Crown Prince and Ghost King

Chapter 53

No.

No, no, no!

It had to be a fucking joke! It had to be!

The place Jun Wu told them to go first, to start their investigation, was literally...

«What the fuck is going on?», Feng Xin took a step back, horrified, mind already flooded by hundreds of unpleasant memories. It was a dilapidated shack, almost completely claimed by moss and plants, but no less recognizable. It was clear someone else had to have lived in there, for it to still exist after eight hundred years – it was nothing but a wooden house, how long could it have survived without care? – but now it was empty.

Almost gone, the wood eaten away, half-collapsed on itself.

It was still the same fucking house Feng Xin had to live in, before Xie Lian went completely mad thanks to Bai WuXiang.

«You don't think... you don't think that temple could be one of His Highness, right?», he tentatively asked, moving careful steps to see if it was still possible to go inside the house. It wasn't something he thought about, that they could find themselves before a remnant of the old temples Xie Lian counted under his name. Now it seemed more plausible than not.

Mu Qing wanted to nod, because yes, he thought it was possible, but as soon as he placed a single foot inside what was left of that house, he recoiled back with a hiss. The same did Feng Xin, though he did it with far less grace and ended up hitting a rotten beam in his step back, making even more of the structure crumble.

«What is this!?», the god exclaimed, looking down at his foot as if it got burned. «Why is there so much lingering resentment? Who died in here?».

It wasn't something visible. It was also something that human tenants surely missed, after taking over the house for themselves. But it hit Mu Qing with the strength of divine wind, knowing the wind out of him. it was also old, too old to belong to someone that came after Xie Lian left.

Mu Qing wasn't the best when it came to examination of resentful traces, that description fitted other officials much better, but even he was able to recognize it was something that waited there for eight hundred years.

«I don't know, I... no one was dead when I left», Feng Xin compulsively shook his head, staring at the ruins of the house with red-rimmed eyes. And he kept staring until something struck him, and he swallowed dry, hands starting to shake: «Mu Qing», the god called for his companion, unable to look away from rotten wooden beams as he spoke. «How did Xie Lian's parents die?».

He even forgot to call him by his title.

It couldn't be his fault, right? Xie Lian did look completely out of it, the day he came back from fuck knew where, but... there was no way he killed his parents. He loved them, there was no way!

But if they died of natural causes, then why all that resentment was still there, lingering, waiting to be found? People who died of old age rarely left the world of the living with so many scattered pieces refusing to follow.

Now positively scared of an answer, Feng Xin turned to look at Mu Qing and grabbed him by the collar of his robes: «How did they die?!», he almost yelled in his face, shaking him back and forth, shock making his fingers go numb. «Don't tell me he did this. I could have stayed, don't tell me he...».

He couldn't say much else after that, all words cut off by the sharp, familiar pain of Mu Qing's fist colliding with his face, the hit producing a cut high on his cheekbone.

For once, he didn't fight back.

Chasing away tears that threatened to wet his eyes, Mu Qing massaged the back of his hand after the blow and let out a painfully harsh breath: «Don't jump to conclusions, we have no idea what happened», he said, voice cutting through like a blade would cut living flesh. «For all we know, they could have died of an illness». Or killed themselves. That, he didn't add out loud.