The crowd parted, and Chen Zheng saw Yi Lei rush in, looking flustered. Even in the depths of winter, Yi Lei wore nothing but a drab gray jacket, with dust all over his clothes. Yet judged only by his face, he was a handsome man, particularly his bright, alert eyes. With a little grooming, he would have been an attractive middle-aged man.
“You…” Unlike the other villagers, Yi Lei hadn’t come brandishing tools or weapons. He went straight to his mother. “Are you really police officers?”
“Yes, police,” Chen Zheng said. “We’re here to ask Zhu Yi a few questions.”
Yi Lei’s face was red from running. At Zhu Yi’s name, sorrow immediately filled his eyes. “Xiao Yi… she’s already gone.”
“Pah!” his mother spat. “You still call her so affectionately! Have you forgotten what she did? She disgraced you so badly you’ll never be able to hold your head up again, and you still miss her!”
“Mom! What’s the point of saying that now? She’s dead!” Yi Lei turned to the villagers. “Everyone, please go home. I’m begging you!”
Who didn’t enjoy a spectacle? The villagers jostled and lingered for ages before finally shuffling out of the Yi courtyard. Chen Zheng could see that Yi Lei was rather weak-willed. They hadn’t left because of his repeated pleas, but because there were four police officers standing in the house, one with a gun at his waist.
Once he’d persuaded the villagers to leave, Yi Lei told Aqiong to take his mother and the child into the back room. The child couldn’t be soothed and kept crying. His mother complained incessantly. Aqiong said nothing, but her eyes were full of displeasure. Watching Yi Lei handle everything, Chen Zheng thought the man looked exhausted, as though this family had drained all the spirit out of him.
At last, when he’d settled his mother, wife, and child, Yi Lei let out a long sigh and wiped his face. “Officer Chen, ask whatever you need to. I’m the one who knows the most about Xiao Yi.”
His accent was lighter than his mother’s. Chen Zheng could communicate with him even without Wen Wu’s help.
“Your accent isn’t as strong as everyone else’s,” Chen Zheng remarked casually.
Yi Lei paused and sighed. “Xiao Yi corrected me every day. If only she’d been content to behave herself… Ah!”
Hearing the words *behave herself* from Yi Lei made Chen Zheng inexplicably uncomfortable. In a village like this, what could demanding obedience from a highly educated woman possibly mean? Nothing good, most likely.
“Behave herself? How exactly did Zhu Yi misbehave?”
Yi Lei lowered his head, looking dejected. Wen Wu stood expressionlessly by the door, watching him. Suddenly he said, “She had an affair?”
Yi Lei jerked as though he’d been electrocuted. “She… she…”
Chen Zheng asked again, “How did she die? Where’s her family?”
Embarrassment and inferiority were written all over Yi Lei’s face. He clenched his fists and muttered, “If anyone had no right to blame her, it was me. She never belonged in a place like ours. It was for my sake that she forced herself to stay.”
That year, seven spirited young interns had arrived in the backward village of Yuanshu, looking for people who needed legal aid. They had imagined all the good they could do. The poorer a place was, the more valuable legal assistance must be. There had to be young people refusing to support their elderly parents, school-age children being denied an education, women beaten by their husbands, girls sold by their parents to older men, and migrant workers unable to recover their wages.
Yet after walking all around Yuanshu Township, they found not a single person willing to seek their help. Unable to believe it, the interns began stirring up conflicts among villagers, insisting that women admit their husbands beat them and children confess they weren’t allowed to attend school.
The villagers were hostile to them. But Yi Lei found Zhu Yi easy to talk to. Unlike the others, who seemed eager to confront everyone, Zhu Yi observed the village quietly after arriving and never deliberately provoked a dispute.
Yi Lei’s father had died early, leaving him and his mother dependent on each other for years. His education was limited, but he loved books. Whenever he went into town, he would buy a pile of cheap secondhand volumes. He had also been ill in his younger years and wasn’t particularly strong, so he never left to work elsewhere. Instead, he earned money repairing appliances and pipes for villagers. When mountain produce was in season, he joined the others in gathering it and selling it in town.
