Chapter 5: The Secret at the Bottom of the Dry Well

The test results chilled Yifeng to the bone. It was a rare poison found only in the Western Regions, worth a fortune, certainly not something his second uncle, who was only good at the timber trade, could have easily gotten his hands on.

So who had supplied it?

That night, he slipped quietly out of the mansion and made his way to an abandoned dry well behind the old garden. According to a hazy memory from his childhood, he had once seen his mother secretly hide a small wooden box there before she died.

The well had been dry for years, its stone walls covered in moss. He tied a rope and climbed down himself, his fingers groping in the dark until they found a loose stone. Behind it was a small hollow, and inside sat a sandalwood box, partly rotted away.

When he opened it, there was no gold or jewels inside, only a stack of yellowed letters and a broken jade pendant carved in the shape of a pair of mandarin ducks.

After reading the first few lines, Yifeng’s hands began to shake. These were letters between his mother and a man named “Beitang Yuan.” Not love letters, as the slander had claimed all those years ago, but warnings: his mother had discovered that his second uncle was colluding with merchants from the Western Regions to smuggle military weapons, and she had been planning to report it to the authorities.

So his mother’s death hadn’t simply been a matter of family jealousy. It had been a calculated killing to silence her!

Yifeng gripped the letters, and for the first time in ten years, a killing intent he made no effort to hide flashed in his eyes.