The night is getting dark.
A black shadow climbed in from the back wall of Liu Mansion with a vigorous posture.
She glanced around, landed quietly, and moved towards Liu Yunqi's study with light steps.
In Liu Yunqi's study, the bronze candlestick on the desk flickered faintly.
Through the flickering candlelight, the figures of two people were reflected on the wooden window.
Song Ran hid herself in the dark without thinking, and listened through the door panel to hear what was going on inside.
"Who, who is outside?" Liu Yunqi's ears twitched slightly, and with vigilant eyes, he signaled the people around him to be silent.
The sounds in the house suddenly stopped. Only the leaves rustled outside the window.
Liu Yunqi pushed open the wooden window.
The moonlight filtered through the gaps in the leaves and softly illuminated half of Song Ran's face. She stood there with an awkward look on her face, as if her face had been roasted by fire.
Song Ran's skills were more than enough to serve as a forward spy on the battlefield. When he arrived at Liu Yunqi's place, he was caught before he overheard a few words.
It can be seen that his ears are extremely sensitive to sounds.
This ability has not faded at all over the years, Song Ran sighed inwardly.
"Come in through the front door." Liu Yunqi's face was as dark as water.
Come in through the front door? Liu Yunqi was afraid that she would jump in through the window. When she was a child, she did a lot of these things. Unexpectedly, he still remembered.
It turned out that he still only regarded her as that young girl with yellow hair.
Thinking of this, she couldn't help but feel depressed.
After a while, he sighed deeply, straightened his back, opened the door and walked in.
When Leheng saw Song Ran, his face did not show the slightest surprise. Just like on the night of the birthday banquet, he walked forward calmly and bowed to her.
Song Ran looked around the room before finally focusing on Le Heng.
Le Heng was recommended by Uncle Guo to restore him to his position, so she naturally thought that he was from Uncle Guo. But today I saw him having a private conversation with Liu Yunqi behind closed doors. Could he be Liu Yunqi's person?
But then I thought about it, Leheng was the former prince's son, and so was Liu Yunqi's father, so it was not difficult to understand.
She casually turned over the still-stained memorial on the table and asked in shock: "You want to impeach Chen Chaobai?"
Le Heng didn't know how to answer, so he turned his head to look at Liu Yunqi, and their eyes met.
"Still discussing. The current impeachment can only impeach him for his failure to discipline his subordinates." Liu Yunqi hesitated before speaking, frowning in thought.
"Then why do you want to alert others?"
Song Ran looked at the man in front of her with confusion. His eyes were deep and mysterious, as if he was hiding a lot of unspeakable thoughts.
"If you miss this opportunity, you don't know when the next time will be?" Le Heng sighed again after finishing his words.
"How to say?"
"The person behind the assassination of the princess has been identified."
Liu Yunqi stood in front of the window, holding the window lattice with one hand, and his eyes were confusing.
"Who ordered it?" Song Ran stared at Liu Yunqi with burning eyes, waiting for him to continue.
"Do you remember what I told you that day? Chen Chaobai's subordinate Xia Chun."
"Is it him?" Song Ran was stunned. Chen Chaobai wanted to kill Zhaohua? It shouldn't be done either emotionally or rationally.
Liu Yunqi explained everything in detail.
As a bachelor, Liu Yunqi had many eyes staring at him, which made it very inconvenient for him to act.
Leheng was demoted to Xiu Zhuan, an idle official position, a peripheral person who did not attract the attention of others. Liu Yunqi asked him to secretly investigate the truth.
They investigated several ministers who helped Chen Chaoci ascend to power one by one, but found nothing. But Chen Chaobai made a major discovery. His right-hand man Xia Chun married his sister to a butcher. The butcher had close contacts with merchants in Qi.
At first, when Le Heng took over the princess's assassination case, he did not connect the two events.
It wasn't until I was doing an autopsy with him in the morgue of Shuntian Mansion that I saw the assassin's appearance and thought I had seen him somewhere before.
Later, Chen Chaobai came to inspect the progress of the case on behalf of the emperor, and he remembered that when he was tracking down the Qi merchants, he seemed to have seen her in various wine shops with them.
Last night, Leheng asked the emperor for instructions, and while the traders were sleeping, he led officers and soldiers to sneak attack on the inn where they gathered.
They are all very skilled in martial arts and are obviously not ordinary traders.
The man in the lead was tall and muscular. With an order, he led the crowd to fight with the officers and soldiers. The officers and soldiers were forced back several times by them, and it was not until dawn that they were all captured with reinforcements sent by the Ministry of War.
Le Heng was prepared for the fact that they would bite their tongues and kill themselves, and finally left a few alive.
The surviving Qi merchants all denied knowing the female assassin who assassinated the princess that day, and claimed that they were just ordinary merchants who knew some martial arts and only did business outside. It was inevitable that they would encounter some gangsters and they needed to protect themselves.
The case has reached a dead end again. No matter how tortured they were, they stubbornly refused to let go and no words came out of their mouths.
Leheng arrested Xia Yu's husband again, put pressure on him several times, and insisted that he was just doing normal business with them.
