“The pearl‑farm women never did a cruel thing in their lives,” Liying said. “All they wanted was a quiet life, but for generations they’ve been trampled and enslaved by Lian Ji’s salt‑transport gang, living with one foot out of the grave. You knew this, Commissioner Lin—didn’t you? Or were you taking your cut in secret?”
“You brought a delegation from the Nanyang to surrender. If they truly presented rare tribute, even without your scheme, wouldn’t you have repeated the same trick—have a tribute ship sabotaged and sunk? The emperor would be enraged; only the Nanyang princess would suffer the blame, and that small southern kingdom would know no peace.”
“How many common folk in Nanyang, and in the Central Plains, would die because of that? Does your heart not stir at all, Lord Lin?”
Liying stepped forward two paces, smiling all the while. She could see her own reflection clear as glass in the commissioner’s eyes.
“You were the hero of the salt case back then,” she went on, voice steady. “Everyone called you the loyal official who stood up for the people. But behind the applause you were in league with Lian Ji, weren’t you?”
Lian Ji had once been nothing more than the unremarkable daughter of the Bai salt merchants—no right to run the household so long as her father and brothers lived. So she chose a scorched‑earth stratagem: she cut the roots, struck a bargain with you, Commissioner Lin. She gave up the Bai house and those of the salt‑carriage crews who wouldn’t obey her as proof of loyalty, and in exchange bought herself a cloak of ‘righteousness’—the kind that looks like filial duty to the public eye.
With that borrowed virtue she pretended devotion and married into the Lu family as a second wife. The Lu patriarch suspected foul play but had no proof and had to swallow the bitter truth in silence, biding his time.
“Commissioner Lin,” Liying said softly, “do you sleep at night? Does your conscience let you?”
“Madam Lu died innocent—taken in the bloom of life. Wasn’t she wronged?”
“Zheng Ji, once the bold head of the caravan men, because of your machinations was left lame, his spirit crushed. He disbanded the caravans and hid away for a decade. Wasn’t he wronged?”
“The caravan men never broke the law. You and Lian Ji had the salt‑gangs don the robes of their enemies and attack them; those honest men were forced into hiding in border towns, living like frightened turtles. Were they not wronged?”
“The Minister of Protocol—who left his post to uncover the truth and restore Madam Lu’s honor—he cut himself off from the world; Old Master Yan retired into private sorrow. Were they not wronged?”
“The head of the Lu household lost his beloved; father and son were torn apart by grief. Were they not wronged?”
With each name, each wound she named, Commissioner Lin shrank another inch. Liying’s words were blades, and by the time she finished he was a spent thing in the corner—like a mouse that had been crushed underfoot—no sound left in him but a rattle.
She lifted her chin. A shadow slid across her face.
“Commissioner Lin,” she said, “people do what they must, but heaven sees all. Do you believe in retribution?”
“My hands have been bloody in every scheme. I’ve walked to the edge of the knife and back.”
“But the heavens are not blind. They help me, not you.”
At that, the last flicker of something like defiance in Lin’s eyes died out. Heaven helps me, not you—how neatly it felled him.
Liying then laid out the whole plot, as lightly as if recounting the weather. Lian Ji had ordered the salt gangs to masquerade as caravan men, then sink the salt‑transport ships and pull the official salt from the water into their warehouses. She used large ships to smuggle the salt out of the realm, while you, Lin, in collusion with the transport commissioner and the salt inspectors, issued official passes and cover papers to ease the transfers and avoid river patrols. With officials protecting one another and abusing their offices, you manufactured an artificial shortage of official salt.
When the shortage came, Lian Ji’s merchant cronies—those you had handpicked to conspire—sold the recovered official salt at exorbitant prices in the counties struck by famine, making monstrous profits. And all the while you shoved the blame onto the Lu family as scapegoats.
“Su stood before the throne and told the emperor all this,” she added. “A man who shields himself against the world and seizes the emperor’s trust cannot hide such treachery forever, Commissioner. Your crimes are against the sovereign—an offense that tears the heavens’ writ itself. You, the emperor’s favored, have no more days to turn.”
Lin’s laugh was a thin, brittle thing. He had stood at the emperor’s knee for years—how could he not understand the suspicious nature of rulership? He knew the emperor’s jealous temper better than most. Evidence piled like stone; the sovereign’s wrath would not be appeased. There was nothing for him but ruin.
The laugh cut off like a snapped wire. In the end, Commissioner Lin died in the imperial jail. The coroner’s report said his organs had ruptured from terror—heart and liver split as if his fear tore him apart. He died without another witness; the last breath he took took with it the whereabouts of the tribute ship’s pearls. The cargo—thousands of measures of glowing nacre—was gone as if swallowed by the sea.
The emperor ordered an exhaustive investigation and ordered the pearls recovered, but everyone knew the metaphor: a brick in the river; silence where there should have been answers. The Nanyang delegation had crossed a thousand miles in good faith only to have their national treasures looted on Central Plains soil. The emperor, his pride pricked, could not bring himself to take the Nanyang princess into the inner palace as he had originally intended—yet neither could he throw her to the wolves. The princess breathed for the first time in many days.
The Lu family were summoned to court. In the end, the salt scandal had been a frame built to crush them. They had opened their granaries and fed the people in honest charity; for that they deserved praise, not the gallows.
“You seek nothing for yourself,” the emperor said to Lu Xunguang with a rising smile. “And yet you plead for your people. Well said.”
“Your subject asks only to serve His Majesty,” Lu Xunguang replied, bowed and reverent. “If the emperor would be pleased to reward us, I beg only that you take the pearl island under the crown’s protection.”
“The people of the pearl isles are simple and honest,” he explained. “They have been harried by pirates for years; the pearls properly belong as tribute to your Majesty. I ask this only to spare them further suffering.”
The emperor was taken aback—no one expected such magnanimity from the Lu household—but soon he laughed, a broad, approving sound.
“Good! A noble plea for the people. So it shall be. Lu Xunguang, though you claim nothing, I will still grant a reward.”
Honor and favor poured into the Lu family’s old mansion in the capital like a river. Though they had wished only for justice, imperial favor comes with its own current; within hours the capital buzzed: the Lu household had risen again, and Su the favored official had been vindicated. Whispers started that the young master of the Lu family might one day sit among the empire’s merchant princes.
Liying paid no mind to the gossip. A woman in those circles could not parade herself about the city; she withdrew instead to the Ruyi Return tavern and set her mind to new dishes. With the Nanyang envoys in the capital, the western‑style plates she had been perfecting in the village would find a fitting debut. She had work to do—and a quieter sort of justice, served differently, to attend to.