"Did anyone else handle the body during transportation?"
"I was responsible for the entire escort. No one else knew about it and had no way of handling it."
The air fell into a brief stagnation, and no one could break the mystery lurking in the darkness.
Xiao Nanhui's thoughts drifted away at this moment.
If, she meant if.
Did Xu Rui really die that night?
She suddenly recalled some details of that night.
As she followed the swaying palace lantern, she seemed to be constantly inhaling a faint, rotten odor. At the time, she thought it was her own imagination. After all, how could there be anything rotten in the royal palace? But now, thinking about it, she suddenly had an incredible answer.
She was not following a living person that day, but a corpse that had been dead for several days.
Thinking of this, she suddenly felt a surge of trepidation and nausea. The doubts deep within her heart spread like ink in water, and Xiao Nanhui felt that her understanding of common sense was being shattered once again.
At this moment, Su Wei's voice finally sounded again.
"Apart from the marks left by you chopping off its arm, are there any other external injuries on the body?"
"There is one place, but I'm not sure if it counts. Your Majesty needs to get closer to see it clearly."
Ding Weixiang held the candlestick close to the arm on the other side of the corpse.
Under the candlelight, there was an inconspicuous black spot on the tip of the swollen finger, which looked like a thorn that had accidentally pricked the finger.
"What's this?"
"I don't know, and the coroner who performed the autopsy couldn't explain it either. Perhaps it was some kind of poison or insect poison that left traces. I've asked everyone in the palace who knows this to look, but no one can tell me. I've also searched all the medical books and found no record of it."
"Wait a minute." Xiao Nanhui suddenly spoke up, then looked at Ding Weixiang beside him. "I remember that during the Changmitai Festival that day, there was a person standing in the crowd ringing a bell. Do you still have that person's portrait?"
Ding Weixiang stood there, not moving for a while.
"There's one more."
"Have you shown it to His Majesty?"
"The assassination has yet to be determined, and the portrait was simply a random sketch by a fortune teller on the street..."
"Take it out." Xiao Nanhui interrupted hurriedly, not caring about Ding Weixiang's reaction for the moment, "Take it out and show it to him."
An inexplicable intuition connected the fragments in her mind, vaguely outlining the truth behind it. She wanted to look more closely but didn't know where to start, so she could only rely on her feelings to grasp one or two of them to verify.
Ding Weixiang's eyes met hers, as if he was considering the reason for the urgency in her words, but Su Wei beside him had already spoken.
"It's okay, it's just a portrait, just show it to me."
After his master gave the order, Ding Weixiang had no choice but to take out the wrinkled wanted poster.
"I once used this portrait to conduct a search for the murderer within a hundred miles of Jiaosong County, but ultimately found nothing. Therefore, I thought this portrait might be different from the murderer, so I did not present it to Your Majesty immediately."
Su Wei didn't say anything, but just took the paper silently.
He held a thin piece of paper in his hand. The light from the candlelight danced on it, and the portrait drawn on it also became distorted like a ghost.
Xiao Nanhui looked at the reaction on his face nervously, but this man always looked unmoved, so she really couldn't tell anything.
Ding Weixiang was already getting a little impatient, but Xiao Nanhui held him down, and Su Weiyi put down the portrait.
"The drawing is indeed a bit sloppy, but it is quite vivid."
Xiao Nanhui quickly asked, "Then your majesty... have you seen this person?"
Su Wei paused for a moment, then uttered a name.
"Zou Sifang."
The three light words were like a giant's wrist that reset a huge rock in Xiao Nanhui's heart.
If one person and two people admit their mistakes, it will not lead to a third person also admitting their mistakes.
Her inference was correct. The shadowy figure mingling among the crowd under Changmi Stage that day was Zou Sifang.
Ding Weixiang couldn't help but remind him.
"But Zou Sifang was already dead in the swamp of Baiyao Pass that day."
"But Xu Rui is dead too." Xiao Nanhui's voice gradually became firmer. She mustered up the courage to speak out her inner speculation, "What if Zou Sifang, like Xu Rui, came back from the dead?"
This bold and terrifying inference caused the entire secret room to fall into a brief silence again.
Life and death are determined by fate. Who wants to change his destiny?
Or was it the god that the servant mentioned that was causing trouble, manipulating ghosts and gods to confuse people's souls?
"The dead cannot be resurrected, and even ghosts and gods are powerless." Su Wei's voice rang deep in her ears. "But this matter is indeed strange. I remember that when we were in Huozhou, it was the boy from the Qu family who cured Zou Sifang."
Ding Weixiang nodded: "Exactly."
"Send me a secret order. Go to the Qu family in Wancheng to find Qu Mo and tell them that..." He paused, then said something that had almost been forgotten, "that there was a problem with the secret seal and that they want him to come and check it out."
"yes."
Ding Weixiang bowed his head and accepted the order, and the emperor's voice reminded him again.
"This matter must be kept secret and no one else should be disturbed."
The smell of styrax mixed with the fishy smell formed a strange smell in the nose, as if some terrible truth was about to be unable to be concealed and was about to rush out.
A gust of cold wind blew, and the torches on the wall began to shake twistedly, and Xiao Nanhui shivered.
In the dim light around her, she almost had an illusion:
The blackened finger hanging outside the white cloth seemed to move.
And the memory of being in Murhe in late spring, because of this finger, spread out a scene that she had never witnessed with her own eyes.
Perhaps after they walked out of that wild land that day, in some wild corner behind them, in that damp and cold swamp, something broke the deathly silence.
After devouring the living creatures, it transformed back into smooth mud. Suddenly, a pale hand stretched out from the earth. A human body that should have been rotting broke out of the earth and crawled back to the human world in a strange manner...
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