Chapter 288: Shadows of Doubt (Part 1)

After clearly threatening Ji Zhun and forcibly roping him onto their voyage of no return, Le Wuya reined in his horse, cracked his whip, and sped off.

Every few miles, a village, with only a few wisps of cooking smoke rising.

The sun hung low, barely a half-pole above the western horizon, clinging weakly to the sky.

When he was only five li from Xiaolian Mountain, Le Wuya dismounted at an old village and asked the local villagers for water.

There were no strong laborers left here; more birds returned to roost than people in the village.

At a thatched cottage at the village's edge, a wrinkled old woman brought him a chipped bowl of water, spilling nearly half before she even got to him.

Le Wuya drank it all in one go: "Granny, let me ask you something—you know Magistrate Zhou?"

The old woman clearly didn't want to chat with this stranger: "...Huh? What'd you say?"

Le Wuya wiped his mouth, didn't push it, stood up, and topped off her half-empty water vat.

Seeing that, the old woman perked right up. Even though she was half-deaf, she still strained to hear, trying to sharpen up: "Magistrate Zhou? Ain't Magistrate Wang the one in charge now?"

If Le Wuya remembered correctly, the "Magistrate Wang" the old woman mentioned should be the magistrate three magistrates ago in Dansui County.

Seeing she didn't know a thing about county affairs, he shifted his question: "Where's your old man?"

The old woman: "Dead as a doornail!"

"...And your children?"

"Went off to the mines. Both of 'em. Gone." The old woman said, "Don't know if I'm cursed or blessed, but everyone's gone, and I'm just a lonely old woman. Anyway, today I still gotta eat my wild greens and noodles!"

Le Wuya didn't stay to share her wild greens and noodles, but he did split one of his own flatbreads and left it on her table.

The bread wasn't as soft and fluffy as when it first came off the griddle, but soaked in noodle soup, it'd probably taste just fine.

Before leaving, he tied his horse to a tree in front of her place, then hoofed it out of the village.

It wasn't until Le Wuya was a good ways off that the old woman noticed he'd left his horse behind. She hustled after him, her big feet slapping the ground: "Boy, what're you doing! You don't want your horse no more?!"

Le Wuya clasped his hands behind his back, turned, and said in a bright, rising tone: "I've got something big to take care of—can't ride a horse for this. Granny, watch the horse for me. If I don't come back, she's yours!"

"For real?" The old woman squinted at the horse—calm, old, and slow—hesitated a beat, then hollered to tease him: "Then I'll butcher it and eat it!"

Le Wuya waved a hand without looking back.

As his figure disappeared into the cold mist of the dying village, the old woman muttered to herself: "...Where in the world did that silly boy come from!"

Back on the main road, Le Wuya picked up the pace.

When the sky went fully dark and the heavy stench of earth and death hit his nose, he knew he'd arrived.

At the foot of Xiaolian Mountain, firelight flickered, lighting up half the sky and giving the disaster-ravaged mountain a ghostly glow.

Half the mountain's face was gone, as if a dragon from the heavens had swooped down and ripped it off.

Shattered cliffs, collapsed peaks, jagged rubble, and mud streaked with dark, rotting leaves and branches winding down the slope.

Among the fallen trees and crumbled walls, leftover water dripped and trickled.

At first listen, it sounded like the mountain's spirits weeping in the night.

From a distance, Le Wuya heard soldiers shouting: "Got another one here!"

People immediately crowded around with torches: "Shovel careful now! These poor folks have been through enough—don't do 'em any more harm!"

"Torch! Torch! Bring a couple more!"

"No, no! Don't all crowd in! Can't even swing a shovel!"

"There's a hand sticking out! Grab a door plank—we'll haul him to the tent to wash up later!"

Some gave orders, some dug, some held torches, some kept records.

It was a remarkably orderly scene.

Le Wuya watched quietly for a bit, then followed the jagged line of the mountain and found a small stream running down from it.

Sure enough, a dozen or so tents stood a few dozen yards from the riverbank, strung out along the water for a hundred yards, like a row of pale grave mounds.

