Chương 216: 33. Investigation in the Pleasure Quarter 3

Jessi chuckled softly beside me.

"You've got nerve, young master."

"This is called trusting your teammates."

"This is called shoving your life into someone else's hands and smiling about it."

"Could you say something encouraging, just once?"

"Sure." She didn't miss a beat.

"I hope you die with dignity." I nearly lost the air in my lungs. Upstairs, the instruments began tuning; downstairs, the scattered guests started drawing their gazes upward. While Azure Silk Pavilion's attention turned to the stage, Jessi and I traded one fast look. She headed for the front hall—to watch, stall, and improvise interference. I slipped toward the side door—to find evidence, check the hidden ledgers, and try, on balance, not to die. Simple. Clean. Full of life experiences I never asked for.

I ducked through the gauze-hung side door into the backstage just as the music started upstairs. A few testing plucks of the strings. Then Alvira opened her mouth. I nearly died laughing on the spot. Not because she sang badly. Precisely the opposite. She sang far, far too well. Well enough to be catastrophically wrong for the venue. Her voice rang clean as snow falling through a forest—clear, cold, carrying the ethereal distance native to ancient elven modes.

Every other singer in this district sang of spring nights, tender longing, hearts swaying with wine. The moment Alvira opened her mouth, she sang of moonlit ancient trees, distant woodland rites, mountain springs and wind. It wasn't seduction. It was purification. Not an accompaniment to drinking. An absolution.

I bit down hard on my laughter and offered silent condolences to every client upstairs who'd come expecting something sultry and had just bought himself a front-row seat to an elven ranger's requiem for the dead. Value for money, honestly. The backstage was even more chaotic than the front hall—not dirty, but the kind of chaos that comes from too many hands arranging things and even more secrets stuffed into the gaps.

Makeup tables, costume racks, incense boxes, fabric trunks, tea trays, jewelry cases, instrument stands, and a few unpacked wicker costume baskets still on the floor. A few girls fresh off the floor were touching up their faces at the mirrors. A young girl clutching a pipa hurried past, muttering:"Why does the new one sing like she's sending everyone off to meet their ancestors…" I almost told her she had excellent instincts. I didn't have time. My eyes swept the backstage fast.

The public roster sat right out in the open—the kind you show inspectors, clean enough to have been freshly laundered, recording each girl's schedule with more piety than a church prayer book. Nothing useful would be left lying around that conveniently. I checked the makeup tables. Nothing. The accounting desk. Only surface ledgers. Then my eyes landed on a small, unusually thick incense cabinet in the corner. Everything on display—incense cakes, calming powders—looked perfectly harmless.

I crouched and knocked on the base. Hollow. Found it. I slid a thin blade into the seam and levered gently. The false bottom popped free, revealing several narrow ledger sheets folded with obsessive precision. I pulled the top sheet and read two lines. My back went cold. This wasn't a standard roster. One column listed the girls' public working names. Beside each ran tiny, precise notations: fox-tail, feather-mark, warm-mark, night-transfer, external loan, honored guest, venue loan.

The far-right column carried dates, client tiers, and abbreviated destination codes. I scanned down fast. Red-Silk — house. White-Mallow — night-transfer. Little Coral — external loan / warm-mark / honored guest. Date — the exact night before Haerdin's incident. Destination — Wave-Tail. Wave-Tail. Wave & Tail Caravan. The thread in my chest pulled taut instantly. This wasn't a guess. Not testimony. Not a survivor's shaken-together memory. This was a physical record—written down, in ink, an internal transfer log.

Once this got back to Ignicia, no matter how much she picked at it, she couldn't say we were building castles out of a dead man's teeth and a frightened woman's story. I was reaching to secure the page when a very faint footstep stopped just outside the door. Not the soft slippers of a house girl. Too steady. Too controlled. Too quiet. I shoved the remaining sheets back into the hollow, straightened, and grabbed a nearby incense box as cover. The curtain lifted.

