Having recovered his wits, the rogue was now trying to emphasize his own importance. He Lingchuan did not call him out and merely furrowed his brows, but General Ling was far more blunt. "Over a year? What does old news from over a year ago have to do with anything happening now?"
Isn't that stretching the timeline a bit too far?
"Just listen, my lords, please hear me out," Wang Mazi said, not daring to keep them in suspense any longer. "East of Zhitian Township, there was a den of porcupine demons—a hundred or so of them. Their land sits at the foot of Mount Yulun, covering a huge area. Those demons had poor relations with the locals and caused trouble all the time. The townsfolk disliked them, but usually couldn't do anything about them. That pack of demons had lived beneath Mount Yulun for over a century, far longer than anyone else. They were there before Zhitian Township even existed."
"And then?" He Lingchuan knew that although Beijia Kingdom was ostensibly a place where humans and demons lived side by side, most demons still preferred to claim their own territory as a clan, maintaining clear boundaries with humans.
This was an innate tribal divide. Take the old goat beside him, for instance—he holed up with his kin on their territory at the edge of the county town, living lavishly while refusing to live within the town itself.
"Last winter, there was a sudden landslide on Mount Yulun that seemed to bury their den," Wang Mazi said. "Nobody went into the mountains back then, so nobody knew. When the snow melted the following spring and the people of Zhitian Township went into the mountains, only then did they discover the landslide and that the demons' den had been destroyed."
He Lingchuan couldn't help frowning. "How does that count as a disappearance?" Wasn't it just an ordinary mundane tragedy?
"One of my partners was from Zhitian Township. When he was hired to clear the rubble, he found that the porcupine corpses in the den were all piled together, as if they had died huddled in a clump—and only bones were left," Wang Mazi said. "Such a huge den, over a hundred of them. Not long after, someone in town was attacked by porcupine demons—one dead, one injured. The authorities were alerted and sent men down. They searched for over a month without finding any trace of them, and after that, the matter was simply dropped."
After listening, He Lingchuan immediately said, "This old tale doesn't seem to have any connection to what happened on Mount Niutou."
Wang Mazi's face fell. "Even if they were crushed to death... My lord, do you know that porcupines never like to huddle together, especially not by the hundreds?"
He knew that the more useful he proved, the better his chances of staying alive. Otherwise, death was his only outcome.
"When living creatures face a desperate end, their reactions are often beyond an outsider's imagination." He Lingchuan shifted the topic. "You said that on your way back to Shuangyi Town, you encountered a ghostly wall and inexplicably wandered into the official fields?"
"Yes, yes!"
He Lingchuan nodded. "Then you were set up." A "ghostly wall" was the colloquial term for a Bewitching Formation; its basic function was to disorient people and make them wander aimlessly in circles.
Formations, naturally, had to be laid out in advance.
Someone had set a Bewitching Formation along their path home beforehand, steering these bumpkins toward the official fields to provoke the wind-boring beasts.
"Who made this plan to steal the goods?"
"My cousin, Wang Ling," Wang Mazi said. "He told us a flock of greenhorns had arrived in Wudou Town—unfamiliar with the place, but carrying top-notch goods. If the theft succeeded, he'd give me two... two taels of silver!"
He added by way of explanation, "A greenhorn means an outsider who doesn't know the ropes around here."
"Is Wang Ling dead?"
Wang Mazi nodded. There was no sorrow on his face, only resentment. "Serves him right! I twisted my ankle that night, and he didn't stay behind to help me at all!"
"Where did he get his information?"
"I'm not sure, but probably in a gambling den," Wang Mazi said. "Whenever he had coin, he'd run straight there."
He Lingchuan thought for a moment. "Then what about the targets of your theft, those greenhorns? How much do you remember about them?"
"Uh..." Wang Mazi had replayed the incident countless times in his mind. "It was a small merchant caravan, only thirty-some people and ten wagons. We stole two of the wagons. They were loaded with chewing tobacco, plus over a dozen bamboo tubes packed with saltpeter. Wang Ling accidentally bumped one open, and it caused frost to coat the entire wagon interior."
He Lingchuan rubbed his temples. "Merchants smuggling chewing tobacco and saltpeter—where did you scoundrels get the nerve to cross them?"
Chewing tobacco was an exceedingly high-profit commodity that Beijia Kingdom strictly operated as an official monopoly; private smuggling was a capital crime. As for saltpeter, it was a vital military resource and one of the essential raw materials for making gunpowder—how could private merchants ever be allowed to transport it?
"Occasionally... people still haul it," Wang Mazi argued stubbornly. "We've seen it before, and in the past, we also... also..."
"Also stole it?"
Wang Mazi shrank his neck and glanced at Jiao Yu and General Ling beside them. Seeing that neither responded, he gave a tacit admission.
Indeed, there was never a shortage of people willing to risk their heads for profit, and backwaters were especially lawless. Both chewing tobacco and saltpeter were compact in volume; once stolen, the loot could be divided up, and each man would take only a small amount to sell, quickly fencing the goods.
They were local ruffians with their own channels.
"Isn't what you do also a capital crime?" He Lingchuan looked at him with a faint smile. "What else do you remember about those merchants? The more detail, the better."
"The leader was roughly in his early forties, neither short nor fat, with a neatly trimmed beard. He wore an emerald-jade ring on his ring finger, and right here on his neck—" He pointed at his own neck for He Lingchuan to see. "—he had a flesh-colored mole."
