Chapter 240: No Rouge in Shanghai

Zhong Kui's eyes flickered with a dark cloud: "Regardless of who it was, to move a corpse from the Huang Daxian Temple to the kiln in this courtyard without anyone noticing—according to your brother's account, this person named Dong Nansheng was not from Sanwu Town. That raises a question: if he was an outsider, how did he know about your kiln, and how could he avoid you to hide the body?"

"Because... he was the previous Great Immortal, and he had magic?" Feng Yongfu answered with a bizarre line of reasoning.

Qi Fei, standing to the side, couldn't help but laugh despite himself. He asked, "Besides the urn that this Dong Nansheng ordered, have you kept any other belongings of Feng Yongshou? I want to see if there are any valuable clues."

With the deepening of Zhong Kui's questioning, Qi Fei's state of mind had relaxed compared to before; he was finally able to use his investigative faculties to think.

"We've been waiting for Yongshou to return. Ever since he went missing, his room hasn't been touched. I'll take you there." Feng Yongfu said, turning and walking toward the other side of the main hall. There was an inconspicuous small door leading to a staircase only wide enough for one person.

Zhong Kui and Qi Fei followed Feng Yongfu upstairs, their feet treading on the old wooden stairs, which emitted a "creak, creak" sound.

Feng Yongfu took out his keys and opened the room closest to the top of the stairs.

Qi Fei looked around the empty two-story house and couldn't help but ask, "Are you the only one living here now?"

"Sigh, yes. Yongshou went missing, and after my parents passed away, I'm the only one left. I told you, in this line of work, it's very hard to find a wife."

As they spoke, the wooden door opened with the sound of the key turning.

A smell of aged mildew rushed out to meet them.

It was a small, square room containing nothing but a wardrobe, a desk, and a single bed.

Qi Fei looked around, opening the wardrobe to find Feng Yongshou's clothes from back then still hanging neatly inside.

"Have you cleaned this room?"

"No. This is exactly how it was set up the day Yongshou went missing. I haven't touched a thing. My brother was a clean person and didn't like us touching his things.

I always thought he would come back, so I respected his habits and kept it exactly as it was back then."

"He really had a bit of OCD, didn't he?" Qi Fei looked at the row of clothes and said, "He even arranged them in a color gradient."

Hearing the words "OCD," Zhong Kui walked over with great interest. Sure enough, Feng Yongshou didn't have many types of clothes—mostly black, white, gray, and blue—but every color was neatly arranged from dark to light.

Zhong Kui scanned them, then suddenly raised a hand and pointed to a spot: "A color shade is missing here."

Qi Fei looked closely and saw that in the blue arrangement, there was indeed a large jump in color between two shirts. However, he didn't think much of it: "Couldn't it just be that he didn't happen to own that shirt?"

Zhong Kui didn't refute him, but turned to ask Feng Yongfu a question: "Your brother bought all his own clothes, right?"

Feng Yongfu nodded immediately: "As expected of the Great Immortal. My brother was very stubborn about these little things. He didn't like the clothes my mother bought him, so he had to buy them himself. He only bought those few colors and didn't want any patterns. My mother and Yongshou argued about this quite a bit. I was the easy one to please, so I often got the hand-me-downs." A rare smile appeared on Feng Yongfu's face, though it was tinged with bitterness.

Zhong Kui smiled faintly and said nothing, turning her gaze elsewhere. Her eyes landed on Feng Yongshou's bedside, where several literary magazines were placed. The yellowed magazines were frayed at the edges, looking as if they had been read many times. It seemed these magazines were a rare pastime in his dull life.

In those days, magazines would illustrate some of the important content on their covers.

Zhong Kui was indeed very interested in these things, looking through them one by one until she stopped at one.

"Look at this cover." She handed the magazine to Qi Fei.

Qi Fei didn't understand, but looked at the hand-drawn illustration on the magazine, which featured characters from different stories of the era.

Soon, however, his gaze fell upon one of the figures.

This person was wearing an oversized suit, had short hair, and wore glasses, but had delicate features that immediately brought that name to his mind—Dong Nansheng.

The character illustration was labeled with its source: *No Rouge in Shanghai*.

Qi Fei hurriedly flipped to the story according to the table of contents.

It was a story about a woman in the Republican era who disguised herself as a man to escape her feudal family and fall in love with a progressive youth.

The content of the story didn't matter; what mattered was that the protagonist's alias after disguising herself as a man was "Dong Nansheng."

At this moment, the smile on Zhong Kui's face was hard to suppress, as if she had caught a ghostly figure. She said leisurely: "The most fantastical imagination is nothing more than a rearrangement of reality."

"Does this mean that the Huang Daxian murder and Dong Nansheng ordering the urn were all made up by Feng Yongshou?" Qi Fei couldn't hide his surprise.

Hearing this, Feng Yongfu was even more shocked. He didn't know what Zhong Kui and Qi Fei had discovered in the magazine, and he hurriedly defended Feng Yongshou: "My brother was a very honest person. He wouldn't joke about such things, and during that time, his depression was so deep—it couldn't have been faked!"

Qi Fei handed the magazine to Feng Yongfu and pointed to the name "Dong Nansheng" in the article: "Could it be such a coincidence that the person he met happened to be reading the same magazine?"

Seeing the name, Feng Yongfu was immediately stunned into silence.

Zhong Kui said inappropriately: "It seems you really never touched Feng Yongshou's things, otherwise you would have discovered twenty-seven years ago that he was spreading rumors about Huang Daxian."

Hearing this, Feng Yongfu said blankly: "Does this mean no one actually died back then?"

"Not necessarily. Someone might have died, but it wasn't Huang Daxian who did the killing." Zhong Kui said coldly, her gaze fixed on Feng Yongfu, as if she were looking at the already-dead Feng Yongshou. "If I'm not mistaken, the killer was your brother, Feng Yongshou."

These words were like a thunderclap, exploding in the quiet Jiangnan courtyard.

"No, Great Immortal, that is absolutely impossible!" Feng Yongfu shook his head stubbornly.

Yet Zhong Kui did not waver in the slightest. She pointed to the clothes Feng Yongshou had arranged so neatly in the wardrobe: "I remember you said that Feng Yongshou was wearing a white shirt when he went missing. But there is a piece of clothing missing here. Some compulsive behaviors are very hard to break. For example, his obsession with arranging his clothes into a complete color gradient—yet in the blue section, a color shade is suddenly skipped..."

"No, Great Immortal, this is absolutely impossible!" Feng Yongshou shook his head stubbornly.

However, Zhong Kui did not waver at all. She pointed to the clothes that Feng Yongshou had arranged neatly in the wardrobe: "I remember you said that Feng Yongshou was wearing a white shirt when he disappeared. But there is one less piece of clothing here. Some compulsive behaviors are very difficult to break. For example, he is obsessed with arranging clothes into a complete gradient color, but the blue place suddenly skipped a color..."