In his twenties, he was injured in the mountains and lost his ability to father children. It became an enduring source of anguish and shame. For years, villagers had gossiped about his supposed impotence. He couldn’t find anyone willing to marry him, and eventually gave up hoping for a family.
Zhu Yi arrived to teach basic legal knowledge one day while he was washing and drying mountain produce in his yard. Because of his private condition, he avoided interacting with women. But Zhu Yi spoke gently and was widely read. Whenever she discussed legal matters, she seemed to glow. He couldn’t help being drawn to her.
He himself had once had a chance to continue his education. His family simply hadn’t been able to afford it, and nobody around him stayed in school either. All these years, he sought comfort in books, escaping reality and trying to make up for his lost chance of studying his way out of the mountains.
Zhu Yi’s arrival cast a beam of light into an otherwise unremarkable existence. Like a student hungry for knowledge, he looked up to her and eagerly anticipated every visit.
He had never dreamed Zhu Yi might become his wife. He never expressed his feelings because he knew he wasn’t worthy of her.
To his utter astonishment, Zhu Yi seemed to like him in return. He couldn’t comprehend it. What had he done to deserve her affection?
When the interns were about to leave for the next village, Zhu Yi said she wanted to stay a few more days and asked to lodge at his house. Like a shy child, he showed her the old books filling his room. Zhu Yi said enviously that when she was little, she’d always wanted a house full of books, somewhere she could hide away and never come out.
On impulse, he blurted, “Then let’s both stay here forever and never go out!”
Immediately afterward, he was mortified. He was already well into his thirties, couldn’t have children, and was a poor villager. What right did he have to ask Zhu Yi to stay? She would become a successful lawyer, shine in her career, make plenty of money, and meet someone who truly deserved her.
But Zhu Yi smiled and said, “Okay.”
He could scarcely believe she returned his feelings. Zhu Yi told him he lacked confidence but was a good person. With the village’s limited resources, it was remarkable how much he’d read. She enjoyed their conversations about the past and present. Her classmates and fellow interns were all competing with one another, and she hadn’t enjoyed speaking so freely in ages. He also listened carefully, making her feel respected.
At last he dared confess his love and promised to work hard so that one day they could leave the mountains together. But she said she wasn’t particularly attached to life outside. Spending a peaceful lifetime in Yuanshu Township wouldn’t necessarily be bad.
The other interns unanimously opposed Zhu Yi’s decision. They couldn’t understand it. Was she mad? Was an older man with nothing to his name worth giving up her entire future?
Zhu Yi calmly replied, “I’m not giving up my life. I’m pursuing the life I want. No one cared for me when I was little. Now someone does. What’s wrong with that?”
Zhu Yi had told Yi Lei she was an orphan. Her mother died giving birth to her, and she lived with her father for several years, the happiest years of her life up to that point. Though poor, her father treated her well and did everything he could to give her a decent life.
But those good years ended quickly. Her father died after working himself to exhaustion, and she was sent to an orphanage. Her excellent grades and scholarships and grants helped her reach where she was now. She pretended to be cheerful and outgoing, but in truth, she was lonely.
“Bro Lei, I haven’t felt truly cherished until I met you,” she told him. “Sometimes you remind me of my father.”
Yi Lei felt a bitter pang. So Zhu Yi’s feelings for him weren’t entirely straightforward. But he was still content.
Zhu Yi resolved to stay, and the interns left disappointed. They held a celebratory banquet at the Yi home, and villagers came to congratulate them. Yi Lei remembered a tall lawyer coming to see Zhu Yi, demanding to know why she’d marry a rural man. He was terrified the visitor would take Zhu Yi away, but Zhu Yi still came back to him.
Village life was monotonous but happy. Zhu Yi accompanied him into the mountains to collect produce, and in their spare time they read together. Miraculously, his “condition” even resolved itself, and they had a child. When Zhu Yi gave birth to a boy, Yi Lei was so moved that he knelt and kowtowed, thanking Heaven for giving the Yi family a descendant.
