Chapter 128: Truly Never Seen (Requesting Monthly Tickets)

At the street corner opposite the main gate stood a breakfast stall; Xu Yuan sat down, ordered a bowl of rice noodles, and asked Lang Xiao Ba, "Care to eat together?"

"No need, my lord has already eaten," Lang Xiao Ba refused stiffly, standing beside the four with his hand on his sword, frightening the diners nearby so they dared not sit close.

After finishing breakfast in two or three mouthfuls, Lang Xiao Ba led the way as everyone hurried to the Nancheng Patrol Station.

Along this journey, the whole of Champa felt slower than yesterday.

A peddler carrying a shoulder pole shouted his wares along the street, yet walked with one footstep after another.

An old man pushed a wheelbarrow loaded with vegetables; going downhill, he struggled to hold the handle, the veins on his neck bulging out.

On a sunlit patch of open ground by the street, more than a dozen carters gathered, basking in the sun and complaining that they would earn not a single coin today, and would have to work harder for the next half month to make up for it.

The thief of heaven truly leaves no path for the poor to live.

From the Champa Office to the Nancheng Patrol Station, they walked for more than half a double-hour.

Yesterday, coming and going in haste, Xu Yuan and the others had no time to carefully examine the entire Patrol Station.

Seeing it today, this two-courtyard compound was indeed quite large; the front courtyard was about forty paces wide and twenty paces deep. In the southeast corner stood a well; in the northwest corner grew a patch of purple bamboo; in the center stood a great banyan tree, dividing the entire courtyard in half.

On this western half, there were stone locks, iron knives, and other items used for strengthening the body.

The banyan tree was lush with branches and leaves, its trunk thick and sturdy; its canopy covered half the courtyard, while dozens of birds darted in and out among the branches and leaves, chirping clearly and loudly.

The back courtyard was much smaller, roughly only one-third the size of the front courtyard.

The arrangement was also much simpler, except that beneath the north wall of the back courtyard lay a heavy rectangular stone slab.

It was about a zhang long, five chi thick, and seven chi wide, probably weighing several thousand jin.

In the center position was a groove five chi long, yet not deep; no one knew what it was for.

The surface of the stone slab was mottled and rough, yet the marks left by the stonemasons, chisel by chisel, when they originally carved this stone were still clearly visible.

The entire stone was cleaned very thoroughly, with no dust, bird droppings, or the like to be seen.

Strangely, scattered beneath the stone were some broken porcelain shards, three broken incense sticks, and several squashed oranges and plantains.

Xu Yuan asked curiously, "What is going on here?"

Lang Xiao Ba hesitated for a moment before saying, "This bridge stone is the auspicious object of the Patrol Station. Normally, everyone would offer fruits, vegetables, and incense to it.

But yesterday, my lord He died right before its eyes; the brothers held resentment in their hearts, so they smashed these offerings. In the future, this thing will probably have to be moved out."

Xu Yuan could not help but step forward to examine the stone closely; auspicious objects were not common.

For instance, Ah Hua was an auspicious object, and even Da Fu should count as one.

In essence, door gods were also auspicious objects, only that they functioned differently from ordinary auspicious objects.

The function of all auspicious objects was: to drive away evil spirits.

Excluding door gods, true auspicious objects were actually very rare. Otherwise, those prominent families would have one each long ago, and would not need to spend so much silver every year to buy the Great Almanac from the Imperial Astronomical Bureau.

Yet Xu Yuan walked around this "bridge stone," circling it three times forward and three times backward, but found nothing strange about it.

Generally, auspicious objects always displayed some extraordinary quality.

For instance, Ah Hua and Da Fu were simply fatter and larger than their kind just by looking at their size.

Yes, fatter and larger—not huge.

"Have you ever personally seen this stone drive away evil spirits?"

Lang Xiao Ba thought for a moment, then shook his head: "I have not seen it."

"When the office originally bought this courtyard, this thing was already placed here. The original owner said that a hundred years ago, it was one of the bridge stones from a stone bridge dismantled on the Hun Du River outside the city; it possessed great spiritual power and must be an auspicious object, which is why he was reluctant to sell the mansion.

He said so, and since the brothers dealt with evil spirits every day, they preferred to believe it existed rather than not, yet they did not expect that after worshipping it for several years, it accomplished nothing."

The Hun Du River outside Champa was a great river, flowing from Southern Jiaozhi all the way into the neighboring Kingdom of Champa.

However, it was now also part of the Great Canal of the Ming Dynasty.

When the Ming Dynasty built the canal, countless various bridges were dismantled.

Why? The Dragon King of the Canal did not like them.

It was said that the Dragon King felt that every bridge was a ring bound around his body.

But building a stone bridge on the Hun Du River? The Hun Du River was thirty zhang wide; Xu Yuan did not believe the people of Jiaozhi a hundred years ago had such capability.

"The price for this mansion was not cheap, was it?" Xu Yuan asked.

"This, my lord, I do not know."

Xu Yuan stopped looking; it was most likely just an ordinary large stone, and the original owner had made up an excuse to ask for more silver.

Xu Yuan walked toward the side room where the incident occurred yesterday: "Has the room been cleaned?"

"It has been cleaned; otherwise, evil spirits might appear at night."

All the bloodstains in the room were gone; Xu Yuan could tell from the traces that they had been burned by the Fu Zhong Huo of a Dan Xiu.

If not handled this way, something might emerge from these bloodstains at night!

Xu Yuan entered the room and stood still beneath the roof beam.

Song Lu, emboldened even in broad daylight, carefully searched and inspected every corner of the room.

Fu Jingyu walked over and stood shoulder to shoulder with Xu Yuan: "Have you seen anything?"

Images flashed through Xu Yuan's mind; the most recent was a few days ago when buying a black donkey heart, where the butcher boss plunged his knife in, and when he pulled it out, donkey blood sprayed everywhere.

"Look at these traces of fresh blood," Xu Yuan said. "Why would the evil spirit deliberately spread fresh blood everywhere?"

Fu Jingyu was puzzled: "Deliberately spread?"

Xu Yuan then changed his wording: "Have you ever seen someone kill a chicken?"

Xu Yuan had seen it; his stepmother would make smoked cured chicken during the holidays.

After plucking all the feathers from the chicken's neck, she would make a horizontal cut across the blood vessels, first catching the chicken blood in a bowl; after it had mostly drained, she would toss the chicken aside.

The chicken would struggle for a while in its death throes, and droplets of blood from the wound would splash everywhere.

But such bloodstains always followed a traceable pattern.

The blood splatter from the black donkey when it was killed also left a traceable pattern.

But the traces in this room are not like that.

Xu Yuan imagined in his mind He Jun'an fighting a malevolent spirit, being bitten and scratched, visualizing how the blood might have splattered.

Even imagining He Jun'an's belly being slit open, and if the malevolent spirit dragged his corpse around the room, it would smear blood everywhere.

Yet even stacking all these possibilities together, they still did not match these bloodstains.

There was a lot of blood in the room, but here a patch, there a patch, as if someone had casually wiped some here and sprinkled a bit there.

But when Xu Yuan asked this question, Young Master Fu looked bewildered: "I've never seen it."

In fact, before meeting Ah Hua, Young Master Fu had hardly even seen a chicken that wasn't served on a plate.

Xu Yuan felt a bit discouraged; after briefly explaining a few points and stating his doubts, he said, "We must find someone from the Zhan Cheng Bureau to ask whether all crime scenes are like this."

Speaking of which, Xu Yuan suddenly remembered: "Why hasn't Inspector Lu arrived yet?"

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(End of Chapter)