Chapter 314: Battle of Wits (9)

Chapter 314: Battle of Wits (9)

Zhi Jie gave a tight-lipped smile: "So it's me and Teacher in one pot, bamboo shoots stewed with crow?"

Le Wuya kicked the tip of his foot: "Cut the jokes. I'm asking you—if you were your father, what would you be thinking right now?"

Zhi Jie said seriously, "Teacher, I am not my father."

Le Wuya kicked his foot again: "Stop pretending. You're sharp as a tack, don't give me that 'above it all' act."

Zhi Jie looked a little wronged, touching his wound and staying silent.

Le Wuya looked up and had a vague idea of what was bothering him.

"Fine, you're not, you're not." He reached out and covered the gauze on his waist. "So what's our clever Sixth Prince thinking?"

Zhi Jie turned his face away.

Le Wuya turned to follow his gaze: "Hey, whatcha looking at? Let me see."

Before he could finish, Zhi Jie suddenly tilted his body and nuzzled into his neck, rubbing against it affectionately.

His warm breath fell on Le Wuya's neck, cozy and slightly ticklish.

Le Wuya shivered slightly, shooting him a sideways grin: "Just nuzzling doesn't count for much—don't you wanna take a bite?"

"I want to."

Zhi Jie's throat went a little dry, and his teeth ached with the urge. He really wanted to sink his teeth into that pale skin just to settle himself.

But he held back.

"...Teacher still has business to handle out there these next few days."

"How thoughtful of you."

Le Wuya was happy to keep him wanting, so he leaned back against the soft pillow, pressing close to him, practically curling up in his arms, keeping his neck just an inch from Zhi Jie's lips.

Zhi Jie dropped his gaze, toying with Le Wuya's loosened sash, scratching at it lightly to soothe the itch in his chest.

He answered softly: "He just wants to confirm that you're really you—that you exist."

Le Wuya reached back and rubbed his chin: "I always said you were sharp as a whip—how'd I ever misread you?"

Bolstered by the compliment, Zhi Jie found his stride: "I think he disliked you from the start, even before he ever saw your face. So he deliberately put you under Wang Su."

Le Wuya cheerfully talked out of his ass: "Bullshit, I'm adorable."

Zhi Jie said firmly, "He's got bad eyes—doesn't know a good thing when he sees it."

Le Wuya was thrilled, grabbed his hand, and planted a big kiss on it.

Zhi Jie got even more serious about his analysis: "Wang Su's always been a loyal hound, quick to jump on whatever his master needs. He deliberately sent you into this snake pit—he must've known exactly what those two brothers were like."

From Le Wuya's rise, to his downfall, to his comeback in a new body, the Zhou brothers had been this man's eyes and ears for over a decade.

They were Wang Su's diehards.

And to confirm Le Wuya's identity, you had to burn the loyalists.

Because he knew their temperaments, their emotions, and their weak spots, Wang Su could pull strings from a hundred li away, plotting every move.

Le Wuya had dug up a stack of reply letters from the capital in Zhou Wen Huan's study.

They were encrypted—to anyone else, they'd read like gibberish, so even if someone grabbed them, no harm done.

But since they used a cipher system Le Wuya himself had designed, Le Wuya could breeze through them.

Clearly, no matter how much Wang Su hated him, he had to admit this was the safest, most secret way to communicate.

From the moment Niu Sanqi got brained with a shovel and the Zhou brothers wrote to the capital for his advice, Wang Su had been cooking up a poison plot in his gut.

Now, that letter with the poison plot was sitting right in Le Wuya's hands.

"Blow up the mountain and silence everyone—now that's a ruthless way to wipe the slate clean." Le Wuya said, "If he pulled that off, the miners at Xiaolian Mountain wouldn't stand a chance, but the Zhou brothers would be walking themselves straight off a cliff."

But it was a cliff they had no choice but to jump off.

After all those crushing failures, Zhou Wenchang had long since lost his mind.

He couldn't stomach going from Golden Hall scholar, to some seventh-rank nobody, to stripped of his post and reduced to a plain civilian.

Zhou Wen Huan, his brother's loyal shadow, marching to his beat, couldn't accept it either.

Sure, they could've avoided this cliff altogether.

They could've reported it all aboveboard and waited for the consequences.

But Wang Su didn't get word of Niu Sanqi's death—he got the mudslide report from Xiaolian Mountain in Dansui instead.

That's when Wang Su knew the Zhou brothers had crossed the line of no return.

So he turned around and recommended Le Wuya, tossing him into Dansui.

The Xiaolian Mountain miners, plus the Zhou brothers—over a hundred lives—were all just fodder to Wang Su.

His only goal was to spring a trap on Le Wuya.

...Not even to kill him, really—just to confirm who he was.

"So Teacher already saw through Wang Su's plan from the start, and that's why you hauled ass to Dansui?"

"Yeah, time's not gonna wait. And that old bastard's a real schemer."

Le Wuya gave a cold laugh at that: "If I didn't wanna take the blame, or just slacked off and took my sweet time getting here, dragging it out for ten or fifteen days—wouldn't they've covered their tracks by then?"

With those two brothers' meticulous methods and ruthless streak, by the time they starved out the survivors—Xiao Tuanzi, Sun Huizhen, Liang Xiu, and the rest—up on Xiaolianzi Mountain, and then waited for the weather to cooperate with a few good downpours, all the evidence would be wiped clean. Even if Le Wuya dug deep, he probably wouldn't find a thing.

If that happened, Wang Su could at least keep the Zhou brothers as two key pawns.

