Chapter 18

(Did he castrate himself or not, that is the question.)

Gu Liang walked past Doctor Yu to take a look, and saw that there were two men, one tall and one short, who were clad in long, loose robes coloured in blues and whites, standing outside the room door.

In the current scenario, there were still five characters apart from the deceased. And from the looks of it, they had to be the Oldest Martial Brother and Second Martial Brother.

The slightly taller man took a step forward and greeted Yang Ye and Gu Liang proactively. “We’ve already met Doctor Yu just now. Judging by your appearance, you should be Master Hui and Beauty Yi respectively. h.e.l.lo there, I’m Oldest Martial Brother.”

The slightly shorter man echoed him closely as he said: “I’m the Second Martial Brother.”

“h.e.l.lo.” Yang Ye stopped in front of the room door. “Have you seen the corpse?”

“I’ve seen it,” Oldest Martial Brother replied.

“How do you describe it?” Yang Ye asked casually.

The pale complexion the Second Martial Brother had made it evident that he was a little unwell. “It’s… rather miserable.”

Miserable? What did he mean by miserable?

Logically speaking, he should not have any external wounds if his cause of death was the curse.

Gu Liang’s eyebrows furrowed slightly as he followed in Yang Ye’s footsteps. He had just entered the room when he saw blood gathering in the depressions on the floor.

The trail of blood led to a pool of blood, where the already deceased Perennial w.a.n.g quietly lay.

His lower half was still wearing his pants but the top half was nude. Starting from his collarbones to his torso, there were very few places where there was no blood because his body was littered with knife wounds.

— How much hatred did someone have to possess, to cut into his body again and again?

In the midst of his observation, Yang Ye had already photographed the corpse once before he fetched a basin of water from the water vat in the corner of the room. Then, he retrieved a clean cloth, dipped it into the water and wiped his body down.

“What are youk2026;” Gu Liang wanted to open his mouth to ask something, but he came to a sudden epiphany as wellk2014; the knife wounds were not carved into the deceased in an arbitrary and disorderly manner; these knife wounds seemed to form a few characters.

When Yang Ye eventually wiped off the excess blood, the two characters became incredibly obvious.

— Someone had used a knife and scored the two characters ‘beast’ (畜生) into Perennial w.a.n.g’s body.

Narrowing his brows, Yang Ye lifted up his camera and took another photo of the corpse.

After studying the body for a moment longer, Gu Liang’s gaze s.h.i.+fted towards the left and he noticed a knife at the foot of the bed. The entire blade was stained with blood. There was no mistaking it; it was the murder weapon. After carving the words into Perennial w.a.n.g, someone had directly thrown the knife down at the scene of the crime.

Having photographed the corpse, Yang Ye walked over to Gu Liang: “Have you discovered anything else?”

Gu Liang pointed at the knife. Yang Ye took a picture of it before he turned his head and spotted the empty bowl on the desk.

The camera shutter clicked audibly as Yang Ye photographed the empty bowl thrice. He asked Gu Liang: “Do you know what this empty bowl is for?”

“Beauty Yi has a tryst with you every night, no? In order to keep Perennial w.a.n.g oblivious, she would drug his calming soup with knockout drops. Last night was no exception. I only left after I watched him finish the soup.”

Gu Liang walked to the front of the bronze mirror and handed the rouge box to Yang Ye. “The knockout drops are inside, photograph it.”

Once he was done doc.u.menting it, Yang Ye commented: “If I recall correctly, whenever you looked for me at night, you would always leave before six quarters of an hour into mao s.h.i.+.”

“Yes. Because Perennial w.a.n.g wakes up at that time to practice his martial arts. Beauty Yi had to rush back before he woke up to pretend that she never left,” said Gu Liang. “Today was an exception, considering how she had a.s.sumed that Perennial w.a.n.g was slated to die by her curse. She no longer had to keep up her pretences; she just had to wait for the servant girl to report the news of his death.”

Subsequently after, Gu Liang and Yang Ye continued to rummage and investigate the room, but they did not discover any other useful clues apart from the knockout drops and knife.

Hence, the pair directed their gazes back at the corpse again.

Truthfully speaking, there was nothing left to scrutinise about the front face of the corpse. Yang Ye moved to the side of the corpse and knelt down. Suppressing the nausea he felt, he lifted up the corpse to check if there was anything unusual on his back.