A musician walked in, sanxian cradled in his arms—pale face, no beard, features so average he'd vanish from memory the instant he left a room. But the moment his eyes found me standing at the incense cabinet, something shifted. Not surprise. Confirmation. I swore, silently. He wasted no words.

"The piece playing upstairs," he said quietly, "isn't something this house sings." I smiled.

"Funny. I thought the same thing." In the next instant, he flipped the sanxian over. From beneath the strings, a thread of black light—thin as a hair—shot straight for my throat. I threw myself backward. It grazed my collar, slicing a clean line through the fabric across my chest. My scalp prickled. That was not a toy an ordinary musician plays with. I hurled the incense box at his head. He tilted aside, feet sliding, and closed the distance in the same motion.

His footwork was silent as stepping on water reflections—nothing like a bouncer or a street thug. It belonged in the same category as last night's operative: trained, precise, and built specifically to leave no trace. His eyes kept flicking toward my coat. He didn't want my life. He wanted the ledger page. Fine. Then let's see who's more desperate. I deliberately stumbled left, faking a run for the window. He took the bait and closed in—the sanxian flipped again, and a slim blade slid free from its hollow body.

I'd been waiting for exactly that. I kicked the low stool beside me hard into his knees. If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. He staggered. The blade veered an inch off course, grazing past my shoulder instead. At that exact moment, Alvira's voice upstairs landed its final, long note. The entire hall fell silent. That silence made the small commotion backstage instantly, unmistakably obvious.

Then, from just beyond the curtain, came a voice I'd have recognized anywhere—forever sounding like someone who'd bought a front-row seat to a show she'd been looking forward to all week.

"My, my. Young master really is in here. I was starting to think you'd gotten lost in someone's wardrobe again." The curtain was yanked open. The musician clearly hadn't expected front-of-house backup to arrive this fast. His motion hitched—just a fraction. That fraction was enough for Alvira to nail him where he stood. She stood in the doorway, the thin performance shawl still on her shoulders, her expression cold as an elven blade pulled fresh from a frozen lake. She didn't waste a syllable.

Her hand rose, and a thread of bright silver light shot out, needle-precise, straight for the wrist holding the knife. He reacted fast, twisting to deflect—the knife clattered to the floor—and used the same motion to fling something toward the ledger table. I thought it was poison powder. It wasn't. A small, spark-like talisman.

"Crap—" The paper hit the ledger stack and ignited faster than lamp oil. I mentally cursed his entire ancestral line, because if that pile burned through completely, the page in my coat became the only surviving copy, and the whole thread connecting Azure Silk Pavilion to the caravan would go up with it. Jessi moved faster than I did. She grabbed a nearby basin of ink-wash water and threw the whole thing over the flames. The fire went out halfway.

The top few ledgers still caught at the edges, curling and giving off the sharp, ugly smell of scorched paper. The musician was already diving for the side window. Alvira's wand snapped up—another line of light grazed his shoulder, drawing blood. He moved through it like he felt nothing, cleared the sill, hit the ground, and dissolved into the shadows of the narrow alley behind the building. I reached the window in time to catch only a gray blur vanishing around the corner.

"Don't chase," Alvira said, flat and cold. I ground my teeth.

"I know." Because she was right. This was his retreat line, not our home ground. Whether we could catch him if we gave chase was a separate question entirely. If we lost the ledger page in the process, that was the real disaster—we'd be going back only to wait for death. The front hall had already exploded into chaos by then. Clients were shouting. The girls were asking questions.

The madam's shrill voice cut clean through two layers of curtain, and the general gist of it amounted to: "Which god-cursed bastard set a fire in my house?!" and "Why did that new girl run off the moment she finished singing?!" Hearing that second part, I barely kept my face together. They'd genuinely mistaken Alvira for a new hire.

