Medicine Master Disciple’s Cultivation Notes

Chapter 135: I Can Investigate the Case for You

When the young constable came back to his senses, he found himself trussed up and carried into an empty courtyard.

"Mmph, mmph, mmph?"

"Awake, officer?"

Li Qiuchen walked up to him with a half-smile, hands clasped behind his back, and said with complete sincerity, "Don't misunderstand. I'm simply a passerby with an inquisitive nature. Right now you have exactly two choices."

"First, you take a hard line and refuse to cooperate, in which case, to avoid unnecessary complications, I would have no choice but to silence you permanently."

"Second, you calmly answer a few questions for me, satisfy my curiosity, and then I'll give you a sum of silver to ease the trauma of this experience, after which we go our separate ways and trouble each other no further. What do you say?"

The young constable glared fiercely at Li Qiuchen, then gave a single nod.

"My first question, then. What does the young miss look like, and how old is she?"

"Mmph, mmph?"

"My apologies. I forgot."Li Qiuchen reached out without a trace of guilt and removed whatever had been stuffed in the young constable's mouth.

"That's all you wanted to ask about?"

"That's all. I'm simply curious."

"Then untie me!"

"Answer my questions properly and I'll untie you when we're done."

Li Qiuchen said pleasantly, "Let's neither of us waste words and waste each other's time, shall we?"

"Fine. Our county magistrate's daughter is named Xu Zhen, eighteen years of age. As for her appearance... I have a portrait in my breast pocket. One look and you'll know."

Li Qiuchen reached into the young constable's breast pocket and produced a rolled-up scroll. He opened it and took a look.

"Was this drawn this way on purpose?"

"No, that's just what she looks like."

"Hm. The county magistrate sets a good table at home."

He rolled the scroll back up, then asked, "How did the young miss go missing, and does it have any connection to this lane? What brought you here to look for her?"

The young constable looked at him in surprise. "You're not a local?"

"Never mind that. How did she go missing?"

"She went out for a stroll three days ago and never came home. No trace of her."

"Why come here to look?"

"Word on the street is that Pig-Slaughter Lane has long been involved in trafficking people. There are past records of young women being lured away from this very area."

"With so many people living in this lane, who exactly is running that trade?"

"Unknown."

"You know nothing, and yet you came here asking questions anyway. Aren't you worried about alerting the suspects and getting the hostage killed?"

"They wouldn't dare!"

"If they're the ones who took her, there's very little they wouldn't dare. Your young miss is eighteen years old this year. Has she never left the house before? Wouldn't the people here recognize her?"

"Well..."

"How many households are there in Pig-Slaughter Lane? Of those, how many do you actually know personally well enough to have a clear picture of their circumstances?"

"Uh..."

Li Qiuchen sighed. "Could it be that this is your first day on duty? That would explain a great deal."

"Of course it isn't! I simply didn't think it through!"

The young constable flushed red with embarrassment, then managed a dry laugh. "Young friend, I can see you're not a bad sort. Why not untie me, and we can put our heads together... no, rather, you can give me some pointers. If we can find some lead to the young miss's whereabouts, even just a clue, and I bring it back to the magistrate, there will surely be a generous reward!"

Li Qiuchen smiled. "Not in such a hurry. I'd like you to answer two more questions first. I'm not a local, but you're not local either, are you? Surely you can't be completely in the dark about everything?"

"What do you want to know?"

"Why is Pig-Slaughter Lane this clean?"

The young constable hesitated, then said, "That's county office policy. Every household in the city is required to sweep the street in front of their premises. If it isn't clean enough, they're fined."

"I'm not asking about who does the sweeping. What I mean is, when the pork shop takes in its stock, doesn't it come as whole pigs? Don't the animals relieve themselves along the entire route? Who pays to clean that up?"

Walking through half the lane, Li Qiuchen's greatest puzzlement had been this: how could a place selling pork be kept this clean?

There was no cold chain logistics or refrigeration in this era. You couldn't slaughter pigs outside the city and then transport the meat to the shop. The meat would spoil before it arrived.

Pork shops slaughtered on the premises, with a fixed number of pigs killed and sold each day.

Never mind the issue of animal waste. Even after slaughter there would inevitably be all manner of foul-smelling scraps left behind.

This trade was simply not a clean one, however you approached it.

Was the pork shop owner so well-connected that he could afford to ignore the fines? And if he truly had that kind of backing, why would he need to abduct the county magistrate's daughter?

The young constable had no answer to this either.

Or perhaps his script simply didn't contain the answers to these questions.

Which meant he wasn't the main character.

Otherwise, in his role as a constable, he ought to have more information to hand than this.

With that thought, Li Qiuchen raised a hand and released the ropes binding the young constable, and pressed ten taels of silver into his hand along the way. "My apologies for the earlier indignity. A small token for your trouble."

The young constable showed no anger. He pushed the silver back with a direct expression. "You're right. I was inexperienced and I oversimplified the whole matter. If I were to investigate properly, where would you suggest I begin?"

