noffsinger Chapter 877 Di Gong was right about you
Chapter 877 Di Gong was right about you
When Su Wuming opened his eyes again, he was lying on the bed in the guest room of Di Mansion.
The tent ceiling was embroidered with a lotus pattern, and the material was the softest he had ever slept on.
A faint scent of mugwort wafted towards his nose, mixed with the rustling sound of snowflakes hitting banana leaves outside the window, which reminded him of the days when he was recuperating in the countryside as a child.
"Awake?" Di Renjie came in with a medicine bowl, his official robes still stained with snow foam. "Yuan Fang said you clenched your teeth when you fainted. You must have been terrified."
Su Wuming sat up suddenly, but the back of his head felt heavy. He held onto the edge of the bed to avoid falling: "Di Gong, I..."
The words came to his lips but he swallowed them back, his Adam's apple rolled before he whispered, "I fainted from blood."
Di Renjie placed the medicine bowl on the bedside table, the porcelain bowl making a soft sound as it collided with the wooden surface. "The bloody cloth bag in the old woman's arms this morning was her son's severed finger."
"The county magistrate accepted money from the salt merchant and accused her son of stealing salt, then chopped off his fingers."
He picked up the medicine spoon and stirred the brown medicine. "Do you think this case should be investigated?"
"Of course we should investigate!" Su Wuming was so anxious that he wanted to get out of bed, but he stumbled as soon as his feet touched the ground. "That county magistrate is so reckless in killing people. He must be punished..."
He suddenly stopped talking mid-sentence, the red shadow of a blood-stained cloth flashed before his eyes, and his stomach suddenly churned.
"Lie down." Di Renjie pressed his shoulders, his fingertips calloused from years of holding a pen. "How can you judge a case if you can't even stand the sight of blood?"
This sentence was like a needle, piercing Su Wuming's high spirits of the past few days.
He looked at the lotus pattern on the ceiling of the tent and suddenly remembered the scar on Aisha's husband's hand from the base of the thumb to the wrist when he handed him the Hu pancake - it was caused by the back of a soldier's knife.
At that time, he was so moved that he didn't dare to take a closer look at the wound covered with black scabs.
"Am I... not cut out for solving cases?" His voice was muffled, as if buried in a pile of snow.
Di Renjie didn't answer. He turned around and pulled a blue cloth-covered volume from the bookshelf, flipping through it to a certain page: "Look at this."
On the yellowed paper was a map, with a dozen red dots marked in cinnabar. Su Wuming took a closer look and saw that it was the location of the granaries in various prefectures and counties during the drought in Longyou last year.
Next to a red dot was a line of small characters: "Warehouse clerk Wang Xian, blind, yet able to distinguish between fresh and old grains."
"Wang Xian was blinded by smallpox as a child, yet he was able to uncover the corruption of three successive grain officials by feeling the grain lines and smelling the musty odor of stale rice."
Di Renjie pointed at the map with his fingertips and said, "How can he solve the case if he can't see?"
Su Wuming was stunned.
"Some people rely on their eyes, some on their ears, and some on their noses." Di Renjie closed the book. "Solving a case depends on carefulness, not boldness."
"But besides being attentive, you must also have the courage to face the truth. This courage doesn't necessarily mean being brave enough to see blood, but rather being brave enough to delve deeper."
He stood up and walked towards the study. "Drink the medicine while it's hot. Come back in half an hour."
Su Wuming looked at the bowl of steaming medicine, suddenly grabbed the bowl and drank it all in one gulp.
The bitter medicine slid down his throat, clearing his confused mind a little.
Half an hour later, he walked into the study with a heavy heart, but saw more than a dozen celadon bowls on the desk, filled with liquids of different colors - rouge red, ochre yellow, indigo, ink black, and a bowl of cinnabar water that looked like blood.
"I heard from Yuan Fang that when you were a kid, you secretly drank your mother's rouge and powder and painted your face like a monkey's butt." Di Renjie picked up a wolf-hair brush and said, "Today I'll let you practice your courage again."