He also excitedly accused the government of arresting innocent people and refused to answer other related questions.
Leheng was at a loss as to what to do, tomorrow was the deadline.
Then I thought of coming to Liu Mansion to discuss it. Tomorrow morning, the matter will only be reported to the Qi merchant level, but Chen Chaobai will also be involved through Xia Yu's husband.
Before Song Ran entered the room, the two of them had not yet reached a conclusion.
"I wonder if you two can get the news? Concubine Chen is happy." Both of them widened their eyes when they heard it, as if they couldn't imagine what their ears were hearing.
They looked at each other in disbelief, their eyes filled with astonishment. He turned his attention back to Song Ran again.
"If this news spreads tomorrow, I'm afraid it will attract criticism from the courtiers." Le Heng frowned slightly, with a trace of worry in his eyes.
"The urgent matter now is, if Chen Chaobai has second thoughts about the emperor and wants to kill his brother to seize the throne, then Concubine Chen's child will be a stumbling block for him. Will he take action?"
Song Ran and Liu Yunqi had different ideas.
Although she didn't like Concubine Chen, she didn't want anything to happen to the child.
Everything about Chen Chaobai was actually just their suspicion. They have no definite evidence.
For now, they can indeed sit back and let things unfold. See if Chen Chaobai takes any action, and wait patiently for the fox's tail to show up.
However, it is a living life after all. She couldn't let it go for her own selfish desires.
"What you're worried about does make sense."
Liu Yunqi fell into deep thought. He paced back and forth in the room, his eyes wandering on the bookshelf, as if he was looking for some answer.
He suddenly fixed his gaze on Le Heng's face, picked up the memorial on the desk and said, "I will report this matter to the emperor tomorrow, whether it is to scare the snake, or to shock the tiger."
"If all of this has nothing to do with him, even if we go to court, he won't deliberately embarrass us. If all of this has to do with him, it's not the best policy to alert the snake and make him stop temporarily."
Le Heng nodded and agreed very much with Liu Yunqi's idea. He picked up the pen on the desk again, concentrated on it, and wrote a few strokes on the memorial.
Song Ran saw that the two of them had a tacit understanding of each other, and thought that this was not the first time that they had discussed something like this.
I don’t know when they started to have contact.
The helpless compilation was able to help Liu Yunqi find out so much useful information behind his back. There was no way it was just Le Heng.
Song Ran believed that regarding Xia Chun, they had told her the whole thing in every possible way, but what else? How many things are there.
Song Ran looked at them intently, and Liu Yunqi also felt the fiery gaze behind him.
He turned his head and raised his eyebrows: "This move will probably postpone your marriage for a while."
Song Ran looked at him steadily, opening her lips slightly, as if she wanted to say something, but before she could speak, there was suddenly some commotion outside the room.
The three of them looked outside the house together.
Leheng walked to the door first and opened it.
I saw a maid in Mrs. Liu's room talking to the steward, looking panicked. The steward frowned and looked in the direction pointed by the maid's finger.
Only then did the three of them see that half of the sky was already red.
The red light came from the southwest of the back door of Liu Mansion. There was a smell like burning wood in the air, which was a bit nauseating.
It should be that there was water not far from Liu Mansion.
The street, which was originally quiet late at night, suddenly became noisy.
Liu Yunqi ordered the housekeeper to open the back door.
Several people walked to the door together and looked out.
On the street, fire fighters were busy dragging bucket trucks back and forth to put out the fire.
The barrel cart made a squeaking sound as it bumped along the uneven stone road.
The residents of several households facing the street also wore clothes and opened their doors one by one to come out to find out.
There was a lot of discussion as they looked in the direction of the fire, only to feel that the fire over there was getting stronger and stronger, with no sign of being extinguished.
Song Ran saw Le Heng's expression getting worse and worse, and her heart tightened.
His face turned pale, his hand loosened, and he dropped the folded book on the ground.
Liu Yunqi's face was livid, his hands were clenched into fists, and his eyes were full of anger.
"Is that the direction of Shuntian Mansion?" Song Ran asked anxiously.
Le Heng lost his mind, and his voice sounded like he was frustrated: "Yes. Although the emperor asked Shuntian Mansion to transfer the case to the Ministry of Punishment, Shuntian Mansion is still used for trial cases and prisoner detention."
"Someone can't hold it any longer." Liu Yunqi wanted to rush out of the door and go to have a look. Before he took a few steps, he was stopped by Song Ran.
"Brother Qi, let Master Le go." Le Heng knew what Song Ran meant, nodded to indicate to her, patted Liu Yunqi's shoulder comfortingly, and then ran in the direction of the fire.
Song Ran knelt down and picked up the zhezi that Le Heng had thrown on the ground, then turned around and ordered the housekeeper of the Liu Mansion to close the back door again.
She drove Liu Yunqi back to the study, climbed up the eaves, slowly turned around, and looked down at the surroundings of Liu Mansion.
She was worried that someone was secretly checking every move of Liu Mansion.
She felt relieved after confirming that there was nothing strange around her.
That person probably hadn't noticed Liu Yunqi behind Le Heng yet.