She stood amid the wreckage of the backstage, hair slightly disheveled, faint traces of spent light still clinging to her wand, her expression carrying enough cold intent to qualify as a physical hazard. If Jessi hadn't been standing right there, I was fairly certain her next move would have been to pin me to the floor and settle the accumulated debt—last night's grandmother joke, this morning's substitute songstress stunt—with compound interest.

I very sensibly shoved the ledger page deeper into my inner pocket and cleared my throat.

"We leave first?" She cut me a sideways glance.

"Or would you like to stay and request an encore?"

"…I feel like your repertoire today was better suited to a requiem than an encore."

"Cedric."

"I'm quiet." Jessi had already scouted our exit through the side door. One hand holding back the still-wailing madam, she smiled bright as a spring breeze and smoothed things over.

"Nothing to worry about, nothing at all—just a tipped incense burner. Look, it barely even scorched! As for that young lady just now—well, you know how it is with true talent. A little temperament comes with the territory." The madam's face was a masterpiece of competing emotions—grieving her backstage, furious about the fire, and simultaneously unable to let go of the elven singer who had somehow performed a funeral eulogy for someone's ancestors and left the entire room sitting there spellbound.

She looked like a woman who'd swallowed a bitter melon and a gold nugget at the exact same moment. We slipped out the side door in the confusion, moving fast through the narrow alley behind the building. Two sharp turns, a quick check that no one had followed, and I finally let myself lean against the wall and breathe.

"I have three things to say right now." Jessi, already working through another half-portion of bread acquired from who-knows-where, asked: "Which three?"

"First, I hate Ignicia. Second, I hate the red-light district. Third—" I looked at Alvira and made a genuine effort to arrange my face into something resembling sincerity.

"You really did sing beautifully just now." She froze. For one brief fraction of a second, that layer of killing intent on her face actually cracked—the thinnest of hairline fractures. Unfortunately, it sealed itself back over almost instantly, refilled with even more frost.

"Shut up."

"That was genuine."

"Your genuine opinions are usually more punchable than your lies."

"I have absolutely no counterargument to that." I spread my hands. Jessi's shoulders shook with laughter beside us.

"Young master, complimenting someone at a time like this really does come across like handing them flowers in the middle of a burning building."

"I'm working very hard to pass as a normal, well-adjusted person here."

"The results remain unconvincing." I didn't bother arguing with her. I pulled the ledger page out, and the three of us huddled together in the slanted morning light at the mouth of the alley to review it fast. The more I read, the heavier my chest got. Little Coral wasn't the only name on it. Several other Vixenfolk working aliases appeared, tagged with nearly identical notation: external loan, night-transfer, warm-mark, honored guest. Worse, their corresponding venues weren't fixed.

Some were listed under Azure Silk Pavilion. Some were flagged as venue loans. A few carried only a date and a client tier, with no destination recorded at all. This wasn't a single brothel hiding a handful of suspicious women. This was the entire harbor's red-light district running one shared system of aliases and rotations. I tapped one line with my finger.

"Here. Little Coral—external loan, warm-mark, honored guest. Date matches the night Haerdin was killed. Destination code: Wave-Tail." Jessi's smile dropped. Her eyes went flat and hard.

"Wave & Tail."

"Exactly." I turned the page.

"Which means Wave & Tail Caravan wasn't a lone tentacle reaching into the harbor. There were already receiving points inside the city. The caravan delivers the people in. The songhouses and brothels handle the rotation, the client contact, the false identities, and pass them along to whatever private room or bed they're meant to end up in." Alvira said quietly, "Shared aliases, shared markings, shared dispatch. You don't get this level of synchronization without a coordinating hand above it all."

I looked up at her.

"Did you notice anything unusual from the stage?" She was silent a moment, visibly reluctant to admit she'd actually performed.

"Yes," she finally said.

"The half-open private room at the far right of the second floor. Two people inside never reacted to the room at any point. One was trained. The other—""The other what?"