Su Wuming's face flushed. That was a stupid thing he did when he was five years old. How come Judge Dee even knew about this?
"Come, pick up this bowl of cinnabar water and stare at it for an incense stick." Di Renjie pointed to the bowl that looked most like blood.
Su Wuming's fingertips retracted as soon as they touched the edge of the bowl, as if it was not water but a hot iron.
He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and grabbed the bowl. When he opened his eyes again, the cinnabar water swayed in tiny red streaks at the bottom of the bowl, resembling the blood-stained cloth bag in the old woman's arms. His stomach churned again, and he gripped the rim of the bowl tightly, his knuckles turning white.
"I wonder if the bloodstains on Butcher Zhang's back when he was tortured into confessing were this color?"
Di Renjie's voice rang out from behind the desk, "When Aisha was dragged, her forehead hit the stone steps. Was the blood that oozed out this consistency?"
Su Wuming's eyelashes trembled violently, and the cinnabar water in front of his eyes gradually blurred, overlapping with the fragments of memory - the blood scars on Zhang the Butcher's back, the blood beads on Aisha's forehead, and the old woman's trembling hands this morning, holding the blood-soaked cloth bag...
"The blood they shed is much hotter than this bowl of water."
Di Renjie's voice suddenly turned deep. "You tremble even when looking at a bowl of fake blood. How can you be worthy of those who shed real blood?"
"I can see!" Su Wuming raised his head suddenly, his eyes red, "I can see!"
He stared at the cinnabar water in the bowl, letting the nausea swirl in his throat.
When the incense was half burned, he suddenly discovered that the cinnabar water was brighter than real blood, and there were tiny cinnabar particles in it - just like when he discovered that the loss ratio in the account book was wrong.
"This cinnabar is not ground finely." He blurted out.
A smile flashed in Di Renjie's eyes: "Not bad. Look at this again."
He handed over another file containing several autopsy sheets with drawings of the deceased's wounds and notes beside them: "Injured by a sharp weapon, wound turned outward" and "Injured by a blunt weapon, bruised edges." Su Wuming had just turned two pages when his fingertips began to tremble.
"Don't you dare to watch?"
"No!" Su Wuming gritted his teeth and flipped through the pages. "This part isn't right!" He pointed to a page. "The deceased's throat was cut. The autopsy officer said 'blood splattered three feet', but the edge of the wound is flat. If the throat was cut from the front, the wound should be slanted!"
Di Renjie raised his eyebrows: "Why do you think so?"
"When I was a kid, I saw a butcher slaughtering a pig. When he cut the throat from the front, the knife went in at an angle..."
Su Wuming hadn't finished speaking when he suddenly realized that he was analyzing the autopsy format and had forgotten his fear.
"That's right." Di Renjie put away the file. "When you only see doubts, you don't care about fear."
In the following days, Su Wuming seemed like a different person.
He no longer deliberately avoided the sight of blood. Instead, he took the initiative to see a trauma doctor to treat his wounds and listened to the coroner talk about the tricks of autopsy.
Once, I followed Li Yuanfang to investigate the crime scene. The victim was hacked to death with a hatchet, and there was a pool of blood on the ground.
Although his stomach was still tight, he forced himself to squat down and found a series of half-blurred footprints at the edge of the pool of blood - the shoe prints were deep in the front and shallow in the back, like someone walking on tiptoe.
"The murderer must be a cripple!" He was surprised when he blurted out.
Li Yuanfang raised his eyebrows: "Why do you think so?"
"People who walk on tiptoe have their center of gravity on the forefoot, so the shoe print is deeper in the front and lighter in the back. But the difference in depth is so great, it's more like someone has different legs and has to tiptoe."
Su Wuming pointed at the scratches on the edge of the footprints and said, "Look at these scratches. They show that he dragged his feet. He must have been lame."
Li Yuanfang stared at the footprints for a long while, then suddenly laughed and said, "Di Gong was right about you."