Zhu Yi had a hard time recovering after childbirth. Yi Lei and his mother took turns caring for her. But perhaps she finally grew tired of village life. She gradually became distant, expressing a desire to return to the city.
Yi Lei was miserable but understood. They had never registered their marriage. He had insisted on leaving it unregistered out of insecurity. He couldn’t believe Zhu Yi would love him forever, so by keeping her free of a legal marriage, he could give her a way out.
He had intended to take Zhu Yi back to the city personally once her health improved. For the time being, the child was too small, and both he and his mother hoped she would stay with the baby a little longer.
But Zhu Yi’s love vanished even faster than it had appeared. Once her affection for Yi Lei disappeared, only hatred remained. She hated him for luring her with sweet words, and hated herself for throwing away her future for such ridiculous love. The two of them had made the decision together, yet in her eyes, every mistake was now his!
He didn’t want Zhu Yi to suffer, so he bore all the accusations. His mother wept at the sight.
Never in his wildest dreams did he expect Zhu Yi to begin secretly seeing a young man from town. When he confronted her, she sneered at him and belittled him from head to toe. Unable to bear it, he slapped her.
From then on, Zhu Yi opposed him in everything. She often stayed in town and became involved with multiple men.
He would rather Zhu Yi had returned to the city and never seen him again than watch her destroy herself like this. But what had Zhu Yi said?
“You think I don’t want to? But can I still go back? I can never be a lawyer now! You ruined me, Yi Lei! How could you be so selfish? You’re practically at death’s door. Why did you have to seduce me?”
Her tirade left him devastated. He returned home and sank into despair. Some time later, he heard news of Zhu Yi again. That once lively, beautiful woman had contracted a “filthy disease.”
He brought her home and cared for her devotedly. But Zhu Yi had lost her will to go on. Illness ravaged her body, and she grew weaker by the day. She refused treatment and finally died in bed.
As Zhu Yi breathed her last, he heard her whisper, “Dad, I’m sorry…”
The room fell into a silence that seemed almost audible. Yi Lei’s clenched fists trembled. Through gritted teeth, he said, “I failed her. I’m the one who ruined her. Back then, I should’ve pushed her firmly back toward her friends. She never belonged here.”
His mother burst out of the inner room, sobbing and beating him. “You’re still defending her! Hasn’t she made you suffer enough?”
Aqiong emerged too, carrying the child, who had finally been soothed and was waving a toy dog. Chen Zheng looked at them. Aqiong’s eyes were blank, as if her mind were completely empty.
Chen Zheng nodded toward her and asked Yi Lei, “Are the two of you legally married?”
Yi Lei nodded. “This one is registered.” He rummaged through an old drawer and produced their marriage certificate. Aqiong had been introduced by an acquaintance. She was honest and dutiful. He was growing old and needed someone to take care of him and his mother. Aqiong had two younger brothers, and her family was eager to marry her off. Both sides had been satisfied.
As he spoke, Chen Zheng noticed Aqiong pressing her lips together and tucking her hair behind her ear. He couldn’t see happiness or grief in her expression. She seemed to regard these words as perfectly ordinary.
To Chen Zheng, however, they were as uncomfortable as Yi Lei’s earlier gratitude to Heaven for granting the family an heir. These weren’t normal things to say. People were being turned into tools, and the tools were expected to be grateful.
“How were Zhu Yi’s funeral arrangements handled?” Chen Zheng asked. “Was it just your family? Did her friends come to say goodbye?”
After calming his mother again, Yi Lei led Chen Zheng out into the courtyard and pointed toward a hill beyond the village. “Xiao Yi’s buried there, in our family’s ancestral graveyard. She had nowhere else to go. The last thing I could do for her was give her a proper burial.”
Zhu Yi had no relatives to return to, although she had once had plenty of classmates and friends. Nobody understood why she chose to marry Yi Lei, and she gradually stopped contacting them. At first, she felt they looked down on him. Later, she grew ashamed: her friends were flourishing while she’d become a peasant woman. Yi Lei had watched her delete their contact details, as though not seeing their success would spare her the humiliation of comparing herself to them.
