Chapter 129: Suspected Poisoning

The gate did not open at once. For a long, uncomfortable stretch, the carriage simply sat before the dark wall, the horses shifting their weight and blowing soft clouds of breath into the cooling air, while Lu Feng strained to catch any sign of movement beyond it. Then, finally, a lantern flared to life somewhere behind the wall, followed by the heavy grinding sound of the bar being drawn back.

Two guards pushed the gate open, one on each side, moving with none of the crispness Lu Feng remembered from his last visit. Their steps dragged. Their shoulders sat low, as though each of them carried some private weight they hadn’t set down in days. One of them held his lantern at an angle that barely lit his own face, let alone the carriage rolling past him, and neither guard offered the usual greeting Lin Laifu’s household was known for.

Old Ma guided the horses through without needing to be told to slow down. He’d clearly noticed the same thing Lu Feng had.

"Stop here," Lu Feng said, before they’d gone more than a few paces past the threshold.

The carriage rocked gently to a halt. Lu Feng pulled the door open himself rather than waiting for Bai Bao, stepping down onto the packed earth of the courtyard and turning back toward the gate, where the two guards were already swinging it shut behind them with the same slow, joyless motion.

"You there," Lu Feng called, walking back toward the nearer of the two. "A word, if you would."

The guard startled slightly, as if he hadn’t expected to be addressed directly, then straightened and offered a stiff bow. "Young Master Lu. Forgive us. We weren’t told to expect visitors this evening."

"That’s not what concerns me." Lu Feng studied the man’s face in the lantern light, the dark circles under his eyes, the tightness around his mouth. "What’s happened here? The whole estate feels as though it’s in mourning."

The guard hesitated, glancing toward his companion, who had drifted closer without quite joining the conversation.

"It’s Master Lin," the first guard admitted finally, voice low. "He’s taken ill."

"Ill how?"

"Two days ago, after the auction closed, he held a small celebration here. Nothing grand, just his workers, himself, and his lady. Wine, a good meal, some music. He was in the finest mood any of us had seen him in for months." The guard’s throat worked as he swallowed. "By Yesterday morning, he could barely stand. Fever, chills, something twisting in his gut that wouldn’t ease no matter what we tried."

Lu Feng felt something in his chest draw tight. "You called a healer."

"Several, young master. None of them could agree on what ailed him. We tried pills from three different masters, hoping one of them would settle his stomach or break the fever." The guard’s hands tightened around the hilt of his lantern. "Every single one made him worse. Not better. Worse, every time, as though his body was rejecting anything we gave him."

"When did this start?"

"Just after the celebration he held. It’s been getting steadily worse since." The guard rubbed a hand across his face, as if trying to wipe away the exhaustion of watching it happen. "First it was just complaints of a heavy stomach. We thought he’d simply overindulged at his own party, truth be told. Nobody worried much yesterday morning."

"And then?"

"By the evening, he couldn’t keep food down at all. Fever set in that night, bad enough that his lady sat up with him until dawn, pressing cool cloths to his head. We sent for the first healer that same morning." The guard shook his head slowly. "The man gave him something for the fever. It broke the fever, but left him weaker than before, shaking so badly he could barely hold a cup."

Bai Bao had stepped down from the carriage as well by now, standing a few paces off with his arms crossed, listening without interrupting. Old Ma remained up on the driver’s bench, reins loose in his hands, his weathered face drawn tight with concern of his own.

"A pill master came by earlier today," the guard continued, unprompted now, the words spilling out of him as though he’d been waiting all evening for someone to ask. "An older man, very serious. He examined Master Lin for a long while, checked his pulse three separate times, then told us to stop giving him anything else. Said whatever’s wrong with him isn’t an ordinary illness, and that continuing to feed him random pills would only hasten what’s coming."

"What’s coming," Lu Feng repeated quietly.

The guard’s eyes dropped to the ground. "He said Master Lin has, at most, a handful of days left. Unless we can find whatever will actually counter what’s inside him."

For a moment, none of them spoke. Somewhere beyond the courtyard, a dog barked once and then fell silent, as if even the animals in this place had learned to keep quiet.

"Do you know if anyone suspects poison?" Lu Feng asked, though he already knew the answer before the guard opened his mouth.

