Commander Zhang’s handwriting was very ugly.
Yu Lin knelt beneath the Drum of Appeal, while Mao Heng and Wang Chong of the Military Patrol Office stood together before Chang’an Gate.
Today, Chang’an Gate remained temporarily closed. Merchants who would normally enter through it were blocked outside. Crowds gathered on both sides of the gate, and discussion, shouting, and questioning filled the air. After listening to it for so long, a ringing began to build in Yu Lin’s ears, making her temples throb.
She looked up at Mao Heng and the other officials standing in the distance, as well as the officers of the Military Patrol Office carrying shackles and cangues, and suddenly felt tired.
Mao Heng had ordered her to kneel facing north beneath the Drum of Appeal.
But she no longer wanted to kneel.
Turning toward the drum, she sat down with her knees drawn up.
The Drum of Appeal loomed above her head, its enormous face casting a shadow large enough to envelop her entire body.
The drum that petitioned the throne.
The road that crossed ordinary channels of appeal.
To Zhao Heming, it was a political achievement of his career.
In the year the Drum of Appeal was first established, Zhao Heming arranged for Supervising Censors to receive petitions submitted through the drum and forward them directly to the Emperor. For a time, public remonstrance flourished throughout Liangjing.
Afterward, it was Yu Lin who protected and preserved this extraordinary institution.
In the early years of Fengming, after the Eastern Palace advisers who had beaten the drum were executed, members of the Grand Secretariat petitioned Fengming Emperor to shut down the Drum of Appeal Court and remove the drum entirely. At the time, even Zhao Heming’s father, Grand Secretary Zhao Hanyuan, supported the proposal.
Zhao Heming, serving within the Grand Secretariat, could neither argue openly nor defend it in writing.
Among the Three Judicial Offices, only Yu Lin and Wu Longyi took up their brushes and debated the Grand Secretariat for months. In the end, the Drum of Appeal was preserved.
Now, after being stripped from the Ministry of Justice because of her conviction, people spoke of the Drum of Appeal only to praise Zhao Heming as a beacon of righteousness.
Yu Lin did not care.
To Zhao Heming, the drum upheld his reputation.
To Yu Lin, it was the place where she had once listened to the voices of the people.
Back when she had only been an eighth-rank official in the Ministry of Justice, she had stood beneath this drum countless times.
Liangjing was a city of wind and rain. The seasons changed endlessly before the city gates.
Under the drum stood old men and frail women.
They came bearing both sorrow and joy.
Sorrow for their difficult circumstances.
Joy because the road before them had not yet ended. Their lives were miserable, but they could still continue living.
Yu Lin’s eyesight was poor, yet she had seen all those scenes of human grief and happiness.
Later, the Drum of Appeal fell silent.
Though it still stood where it always had, it could no longer protect the ordinary people of Liangjing struggling to survive beneath wind and rain.
Even so, Yu Lin would occasionally come to Chang’an Gate and look at it once more.
Now she sat beneath it again.
The drum’s shadow was like a gigantic umbrella sheltering her beneath it.
All things possessed spirit.
The drum she had once protected now sheltered her in return amid the clamor and criticism of the crowd.
For a brief moment, Yu Lin seemed to recover the happiness she had felt when the drum was first erected.
Wang Chong, Commander of the Military Patrol Office, looked at the woman sitting with her knees hugged to her chest and could not help saying to Mao Heng,
“She’s far too presumptuous.”
A letter lay spread open in Mao Heng’s hands, and fine beads of sweat had already formed on his forehead.
He barely heard Wang Chong’s words and did not even look up.
All of his attention was fixed on the letter in his hand.
The letter had been taken from the correspondence exchanged between Song Yinbing and Liu Yinglian over the years.
It was also the so-called evidence Yu Lin had presented.
The contents were brief.
Its meaning could be summarized in a single sentence:
At the end of the eighth month, burn Tianji Temple.
There was no signature.
No name.
Yet the elegant, old-style calligraphy revealed its author in every stroke.
It was Zhao Heming’s peerless “Tiger Claw Script.”
Mao Heng had a personal friendship with Zhao Heming.
When handling official documents, Zhao Heming wrote in standard script.
But Tiger Claw Script was his unique masterpiece.
In recent years, Zhao Heming had devoted little attention to poetry or calligraphy, leaving few examples of his work behind. Moreover, Tiger Claw Script was exceptionally difficult to master.
Though he had many students, apart from Yu Lin, none had truly inherited it.
Standing beside Mao Heng, Wang Chong stared at the writing and felt his own heart pounding.
The Tianji Temple case had passed from his hands into Zhang Yao’s.
He had assumed that once Fengming Emperor’s hidden hand descended upon it, Liu Yinglian would be dead before nightfall.
The temple fire would ultimately be concluded as the work of a lone young woman who had burned down a monastery.
That would have been the best possible outcome.
One Liu girl dead, and the Military Patrol Office would escape responsibility.
The fire-fighting troops from Hongpu could survive.
Even those officials from the censorial offices who had sought punishment by court caning could temporarily settle down and preserve their lives.
However, once Zhao Heming’s handwritten letter had been revealed publicly before the Drum of Appeal, it became new evidence that even the Northern Pacification Bureau could no longer suppress.
Yu Lin had transformed Liu Yinglian from an insignificant condemned prisoner into a crucial witness.
Even if that witness was mute, the Three Judicial Offices could never permit the Northern Pacification Bureau to torture her to death and silence her.
Otherwise, the accusation that Zhao Heming had ordered the burning of Tianji Temple would never again be clearly disproven.
Zhao Heming would not necessarily die because of it.
But his political career might very well be severed at the root.
He was the youngest Minister of Justice in Great Liang and the most promising member of the Grand Secretariat.
