Nine Chapters of Strange Cases

Chapter 186 The truth comes out
Dai Changming's pupils constricted sharply as he looked at Chen Tao at the door in disbelief. "You dare!"

Zhou Zhao looked at Dai Changming as if he were a fool. "He has endured humiliation and hardship for so many years, leaving behind evidence of your killing of Wu Heng, all for this day. What wouldn't he dare to do?"

When Su Changying cut open the five balls and saw the dismembered parts inside, she realized something was wrong.

The person who dismembered the body chose which part to hide in the sphere, and each choice was made to let people know that the deceased was Wu Heng. He wanted people to discover the identity of the deceased and tell the discoverer how the person died.

This is definitely not a coincidence.

It's either a perverted provocation from the person who dismembered the body, or he's also looking forward to the day when the contents of the sphere are discovered.

Chen Tao wiped away his tears and kowtowed heavily on the ground.

"My name is Chen Tao. Twenty years ago, my master Jiang Hao, my senior brother He, and I went to make leather figurines for the Dai family to be buried with. On the day we finished, Dai Changming sealed the tomb, leaving all of us inside. There were more than thirty of us in total."

At first, everyone tried their best to escape, but no matter how hard we searched, we couldn't find a way out, and we had no food or water. Gradually, everyone gave up. But Master refused to accept fate; he worried that if the three of us died, our junior sister Jiang Ju would be left alone with no one to take care of her.

As Chen Tao spoke, his voice trembled with sobs.

"We were groping around blindly in the tomb. At first we could walk, but in the end we were practically crawling through the passageways. Our master was older and was the first to give up. He left the last bit of water he had secretly saved for my senior brother and me, and asked us to take care of our junior sister after we escaped."

Master is gone. My senior brother and I continued searching. I don't know how much time passed, but just when I thought I was going to die, we finally found an exit. The exit was overhead, and only by one person supporting another could we get out.

I told my eldest brother to go out; he's engaged to my junior sister, and he can go up there to take care of her.

Chen Tao burst into tears and looked at Ju Niang beside him, "But Senior Brother said he is Master's son and should take care of Master on the road to the underworld. Junior Sister doesn't like him like this. If he goes back, he will only be a shackle for Junior Sister."

Why not let me go up? From now on, I will be my junior sister's elder brother, and my parents and family will be her parents and family as well. When the time comes, I will let my junior sister marry a good husband, and I, as her elder brother, will be content.

I would never agree to that; the one who stays will surely die. I would rather be the one who dies.

But the eldest brother said that he had been pretending to drink water the whole way, but in reality, he hadn't had a drop of water for a long time, and he was about to die.

As Chen Tao spoke, he covered his face.

"And so, my senior brother lifted me up, and I struggled to crawl out of that small hole. But my senior brother collapsed... I thought I had escaped with my life, but I didn't expect that Dai Changming was waiting for me there."

He was right there. If he had just lowered the rope, my senior brother and I could have survived! But he just watched helplessly as my senior brother died, and as I thought I was saved, only to find myself in another hellish abyss.

As Chen Tao spoke, he looked angrily at Dai Changming.

He would always remember that man's smug face.

“That place wasn’t an escape route at all; it was where Dai Changming secretly minted coins. I was imprisoned there, and every day I was burning ore and minting coins with the others. There were half-ounce coins and gold ingots.” Zhou Zhao listened and looked at Su Changying, who nodded.

“Indeed, it was under the manor where Shenxiao practiced his ball skills that we discovered the place where Dai Changming privately minted coins, and they were all official coins that he was burning.”

After listening to Su Changying finish speaking, Chen Tao continued, "And so, we lost track of time in the mountains. Gradually, Dai Changming's control became less strict. I secretly inquired and learned that it had later become the Great Qi Dynasty, and private minting of coins was no longer punishable by death."

Just as I was about to seize the opportunity to escape, Dai Changming suddenly found me and brought a corpse with him.

He said it was a skilled Cuju (ancient Chinese football) player he had found, who had just made a name for himself but then became disobedient. He told me to skin the man and make him into a figurine. He must have sensed the unrest among the people and wanted to make an example of him. The figurine made from the skin was placed in a corner of our coin minting workshop as a warning that this was the consequence of disobedience.

Later, two more people appeared, one of whom was a skilled Cuju player from another team. They said they were going to play against Shenxiao the next day, and they had set up a betting pool. Dai Changming wanted to ensure victory without any chance of failure, so he killed the man. I thought that if the body was burned, there would be no way to prove it, so it would be better to leave a terracotta figurine.

So they turned that person into a human terracotta figure. The third was someone who wanted to escape; that person's name was Xu Ayong..."

As Chen Tao spoke, his hands trembled incessantly.

"Three years ago, a man named Wu Heng accidentally broke in. He discovered Dai Changming's coin minting and even saw the three corpses from afar. I was initially saddened, thinking that another innocent person would die today, but then I smelled the fragrance of locust blossoms on him."

I also noticed the sachet he was wearing at his waist; it was made by my junior sister. So I devised a plan to secretly distract the patrolmen, allowing him to escape.

Upon hearing this, Ju Niang knelt down beside Chen Tao with a thud.

"Lord Zhou, it's not that I'm trying to hide anything. When Wu Heng came back that day, he told me that he accidentally fell into a hole and not only found Dai Changming minting coins, but also the body of his former greatest rival."

No wonder that person fled during the final showdown back then, and Shenxiao won a great victory that time. It turns out that Dai Changming killed the person in advance.

He felt uneasy and wanted to report Dai Changming to the authorities, but he was afraid that Dai Changming's power would eventually harm Jian Daotong and Qingshan. When he fell, he broke his leg. In order not to let Dai Changming see through his act, he deliberately pretended to break his leg while riding his horse, and then forcibly disbanded Shenxiao.

Wu Heng was proud of being the top marksman, and he couldn't accept that his title of "number one" was earned through Dai Changming's murders. He was severely traumatized and, to avoid further trouble, he remained secluded at home…

Zhou Zhao thought to himself and sighed inwardly.

The Wu family was a small and insignificant household. Wu Heng was clearly frightened by the secret he had discovered and reacted unusually. It was precisely because of this that Dai Changming became aware of the situation.

"Wu Qingshan, do you now understand why your first opportunity to enter officialdom was in the Imperial Household Department?"

Wu Qingshan trembled upon hearing Zhou Zhao's question.

"That's why my father was kidnapped right around the corner as soon as he stepped out of the house. Dai Changming was my father's best friend, and he knew everything about my relationship with Wu Jiandao."