"Two things."

Li Qiuchen held up two fingers. "First, go back to the office and pull the case files from previous abductions of young women in this area. See whether there are any leads to be found. Don't waste time wandering around aimlessly like this. A few more days of delay, and even if Miss Xu hasn't been killed, she may well have been compromised in a different way."

"Understood, I'll go right away. And the second thing?"

"I'd like to borrow your uniform."

"Ah, that's..."

"If you'd rather not cooperate, I can simply take it by force and leave you hanging here again."

"What do you need my uniform for?"

"To investigate the case on your behalf, of course. Don't worry, I'll stay right here and go nowhere. Now hurry up and take it off."

Ten minutes later, Li Qiuchen had changed into the constable's uniform.

It didn't fit particularly well. A normal person would see through it at a glance.

But this was an illusory realm. There were no truly normal people inside it.

Changing clothes was equivalent to changing identities, and this too had appeared in his mental archive of problems.

Many stories, in the interest of keeping the plot moving smoothly, didn't concern themselves with such details.

A big bad wolf who eats a grandmother and then lies in her bed impersonating her, for instance.

Or the saintly hunter figure who manages to extract living people from inside a wolf's stomach.

Dressed in the constable's uniform, Li Qiuchen began going door to door.

This time it was considerably more involved than simply following a scripted flow.

His first task was to eliminate the vast majority of ordinary households in the lane from suspicion.

"How old are you?" "What's your name?" "Where are you originally from?"

"What's your mother's name? Your grandmother's name? Does your mother have any female cousins?"

The moment the questions became even slightly complex, the people being questioned couldn't answer. They could only stare at Li Qiuchen with a vacant expression.

The creator of this illusory realm wouldn't have invested the effort to construct a perfectly seamless life history for every background character in the place.

Li Qiuchen spent a full two hours visiting all fifty-seven households and twelve shops in the lane.

Fifty of those households were pure background filler. He could rule them out immediately.

The real substance of the matter lay with the twelve shops.

First, they covered a strikingly diverse range of trades. A restaurant, a roasted snack shop, a confectionery, a teahouse, these were all understandable enough.

It was essentially a food street.

But beyond those, there was a clothing shop, a smithy, and even a pawnbroker's, all situated here, which struck him as somewhat incongruous.

Was Pig-Slaughter Lane some kind of prime commercial district that everyone was scrambling to get a foothold in?

Even if it were prime real estate, the business didn't appear particularly brisk. The clothing shop and the smithy had not a single customer, and the assistants inside were all idling.

It had to be said that these assistants were all, uniformly, young and powerfully built.

After making his full circuit, Li Qiuchen identified an anomaly. Among the permanent residents of Pig-Slaughter Lane, adult men accounted for over sixty percent of the population. That was highly unusual.

Add the elderly, the young, and women together, and they barely reached thirty-five percent.

The rate of single men here was rather elevated.

By this point the day was drawing to a close, and the shops were shutting their doors one after another.

There was a tavern in the lane that offered lodging, but Li Qiuchen was in no rush to go there. Instead he found a large tree, climbed up, and fixed his eyes on the smithy.

During his rounds of questioning earlier, he had clearly sensed an undercurrent of unease from the assistants in the smithy.

That was the look of a guilty conscience.

Once the sky had darkened completely and the street was empty of pedestrians, a furtive figure slipped out of the smithy and made its way into the pawnbroker's not far away.

Li Qiuchen moved closer without drawing attention to himself, and listened carefully.

At his current level of cultivation, when he stilled his mind, he could hear clearly everything within a hundred meters. He didn't need to get too close and risk alerting them.

"Two constables came by today..."

"Nothing to worry about. They're not here for us."

"That young constable asked some very pointed questions. He seemed to have suspicions about our background."

"He was just going through the motions. I asked around. He questioned everyone the same way..."

The speakers were the smithy owner and the head of the pawnbroker's.

"So the preparations we've made..."

"Go ahead without concern. No one will find out."

"What if that constable really does start to suspect us?"

"If it comes to that, we'll give him something else to look at."

"I've had it in for that old Yue fellow for a long time. Might as well take advantage of this and be done with him."

"You've had it in for the old man, but not for his daughter, have you?"

"Ha. That's exactly why I've had it in for him."

"Too obvious. Do you think the people at the county office are fools?"

"If they really do start investigating, it would redirect things nicely."

"You're not capable of something that delicate."

"Which is why I'm asking for your help..."

"Go find Little Four..."

The two voices dropped lower and lower. Li Qiuchen kept perfectly still, and began turning over in his memory the residents of the lane with the surname Yue.

There was indeed an old man with that surname. His daughter had married a couple of years ago, but her husband had died unexpectedly, and her in-laws, blaming her for bringing misfortune, had sent her back.

She was around eighteen as well, as he recalled. A rather striking young woman.

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