Spotting the Third Prince leading his horse toward him, Mu Xueshi charged over, extended his middle and index fingers, and jabbed toward the prince’s chest.
“Hahaha… can’t move now, can you?” Mu Xueshi laughed, making faces at him again and again.
In the very next instant, the Third Prince reached out and tapped Mu Xueshi’s chest twice. Even the acupoint that allowed him to speak was sealed, and he could only make muffled noises as the prince hoisted him onto the horse.
His first experiment had ended in failure. Mu Xueshi struggled for a long time and discovered he could not even release his own acupoints. If the Third Prince bullied him again in the future, then with his current skill, learning this technique would still be useless.
When they finally reached the Grand Tutor’s manor, the Third Prince lifted Mu Xueshi down and released his acupoints. The moment his mouth was free, Mu Xueshi began chattering complaints about everything the prince had done. The Third Prince tapped him again, and he instantly lost the ability to speak.
Mu Xueshi followed the Third Prince into the front hall in resentful silence. Yuwen Tao happened to be examining something there, and when he saw the prince arrive, he hurried forward to bow.
“I pay my respects to Your Highness.”
“Rise.”
“Yes.”
After finishing the formalities, Yuwen Tao stood respectfully in the middle of the hall. “Your Highness, I have had some new thoughts about Brother Mu’s case. Would Your Highness be willing to hear my reasoning?”
The Third Prince said lightly, “Go ahead.”
Yuwen Tao clasped his hands. “Brother Mu was burned to death, yet no marks were left on his remains and not a sound came from the room. It is quite possible the killer first gave him some medicine that rendered him unconscious, then set him on fire. If so, the culprit must have been someone close to Brother Mu, someone able to enter and leave his room without attracting notice.”
Mu Xueshi made muffled noises, clearly disagreeing.
The Third Prince released his acupoint. Mu Xueshi drew a deep breath and immediately said, “That’s too simple. Even I thought of that. But judging from the traces left when my father burned, his body never changed position from beginning to end. Even a dead body should curl up when exposed to fire. Besides, I checked: reducing an adult body to ash within two hours would require temperatures around one thousand degrees. An ordinary fire couldn’t do it. So my father definitely wasn’t simply drugged and burned.”
After rattling all that off in one breath, Mu Xueshi felt immensely satisfied. He had not expected Yuwen Tao, despite his age, to think so simply. Then again, the man looked honest and straightforward enough that Mu Xueshi could not imagine him being especially shrewd. He had no idea how Yuwen Tao had managed to become a county magistrate.
Yuwen Tao was stunned by Mu Xueshi’s long explanation. He had never imagined Mu Xueshi could become this sharp. What seemed obvious to Mu Xueshi left Yuwen Tao astonished and deeply impressed by his attention to detail.
The Third Prince’s expression shifted slightly. He had not expected Mu Xueshi, who spent every day wandering around him looking idle, to have noticed details like these.
When Mu Xueshi saw the Third Prince looking at him, his cheeks reddened. “I won’t disturb you while you discuss serious matters, then. I’m going to keep looking for clues.”
The Third Prince could tell from the way Mu Xueshi’s eyes darted around that he was planning something, but Mu Xueshi’s schemes were usually childish enough that the prince was not worried he would do anything truly serious. After hearing Mu Xueshi’s analysis just now, the prince even thought that giving him some freedom might allow him to discover something useful.
The Third Prince nodded. Mu Xueshi instantly slipped away without showing the slightest discomfort and ran into the rear courtyard to look for Wu Cai. Along the way he wondered what the Third Prince would do if he learned about their plan. Now that the two of them were lovers, surely the prince would not punish him physically anymore. Besides, Mu Xueshi was not going to do anything wrong, and even if he did, the Third Prince would never know…
Mu Xueshi circled the courtyard several times without finding Wu Cai. He checked the study, the side rooms, the pavilion, the covered walkways… every place he could think of, yet there was no sign of him.
Where had Wu Cai gone? Mu Xueshi grew anxious. Had he changed his mind? Mu Xueshi finally had a rare chance to go out and have fun; he did not want it to disappear like this. Or had the Third Prince somehow learned about it in advance and threatened Wu Cai? Could Wu Cai be in danger now?
Mu Xueshi’s mind spun through more than a dozen possibilities, each one making him more uneasy. At last he stopped beside the rockery behind the Grand Tutor’s manor to catch his breath.
A faint moan suddenly drifted to his ears. Mu Xueshi shuddered and tried to make himself ignore it, but his ears seemed to have minds of their own. The more he listened, the more curious he became, until he finally peeked out to locate the source of the sound.
The sight immediately stunned him. Two naked men were entangled in the thick grass, doing something unmistakably intimate. The weeds were too dense for Mu Xueshi to see their faces clearly, but from the voice, one of them sounded like Wu Cai.
“Mm… no… ah… I can’t take it anymore…”
“Do you truly want me to stop?”
“Mm… ah… deeper… don’t stop… ah…”
Mu Xueshi’s face burned. He wanted to crawl into a hole. He was now completely certain that one of the men was Wu Cai. If Mu Xueshi remembered correctly, the Third Prince had only just told him that Wu Cai had been Grand Tutor Mu’s male favorite. The Grand Tutor had barely been buried, and Wu Cai was already meeting another man in secret, right in the family’s own grounds.