Chapter 803: A Tongue Duel Calms a Thousand's Rage, a Lone Millstone Holds the Eight Directions

Chu Ci twitched the corner of his mouth.

"White Feather Letter."

He pulled a similarly folded triangular letter sealed with a white chicken feather from his chest—one he had picked up on the road yesterday.

He shook the letter in his hand twice, and it whooshed.

"Is this thing something you saw in Qi State, or only after you arrived in Xiazhou?"

The crowd fell silent for a beat.

The young man's mouth opened slightly, but no words followed.

Chu Ci unfolded the White Feather Letter, pinched it with two fingers, and held it up where everyone could see.

"Everyone, you have lived most of your lives in Qi State—have you ever seen a letter like this?"

His gaze swept over the crowd, looking at each person.

"You haven't, right? Because this isn't something from Qi State, nor something I placed, nor something Chen Zhuguo placed."

He turned the letter over and pointed his fingertip at the white chicken feather on the back.

"Have you ever considered the simplest question: who slipped these letters into your doorways?"

Someone in the crowd muttered softly.

"I don't know—woke up and it was at the door."

Chu Ci seized on that sentence.

"Yes, you woke up and it was at the door. Over thirty villages, tens of thousands of households, all receiving it the same night—do you think one person could have done this?"

His voice rose a half step, carrying a sharpness that chilled the back of the neck.

"How many people, how much silver, how many roads would it take to stuff tens of thousands of letters into tens of thousands of doorways in one night?"

The sound in the grinding yard fell lower again.

The young man's hoe drooped two inches, his expression shifting from excitement to hesitant doubt.

Chu Ci gave no room for that hesitation.

"Now I'll ask you a second question."

He pointed a finger at a woman holding a child in the crowd.

"Sister‑in‑law, how old is the child in your arms?"

The woman, startled by his naming, instinctively pulled the child tighter to her chest.

"Two, two years old."

Chu Ci's finger moved from the woman to the freshly irrigated field on the north side of the grinding yard.

"Who allocated that plot to your family?"

The woman bit her lip.

"It… it was allocated by the authorities."

Chu Ci's voice suddenly rose half a step.

"No, it wasn't the authorities—it was Chen Zhuguo!"

He thrust his finger toward the direction of Tongwan City in the east.

"When you fled from Qi State, did you have land? No. Did you have grain? No. Did you have household registration? No. You didn't even have a way to live!"

His voice was like a blade drawn from its sheath, cutting into everyone's nerves stroke by stroke.

"Who opened the city gates for you, who gave you rations, who handed out fields, who delivered plow implements, who posted the Three-Year Tax Exemption notices on every county wall!"

The grinding yard fell completely silent.

Over three hundred people stood there, mouths agape, hoe and shoulder pole hanging at their sides, the expression of madness peeling away layer by layer, revealing the forgotten layer beneath.

Chu Ci inhaled deeply, his voice dropping sharply to a heaviness that made the chest ache.

"When you were in Qi State, who fed you grass?"

No one answered.

"The aristocratic lords fed you grass, made you gnaw bark, chew Guanyin earth, starve you by the roadside without even a straw mat."

He withdrew his finger from the east and pointed again at the millstone beneath his feet.

"When you reached Xiazhou, Chen Zhuguo gave you fields, tax exemption, a way to live, and a chance to be human!"

He raised his voice to the loudest he had ever mustered in his life, his vocal cords nearly tearing.

"Do you trust those aristocratic tyrants who drove your whole families to death in Qi State, or do you trust Chen Qingtian, who gives you food and lets you stand as a person!"

When those words landed, the air in the grinding yard seemed struck by a hammer.

Silence lasted five breaths.

The first to collapse was the woman holding a child; her knees gave way and she knelt, tears streaming whoosh, repeatedly murmuring the same sentence.

"It was Chen Zhuguo who saved us, Chen Zhuguo who saved us…"

Then the second, the third, the tenth.

The hoe and shoulder pole were tossed onto the ground, clattering.

The young man who had blocked the door with his hoe stood still, his lips white from biting, the hoe handle slick with his sweat, eventually slipping from his grasp, clacking against the mud twice.

He crouched, hugging his head with both hands, sobbing quietly.

Chu Ci stood on the millstone, chest heaving violently, beads of sweat on his forehead running down his chin into his collar.

He glanced back at the pale moonlit figure standing beneath the crooked‑necked tree at the edge of the grinding yard.

Hongye gave a slight nod, the short sword in his right sleeve never leaving its ready position.

Meanwhile, inside the Zongguan Fu of Tongwan City, forty li from Zhangtai Village, Gao Jiong slapped a list just seized from a Hidden Agent onto Chen Yan's Zitanmu Chang'an.

"Report to Chen Zhuguo, the source of the White Feather Letter has been traced."

Chen Yan lifted his eyes from the desk.

Gao Jiong's voice was held in a very tight tone.

The Chenjia Fang in the south township of Qinggui County, the Majia Wan in the east suburb of Yongchang County, and the Zhou Ji Pharmacy inside Ningyuan County are the three main printing and distribution sites of the White Feather Letter.

He scratched three deep crescent‑shaped marks on the list with his fingernail.

Behind Chenjia Fang stands Chen Wantong, a local three‑generation grain merchant family; on the surface he is a great philanthropist who distributes porridge for three days at the village entrance every twelfth month, and his reputation is outstanding.

Chen Yan's finger made a stroke on the list.

"What about Majia Wan?"

Gao Jiong's voice lowered another half step.

Ma Delu of Majia Wan, an old‑brand landlord left from the previous dynasty, secretly shelters more than two thousand hidden households; the Hidden Agent of the Mingjing Department discovered in his backyard cellar a large amount of standard fire seal of the Qi State Shadow Department and bamboo slips used for encrypted coding.

Chen Yan folded the list once, and his finger rubbed back and forth over the crease.

"The third."

Gao Jiong clenched his jaw.

The shopkeeper of Zhou Ji Pharmacy is named Zhou Mao Cai; his identity is the most complicated. He is not a local—his household registration lists him as a drug merchant who migrated from Nanyang Commandery—but the Hidden Agent investigated for three days and three nights and found his accent carries a hint of the downtown flavor of Yecheng's eastern district.

Chen Yan's finger stopped.

"Yecheng."

Gao Jiong nodded.

The Hidden Agent suspects he is a full‑time liaison directly sent from Qi State, responsible for acting as a messenger between the powerful families of Xiazhou and the Shadow Department of Yecheng.

Chen Yan placed the list on the desk, and his palm covered the three names marked with crescent scars.

"Three Rats, wearing three human skins, have dug a three‑year tunnel on my domain."

His palm slowly contracted, and the list was clenched in his hand into a crumpled paper ball.

"That's enough for me to deal with."

He lifted his head and looked at Gao Jiong.

"Hold off on acting for now; let the Hidden Agent keep watching. What I want isn't the three Rats; I want the entire tunnel behind them."

Gao Jiong punched his chest armor and left the study.

Chen Yan sat alone at the brightly lit desk; the list in his hand, which had been crumpled into a paper ball, gradually loosened, spread on the desk, and the ink of the three names was smeared by sweat into a vague black blot.

His gaze passed over the desk surface and landed on a corner of the military sand table on the wall.

How many tunnels remain beneath Xiazhou, how many rats, how many poisonous snakes wrapped in the skins of good people.

Can they all be killed?

They cannot all be killed.

A knife can cut off a head, but cannot cut away what's inside the mind.

He needs a weapon sharper than a knife.

A weapon that can be thrust directly into a person's brain.