The inspection yielded nothing.

All in all, there were no obvious external injuries on the corpse apart from the carved “beast” that ran vertically down the upper half of his body.

After placing the corpse back into its original position, Yang Ye rose to his feet immediately and breathed out a few times.

It was then and there where he realised that just as he stood up, Gu Liang had chosen to squat down, right beside the lower half of the body.

What made Yang Ye feel strange, however, was the extremely unusual expression on Gu Liang’s visage. There was a smidgen of struggle, some entanglement and hesitation, as if he was trying to make a huge decision.

Yang Ye observed him quietly and watched him hesitate and falter for a whole minute.

One minute later, he finally stretched out his right hand and reached for a certain part of the corpse. His search was extremely thorough too.

Yang Ye: “……!!!???”

But Gu Liang’s action did not last for too long. He seemed to confirm something very swiftly as he retracted his hand hastily.

Yang Ye looked at him incredulously. “Gu Liang?”

Gu Liang raised his eyes to give him a flitting look before he stood up.

Upon noticing that the tips of his ears were a little red, Yang Ye nudged Gu Liang’s straightened body with his shoulder. “What’s the situation?”

Gu Liang went silent for a moment before he asked: “Do you know why I… That’s not right, it’s Beauty Yi. Do you know why she had an extramarital affair?”

“Why?” Yang Ye’s smile was a little roguish, “Isn’t it because I’m too charismatic?”

“Too charismatic?” Gu Liang glanced at his bald head, “Yes, I suppose the top of your head can be used as a light bulb.”

Yang Ye: “……”

Gu Liang’s tone of voice was faint as he continued: “It’s because Perennial w.a.n.g ‘wielded a sword and castrated himself for the sake of cultivating his miraculous skills’, and Beauty Yi found her days as a gra.s.s widow hard to bear as a result of it.”

With keen senses, Yang Ye caught onto something. “But earlier on, Doctor Yu said that she was the daughter borne by Perennial w.a.n.g and his ninth legitimate wife.”

“Precisely. Which is why I previously mentioned that I grasped a lot of important information from Doctor Yu’s words.” Gu Liang’s pupils shrank briefly. “There are three possibilities as to why and how Perennial w.a.n.g had a daughter.

“One, Perennial w.a.n.g only castrated himself after he impregnated his ninth legitimate wife. Two, Perennial w.a.n.g was made a cuckold of, and Doctor Yu is not his biological daughter. Three, there exists two Perennial w.a.n.gs, one real and one fake; Doctor Yu’s father is the real Perennial w.a.n.g; the subsequent ‘self-castrated’ Perennial w.a.n.g, who is concurrently the immediate husband of Beauty Yi, is fake, and is a counterfeit.”

Giving a slight pause, Gu Liang then went on to say: “As a matter of fact, I’ve already eliminated the first two possibilities and confirmed the third ever since we had the conversation with Doctor Yu in the morning. I thought that, even though this case seemed abstruse, it was quite simple in actuality. A lot of people used the same curse simultaneously to kill one person, but there can only be one murderer. It definitely had to be attributed to the fact that there was a problem with the ident.i.ty of the person being cursed.”

Yang Ye nodded his head. “I understand what you’re trying to drive at. The murder suspects are not cognizant of the fact that the current Perennial w.a.n.g is fake, so when they were cursing him, they weren’t using his actual name and Eight Characters. Only the real murderer knows the truth and they killed the counterfeit, since they used the counterfeit’s real name and Eight Characters. There’s no fault in having this conjecture in the morning; this brain hole of yours follows a logical train of thought.”

“Yes. In accordance with this brain hole, Doctor Yu’s father is the bona fide Perennial w.a.n.g, and he has never wielded a sword to castrate himself. Whereas the Perennial w.a.n.g who became Beauty Yi’s husband is a subst.i.tute and fake, and he has castrated himself.”

Having spoken to this point, Gu Liang shook his head. “But from what we can perceive, my thoughts were completely false. For one, I didn’t antic.i.p.ate that there would be blood on the corpse, so whether he died by the curse or the knife is an open question, secondly…”

Yang Ye came to an understanding as he asked: “The deceased still has a small ding ding on his body?”

“…………”

—— Do you have to use that phrase? Are you incapable of imitating the phrase ‘wielding a sword to castrate himself”?

Forget it.

Gu Liang still nodded his head in the end. “Mn.”