Miss Fairy, Please Hear Me Out

Xu Yuan had never really taken Su Jinxuan’s words at face value. Just as Su Jinxuan did not trust him, there was no way he would blindly believe her side of the story either. That said, the information in the sealed report did confirm one thing. When Su Jinxuan was young, her family had indeed been hit by a devastating upheaval.

While her parents were still alive, the Su family had lived quite comfortably. Back then, her parents ran a mid-sized trading guild in Southriver Prefecture, Suqin Cloth House. Their main business was fabrics and silks, along with perfumes and rouge meant for women.

Because Su Jinxuan’s father had once studied with one of the men in charge of the Calm Sky Merchant Association in Southriver Prefecture, the two sides had some connection. They were not especially close. But with that old school tie and a generous amount of gift money, the Suqin Cloth House managed to secure a bit of trade cooperation with the giant that was the Calm Sky Merchant Association, mostly on the scraps and side margins of its business.

And because of that connection, when Su Jinxuan’s household was wiped out, the Blackscale Guards had quietly looked into the matter. After all, a business partner did not just vanish for no reason, especially not by getting exterminated to the last member. That naturally called for an investigation. The other side had covered its tracks well, but the Blackscale Guards still managed to piece together the rough outline through its own channels.

Su Jinxuan’s enemies had come from two sides. One side paid. The other side did the killing. The ones footing the bill were three cloth merchants in Southriver Prefecture. The ones providing muscle were a band of mountain brigands outside the prefectural city. Once the job was done, those brigands were promptly wiped out by the same three merchant guilds that had hired them.

That was as far as the Blackscale Guards went at the time. They never dug deeper, because the Suqin Cloth House was only a low-tier supplier of raw materials for Calm Sky Merchant Association. It did not touch any core interests, so there was no reason to get further involved.

The Calm Sky Merchant Association’s way of handling the matter had also been very simple. They sent a mid-level steward to warn the three rule-breaking merchant guilds, squeezed a hefty compensation payment out of them, and considered the matter closed.

The Calm Sky Merchant Association took the compensation. The three merchant guilds picked up the family’s assets afterward through court auction at bargain prices. The local authorities pocketed the auction money and also got credit for clearing out the bandits. A perfect world where nobody got hurt had officially been achieved.

Of course, even after everyone had gotten their share of the benefits, the case files were still kept in the local Blackscale Guards archives.

Now that Xu Yuan had ordered the case reopened, those old files were pulled out again, and the Southriver branch of the Blackscale Guards immediately launched a full investigation into the three cloth houses involved. They found nothing because everyone from back then was dead.

Even after days of exhaustive digging, they still could not find a single living witness. Again and again, the investigation would get halfway before running straight into a dead end, because every lead was already dead.

Qin Weijiu had handled this whole matter with extreme professionalism. Fortunately, the Blackscale Guards of the Chancellor’s Manor was every bit as professional. They changed direction several times, tried one line of inquiry after another, and in the end finally found a few clues in the properties once owned by the Suqin Cloth House.

Su Jinxuan’s parents were dead, but the land deeds and estates under their name did not just vanish into thin air. Su Jinxuan herself had been rescued and taken away. With no one left to inherit the family holdings, once the deadline passed, the government simply auctioned everything off.

Yes, back then Qin Weijiu had only saved Su Jinxuan herself. He had not helped her keep hold of the family estate. There were plenty of reasons for that, but the biggest one was probably simple enough. He had no motive. Saving Su Jinxuan had been carefully planned from the start, but Qin Weijiu had to make it look like a casual act of mercy.

I saw you were pitiful, so I saved you on a whim. But now I am also supposed to go all out and protect your inheritance for you too? Come on. You are not family, not kin, not anything. What kind of saint runs a full-service charity like that?

Working from that principle, even when Qin Weijiu later helped Su Jinxuan take revenge and silence people, he only started doing it years afterward, once he had slowly built up something like a familial bond with her. He had been cautious to an absurd degree. But no matter how careful the man was, he still could not stop the idiots working under him from being idiots.

Those properties meant little to Qin Weijiu, but to some of his subordinates, they were a slab of fat meat just begging to be carved up. More than ten years later, the businesses and estates once owned by Su Jinxuan’s parents had changed hands again and again, until in the end they were all tucked under the name of a man called Xi Cang.

