Sichuan Tang Clan (2)
The Tang Clan was hiding a woman. I still had no way of knowing who she was, nor could I be certain why they were hiding her; yet it was clear they were treating her with extreme care—meaning she was someone of immense importance to the clan. To find traces of her, I began digging through the family tree once more.
Last time, I'd been paging through it vaguely, just looking for weaknesses. This time, I mobilized both the Hao Sect Leader and the Demonic Cult's liaison network and started combing through every figure in the Sichuan Tang Clan and its branch families who had been recorded as dead. The parameters were simple: female, roughly the age to come of age this year, and recorded as having died or gone missing shortly after birth.
The merchant serving as a Demonic Cult liaison reacted to my orders with clear puzzlement.
"Couldn't the Tang Clan simply have taken in an orphan and raised her? After all, the idea that they've taken someone in and raised her is nothing more than suspicion, isn't it?"
"Then where did the girl come from? If she isn't a child from the main family, then she must be a child taken from a branch family or a distant relative and raised. Although, maybe they really did just take in some orphan with no ties to raise."
That said, I thought the possibility of them picking up some orphan from nowhere and raising her was small.
These were people so wary of giving anyone a handle that they only accepted condemned criminals for experiments on ordinary folk. Poison resistance isn't like a 'martial bone' you can see at a glance; she must have been tested. The claim that they'd raised some foundling orphan was practically the same as saying the Tang Clan was running human experiments out of some slum, wasn't it?
The way they were currently minimizing experiments on ordinary people and the speculation that the Tang Clan's daughter was an adopted orphan simply didn't match up.
A cousin's child, at the closest—or a distant relative who still bore the Tang name. That was the limit of what I considered plausible.
******
The Hao Sect Leader was the first to report results. He met me at the inn and handed over a report dense with the details of his investigation. The closely written document had narrowed the suspects down to two people. One was the daughter of Tang Yeong-ju's older brother, Tang Yeong-hwan. He and his wife had a daughter late in life, but the record said she died early, perhaps due to the difficulties of the late childbirth.
"However, it's possible the death was a lie and he took his older brother's daughter to raise as his own."
"Does Tang Yeong-hwan not live together with the Sichuan Tang Clan's main family?"
The Hao Sect Leader nodded at my question.
"The Tang Clan makes its children compete in research. Only those who produce a certain level of results are permitted to live in the main family estate. From among those, they then select the successor who will lead the clan, they say. I've heard that those uninterested in either poison or power struggles leave Chengdu and live apart."
"So Tang Yeong-hwan gave up the competition early and left?"
"It wasn't that he gave up early. According to my investigation, it was roughly thirteen years ago, after Tang Yeong-ju achieved some astounding result, that he surrendered."
"An astounding result?"
"That's right. After that, Tang Yeong-hwan abandoned the competition and left Sichuan with his wife and daughter, heading toward Zhejiang Province. I heard the daughter caught an endemic disease there at age twelve and died."
"A tragic affair."
"Whether she truly died of an endemic disease is currently under investigation."
Being a close relative of the Tang Clan head, she was a fairly suspicious figure. But if his intention had been to entrust his daughter to someone, there was no reason to drag her all the way to Zhejiang Province, the complete opposite direction from Sichuan. I could fabricate a few reasons Tang Yeong-hwan looked suspicious, but no matter what reason I gave, the sequence of events felt unnatural.
"Who is the other one?"
"This one's entire family is recorded as dead. It was a branch-line family of the Tang Clan, not at all well-off—a household that caught snakes, extracted the venom, and made liquor and medicine to sell, I'm told. But it seems something was mishandled. The snakes escaped, and the whole family died steeped in snake venom."
"Died steeped in snake venom? How old was the daughter?"
"Seven years old."
I scanned the report and clicked my tongue. The incident's year had been marked in detail; it seemed to have been a memorable event in the village, remembered by many.
'A tragic end at such a young age. Seven years old. Had she lived until now, she'd be just about of age this year.'
Hm?
The Hao Sect Leader looked at me as well. I blinked and briefly exchanged glances with him. Then I asked him:
"This incident happened, let's see, thirteen years ago from now?"
"That's correct."
"And the time when the Tang Clan's Tang Yeong-ju achieved that astounding result and became clan head?"
"Also thirteen years ago."
The Hao Sect Leader was staring fixedly at me. He still had his human-skin mask on, so his expression showed little, but the exaltation one feels when pieces of information click into place was burning in his eyes. I reached out a hand and said:
"...Still, we can't be certain. Let's investigate further. We need to approach this a little more cautiously. Just because a death thirteen years ago—and deaths in any given year are not few—coincides in timing doesn't mean the Tang Clan is the culprit in every case."
Having said that, I checked the other parts of the report.
[At the time, the Sichuan Tang Clan took charge of searching and examining the incident scene and concluded the deaths were caused by snake venom.]