"When you cased the place, did you hear them mention their destination?"
Wang Mazi thought for a long time. "N-no, I don't think so?"
"All right, let's head back." While He Lingchuan had been questioning Wang Mazi, the goshawk and the wind-boring beasts brought by General Ling had searched the valley, but in the end they returned empty-handed.
The culprit was first-rate at cleaning up after themselves; staying here any longer would yield no useful clues.
***
After returning to the inn, He Lingchuan brought out Fu Shanji's dossiers once more, wanting to see if he had overlooked anything.
Chiyan Kingdom was so vast; trying to locate a missing bird was no different from searching for a needle in the sea.
Before He Lingchuan set out, Li Qingge had shared newly acquired intelligence with him:
A month ago, Beijia had suffered a setback on the eastern front.
Supposedly, because two armies under Beijia's command had failed to coordinate in time, a major tactical blunder occurred, giving their opponent an opening to exploit.
Indeed, one of those armies was Chiyan Kingdom's troops.
Recalling the Emperor's fury, it was not hard for He Lingchuan to deduce that the disappearance of the eastern imperial eagle had likely prevented crucial intelligence on coordinated operations from reaching Chiyan Kingdom in time, causing heavy battlefield casualties.
Such an incident was naturally intolerable to Lingxu City.
He was very curious about the source of the intelligence, but Li Qingge clearly had no intention of divulging it.
Across the dossiers compiled from various regions, Fu Shanji had also jotted down several keywords in red ink:
The first keyword:
Rainy night!
He had indeed been meticulous, identifying a common factor among the disappearances everywhere: they all took place on rainy nights.
He Lingchuan recalled the night his rock sheep was nearly stolen; it had indeed been a night of continuous drizzle, with the rain stopping only after the Hour of the Ox.
Why did these people operate only on rainy nights?
The second keyword Fu Shanji had summarized was "countryside."
These disappearance cases all occurred in suburban areas and mountain forests, far from the hustle and bustle of human settlements.
Humans were accustomed to living in communities, whereas many demons preferred solitariness, keeping well away from human settlements. If the culprits specifically picked rural wilderness to strike, it made sense that the demon victims outnumbered the human ones.
From this, one could also see the culprits' prudence.
Then the third keyword was "multiple locations simultaneously."
Comparing the time and location of each case, some incidents occurred very close in time—only a day or two apart—yet the crime scenes were very far apart, separated by well over a hundred li.
Why would the culprits travel over a hundred li within a dozen-odd shichen just to strike again? What were they after?
Having personally experienced the attempted theft of his sheep, He Lingchuan leaned more toward the theory that these people operated separately in groups.
In other words, this was very likely a cross-regional coordinated crime ring!
Fu Shanji's deductions ended there. Perhaps he had found no further clues, or perhaps Fu Shan had struck him down right about then...
In He Lingchuan's view, Fu Shanji's top-down method of investigation was doomed to produce nothing.
What was the efficiency of officialdom? An old ox pulling a broken cart moved faster, not to mention all the oversights and omissions.
If one relied solely on government personnel and official records, the day this case was solved would never arrive.
Never mind the motive; if one could not grasp the pattern behind their locations, chosen targets, and timing, catching them was impossible.
Their movements were exceedingly stealthy. Had the Lingxu City courier not gotten dragged into this, likely no one would have noticed these scattered disappearances across the land.
Let alone in a demon kingdom, even in Yuan Kingdom, the occasional disappearance of a villager here and there was commonplace and hardly worth mentioning.
In these times, there were simply far too many reasons for living humans and demons to vanish.
Should he head to Wudou Town, where Wang Mazi and the others had been framed, to see what was really going on?
While He Lingchuan was still deep in thought, a pecking sound came from the window.
He stood up and opened the window, only to see a dozen-odd crows perched outside.
"Something on your mind?"
The largest crow poked its head in to look around, and only after confirming the goshawk was not inside did it boldly hop in and take two steps forward.
"Are you still looking into the strange business on Mount Niutou?"
He Lingchuan nodded. "Do you have a new lead?"
"That depends on what reward you're offering," the crow said brashly. "No reward, no clues!"
He had been dealing with these creatures since Three Hearts Plain and knew they possessed typical bandit temperaments—bullying the weak and fearing the strong.
"Name your price, let's hear it."
"Three hundred jin of beef and mutton each month, and a hundred Baoling Pills!" The crow had come well-prepared. "Also, we want the woods south of Shuangyi Town as our roosting ground—no other birds allowed to nest there except crows!"
He Lingchuan raised an eyebrow. "I am the Crown Prince's special envoy. Seeing me is like seeing His Highness in person. You dare make such an exorbitant demand?"
"How rich is the Crown Prince? Plucking a single hair of his would be thicker than our thighs!" the crow sneered. "A few hundred jin of meat and a hundred pills a month are nothing to him!"
"Fair point." The moment the words left his mouth, He Lingchuan pursed his lips and blew a sharp whistle, then swept his hand across.
A gust of qi swept past, shutting the window.
This separated the crow leader from its dozen-odd subordinates.
Seeing that things had taken a turn for the worse, the big crow didn't attack He Lingchuan; instead, it slammed headfirst toward the window paper, intending to burst through and escape.
He Lingchuan anticipated its move with pinpoint accuracy, casting a net right in front of it—making it seem as though the crow had thrown itself straight into the snare.
Chapter 447