That evening, Zhong couldn't take it anymore. She kept banging on the door and shouting, "Princess, Princess, kill me! Kill me! Qiangzi has appeared! Qiangzi wants to kill me for revenge!"
"Princess, I'm guilty! I'm guilty! Qiangzi is a child I stole, I confess, I'm guilty!"
"Princess, princess, please kill me quickly! Qiangzi will torture me to death, he will definitely torture me to death. Princess, please end my life with one stroke!"
Gu Xin led her people upstairs and pushed open the door to go inside.
Standing beside Madam Zhong were the Qian family's guards, who were watching her intently, allowing her to move and speak, but would immediately stop her if she had any other ideas.
She had just tried to kill herself by banging her head against the wall or biting her tongue, but she failed. She felt it was torture.
"Princess, Princess, please, kill me! I deserve to die, I deserve to die a thousand deaths! Please end my life with one stroke! Stop torturing me!" Zhong Shi rushed forward as if she had seen a savior when she saw Gu Xin, trying to grab Gu Xin's legs, but Lu Zheng blocked her away.
The Zhong family member at this moment is completely different from when they arrived last night.
She looked as if she had aged ten years overnight. She was dazed, pale, with bloodshot eyes and disheveled hair, like a madwoman.
"You said you stole Hu Qiangzi, how come?" Gu Xin asked.
"Princess, Princess, if I tell you, will you kill me? Let me die!" Zhong pleaded, her eyes darting around as if someone were hiding in the air.
"You're still trying to negotiate with me at a time like this? Fine, tell me, and I'll change your room." Gu Xin thought for a moment and decided it was better to keep the person around; it wouldn't be good if they were scared to death.
She didn't want to do those complicated things—taking the case back to the capital, writing a case file, and issuing a judgment.
"Okay, okay, okay." Zhong said "okay" several times, and then stammered out the details of what had happened.
She and her man were childhood sweethearts and cousins; they came from a small village in Yizhou.
When a plague broke out in their village, everyone was confined to the village. That day, she and her cousin were having a secret rendezvous in the back mountains and didn't go home all night. When they tried to return to the village before dawn, they found it surrounded. Terrified, they secretly ran away.
They were not infected with the plague, but they were in a hurry to escape and had no money, so they looked for odd jobs wherever they went.
Later, because her cousin got into a dispute with someone, that family wanted to take her cousin to the yamen. The two of them had escaped from a village with a plague. If they registered their real household registration, they would be executed. They also had no fake household registration to produce, so her cousin killed the family.
As luck would have it, they stole their household registration and brought her all the way to Taizhou Prefecture.
Fearing discovery, they carried the bodies of the family of three with them when they fled. It wasn't until they left Yizhou and passed through several counties that they dared to strip the already rotting corpses naked and throw them away.
Finally, they used their family's household registration to find work in Taizhou. After accumulating some savings, they came to Qi'an Town and settled down there.
As for the child, it was because his cousin was unable to have children. When the two went out to seek medical treatment, they passed through a village and happened to hear a fortune teller giving a fortune reading to a woman in a family who was newly pregnant.
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