‘It is fine if you insist,’ Yang said with a touch of resignation, ‘but I will have to stay with you all the time in the temple.’

‘You’re being overprotective again, Yang, but I’ll have two rooms booked, no problem.’

‘To the temple, then! Sit tight, Master.’

The carriage started rolling slowly along the trail. It was quite bumpy and slippery after the off-and-on drizzle throughout the night. Driving the carriage in front, Yang made occasional comments in between the whip cracking through the stillness of the surrounding hills.

‘You may well take a break in the carriage, Master, after the disturbance of last night’s knife note. I really don’t like it.’

Yang was not overreacting to the knife note left at the hostel the previous night, Dee reflected, still far from sleepy, even though he had slept little during the night. With the unexpected request from Minister Wu, the message in the knife note seemed to have become even more inexplicably sinister.

In accordance with the message reinforced with the Book of Changes, Judge Dee had better stay put. It was perhaps a coincidence that the second reading in the light of the coin consultation with the Confucian classic carried a similar implication. A deep-dyed Confucian scholar, Dee could not help taking the message seriously. Any drastic movement on his part could lead to disastrous consequences.

Didn’t the authorization letter from Minister Wu mean, however, that Judge Dee had to move on?

But he could not but remind himself again that the message in the knife note spelled an opposite direction that he should follow.

Another cracking of the whip in front, Yang could be heard heaving a dramatic sigh, characteristic of the overprotective assistant as before – as always.

Time flies. It was more than a dozen years since Judge Dee had seen Yang for the first time. At the time, Yang was rotting in prison for beating up a young rogue from an official family who attacked a poor girl in a wet market. Judge Dee managed to snatch Yang out of prison and clear his name from the false accusation. There and then, Yang declared kneeling at Judge Dee’s foot in the dust, ‘Master, you’ve given me a second life, and from now on it belongs to you alone.’

Yang had kept his words all these years, proving to be a more valuable assistant than expected – skilled in Shaolin martial arts, street-smart, incessantly energetic – and, more than anything else, intensely loyal to Judge Dee, guarding him all the way through the ups and downs in his official career.

Time changes a lot.

Some people changed; however, some people did not.

But how could a celebrated, talented poetess like Xuanji have turned into a diabolical murderer in such a shorter period of time?

The deep yearning in those sentimental poems of hers might have not changed, though.

The music floating from the neighbors

under the moonlight, I look out, alone,