"The pill master didn’t say the word outright, but everyone here believes it. Nothing about the way it’s spreading through him looks like any sickness we know. And Master Lin has never been a sickly man." The guard’s jaw tightened. "Someone did this to him. We just don’t know who, or how."

Lu Feng thanked the man with a nod that felt entirely too small for what he’d just been told, then turned and walked back toward the carriage without another word, his mind already racing far ahead of his feet.

Poison. Something that mimicked illness closely enough to fool three separate apothecaries, that turned every remedy offered against it into further harm, that a trained pill master took one look at and immediately recognized as something beyond ordinary treatment.

He’d heard of poisons like that before, the kind brewed specifically to punish anyone foolish enough to try treating them the conventional way, each failed remedy feeding the poison rather than fighting it. If that was truly what they were dealing with, then every hour they spent guessing at cures was an hour closer to losing him entirely.

He thought, unbidden, of the Heaven and Earth Mending Pill.

He’d used one on Ye Chenxue the very day they’d met to recover her completely ruined Dantian. The Heaven and Earth Mending Pill hadn’t just treated a problem. It had reached past whatever was actively working against her body and repaired the damage at its root, indiscriminate of what had caused it in the first place.

If it could undo what Ye Chenxue had gone through, there was at least a chance it could do the same here.

"Old Ma," Lu Feng said, climbing back into the carriage without waiting for Bai Bao to settle in first. "Drive straight to his quarters. Now."

"Yes, young master." Old Ma didn’t ask for clarification. He simply snapped the reins, and the carriage lurched forward again, rolling deeper into the estate grounds at a pace that bordered on reckless for the narrow courtyard paths.

Now that Lu Feng understood what had happened, the gloom hanging over the whole estate made a terrible kind of sense. The guards at the gate, the empty offering plates he’d noticed along the canal earlier, the silence pressing down over the entire district like a held breath.

A man like Lin Laifu, gregarious and constantly surrounded by noise and business, brought low enough that his own household had gone quiet out of dread rather than habit. It wasn’t just illness that did that to a place. It was fear.

And Lu Feng had a growing, unwelcome suspicion about where that fear had come from.

He thought back to the four men who’d tried to take Han Lin that very afternoon, to the folded paper with its crude sketch and its small inked fang wrapped in chain, still tucked away in his sleeve. Two attacks, on two people close to him, within the same handful of days. It was possible they were unconnected. He wanted, badly, for them to be unconnected. But the part of him that had learned to distrust convenient coincidences refused to let the thought go.

What did Han Lin and Lin Laifu actually have in common? They moved in entirely different circles. One was a maid who rarely left the estate grounds except for errands like today’s. The other was a merchant with contacts across half the city, a man who’d built his fortune long before Lu Feng had ever wandered into his life. On the surface, there was almost nothing linking them at all.

Except for him.

It was such an obvious answer, once he let himself actually look at it, that he almost laughed at how long it had taken him to arrive there. Han Lin served his household. Lin Laifu handled his business. Both of them were bound to him in ways that were supposed to be quiet, careful, kept well away from prying eyes. And yet here they both were, one nearly kidnapped in broad daylight, the other possibly poisoned in his own home, within days of each other.

Someone knew exactly who mattered to him. And that someone was working their way through the people around him with a patience that unsettled Lu Feng more than any direct attack on himself ever could have.

He pushed the thought aside for now, not because it wasn’t important, but because it wasn’t useful in this exact moment. Lin Laifu was dying somewhere ahead of him, and theories about who was responsible wouldn’t save the man’s life. Only action would.

The carriage rattled to a stop in front of the main building, its windows dimly lit from within by what looked like a single lamp rather than the usual warm glow Lu Feng remembered from past visits. He was out of the carriage before it had fully settled, boots striking the packed earth hard, already moving toward the entrance without waiting for Bai Bao or Old Ma to catch up.

Behind him, he heard Bai Bao drop down from the carriage as well, his footsteps quick against the stone path, and Old Ma calling softly to the horses to keep them settled. Neither of them tried to slow him down.

Whatever questions they had about the poison, about Iron Fang, about what any of this meant for the household they now served, they seemed to understand that those questions could wait.

Somewhere inside that building, Lin Laifu was running out of time. And Lu Feng intended to find out exactly how much of it was left.