I grimaced. Clicking my tongue, I frowned. I was trying to view this dispassionately, without suspicion, but the circumstantial evidence in the case pointed far too squarely in one direction.
******
A few days after speaking with the Hao Sect Leader, the Demonic Cult liaison likewise came to find me with intelligence in hand. When we secured a room at a different inn and met face to face, the merchant frowned and said:
"Two individuals match the overlapping details you mentioned, great hero. One is Tang Yeong-ju's older brother, Tang Yeong-hwan. The other is a branch-line Tang clansman, the snake-catcher, Tang Ui-gyeong."
He, too, laid out information similar to the Hao Sect Leader's.
"I looked into them, but the Tang Clan has already built a tomb for Tang Ui-gyeong's whole family, I found. And Tang Yeong-hwan, they say, shaved his head and vanished into the mountains. For that reason, no proper testimony could be obtained from either."
This was information the Hao Sect Leader had not mentioned. Did losing the succession competition really drive a man to that? I couldn't fathom what kind of shock would make someone change so drastically.
"Tang Yeong-hwan became a monk?"
"I heard that he and his wife live as recluses deep in the mountains. But no one knows what mountain he went to, and he erased his secular name as well. Finding him through simple inquiries alone was difficult. As you know, our information network isn't suited for openly searching for people."
Even as he spoke, the merchant's face showed a touch of wounded pride. He narrowed his brow and said to me:
"At this rate, even if we have our suspicions, isn't it impossible to secure solid proof? How do you plan to proceed from here?"
Truth be told, based on the intelligence the Hao Sect Leader had conveyed, Tang Ui-gyeong's side drew my suspicion more strongly. But, as the merchant said, there was no one we could question right this instant either.
"No, there is someone to ask."
But that was a statement one could only make when dealing with the living. Tang Yeong-hwan had hidden himself in the mountains, and Tang Ui-gyeong had died from snake venom—if he died, remains would be left, and remains belonged in a grave. That was the normal course.
"Who on earth do you intend to question?"
"Let's ask the grave. Tang Ui-gyeong's grave."
The merchant's eyes went round at my words.
"The grave? You mean to dig up a grave right now?"
I nodded and said:
"Is confirming things with our own eyes not the fastest way? If Tang Ui-gyeong's daughter is now in the Tang Clan main family, do you think a child's bones would be in that grave? And since the Tang Clan handled the funeral themselves, they would have used good coffins."
The merchant's face showed some consternation, but I had no intention of stopping. The circumstantial evidence was solid, and there was no one available right now to give additional testimony. If so, we had no choice but to dig up Tang Ui-gyeong's family grave and confirm its contents with our own hands.
"Or do you have another way?"
The merchant, his face uneasy, reluctantly nodded.
******
"This is the grave of Tang Ui-gyeong's family. They were buried right next to where the Tang Ui-gyeong family lived."
The site where Tang Ui-gyeong's family had lived was so collapsed it was practically a haunted ruin. Even now, a pungent stench of blood seemed to rise as you drew near, and the rags hanging from the ceiling and around the place looked like the decayed shapes of what had once been snakes. The merchant clicked his tongue as he surveyed the surroundings, then pointed at the shovel and sack we'd brought and said:
"Because the whole family died steeped in snake venom, nobody comes near, calling the place cursed. The Tang Clan doesn't seem to be patrolling it either, so let's dig quickly and be done with it."
"Let's."
I offered a light bow of respect to Tang Ui-gyeong's grave, then gripped a shovel firmly. Since the entire family had died at once, a single large burial mound had been raised for them all together, and it sat imposing behind the headstone.
I felt uneasy about digging up a dead man's grave. Still, if Tang Ui-gyeong's daughter had been taken to the main family as we suspected, then we might be avenging his enemy on his behalf—so wouldn't this count as a good deed for him too?
The merchant and his subordinates were surveying the surroundings and keeping watch. I and two other Demonic Cult members began lightly shoveling away the dirt. With three martial artists scraping earth as if it were child's play,
the grave's soil vanished in an instant, and three coffins presented themselves to us, all in a row.
They were uniform in size, and the wood used was of quite fine quality—none of them had rotted yet. At my gesture, one of the men carefully pried open the leftmost coffin. As dirt sifted into the interior, the Demonic Cult member who had been frowning and peering inside the coffin let out a strange sound.
"What?"
The merchant and I simultaneously shifted our gazes into the coffin.
The coffin was utterly empty.
As if no one had ever been placed in it from the start.
"As expected...."
Just as I was about to call out in triumph, certain my hypothesis was correct—
"Uh?"
A bizarre sound escaped from the Demonic Cult member who had opened the opposite coffin.
"What is it?"
"This one's empty too, sir?"
"Huh?"
Three coffins beneath Tang Ui-gyeong's grave.
Among them, only the one presumed to be Tang Ui-gyeong's wife's coffin contained proper skeletal remains.