Chapter 624

Under the gaze of Meng'er's sorrowful eyes, Pei Ye did not abandon his principles, stubbornly insisting with a heart of stone that he would tell Princess Jinyang about her true schemes.

The maidservant had no choice but to limp away from the courtyard wall as fast as she could, as if she thought that if she walked fast enough, Princess Jinyang wouldn't be able to catch her and wouldn't bother to hold it against her.

Pei Ye watched her disappear with a smile, then stood up and looked back into the palace. That red-clad figure was hidden amidst the tattered curtains, quietly watching something. Pei Ye withdrew his gaze, looked down at the black ball left on the steps: "Come on, little cat."

The black cat seemed to sigh lightly, stepped forward, and leaped gently onto the snow.

A faint blue line extended from under its paws, sticking to the ground and crawling under the snow, then growing and branching out, gradually spreading into an intertwined, dense net.

Until it covered the entire courtyard, the entire old Moon-Bright Palace seemed to sprout countless magnificent patterns.

Then Pei Ye gently reached out his hand and clenched his fist.

Nothing happened.

"..." He lowered his head.

The black cat looked at him indifferently with its emerald eyes, pressed its small paw down, and orange-red flames suddenly rose from the ground of the entire Moon-Bright Palace, as if a pond of red lotuses had bloomed.

All the residual snow melted away within three breaths. Finally, the flames flew up to the eaves, sweeping away the residual snow and old dust in the gaps of the roof.

"It's been so long, and we still have no rapport," Pei Ye muttered, then began to search. He had already checked carefully once before, and this palace wasn't very complex. Soon, he walked through every corner of the courtyard again with his sword in hand. However, to his surprise, this snow, which had come so coincidentally, hadn't covered up any traces from the old years. He carefully examined the exposed ground and courtyard walls. Let alone fighting, he actually saw very little man-made damage.

This palace had been abandoned four years after it was built. In fact, beneath the dust and rot, it was much newer than it looked.

Pei Ye tilted his head and looked at the black cat squatting on the lamp post. The black cat looked at him, too. Both man and cat were frowning.

When he walked back to the starting point, he saw Li Xizhou had already walked out of the palace and was standing on the steps waiting for him: "What were you doing just now? It made the palace glow red."

"Reporting to Your Highness, the thick snow covered everything last time, so I melted it all away to check this time."

"Did you find anything?"

"No."

Li Xizhou withdrew her gaze and swept a glance over the clean courtyard: "That's fine. Go back and sweep the Zhu Jingdian, too."

"..."

"On the ninth day of the third month in the fourth year of Suolin, ignited by the Moon-Bright Assassination, the Calamity of Qilin Blood set off the greatest political whirlpool in the Divine Capital since the current Saint ascended the throne. In the month that followed, the Ming Ming Niangniang's residence in the deep palace became a true forbidden area, and all entry and exit were controlled... or rather, during those years, there were no records of any entry or exit for this palace at all," Li Xizhou gathered her sleeves. "A month later, the Ming Ming Niangniang died in this palace. No one knew the cause of her death; even the funeral was hasty and sloppy, unable to see the light of day. A few old eunuchs and palace maids burned some yellow paper... What glory in life, what sorrow in death."

Pei Ye listened in silence.

"How do you think my mother died?" Li Xizhou asked.

Pei Ye was silent for a moment: "I've actually been thinking about this these past few days. I've heard that the late Ming Ming Niangniang's own cultivation was at the peak of perfection. Although there are few records of her fighting now, in many aspects, that kind of restrained power could be felt... for example, she was another center of power back then, yet she didn't travel with caution, and there wasn't a truly powerful guard by her side."

"Yes... my mother was very strong."

"Then, the case files say she was weak from childbirth, which is why she was assassinated... I wonder, could a body after Body-Binding really become so fragile from a single childbirth?" Pei Ye said. "The Immortal Platform never touched upon the hidden truth of this. However, if Her Highness the Ming Ming Niangniang truly had less than one-tenth of her strength back then, then there are many ways she could have died."

The youth lowered his voice as much as possible, but his words were still cruel: "She could have been poisoned, she could have been strangled—that's how it's written in books. She could also have committed suicide out of despair, or just anyone with a dagger could have walked in and killed her."

