novelraw Chapter 116: Motive Matters More Than Evidence
Chapter 116: Motive Matters More Than Evidence
Murong Feng shook his head and said, "The North Sea Academy does not accept cultivators still at the Qi Refining realm."
"But there are exceptions!"
Li Qiuchen pressed on quickly. "Magistrate Peng has a single exemption slot that allows direct enrollment without examination!"
"How do you know something like that?"
"How I know isn't important. What matters is that you should have ways of verifying it, shouldn't you?"
In truth, he had had Bai Ke pry it out of Xu Qing.
Senior Sister Peng Lan was a relative of the county magistrate by blood. Xu Qing was the magistrate's nominal brother-in-law. Liu Mengyun was a distant nephew of Sheriff Ma Tiancheng.
Within their circle, this was hardly a secret.
Criminal motive mattered more than criminal evidence.
Evidence was only needed for conviction.And the main reason this whole affair had dragged on without resolution was that nobody could figure out where the Old Blind One had come from, why it had abducted county school students, or where it had disappeared to afterward.
Murong Feng gave a nod and said, "This is something we genuinely hadn't considered. You are not to mention this to anyone else. Yanzhi, that goes for you as well. Don't get involved any further."
Senior Sister Yanzhi held out her hand. Murong Feng let out a sigh, unclipped the jade pendant at his waist, and placed it in her palm.
Once they were out of Murong Feng's sight, she draped her arm over Li Qiuchen's head again and said with a grin, "Junior Brother Li, I'm finding that you have quite a bit going on beneath the surface."
Li Qiuchen was quick to be modest. "Compared to Senior Brother Murong, I'm just playing around. Besides, from the way Senior Brother Murong looked just now, he had already suspected Liu Mengyun for some time. He simply hadn't known about the enrollment slot."
"That's true enough. Liu Mengyun and Peng Lan were the inner hall's golden pair, childhood sweethearts, perfectly matched in background and cultivation, devoted to each other."
Senior Sister Yanzhi said quietly, "By rights you'd never think to suspect him of all people. But I think your reasoning is correct. Once you eliminate all the impossible options and trace the case from the beginning, the person who came out looking the cleanest is actually the most suspicious... I'm not talking about you, junior brother, don't read into that."
Oh, I'm truly grateful for the clarification.
Li Qiuchen could only manage a dry laugh.
He finally understood why this unhinged senior sister had zeroed in on him.
If you set aside the initial conclusions and looked at the case fresh, then compared to Liu Mengyun, he and the two young misses, who had no business being on the outing roster in the first place, were actually quite suspicious themselves.
The original prime suspect should have been Bai Ke, who wasn't even an inner hall disciple.
But anyone who dug a little deeper would discover that there was a connection between himself and Bai Ke.
You couldn't treat everyone else as fools.
Once the senior brothers and sisters of the inner hall began investigating in earnest, every suspicious detail would be pulled out and examined from every angle.
"Actually, junior brother, I have one more question."
Senior Sister Yanzhi kept a firm grip on Li Qiuchen's shoulder, and only continued speaking when she could feel him on the verge of snapping. "Assuming your theory has some merit, what do you think is the background and origin of the Foundation Establishment demon behind Liu Mengyun?"
"Senior sister, that question is well beyond my scope."
"Do you want that box of Hundred-Li Soul-Chasing Smoke?"
You're at it again. Why are you always like this?
I'm telling you, I'm not the kind of person you think I am!
"It comes with an instruction manual!"
"I don't know. But Senior Brother Yang probably knows something."
"Which Senior Brother Yang?"
"Yang Wenping. Whatever you do, don't say it was me who told you."
"Don't worry, I'm the soul of discretion."
There is absolutely no way I'm believing that.
Having shaken out every last piece of useful information he had, Li Qiuchen finally escaped Senior Sister Yanzhi's clutches.
He stumbled back to the classroom to find that both Tang Xiaoxue and Hu Caiyi were gone.
When he asked around, he learned that right after he had been hauled away, the two of them had been taken off by another senior sister.
He wasn't the only one being singled out.
With two traitors already exposed and the real problem still unsolved, the atmosphere in the inner hall grew more oppressive with each passing day.
Liu Mengyun, however, was unmoved as a mountain.
Everyone present at the scene that day had been questioned repeatedly by multiple parties. Even Xu Qing had been worn down to the point of something close to a breakdown. Yet Young Master Liu conducted himself as though nothing had happened at all. No matter who came to question him, his account was identical every time and his manner showed not the slightest change, as though he were genuinely innocent.
What he didn't know was that it was precisely this composure that had aroused Murong Feng's suspicion.
By the time the fifth month arrived, the sweeping, all-hands investigation conducted by the senior brothers and sisters had run its course. The inner hall, thoroughly turned upside down in the process, finally settled back into something resembling its former calm.
But Li Qiuchen didn't believe for a moment that this was the end, or that the matter had simply been dropped for lack of results.
On the contrary, he suspected that Murong Feng had eliminated every other possibility and fixed his attention entirely on Young Master Liu.
On the first day of the fifth month, a newlywed daughter-in-law in a commoner household in the south of the city hanged herself.
This sort of thing was not uncommon in ordinary times and impossible to prevent entirely.
Life offered no guarantees of smooth sailing. Accidents happened. Sometimes people simply reached a breaking point.
On the fifth day of the fifth month, the only daughter of Zhang Laonian, the tofu seller in the north of the city, threw herself into a well.
On the tenth day of the fifth month, a female student from the county school's outer hall, having taken leave for several days, died of illness at home.
Three deaths in less than a month, all of them young women. Something about this didn't sit right.
On the night of the sixteenth day of the fifth month, Li Qiuchen was in the third level of the cellar he had dug in the rear courtyard, cultivating quietly as he always did, drawing earth energy in his usual unassuming fashion.
Suddenly, a creeping chill rose through his chest.
The earth energy, which had been flowing steadily, began to show faint signs of disturbance.
An earthquake?
Li Qiuchen quickly ruled it out. This was not the sign of a tremor. Someone was using an earth-burrowing technique to move underground.
That ominous chill closed in rapidly, and within a few breaths, a furtive figure burst up from the ground.
Their eyes met, and both parties froze.
The intruder had clearly not expected to find such a large underground space beneath the rear courtyard of this wealthy household, let alone find someone inside cultivating in secret.
Li Qiuchen, for his part, was thoroughly taken aback by what he was looking at.
By build alone it appeared to be a woman, her body decomposed to an alarming degree, dead for who knew how long, and over her face was pulled a rough burlap sack on which, in something that was either blood or paint, someone had drawn a grotesque smiling face.
The aesthetic here is completely wrong, my friend. Gotham City is next door.
But after the brief shock, what followed was mutual revulsion.
The decay and death emanating from the figure triggered a deep, visceral discomfort in Li Qiuchen.
The Medicine Master's Blessing within him let out a sharp, screaming resonance, and a nameless fury surged up inside him, impossible to suppress.
This was the instinctive revulsion and rage of one who revered life toward one who had desecrated it.
Like an Italian confronted with a pineapple and durian supreme pizza, or a Sichuan native faced with cream dumplings stuffed with macaroni and doubanjiang.
How dare life be treated with such contempt?
The intruder, for her part, was feeling much the same way.
What gives you the right to still be alive when I'm already dead? You look so fresh and tender, like a dewy little head of bok choy. You look absolutely delicious.
Intolerable!
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