of bl00d-soaked confessions, they raised a hand to their forehead and said, “This case will be discussed another day.”
The bailiff pointed at Ying Xiu and the commoners kneeling in the hall with his bl00d-stained fingers. “You, and all of you, stay here and cooperate with the government office’s investigation.”
Although he said “cooperate with the investigation,” the bailiff’s face was clearly full of a playful smile, as if he were looking at his prey.
As soon as he said this, the commoners kneeling outside immediately panicked.
They had not failed to smell the strong stench of bl00d on the bailiff. If they fell into his hands, they would surely be tortured, if not killed.
The commoners looked at the boy in the golden robe with earnest eyes. The boy was tall and slender, as radiant as jade and gold, standing at the boundary between the inner and outer parts of the hall.
He stood alone, confronting a hall full of nobles, with the commoners in their rough clothes behind him.
Just by looking at him, the commoners felt an inexplicable sense of calm and security.
“Okay.”
To everyone’s surprise, Ying Xiu smiled gently.
He had almost forgotten that he was an assassin, not a scholar waiting to be captured.