A few men tasked with watching the bodies sat outside the tents, cloth masks over their mouths and noses, dozing off.

Le Wuya crept like a fox, wading through the water on his toes, and not a single one of them noticed.

The tents were shoddily built, just cloth thrown over frames. Under each body was a thick sheet of black oilcloth to catch any fluids, keeping the corpses from seeping into the river as they rotted in the heat.

By disaster relief protocol, this was beyond reproach.

Bodies of disaster victims shouldn't be cremated right away. Instead, they should be washed, identified, and families called in to claim them. After that, the records go to the authorities to officially strike them from the rolls, and then they're buried in a mass grave away from any water source.

Unless a plague had already broken out and cremation was urgent, the procedure was sound.

Le Wuya figured this Magistrate Zhou, whom he still hadn't met, was a thorough one indeed.

With people around, no way to examine things closely, and no decent light, this wasn't the place for a proper corpse inspection.

Le Wuya casually grabbed a corpse's hand.

The back of the kid's head had been bashed in, his body curled up stiff, but his face was still clear—a boy tanned like a little dried black fish, no more than fourteen or fifteen, with a rope around his ankle and a wooden tag hanging off it: "Sun Wei."

Though someone had said to wash the bodies, these corpses only had their faces wiped clean; their bodies were still caked in thick black mud.

But that made sense.

Digging out the buried was the first priority.

If they could pull out even one or two survivors, that'd be a real achievement.

Diverting precious manpower to pretty up the dead—washing and scrubbing—would be putting the cart before the horse.

The calluses on Sun Wei's hands were almost identical to the miner A Shun had strangled—he was probably a miner too.

But Le Wuya felt something was off.

He scanned the area.

Bodies encased in black mud lay sprawled on the oilcloth, nearly blending into the earth itself.

Suddenly, it hit him. He crouched and rubbed the dried mud off Sun Wei's calf with his thumb.

Le Wuya: "..."

He kept climbing, scraping off a large chunk of caked mud from his crushed thigh.

...He was completely naked—not a stitch of clothing on him.

Because they were wrapped in black mud like mud-caked chickens, at first glance, they looked as if they were clothed—hard to tell at a glance.

These miners had been hit by a mudslide in their sleep. Some people don't even bother with underwear when they sleep, so this wasn't unusual.

But what was strange was...

Le Wuya walked to another corpse and did the same, rubbing off the mud from its thigh.

...This one was bare as well.

Because they were so completely bare, the mud clung tightly to their bodies, making them look bizarre.

That was exactly what had felt off to Le Wuya earlier.

...But the survivor killed by A Shun had been fully dressed, with his belt even fastened tight.

A thought crossed Le Wuya's mind.

Risking discovery, he slipped into the next tent.

After going in and out of seven tents and examining over twenty corpses, his suspicion was finally confirmed:

The dead miners—men and women, old and young—fell into two extremes:

They were either fully clothed from head to toe, or completely naked.

Also, the corpses in the same tent mostly wore similar clothing.

In Sun Wei's tent, most of the corpses were naked.

But in the other three or four tents, most were clothed.

...Why would that be?

With doubts swirling, Le Wuya silently slipped away from the corpse tents.

The road up the mountain was guarded by official troops, so he followed a half-ruined, overgrown dirt path and climbed up the ravaged Xiaolian Mountain.

There were also soldiers on the mountain holding torches and carrying shovels—several dozen of them, moving like fireflies, scattered and drifting across the slopes.

Le Wuya deliberately avoided them, using the cover of scattered rocks and fallen trees to weave through the mountain.

After tailing two or three people, he realized they didn't seem to be digging for survivors or bodies, but rather keeping watch.

Or... searching?

There were plenty of people searching the mountain, and Le Wuya didn't want to be spotted. With torches closing in from both sides, he noticed a half-collapsed cave entrance on the cliff and dove in.

But the moment his feet touched the ground, a hand shot out from the darkness, grabbing him and pulling him in!

The next second, a cold mining knife pressed against his neck.

"Don't move... don't move..."

However, this captor was clearly inexperienced—sounding even more panicked than Le Wuya, his captive. "You... you got any food?"