Li Xizhou looked at him with her golden mask, her voice without fluctuation: "Yes, but I don't think it was like that."

"Hmm?"

"I have always felt that my mother must have ended her own life, but it wasn't necessarily out of despair," Li Xizhou looked up and said. "I discovered a long time ago that my mother was much smarter and knew much more than I imagined. Perhaps she saw clearly at the time that she had to die, so she chose to die... it didn't mean she had lost her passion for this world."

"In the month before she died, she sent letters to many people. You didn't find one in Xu Ji's study because he burned it for himself when he went to his execution. In that letter, she told him to exercise more, preferably by running to court every day, and even listed several tips for dealing with lower back pain from old age..." Li Xizhou smiled faintly.

"..."

"... That's a digression," Li Xizhou turned back. "In any case, we now know that a battle must have occurred here before she died."

"..."

"One side was Yu Ziliang's 【Mercury Flower Gonghua Gonghua Gonghua Fucha】, which came to protect her, so the other side was..."

"Coming to kill her."

"Correct, or at least, it posed a threat to her life," Li Xizhou said. "Then in this battle, were Yu Ziliang and his group the attackers or the defenders?"

Pei Ye looked up slightly and understood.

He immediately cupped his hands: "Your Highness is wise; this subordinate has been enlightened."

Li Xizhou smiled faintly: "You understood too quickly; it makes you seem too smart. I hadn't finished speaking yet."

She continued: "Back then, this palace was strictly sealed off. The guards definitely weren't Guo You and Yu Ziliang; they were the ones being guarded against—if you assume they were guarding the late Ming Ming Niangniang here but were defeated and broken through by the killer, you would be wrong. That's why no traces of battle could be found in Moon-Bright Palace."

"Then may I ask Your Highness, where should this subordinate look?"

Li Xizhou nodded with satisfaction: "What Yu Ziliang and Guo You faced back then wasn't an unknown figure coming to assassinate the Ming Ming Niangniang, but rather that the Ming Ming Niangniang had already been sealed inside that palace, with no news getting out and her life or death unknown. That's why they had to risk their lives to activate the highly dangerous 【Mercury Flower Gonghua Gonghua Gonghua Fucha】... so the route they took up was actually the same as ours."

"May I ask Your Highness, how so?"

"From the Directorate of Imperial Manufactories to the back wall of Moon-Bright Palace. If there was a battle, it must have happened on this road."

Pei Ye frowned: "I didn't see a road when I came up."

Li Xizhou turned her head away indifferently: "I told you not to act so smart in front of me, not to turn into a fool."

"Yes."

Pei Ye picked up his sword and leaped outside the courtyard wall. He looked up at the tall, snowy forest of cold pines, then looked down. The stone path, unused for a long time, had indeed been buried long ago.

"These trees must be more than twenty-three years old, right?" He said, looking up.

"Probably two hundred and thirty years old," the black cat said.

Pei Ye said no more. He followed the path downward, carefully examining the surrounding trees. This time, he didn't go far before stopping his steps, looking at a dead, broken tree in front of him.

Moving his gaze to the side, he saw two old trees growing obliquely from the waist, still pointing high toward the sky.

In a forest like this, untended, tilting, twisting, and breaking were actually common. Some trees were even entangled together, their branches poking at each other while their trunks were pressed tightly together... but if you were looking with a purpose, you could still spot some differences.

Trees knocked down by strong winds and those broken by a punch still had different characteristics, even after twenty-three years.

Pei Ye raised his hand to stroke the trunk. Roughly at the height of his chest, a thick scar ran across the entire tree, and the tree burls bulging on it looked like seven or eight giant fists punching from the inside out. And the trunk above this point was leaning toward the south, resting on another tree. It clearly hadn't died; in another month, it would probably sprout tender buds.

"Cut it from here," Pei Ye stepped back two paces and said.

A vermilion line of fire flashed and vanished. As the winter wind blew, the big tree began to emit a faint groan. Pei Ye lowered his head and swept along the stone path he had found, condensing the Vermilion Lotus Fire on his sword into a shovel shape, exposing the stone path that had been buried for twenty years by clearing away the fallen leaves and dead branches buried in the snow and dirt.