Consequently, her former friends never learned that she fell ill or died. Yi Lei also knew she hadn’t wanted them to see her in that condition. While still lucid, Zhu Yi told him to cremate her and scatter her ashes in the earth.
But Yi Lei couldn’t bring himself to do it. Following village customs, he held a lively three-day funeral. Zhu Yi had been lonely in life, but when she died, the entire village came to bid her farewell. At the burial, Yi Lei set off firecrackers all morning. Once everyone left, he opened a bottle of liquor beside her grave and sat there alone until late at night.
“I still can’t forget her.” Yi Lei’s eyes were red. “I wanted to cure her and stay by her side for the rest of our lives, but she couldn’t bear being with me. So she left.”
The exhausted man spoke with apparent sincerity, seemingly a rare example of lasting devotion. But Chen Zheng’s gaze grew colder.
Something here was wrong.
Even without the events at Weimo Mountain Resort, Zhu Yi’s death was suspicious. Beyond that, the story of her falling in love with Yi Lei was unconvincing from the beginning. In He Mei’s account, Zhu Yi was the most outstanding of the seven interns.
What did *outstanding* mean? Surely it wasn’t only her grades. It also meant her thinking and character. Why would a highly educated young woman decide so readily to stay in an isolated place like this? Her companions had all seen the deeply entrenched feudal practices, wives treated like beasts of burden. Had she failed to see them?
Chen Zheng calmed himself and asked, “Did Zhu Yi leave anything behind?”
Yi Lei nodded. “I kept all her photographs. And her hair clips and cosmetics.”
“Show me.”
They entered the house again, this time going to the room Yi Lei shared with Aqiong. The furniture was very old, and a faint, unpleasant smell lingered in the air. Aqiong followed them and stood in the doorway. Yi Lei turned and waved her away as though shooing a dog. She pursed her lips and backed up a few steps.
Yi Lei took a thin photo album from the bedside cabinet. It was full of Zhu Yi’s pictures. Then he brought out a metal box and rummaged through it. Apparently discovering something was missing, he shouted at the doorway, “You damned woman! Did you take it?”
Chen Zheng saw only cheap hair clips and ornaments inside. Earlier, he’d noticed a blue hair clip holding back Aqiong’s hair.
Aqiong said nothing. Yi Lei looked as though he wanted to go outside and punish her, but restrained himself because the police were present. “These all belonged to Xiao Yi. I look at them when I miss her. Aqiong doesn’t know any better. She keeps sneaking them out to wear.”
“You keep Zhu Yi’s possessions in this room,” Chen Zheng said. “Doesn’t Aqiong have anything to say about it?”
“What could she have to say?” Yi Lei retorted. “She’s a woman. It’s not her place to comment.”
Chen Zheng had come to find Zhu Yi. Learning she was dead was wholly unexpected, and the direction of his investigation would have to change. For now, he had no choice but to leave. Some villagers still gathered outside the Yi courtyard, shrinking back when the police emerged, their eyes distinctly unfriendly.
Chen Zheng looked back. Aqiong was standing on tiptoe, peering after them.
“Bro Chen, are we going back now?” Wen Wu asked.
“Not yet. We won’t go back tonight. We’ll find somewhere in town to spend the night. There’s still time, so let’s visit the burial hill Yi Lei mentioned.”
Wen Wu hesitated, and Chen Zheng asked, “What is it?”
Wen Wu shook his head. “Bro Chen, are you really staying in town tonight?”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“It’s not that you can’t. The conditions there are terrible.”
Chen Zheng laughed. “What, do I look like someone who has to stay in a five-star hotel?”
Wen Wu seemed lost in thought. Chen Zheng continued, “Don’t listen to that nonsense Brother Bird tells you. I’m a detective too. What kind of detective can’t endure a little hardship?”
“Got it.” Wen Wu stepped on the accelerator and drove toward the grave-covered hill outside the village.
Small villages like those in Yuanshu Township still had plenty of private family graves, though people were cremated now and their ashes buried in urns rather than being interred in coffins as in the past.
It didn’t take long to encounter graves on the hill, grouped by family. Wen Wu was more practiced at finding them than Chen Zheng. Soon he called, “Bro Chen, look. Could this be the Yi family’s plot?”
