Shuli Go Stories Vol. 6: Liars and Cheats

Part 10

           

Lian bowed towards Ren and then approached the middle of the room where Baodung and Fang stood. She took a deep breath and began.

"Yesterday Master Yao told me that lady Jingyi had been kidnapped the night before. He offered to hire my services to find the kidnappers. I accepted, and then I asked how he knew the girl had been kidnapped in the first place. He told me her room would tell me everything I needed to know. And when I got to her room, it was a disaster – every piece of furniture had been destroyed, and all the lady's possessions had been thrown across the room. To an untrained eye it would have looked like the young girl had tried to fight her attackers, who had gone through all her things in order to steal them. It took me about five seconds to realize that was not what happened.

"First of all, nothing was missing. If they were thieves they would have stolen something – jewels, clothing, anything – along with taking the girl, especially if they went to the hassle of going through all her things. Second, while I didn't know the size or shape of the lady Jingyi, I knew that it would have taken five or six strong individuals to do the damage that was done to that room. And five or six strong individuals could have carried her away without any trouble whatsoever. So the room was not damaged because of a struggle. Third, as I explained to Lord Baodung later that night, there was no ransom. If it had been a kidnapping, there would have been a note or at least an indication that someone would be contacting them. Finally, neither the door to the room nor the window had been forced open, and when I inspected the outside of the home, I saw that no human foot had ever tried to climb up the side of the house. To me, that all pointed towards lady Jingyi leaving of her own free will.

"Now usually when a young woman leaves home, it's because of, well, frankly, her midsection. Either she's pregnant and ashamed, or she wants to be pregnant and is ashamed, or she never wants to be pregnant and is ashamed of that. So, I asked Jingyi's serving woman if the lady had any lovers. And she was the one who told me that Lord Baodung had been sleeping with his daughter."

All eyes fell on the servant, whose terror looked near-fatal. Jingyi, now clutching her mother almost as tightly as she had her father, began shouting abuse at her onetime confidant, calling her names and threatening her with myriad sadistic deaths. Lian didn't let the abuse go on too long for fear it would further rattle the servant.

"But!" Lian ensured the room quieted down before she continued. "The servant was not the only one who confirmed this. When I was speaking with her I found out that Master Fang here had been giving the lady a sleeping mixture before bed. So I went to talk to him about this mixture, to try and piece together what could have happened in the room. And while I was speaking with him he accidentally revealed to me that he'd been dosing the lady's nighttime drink with Gouyino Jiliangtu – what's commonly known as the love potion."

Master Fang's surprise this time was genuine. He roiled himself up taller and taller as if he was about to retort, but he never found the nerve. Instead he just contracted again when Lian started to explain.

"I knew this because Master Fang, despite looking like he could keel over and die any minute now, is not a man in his sixties. In fact he's probably in his mid-forties. And his stick-of-a-body and graying hair has nothing to do with age. He has those things because for the last year he's been concocting the Gouyino Jiliangtu using the ingredients a fairly ignorant, rural doctor would have at his disposal.

"Gouyino Jiliangtu can be made three different ways – the way Fang had been building it required strong magic, especially as lady Jingyi built up a stronger tolerance to it. It's magic that someone with as little training as Fang could achieve only through the continued use of his own body's energy reserves. And Fang had been using a lot of his body's reserves this past year. I could tell that because of the painting on his desk.