The next day, Song Chuyu suddenly returned. Xiang was overjoyed, with a spring-like glow on her brows. Even the servants and maids in the Song Mansion were all beaming with happiness.
"Yu'er! You're going back to Tianmen Mountain?" Song Chuyu was a bit disappointed. He had just returned home for a break. Before he could get close to his family properly, Song Jinyu came to bid them farewell.
"Brother, I secretly ran back from Tianmen Mountain in the first place." Jinyu was also reluctant to part with her brother.
Her brother was a young general, highly respected among the guards in Qinghe Pass. He had long become a Tiger Ben General and had made countless military achievements. Thanks to his guarding, the nearby countries of Shuo, Yanqiu, and the Gu Tribe didn't dare to harass Liuzhou City wantonly.
"Father said you could stay at home. You don't have to suffer in the mountains." Song Chuyu felt extremely sorry for his sister. Now that he had become a general, he would never let his sister suffer anymore.
"It's not suffering at all. I'm very happy there." Jinyu smiled and told Niaoniao to put away the gifts her brother had brought.
While joking with her brother, she was also trying to persuade them.
"The current situation in the court is unclear, and there are many disputes among the martial arts sects." Song Chuyu was worried.
"Father also has your best interests at heart."
"However, he has no time to take care of you recently." Song Chuyu told her about the discovery of several corpses in the dilapidated temple, hoping to scare Jinyu.
Hearing this, Jinyu frowned delicately. Her slender fingers brushed past a cluster of rosemary, and the fragrance rushed straight into her nostrils. It was as if some past memories had returned to her mind. A sudden dizziness almost made her unable to stand.
"Yu'er!" Song Chuyu quickly supported her.
"What's wrong with you?"
"Brother, you said those corpses were covered in red spots and all their blood had drained?" Jinyu's voice trembled slightly. The terrifying memory from when she was six years old seemed to be back again.
That time, her mother vomited all her blood, but the doctor was helpless. Slowly, countless red dots appeared on her body. Her mother was afraid of scaring her and her brother, so she refused to look at them until she passed away.
Little Song Jinyu missed her mother so much that she had to sneak in to visit her until she took her last breath.
Father said that Mother had contracted a strange disease. But after nearly ten years of learning medicine and poison from Tianmen Mountain, Jinyu increasingly suspected that her mother had been poisoned back then.
"Brother, go and talk to sister-in-law for a while." Jinyu said with a pale face, trying hard to hold back her grief.
"Sister-in-law has suffered a lot these days."
After Song Chuyu left, Jinyu crushed the rosemary in her hand into a ball. She summoned Cheng Song and secretly told him to secretly observe those corpses in the morgue.
Under the urging of Prince Yu, the He family reluctantly married Song Wangqiu into their family. The second wife was extremely proud. After Song Wangqiu got married, she planned to teach her a lesson and show off in the Prefect's Mansion.
But the people in the Prefect's Mansion refused to let her in, saying it was the order of the Tiger Ben General.
The second wife took a closer look and found that the guards at the Prefect's Mansion had already been replaced by soldiers.
She didn't dare to make trouble and had to leave dejectedly.
After Song Jinyu learned about this, she told Cheng Song to bring the mistress who was pregnant with the second master's child from Liuhua Alley into the second branch's house.
Just as the second wife returned home, she saw the charming woman Tao Ling with a round belly. For a moment, there was a great commotion in the second branch. The second master was determined to take in Tao Ling. If the second wife didn't agree, he would divorce her on the grounds that she had only given birth to a daughter over the years and had no other children.
In this way, the Prefect's Mansion finally got some peace.
Song Jinyu wasn't in a hurry to return to Tianmen Mountain. She talked to Yan Fei for a long time. Yan Fei knew her concerns and promised to help her investigate this case together. If it was really related to her mother's death a few years ago, Jinyu was determined to get to the bottom of it.
Jinyu told Niaoniao to stay at home. She changed into men's clothes and rushed to the morgue with Yan Fei. Coincidentally, there were already soldiers guarding the morgue.
"Why are you here?" Zhongli Mingye saw Jinyu and Yan Fei coming side by side and immediately questioned them.
"Greetings to Your Highness!" Jinyu and Yan Fei saluted and greeted Prince Yu.
"This is not a place for you to come!" Zhongli Mingye was dissatisfied with Jinyu. You're so close to other men but distant from me. The hands clasped in front of him revealed his emotions.
"I saw that my father has been worried about this case for several days, so I want to share his worries." Jinyu didn't dare to look at him. Naturally, she had heard from Niaoniao about her heroic deeds in the wine shop that day. No matter whether Prince Yu was homosexual or not, she should have been punished for shouting in the wine shop that day.
After waiting for a few days and seeing no reaction from Prince Yu, she thought the matter was over. Now seeing Prince Yu's gloomy face, Jinyu felt a bit nervous.
"Come here!"
Although Zhongli Mingye had a gloomy face, he didn't make things difficult for her.
Suddenly, he reached out and removed a dead leaf from her head, then turned around and walked into the morgue.
Jinyu stuck out her tongue at Yan Fei and motioned for him to go in with her.
She took out a pair of gloves and gave them to Yan Fei. Prince Yu Zhongli Mingye glanced at her out of the corner of his eye.
She felt a bit embarrassed and had no choice but to take off her own gloves and offer them: "Your Highness, I didn't know Your Highness was here. I only prepared two pairs."
Zhongli Mingye didn't take them and said, "You use them first. Remember to prepare a pair for me next time."
Really, so fussy. Jinyu didn't give in to him and put on the gloves on her own.
When examining the first corpse, she found that, just as Song Chuyu had said, the corpse had no blood, only some residual blood left in the mouth. It seemed that the person had died from vomiting blood. There were red spots on the surface of the body, and there were more dense red dots on the face.
Yan Fei felt numb in his heart. He only thought the corpse's death was extremely terrifying.
Jinyu remained calm. She pried open the corpse's mouth with a knife and examined it more carefully.
The more she looked, the more solemn her expression became. After looking through several corpses in a row, she finally stopped.
"Well? Any findings?" Zhongli Mingye asked her concernedly.
"They were all poisoned by the Gu poison from the Miao region." Jinyu answered while taking off her gloves.
"Was it the work of the Miao people? But Liuzhou City is thousands of miles away from the Miao region. How could they be involved?"
"It's just the Gu poison. It's not necessarily the work of the Miao people." Jinyu thought for a moment and was sure that these people had been killed by the Gu poison.
"Their blood was vomited out. The red dots are all small holes. It's actually the work of Gu worms." She was calm and composed. Zhongli Mingye looked at her inquisitively.
"These people are all homeless beggars. If the people don't file a complaint, the officials won't pursue it." Jinyu thought and summarized the information fragments in her mind.
"There must be a conspiracy behind this."
"I'm not feeling well. I'll take my leave first." Looking at these corpses, Jinyu thought of her mother. She felt a bit uncomfortable at once. Before, she only suspected that her mother had been murdered. Now she was even more convinced that there was something fishy about her mother's death.
The large mouthfuls of vomiting blood, the red scars all over the body, and the red dots all over the face. She knew that her mother must have loved her and her brother. That's why she was reluctant to let them see that tragic scene in the end.
Jinyu's words reminded Prince Yu. He nodded and let them leave.