Free Web NovelChapter 1020: Chapter 980: Fragrance Wafts Through the City Lord’s Mansion
Now looking down again.
All his trusted aides had been brought to justice, and the City Lord’s Mansion, once as luxurious as the Imperial Palace, no longer belonged to him.
Right now he truly regretted it so much his intestines were turning green.
If Heaven gave him another chance, he definitely wouldn’t be so arrogant and overbearing; he’d surely keep a low profile when exercising his power.
As for this City Lord’s Mansion—so what if he’d built it that big?
In the end, didn’t he still have to hand it over to someone else?
All told, he had lived here for just over half a year.
That’s right, this City Lord’s Mansion had only been completed for less than half a year, and he’d actually moved in only a few months ago; yet in these few short months he hadn’t even managed to walk around every corner of Chengdu Prefecture, and it had already become smoke in the wind.
For the first time, he felt this enormous residence was actually so desolate, so sorrowful.
This was completely different from his original intent back then. When he first began building this City Lord’s Mansion, how high-spirited and vigorous he had been, how arrogant and tyrannical; you could say his eyes had already grown onto the top of his head.
At the time, taking advantage of the discord between Prince Ning and the Right Prince, he had seized the opportunity to rake in so many benefits, to rope in so many powerful nobles.
But now? What had he ended up with?
Heh, when dawn comes tomorrow, people coming to lodge complaints against him will probably be streaming in without end, won’t they?
By then, never mind the Right Prince passing sentence on him—even if each person only spat once, they could drown him to death.
After all, no one knew better than he did what he had done in the past.
How many heaven-defying, conscience-less things he had done—though he couldn’t remember the exact number, he knew it had to be an extremely large figure.
The number of commoners who had died because of him was absolutely another huge figure.
Just those numbers alone—once they reached the Right Prince’s ears—there would definitely not be a single good outcome waiting for him.
Precisely because he understood this, because he saw this so clearly, he had now already resigned himself to death. It was exactly for this reason that, in order not to suffer humiliation, he decided to kill himself.
Only in this way could he perhaps escape those insults and those torments of flesh and blood. When he thought of this, he immediately stuck out his tongue, intending to bite down hard.
However, when he tried to stick out his tongue, he was shocked to discover that he was already restrained—his mouth had been stuffed tight by someone.
He couldn’t even manage to push that wad of stuff out with his tongue.
After all, there was a loop of rope tied around that gag, tightly binding his mouth shut.
It was only at this moment that he truly felt a kind of grief that left him wanting to cry but with no tears.
Of course, Lin Yi had long anticipated all of this. For someone as steeped in sin as he was, he definitely wouldn’t be willing to wait until tomorrow to be tortured. Precisely because of that, he would surely choose to simply end things himself.
So Lin Yi had already ordered people to make thorough preparations in advance.
You could say that now, as for this Lord Liu, as long as Lin Yi didn’t nod, there was absolutely no way he could "resolve" himself.
On this point, those interrogators could absolutely get it done. Speaking of Lord Liu, after running things for so long, could it be that he had no trusted subordinates at all?
Of course that was impossible.
You could say that in this city Lord Liu had no fewer than a hundred confidants, and from top to bottom they occupied every kind of post.
The lowliest of them were still soldiers in the army.
But don’t forget, after Lin Yi’s order had just gone out, all those people eager to earn merit truly showed no mercy when it came to arrests.
Never mind officials—even their own comrades-in-arms, as long as they had been close to Lord Liu, had now all been tied up.
After all, Lord Liu had been arrogant and overbearing for so long that he had indirectly raised up a whole pack of equally arrogant underlings.
Here, Lord Liu was heaven itself, the man who could back them up, so they went around with their noses in the air every single day.
Even those soldiers in the army favored by Lord Liu had become extremely overbearing now.
You could say that when they were in the army, even their immediate superiors didn’t dare lay a hand on them; their status was far more impressive than that of their officers.
Of course, that was when they were in the army. When they were in front of Lord Liu, they behaved unusually docile.
This had made Lord Liu believe all along that they were still his plants inside the army—spies—and the most low-key, least noticeable kind at that.
Little did he know that, because of his own arrogance, these men had long since been treated by everyone like living ancestors to be worshiped. freeweɓnøvel.com
You could say they were doing one thing to his face and another behind his back; they had mastered this game perfectly.
Therefore, when it came time to arrest people, they hardly needed to investigate—everyone could be swept up in one go.
It was precisely because of this that Lord Liu’s faction was wiped out in a single pot, not even letting off the tiniest small fry.
If Lord Liu had known this would be the result, he probably wouldn’t have chosen these people as his informants in the first place.
He had used them to help him keep watch over the situation in the army, but he’d never imagined that these men would ride on his reputation to throw their weight around and act with impunity.
This really fulfilled that old saying: when the upper beam is crooked, the lower beams will be skewed.
Whatever kind of commander you have, that’s the kind of soldiers you’ll get. That’s an indisputable fact.
By contrast, aside from these men, the womenfolk were treated much better.
They weren’t tied up like zongzi and dragged out; instead, their hands and feet were bound, and they were arranged to sit in place along the outer wall of the City Lord’s Mansion.
Although they were women and children, Lin Yi knew that such women had surely been bullies of the people in normal times as well.
Thus Lin Yi decided they would be tried together tomorrow. As long as anyone brought charges against them, then even if they were women and children, they would definitely be punished.
If there really were those with kind hearts who had never done anything bad, Lin Yi wouldn’t make things hard for them in the end.
Time passed bit by bit like this, and Lin Yi didn’t go back to sleep or rest; he simply dragged a chair outside the City Lord’s Mansion and sat there, watching everything outside.
The soldiers were all bustling back and forth.
Having been busy this entire night, they were already starving.
In response, Lin Yi simply waved his hand and ordered people to start burying pots and lighting fires right outside the City Lord’s Mansion.
After just an hour, rich aromas were already wafting out.
As for why there was such a fragrance?
[To be continued....]