Chen Zheng walked over. The graves were clustered together, all bearing the surname Yi. One tombstone listed the person who erected it as *son Yi Lei*. It seemed Yi Lei’s father was buried here.
The municipal detectives came over, and the four searched together for a while, but found no grave belonging to Zhu Yi.
“Was Yi Lei lying?” Wen Wu asked.
“He may have lied about more than one thing.”
“Could Zhu Yi’s death be suspicious too?”
Chen Zheng couldn’t reach a conclusion yet. But if Zhu Yi hadn’t died of illness, then the way Du Ying and the others avoided mentioning her when discussing their internship, combined with Dong Jing and Zhu Xiaodi’s disappearances and the fact that nobody could clearly account for their movements on the afternoon of the eighteenth, became far more intriguing.
Night fell early in the countryside. The group reached Gezi Town and took rooms in the police station’s guesthouse. Chen Zheng planned to ask local officers about Yuanshu Township in the morning. Tonight, he wanted to exchange information with the city police first.
The Junan police were currently dealing with another headache: Shu Jun. Soon after leaving the municipal bureau, he posted a lengthy statement online declaring that he didn’t trust the police, publicly soliciting clues and promising an astronomical reward to anyone who uncovered the truth.
Because of Shu Jun, countless eyes were now focused on Junan City. The municipal bureau had never dealt with such a troublesome situation, and even Li Zhi was at a loss.
“Ignore him,” Ming Han said, drawing on experience. “There’s no realistic way to make him shut up now. He’s not entirely without restraint, though. At least he hasn’t exposed the Huo family’s problems. Let’s wait. He might even bring us leads.”
Chen Zheng called Ming Han. Ming Han was astonished to hear Zhu Yi was dead. “Could all of them have left the law firm because of what happened to her?”
“I think there might be something wrong with the Gu Qiang case too,” Chen Zheng said. “But I still can’t work out how Dong Jing and Zhu Xiaodi’s disappearances fit into it. By the way, find out who the legal-aid lawyer was who defended Liao Huaimeng. Her own children abandoned her. It’s unusual for a legal-aid lawyer to go to such lengths for someone in her position.”
Ming Han made a note. “I’ll look into it tomorrow.”
Ming Han then told Chen Zheng about the missing minors from Huyun Tea Factory. Chen Zheng pressed his fingers to his brow. “Zhou Xia and the others never mentioned that their New Year trip to Weimo Mountain Resort was an outing by their mutual-help group. They didn’t want us knowing what had happened to them.”
Ming Han suddenly said, “Those disappearances have never been solved. The Gu Qiang case has suspicious aspects, and now Zhu Yi is dead. These all fall within your institute’s line of work. Why not bring that kid over on a business trip?”
“Who?” Chen Zheng asked before realizing. “Xu Chuan?”
“Doesn’t he want the institute to start doing meaningful work? Can’t hurt to ask him.”
As it happened, Xu Chuan was already examining the Gu Qiang case. The institute hadn’t been especially busy lately, and Huo Yewei’s murder had become provincial news, so Xu Chuan had begun looking through Junan City’s cases from recent years. A colleague’s voice sounded beside him. “Is that Zhu Yi?”
The colleague was Xie Wuming, twenty-nine, Xu Chuan’s senior at the institute. She was meticulous in her work and rarely smiled.
Xu Chuan had been afraid of her at first. When Zhao Shuihe’s case was first brought in, he’d spoken poorly at a meeting and Xie Wuming had openly mocked him. For a while he avoided her whenever possible. But after he told Chen Zheng he wanted the institute to fulfill its purpose, Xie Wuming was the first to support him, not merely with words, but with concrete action.
Over time, Xu Chuan stopped fearing her and began consulting her about all his ideas. They were reviewing the Gu Qiang case together.
Xie Wuming had spotted a group photograph containing Gu Qiang. Zhu Yi seemed to have entered the shot by chance. Xu Chuan searched through the entire file but couldn’t find her name.
“Xie-jie, do you know her?” he asked.