All of Song's strength vanished after seeing the dozen or so corpses laid out in front of the courtroom.
She scrambled and stumbled out of the courtroom, yelling, "Witch! Witch!"
She's a witch!
Bai Yan gave her a look, and Cai Zhu went down and grabbed Madam Song's shoulder: "Take a good look at the sins you've committed over the years!"
Chen Mingzhao is a beast, she's worse than a beast!
"Is that all?" Bai Yan asked.
“Not just that.” The head constable in charge of the salvage operation was pale. “Some of them were already skeletons, submerged underwater and bound by aquatic plants. Only people with excellent swimming skills could retrieve them. We could only bring back the bodies from the bottom of the river.”
Some were highly decomposed, while a few, having been dumped in winter, were still fresh.
"Ah!" In the courtroom, Widow Sun suddenly screamed and rushed towards one of the corpses with a gold bracelet on its wrist: "Ahhh! My daughter, my daughter!"
She wept uncontrollably: "They said you're still alive! They said if I didn't tell them, they would let you come back!" Widow Sun hugged the corpse and wailed.
"My daughter, come back!"
We are all born of parents; who could remain unmoved by such a scene?
"My daughter disappeared seven years ago too. Was she killed by Chen Mingzhao?" Another beggar-like madwoman burst in, and no one stopped her. She walked up to Song Shi and shook her frantically: "Her name was Xiao Rong. Chen Mingzhao killed her, didn't he?"
"You madwoman, I don't know you!" Song felt nauseous from being shaken, but she couldn't push her away.
Bai Yan sighed softly. She walked from inside the hall to the grievance drum at the entrance of the yamen: "It is true that I killed Chen Mingzhao, but I do not admit to the crime of murder."
She looked up at the sky and said, "Heaven above, if you believe Bai Yan is innocent, then please let the dark clouds disperse and restore a bright and clear world to the land."
These days, the snow and rain have been incessant, and the sky is covered by dark clouds, making it naturally gloomy overhead.
But after Bai Yan finished speaking, a gust of wind rose up, stirring up the remaining clouds in the sky, causing the sunlight to pour down on the earth and onto the girl standing in front of her. Her skirt was slightly lifted by the wind, but her back remained straight.
"It's Heaven! Heaven says the Second Miss is innocent!"
"The Second Young Lady didn't kill a human, she killed a demon!"
"What second young lady? It's the Empress! Even the heavens are endorsing the Empress. Today, it must be the Heavenly Emperor possessing the Empress's body, otherwise why would Madam Song speak so frankly!"
"How dare she lie to God?"
"Heaven is rewarding the goddess for punishing this evil spirit on earth!"
"Long live the Empress!"
"Long live the Empress!"
Amidst the cheers of thousands, Huo Yanjun and Bai Shengqi quietly slipped away from the outside...
After asking the questions, Bai Yan and Bai Ruifeng rode back to the mansion together, and the rest of the matters were handled by Lord Liu of the Jingji Prefecture.
Because Bai Yan had promised to pay for all the money to retrieve the remains from the river, many people knelt outside her sedan chair to see her off.
Bai Ruifeng looked at the people kneeling all the way at the entrance, and her heart trembled slightly.
She seemed to have found a way of life more interesting than revenge, and then suddenly laughed as she thought of something: "When I used to read storybooks about souls traveling to the mortal world to take revenge, I always felt like I was the protagonist in those storybooks. Now I realize it's you, Xiao Yan. Even God is on your side."
"It's not that God is on my side."
Bai Yan leaned against the carriage, eating fresh fruit. "If I am to be the empress, I cannot bear the burden of murder. It is true that I killed someone. By observing the celestial phenomena, I can ask the heavens to grant me the power to kill."
Chen Mingzhao deserved to die, but her death shouldn't tarnish her reputation.
He is a wise ruler of this world, so she should also be a benevolent empress.
Bai Ruifeng's eyes widened: "Then those questions you asked Song Shi, weren't they told to you by God?" If it weren't by God, how could she have so accurately told when Chen Mingzhao killed someone and where he hid the body?
Bai Yan said, "A person's mouth can lie, but their subconscious actions do not."
"I only need to test her; the more accurate my statements are, the more her psychological defenses will crumble." Coupled with some subtle techniques for observing micro-expressions, how could Song not confess?
She's not a professionally trained person, and besides, even a secret agent could ask her that question.
She understands celestial phenomena and can solve cases... Bai Ruifeng looked at Bai Yan in surprise... Is this her sister?
"Sister, are you crazy!" Bai Yan waved in front of her with a smile: "I want to eat meat dumplings when we get home. You make my favorite meat dumplings."
"Oh, okay." Bai Ruifeng glanced at her tentatively again: "I'll make you a few jujube paste fillings too, I remember you like them too."
Bai Yan frowned: "Sister, you must be mistaken. I hate red date paste filling the most."
Bai Ruifeng finally breathed a sigh of relief: "I must have remembered wrong." She pinched her cheek and rubbed it: "I'll go home and make you some zongzi right away!"
...
The reputation of the Chen family was completely ruined during the public trial at the Jingji Prefecture government office.
Even if the whole thing was done by the Song family and Chen Mingzhao, Chen Hou cannot escape his guilt even if he was unaware of it—he gave a demon enormous power, and that was his mistake.
The Chen family were founding fathers with unparalleled achievements. Moreover, the ringleader had already died, and the capital prefecture government could not impose a heavy punishment. In the end, the matter was handed over to His Majesty, who stripped the Chen family of their title of Marquis. However, this also erased all of the Chen family's century-old glory.
Leaving aside how many of the male members of the Chen family were affected in their future, the married and unmarried girls were devastated. With such a mother (the legal wife) and such a devilish brother, how could they possibly survive?
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