What the man was called did not really matter. What mattered was that he was the elder brother of the son-in-law of the chairman of the Konghua Merchant Guild.

The Konghua Merchant Guild was a major local guild and was not formally attached to any larger power. At that point, the trail seemed to go cold again. Because for a large merchant guild to swallow up and consolidate all sorts of scattered properties was about the most normal thing in the world.

So the Southriver Blackscale Guards submitted its report. The investigation was just about to be wrapped up when a crucial piece of information came back from the Blackscale Guards headquarters in the Imperial Capital. The power backing Konghua Merchant Guild was the sect tied to Qin Weijiu’s clan. That news instantly put fresh life into the Southriver Prefecture branch.

Qin Weijiu himself had never touched the properties left behind by Su Jinxuan’s parents, but one of the hidden pieces on his board had quietly swallowed them whole. If it had been done openly, that alone would not have meant much.

After all, Su Jinxuan trusted Qin Weijiu so deeply, and his relationship with her was practically that of brother and sister. It would not have been impossible that he was merely managing the estate for her, planning to return it when the time was right.

But taking it in secret was another matter entirely. That was not hard proof, not yet, but it was enough to give the Southriver Blackscale Guards a new direction. The earlier investigation, tracing upward from the bottom, had hit a wall because the key figures from those three merchant guilds had all been silenced.

Now, with this new lead, they could investigate from the top down instead. And as they kept digging, the Southriver Blackscale Guards discovered that the points where those two separate trails had gone dead... were actually the same place.

Back then, the Suqin Cloth House founded by Su Jinxuan’s parents had done business under the wing of the Calm Sky Merchant Association, while those three cloth houses had been backed by Konghua Merchant Guild.

The way they found that out was simple enough. It was a bit like modern clothing brands slapping some flashy collaboration label on everything. Once these small cloth houses, the kind forced to survive in the cracks, managed to strike a deal with a major merchant guild, they wanted nothing more than to paste that partnership right onto their foreheads.

It was a strange sort of quality certification, really. All it took was a few visits and some questions for the old managers who had worked in the trade for over twenty years, and the whole thing came out easily enough. Of course, more importantly, the businesses once owned by the three cloth houses that had been Su Jinxuan’s enemies were all now attached to the Konghua Merchant Guild.

The Konghua Merchant Guild had taken in every last asset from those three cloth houses without exception. Other than swapping out the figureheads after the original ones died, almost none of the mid and upper level managers had changed in more than ten years.

When Xu Yuan saw that, he actually laughed out loud. Fine, after buying out a company, maybe you don’t want to start swinging the axe immediately and scare everyone half to death. But at the very least, you should plant a couple of your own trusted people in the key positions, should you not?

But the Konghua Merchant Guild bought up three cloth houses and did not replace a single manager for over a decade. What was that supposed to mean? First they were holding the shares on someone else’s behalf, and now the property was quietly returning to its original owner, was that it?

More than half an hour later, Xu Yuan finally arrived and pushed open the door. The room was still as dim as before. The fine dishes and food had already been cleared away by the maidservants, leaving only the woman sitting alone at the little round table.

Su Jinxuan sat with her back to the door, her spine straight, though somehow she looked terribly slight.

Xu Yuan walked over slowly and saw that beneath her pale blue silk dress, her delicate body was trembling faintly.

He took two more steps forward.

Su Jinxuan’s voice came softly, shaking just a little. ”Do you... do you have proof? Proof of the connection between Mister Qin... and that Konghua Merchant Guild?”

Xu Yuan said nothing as he walked to stand in front of her. That was exactly what he had gone out to get. He and Ying’er had used the communication formation all the way through to have the key evidence sent over from the Imperial Capital.

He just had not expected there to be quite so much of it. Printing it all out with the array-powered movable type press had taken over half an hour by itself.

THUD! With a flick of thought, several thick stacks of account books fell out of Xu Yuan’s Sumeru Ring and hit the floor with a heavy muffled sound.

Su Jinxuan stared blankly at the ledgers scattered across the ground. After a long moment, she finally spoke in a low voice. ”This is...”

Xu Yuan sat down, poured himself a cup of tea, and replied in the same calm, unhurried tone as ever.

”The account books of the Konghua Merchant Guild over the past decade and more. Every month, they send a huge amount of silver, medicinal herbs, finished pills, and other resources to the Skysteer Sect. You can look through them yourself.