Of course, those stinking miners' lives didn't matter—dead was dead.

But the Zhou brothers weren't just sitting around.

Zhi Jie, tracing the chain of events since Le Wuya hit Dansui, laid it out piece by piece: "Those two knew you'd be coming long before you showed. Scared you'd stay in the dark while they were out in the open—if you never showed, they couldn't make a move—so they planted informants all over the county seat first, then, using the excuse of cracking down on price gouging during the disaster, they grabbed Yan the Third and Blackie Liu first—both with nasty reputations—and then You the Second. You the Second sold silk—nothing that threatened anyone's livelihood. They deliberately grabbed someone so borderline to leave an opening, just waiting for you to step in."

And it worked like a charm.

At first, the whole vibe was genuinely scary.

But no matter how tight the trap was, Le Wuya simply went with the flow of the scheme and managed to get himself and his whole crew thrown into Dansui's prison.

Clearly, even stinking miners have someone looking out for them in the unseen workings of fate.

So Zhong Piaoping captured A Shun, who'd come to silence them, and Le Wuya stumbled upon Little Dumpling, who was still clinging to life.

From within the seemingly airtight facade, he pried open a crack of truth.

But this was still the Zhou brothers' scheme.

Beyond this killing ground, stained with mud and blood, there was another pair of eyes, watching Le Wuya coldly from a hundred li away.

Le Wuya said, unhurried:

"Wang Su trusts me. He knows I've got the chops to uncover everything."

"By the same token, Wang Su doesn't trust the Zhou brothers. He knows that to save their own skins, they'll keep the letters they exchanged with him. When truly cornered, they'd rather burn the boats and take everyone down with them."

Le Wuya waved the letter, and his words sent a chill down the spine: "This is the bait he left me."

Xiang Zhijie was quiet for a long beat: "...Wen Ren probably couldn't read this letter."

Le Wuya shot back playfully: "But Le Wuya can."

Zhou Wenchang and Zhou Wenhuan had long since mastered the code of the *Book to Sons* and thrown away the master copy.

Even if Le Wuya wanted to fake a discovery and crack their code, he couldn't.

So the question became:

Should he use this letter as his way in?

Wang Su always worked clean—the only evidence left was these stacks of replies that didn't match his handwriting.

Of course, the wording in the letters still inadvertently gave away his identity.

But Le Wuya was supposed to be unable to make sense of the contents.

Xiang Zhijie offered a suggestion: "When you were prefect in Tongzhou, wasn't there a Changmen Guard the emperor sent to keep an eye on you?"

Le Wuya caught his drift in an instant and shook his head firmly. "No."

Xiang Zhijie raised an eyebrow, surprised, but quickly caught on to his teacher's intent.

...Zong Yao would indeed be a good pawn.

But his teacher didn't want to drag him into the mud.

The reason was simple: Zong Yao held the master copy of the *Book to Sons* used by the Changmen Guards out in the provinces.

Le Wuya could easily drag him into it when reporting this to the throne, claiming that this guy had blown his cover as a Changmen Guard while in Tongzhou, and that the *Book to Sons* was one of the codebooks the Guards used.

But if he did, Zong Yao would offend the emperor and get dragged into a disaster that had nothing to do with him.

He'd barely escaped the shadow of his older brother and uncle, and had recently been hitting it off with Mu Jiazhi, rolling out several policies that helped the people and merchants, making Tongzhou's markets and official circles thrive.

The first time Le Wuya dragged him into trouble, it was because his brother and uncle had brought it on themselves.

But Zong Yao himself had never done anything seriously wrong.

He was Le Wuya's student, after all.

Le Wuya pitied him, treasured him, and didn't want him wading into such murky waters a second time.

Xiang Zhijie knew Le Wuya's nature well, so he decisively dropped that easiest option: "Then how about sounding out the Zhou brothers?"

Le Wuya rested his chin on his hand and shook his head.

Zhou Wenhuan was clearly planning to play dead all the way.

And Zhou Wenchang, having withered away in this backwater for ten years, was no longer the young censor who could be used as a pawn.

If Le Wuya used this letter to probe Zhou Wenchang directly, the man would immediately smell a rat. Worse, his stubborn streak might kick in, and he'd clamp down like a turtle and never let go.

Remember, both Zhou Wenchang and Zhou Wenhuan would eventually be hauled to the capital to await the emperor's verdict.

At that point, if Zhou Wenchang quietly tipped off the throne about his suspicions, Le Wuya's identity would be mostly confirmed.

Even just the question of "where did you learn about the master copy of the codebook" would leave Le Wuya with no defense.

While Xiang Zhijie sat lost in thought with Le Wuya, a hundred li away in the capital, at the Left Censor-in-Chief's residence.

Wang Su stood under the eaves, slowly crumbling birdseed between his fingers and feeding it to an ordinary white parrot on a stand.

As he admired the bird, he murmured softly, as if talking to Le Wuya from a hundred li away:

"Le Wuya, oh, Le Wuya."

"Old as I am, I know your character well."

"Even at death's door, you'd drag a bunch of corrupt officials down with you. You're no villain—you're a rare good official, one in a century."

"So, Le Wuya, a man with a heart like fire—if you truly saw through everything in Dansui, wouldn't you hate to leave me unpunished?"

The white parrot had been with Wang Su for nearly three months, and now it piped up eagerly: "Le Wuya! Le Wuya!"

But no sooner had it learned to talk than it was grabbed cleanly by the neck.

Only when the bird had gone quiet did Wang Su let go, regretfully tossing the corpse into the grass nearby: "How did it learn to talk again? What a shame."