Chapter Thirty-Two: Vital Intelligence

Early on the morning of the third day, He Jiping, who was later called Qianya Liangzi after the two had confirmed her identity, came to the inn where Chen Tianyu was staying.

This startled Chen Tianyu. Did they have to be so brazen about it?

To his surprise, Qianya Liangzi looked utterly unconcerned, smiling as she said, "They’re gone already. What are you worrying about?"

"Oh?" Chen Tianyu was slightly taken aback. Of course he knew who she meant. "Then come inside and sit."

Qianya Liangzi was not the least bit polite. She slipped into his suite at once, where Liu Zichen was already seated. Her sweet tongue came readily enough: "Sister Zichen, hello!"

Liu Zichen smiled and nodded. "The little Ya I know has come back."

"Heehee!" Qianya Liangzi sat down on the sofa without ceremony. She picked up a cup of tea and looked at it, but in the end did not drink; the tea had gone cold.

"You really don’t know how to take life easy. Even on a trip, you’re this busy," she joked.

Chen Tianyu cut her off. "Enough. What did you find out?"

"What’s the rush?" Qianya Liangzi said unhappily. "So impatient. Don’t tell me you’re eager to go to Yiruo’s flower house again?"

Chen Tianyu glared at her. "Say one more nonsense like that and I’ll stuff your mouth with a rag."

"Tch..." Qianya Liangzi rolled her eyes. Out of the corner of her vision she saw Liu Zichen smiling with gentle amusement, clearly unbothered, so she stopped provoking him.

Unexpectedly, Liu Zichen said with a bright laugh, "Little Ya, did you actually see him climbing a flower house?"

Qianya Liangzi froze. She had not expected Liu Zichen to be so open about it.

"Well, no," she said, covering her mouth as she laughed. "But it’s easy enough to imagine. A cripple..."

Seeing her drifting further and further into absurdity, Chen Tianyu hurriedly grabbed an apple and stuffed it into her mouth, chuckling, "Eat this. It’s washed!"

"Bah, you old rogue!" Qianya Liangzi angrily flung the apple back onto the coffee table, and the topic of climbing flower houses was not brought up again.

Chen Tianyu quickly asked, "What about the thing I asked you to look into? How was it?"

"What thing?" Qianya Liangzi pretended not to understand, but when she saw Chen Tianyu’s eyes widen, she hastily said, "All right, all right. Didn’t I already tell you? That ghost detective left first thing this morning."

"Where to?" Chen Tianyu asked.

Qianya Liangzi stuck out her tongue. "Er... that, he doesn’t seem to have told me."

"Hm. Then what about the past two days?" Chen Tianyu ignored her evasion.

"Oh, the past two days..." Qianya Liangzi said in dissatisfaction. "Hasn’t he been following you all along?"

Something stirred in Chen Tianyu’s mind. "All along? Every moment?"

"Yes." Qianya Liangzi said helplessly. "If we hadn’t made a prior agreement, I wouldn’t have bothered with such a boring thing."

Chen Tianyu gave her a cool look. "Aside from following me, did he do nothing else?"

"That’s right." Qianya Liangzi answered with complete certainty.

Liu Zichen could not help laughing. "That Yun Ji even came looking for me. Why didn’t you mention that?"

Qianya Liangzi’s mouth fell open in astonishment. "Ah, Sister Zichen didn’t tell you that? Then I assumed it."

"I just haven’t had the chance to say it yet. He’s been fooling around with Yiruo these past two days," Liu Zichen said, not meaning to make things difficult for her.

"..." Chen Tianyu was left speechless.

Still, he did not buy Qianya Liangzi’s act. Right now, what he feared most was that she had not been carrying out her task properly at all.

"Don’t tell me this Yun Ji doesn’t eat or sleep?"

"Oh, eating and sleeping are certainly necessary," Qianya Liangzi nodded. "Those are things any normal person has to do. Nothing strange about that."

At last Chen Tianyu understood that this girl was quite slippery indeed, and he silently laughed to himself.

"Where did Yun Ji eat?" he asked.

Qianya Liangzi asked back, "Which meal are you asking about?"

Chen Tianyu was remarkably patient. "Every meal. That should be six over two days, seven including this morning."

"Ah!?" Qianya Liangzi rolled her eyes. "Aren’t you bored out of your mind?"

"Not bored," Chen Tianyu said calmly.

Qianya Liangzi pouted and reluctantly replied, "He got up very early every day, probably leaving around six or seven in the morning. Then around eight he’d go to a roadside breakfast stall for some porridge. Lunch was simple too. At noon sharp he’d go to a family place on the hillside for a plate of greens. As for dinner, of course he went home to eat."

"A family place on the hillside?" Chen Tianyu exchanged a glance with Liu Zichen. "Is that the first choice for tourists coming to Lugu Lake?"

"It’s an old shop run by locals. It’s well known, so most people choose it," Qianya Liangzi said after a pause. "Unless they don’t bother reading travel guides."

Chen Tianyu nodded. Something occurred to him. "So you and Yiruo were willing to come the first time because Yun Ji was at that restaurant?"

"Tch!" Qianya Liangzi snorted. "Did I need him to protect me? The location was chosen by you people. As for whether Yiruo thought the same, I don’t know."

"Mm." That explanation was acceptable enough, so Chen Tianyu did not press further.

He asked curiously, "I went there with Zichen several times, so why did we never see him?"

"He’s close with the owner. Every time, he sits alone in a small room in the upstairs corner. He can see everyone, but not everyone can see him," Qianya Liangzi said with evident disdain. It seemed she did not approve of the man’s behavior either.

Liu Zichen smiled lightly. "He only eats a plate of greens each time and still takes up a whole room by himself. Wouldn’t the owner go bankrupt running a business like that?"

"Well, the owner is his wife's family, so what can he do?" Qianya Liangzi said, shrugging.

Chen Tianyu was startled. "What? Yun Ji is also a Mosuo?"

"What are you talking about? Of course not," Qianya Liangzi said with a laugh. "Yun Ji’s wife is the owner’s younger sister. Get it?"

Chen Tianyu focused on something else. "So Yun Ji is also an outsider who married in?" He thought for a moment. The phrase seemed a little off. "I heard from Yiruo’s aunt that it’s extremely rare for outsiders to form visiting marriages here, and even rarer for them to stay. Then he really is no ordinary man."

Qianya Liangzi rarely nodded. "Exactly. In all of Lugu Lake, he’s the only one who stayed. Everyone else left one after another."

"I do admire him for that, even if I can’t stand the way he carries himself," Qianya Liangzi added. "That’s precisely why the girls at Lugu Lake now rarely agree to visiting marriages with outsiders. Those lechers looking for a one-night fling are completely against the original spirit of the custom."

Chen Tianyu nodded to show he understood. "By the way, where does Yun Ji sleep at night? I mean the exact location. I’ve got a fairly good sense of the layout of Lugu Lake now."

Qianya Liangzi covered her mouth and laughed, probably remembering something amusing about climbing flower houses again.

Holding back her laughter, she said, "Actually, the flower house belonging to the owner’s younger sister is only thirty or fifty meters from Yiruo’s flower house. You just didn’t know that."

She almost blurted out that perhaps the sounds from your room at Yiruo’s place could be heard clearly by everyone else.

Chen Tianyu’s old face reddened, but he quickly sensed that something was deeply suspicious.

Everything seemed too much a coincidence.