The Sleuth of Ming Dynasty (ENGLISH TRANSLATION)

CH 10

Ever since the establishment of the Eastern Depot, it had been met with quite a few fires. The one from this time wasn’t as extreme as Old Wang had described; there was only one blaze, which hadn’t spread, in the western area, and that got speedily put out. The cause was purported to be some citizens burning something nearby, and the sparks had drifted into landing over there, causing the wood to ignite. If the continuous rain from a few days prior had been happening right now instead, it might not have caught.

Asking around, Tang Fan found out that the burned part was indeed a holding area the Depot used to keep prisoners, and also happened to be where Zheng Cheng’s body was stored. Two prisoners died in the flames, with even the corpse getting turned to ash.

As things had come to this, any further supposition would be of no use — the one with the unfathomable motives was shooting for exactly that idea, in all likelihood. Tang Fan sighed inwardly, thinking to himself that this had gone round and round, yet had unexpectedly ended up just returning to square one. That maid, Ah-Lin, probably wouldn’t be able to escape calamity this time around.

He had his heart set on this case, and wanted to discover the truth. It wasn’t for the thought to stand in the limelight, nor to work against Pan Bin, but for a simple desire to console the deceased in the Nine Springs, and to save the innocent from blame. He had studied painstakingly by cold windows; was that not to be able to defend the common folk one day? Now that the Court was corrupt in discipline, many people would rather place their energy into fighting and scheming, refusing to do anything practical for the sake of the citizenry. Just like Pan Bin’s type of being neither good nor evil, even more officials that would look after themselves before principles could be found all over the place.

Yet, even at that state, there would always be someone that wanted to act. Since everyone else refused to do so, Tang Fan thus didn’t take any offense to taking over.

Being capable of giving Pan Bin the plan to pull the Eastern Depot and Brocade Guard entirely down into their water fully demonstrated that Tang Fan’s methods weren’t lacking in slyness. Even so, a nobleman was flexible on the outside, but rigid on the inside; he only wished to use that cleverness for proper business.

However, he wholly hadn’t anticipated that this incident would be so difficult to advance. The originally very uncomplicated case had quickly met with obstruction after obstruction, and now even the body was gone, which explicit cut off all ways back.

Only now did he learn why that despite his teacher Qiu Jun having entered his post many years earlier than Pan Bin, and also being a great scholar of the present age, he was merely an Imperial College Chancellor.

With the way the world worked, stubbornly benevolent sorts that refused to compromise like his teacher were bound to not be put into positions of power.

As for himself… did he have to walk down his teacher’s old path, too?

He shook his head. His cool-headed, meticulous disposition causing him to rapidly disengage his emotions from the loss of the Marquis Estate’s case, he pulled out the bottommost one in a pile of dossiers and flipped through it.

That homicide case had admittedly been major, but with how big Shuntian Prefecture was, there was never a shortage of cases, and the controversial, unresolved ones in particular had accumulated over the years into a heap even bigger than a mountain. As a Judge of the Prefecture, the substance of his job was not any more breezy than anyone else’s; this was not his non-essential civil post in Hanlin, where documents would be arranged and compiled just to kill time.

Even though a Judge’s position was minor, he was still someone in charge of judging cases and lawsuits in the Prefecture — a duty that could not be rashly neglected.