"Was evaluating whether I was of genuine elven lineage." She frowned slightly.

"By the third verse, there was a very faint response from inside. Not musical appreciation. Something closer to recognition—of the old mode itself." Something sank in my chest. People capable of identifying elven ancient musical modes had no business being common in a harbor songhouse. Especially not the kind who sat silently behind a half-drawn curtain and never showed their face. Jessi added: "Out front, two men who looked like bouncers started swapping positions the moment you slipped backstage.

It wasn't normal floor-watching. It looked more like sealing the exits. If Alvira's set hadn't left the entire hall too stunned to move, you might not have gotten that page out so cleanly."

"So we didn't stumble into this by luck today. We walked straight into their standard operating line." I folded the ledger page again—smaller this time, tighter, like locking a clasp around someone's throat. Alvira watched me tuck the evidence back into my inner pocket, then said abruptly:"What are you smiling at?" I blinked.

"Am I?"

"You are." Her expression stayed perfectly flat.

"That particular look you get—the one where you've just stepped into something terrible and are still pleased with yourself for having predicted it." I touched the corner of my mouth and found she was right. That mixed feeling of irritation and vindicated satisfaction was proving difficult to fully suppress.

"Because it means we didn't come out here for nothing," I said.

"And it means that fire-breathing dragon of a princess is probably going to have a very busy day again."

"Whether she's busy or not, I can't say," Jessi said cheerfully, "but I know for a fact you've still got plenty of running left to do today, young master." I looked down the alley toward the main street, brightening by the minute under the morning sun, and felt the urge to pre-order my tombstone inscription all over again. Before yesterday, the red-light district had just been the place where men paid good money to buy themselves trouble. Looking at it now— It was a keyring.

One the Yanxia Empire used to open doors. Performance troupes. Caravans. Vixenfolk. Songhouses. Brothels. Private rooms. Warming cases. False names. Rotations. Honored guests. Each piece, on its own, was just ordinary gray-market business. Strung together, they formed a silent network of forward positions—capable of delivering a person straight to the side of a local official, a merchant, a soldier, even a foreign envoy. The thought sent a shiver down my spine. Not from fear. From exhaustion.

The more you know, the more clearly you see exactly how much is still left to investigate. I let out a long breath and patted the pocket where that scorching-hot piece of evidence sat.

"Let's go." Jessi blinked.

"Back to the command post?"

"Where else? I'm not carrying this into the next house just to sit through another one of Alvira's concert engagements." Alvira turned a look on me cold enough to freeze a river.

"Mention singing one more time, and I'll make sure you spend the rest of your life speaking through your nose."

"… I genuinely recommend saving that particular talent for the interrogation room." She didn't answer. She only turned her face slightly away. But I saw it clearly—at the very tip of her ear, a faint flush that hadn't quite finished fading. I was sensible enough not to say anything more. Some jokes keep you alive. Some jokes actively shorten your lifespan. Given my current working hours and physical condition, voluntarily fast-forwarding my own funeral seemed like a poor use of the morning.

The three of us walked back out onto the main street. By daylight, the red-light district was as lively as ever—fragrant, loud, full of people laughing, calling out from doorways, trading secrets with the most relaxed postures imaginable. But looking at this street now, I felt nothing like the "what a stubbornly hardworking bunch" amusement I'd had walking in. All I saw now were connection points. Dispatch nodes.

Quiet infiltration paths, laid piece by piece behind the rouge, the songs, and the bed curtains, built for the Yanxia Empire's benefit. And the Transfer Alias Cross-Reference Sheet now folded in my coat was the first thread we'd actually managed to yank free from all that laughter. We had hold of it. From here, it was up to Ignicia to see whether she could follow that thread and haul the whole net up out of the sea. As for me— Right now, I just wanted to survive long enough to get back and drink a cup of hot tea.

Tombstones, after all, are the kind of thing best ordered one day later rather than one day sooner.