When he looked up, there was a loud crash as the big tree behind him also fell.

Pei Ye didn't rush to look. Using this as a radius, he cleared the snow and dirt within a ten-zhang circle, cut down three big trees that looked like they had been damaged, and organized the entire area.

Then, there was no need for any eagle-eyed vision. The traces of the fierce battle back then had only been buried by dust and wood, not vanished with time.

Pei Ye put away the Vermilion Lotus Fire, squatted down on the spot, and reached out to stroke it.

Stones do not heal their own wounds; buried trauma remains unchanged for a hundred years.

After peeling away the mud, a half-length, sharp, and neat crack was branded there, clearly the aftermath of the tip of a sharp weapon being brandished back then.

He stood up and looked around from here. One, two, ten... all the stone slabs that made up the path in this area were left with dense black scars. The observable part was bounded by the edges of the stone slabs; everything beyond that had disappeared—either becoming scars on the trees or falling to the ground, long since leaving no traces.

The black cat stared for a while: "... Are these sword marks?"

"No," Pei Ye touched them lightly, "they are spear marks."

He stood up and turned his head, coming to the trees that had been felled again after twenty years. This time, their cuts were flat and smooth, and the messy growth rings told of the tree's ill-fated life.

As long as all the cover brought by time was wiped away, the fierce battle from back then was completely exposed. Even if only the lingering echoes remained, it was enough to be shocking.

Her Highness the Princess was indeed wise; the place she pointed out was not off by a single bit.

A powerhouse with peerless, fierce spear techniques, a newly forged 【Mercury Flower Gonghua Gonghua Gonghua Fucha】—the two sides of the battle were very clear.

But...

"Can a single spear really defeat this iron body?" Pei Ye frowned and muttered.

If Yu Sicheng had been this strong twenty years ago, he shouldn't have survived the previous two times.

Of course, there were many things that could be analyzed here, such as the actual strength of the 【Mercury Flower Gonghua Gonghua Gonghua Fucha】 used by Yu Ziliang, which could actually be deduced from the remaining traces. Then, one could guess the level of the spear-wielder and whether they had other means... but it actually wasn't that troublesome.

Because the things left behind on this battlefield were more than Pei Ye had imagined.

When he came to the second felled tree, the wounded stump showed him a natural wonder he had never seen before.

From the outside in, first were the dense, wave-like growth rings, then a circle of transparent, amber-colored rings—that was long-solidified resin. And the inner circle sealed by this circle of resin was a carbonized strip the thickness of a finger, brittle in texture and withered black in color, as if it were a different world from the healthy wood on the outside.

Not just this one. Pei Ye continued to search for the trees that had been affected, cutting them into slices one by one. Even if they weren't as standard as this one, he could still always see patches of charred black from many years ago.

He stood still for a moment, then walked quickly back to the stone path, cleaning several stone slabs thoroughly to the end without saying a word, wiping away all the dust. The others had no abnormalities, but one also had a large patch of black soot left on it.

"... Fire."

"Fire," the black cat confirmed.

Pei Ye dug through this land without stopping, occasionally seeing newly buried broken stones and deep spear marks, and constantly seeing traces of smoke and fire like this. It wasn't until he cut open an old tree that had been dead for many years again that Pei Ye truly stood before it in silence.

Inside the heart of the tree, it was completely carbonized. The wood was divided into charcoal strips by its grain, shining with a lustrous black color. If one were to tap it lightly, it would probably emit a crisp sound of gold and jade.

But none of that mattered anymore. Embedded in the heart of such a tree was a finger-long purple-gold fragment... only it was no longer indestructible like a divine material. Its body was covered with honeycomb-like holes, and the edges of each hole were covered with glass-like crystals, as if they had been burned at high temperatures.

Pei Ye was silent for a moment, raised his hand to pick it up. Its thickness was also similar to a finger. He held it up to the sunlight and looked at it carefully for a while, and the shriveled residue inside one of the holes caught his attention.

Dark brown, like rust.

But purple gold clearly doesn't rust.

"This is..."

"Blood," the black cat said definitively.