Neither the Grand Secretariat nor the Three Judicial Offices wished to cut off one of their own arms.
As Wang Chong pondered this, he looked again toward Yu Lin beneath the drum.
The wind stirred her plain hemp dress.
Seated with her back to the wind, she quietly gazed at the enormous drum, completely ignoring the increasingly heated crowd condemning her actions.
Wang Chong thought of who she once had been.
Then he remembered how she had escaped the execution frame and later killed Wang Shaolian inside the Court of Judicial Review.
A chill crept up his spine.
She was already a penniless servant woman.
How had she managed, for the sake of one abandoned girl, to force the Three Judicial Offices into such a position?
“Is… is that really Minister Zhao’s handwriting?” Wang Chong asked.
Only then did Mao Heng glance toward Yu Lin and lower his voice.
“There are only two people in this world who can write Tiger Claw Script. One is Zhao Heming. The other is Yu Lin.”
Wang Chong hurriedly said,
“Then couldn’t this letter have been written by Yu Lin herself?”
Mao Heng shook his head.
“She suffered finger torture in the Court of Judicial Review. Look at her hands.”
“Her hands…”
Mao Heng sighed and spread the letter before Wang Chong.
“For a woman, mastering Tiger Claw Script is already difficult. Although Yu Lin excels at it, the strength behind her brushwork has always fallen far short of her teacher’s. Yet the strokes in this letter are driven with such force that they exceed what a woman’s hand could produce.”
He paused.
“More importantly, they could never have come from Yu Lin’s hand after it suffered finger torture.”
Wang Chong scratched his head in frustration.
“Then that’s strange!”
Those astonished words drifted into Yu Lin’s ears.
She lowered her head, looked at her fingers, and smiled silently.
At the same moment, inside the Imperial Prison, Zhang Yao finally lost his composure and yawned in front of Liu Yinglian.
He was truly exhausted.
So exhausted that he could barely hear what Li Hanzhou was saying beside him.
The previous night, in Song Yinbing’s room, Yu Lin had endured agonizing pain in her fingers and written Zhao Heming’s Tiger Claw Script by candlelight.
Almost as though she were torturing herself.
Yet, as Mao Heng had said, even though she had practiced that script diligently under Zhao Heming, she had only reproduced its form and spirit.
At first glance, there was no difference.
But anyone truly knowledgeable about calligraphy—people like Mao Heng, Wu Longyi, or even Xu Songnian—would spot the flaws upon close inspection.
And the injuries from the finger torture had already damaged the tendons and bones in her hand.
Without years of recovery, she could never regain her former condition.
Zhang Yao had watched her bite down on a strip of white cloth and force herself to grip the brush.
He knew better than most how devastating finger torture was for women.
Damage to tendons and bones brought pain at the slightest touch.
Writing such a difficult script was one thing.
Even simply opening and closing her fingers was enough to cost Yu Lin half her life.
So although she had written only a few short lines, by the time she finished, her entire back was soaked with sweat.
Zhang Yao picked up the paper and glanced over it.
His own handwriting was ugly, but he still possessed a decent eye for judging calligraphy.
Yu Lin’s writing had enough form.
Yet the strokes were too soft.
The ink flowed sluggishly.
At a glance, it was obvious the work could not have come from Zhao Heming’s hand.
Setting down the paper, Zhang Yao said,
“Your eyesight is poor. Do you think Mao Heng and the others are blind too?”
Yu Lin raised her injured hands, trembling from pain, and looked at Zhang Yao with a pale face.
“That’s why… I need Commander Zhang… to help me.”
After hearing those words, Song Yinbing lay propped against the bed and glanced at Zhang Yao.
Like Zhao Heming, he was very familiar with Zhang Yao’s handwriting.
Unable to resist, he said,
“Commander Zhang’s handwriting…”
“Is very ugly.”
Zhang Yao finished the sentence himself before Song Yinbing could.
Looking down at the elegant brushes, inkstones, paper, and ink spread across the desk, he continued,
“No one ever taught me calligraphy. I taught myself after joining the Northern Pacification Bureau. I haven’t even properly practiced the Yan or Liu styles, much less Zhao Heming’s Tiger Claw Script.”
“I know.”
Under the candlelight, Yu Lin gave him a faint smile.
Her trembling hands slowly lowered and rested gently on the desk.
As she spoke, she rose from behind the desk and stepped aside.
Softly, she said,
“Sit.”
“Did you not understand what I just said?” Zhang Yao asked.
“I understood.”
Yu Lin’s smile remained.
“And when I worked in the Ministry of Justice, I saw your handwriting on official documents.”
The tips of Zhang Yao’s ears grew warm.
He had never liked writing and never tried to hide how ugly his handwriting was.
But hearing Yu Lin say she had seen it still made him feel awkward.
“Your writing truly lacks structure,” she continued, “but your hand strength is excellent. That’s enough for me. Sit down. Use Imperial Annotation Paper and trace the characters I’ve written.”
Zhang Yao remained standing.
Yu Lin, however, stepped out from behind the imperial desk and slowly approached him.
She was not tall.
Standing before Zhang Yao, she had to tilt her head back to look up at him.
She had always claimed her eyesight was poor.
Now it seemed to be true.
Her eyes were not particularly clear.
In fact, they appeared dim, as though covered by a layer of gray-white mist.
Yet the contours of her features were delicate.
Her nose was straight, and her face smooth and oval.
Looking closely, there was nothing masculine about her appearance.
She even possessed a willow-like fragility.
It was not the sort of beauty Zhang Yao preferred.
Though perhaps that was not quite right.
After all, apart from wanting to die, he rarely had any other thoughts.
He did not even know what kind of appearance he liked.
He only knew that he disliked his own gloomy face as much as he disliked his ugly handwriting.
“Sit down. I’ll teach you how to trace it.”
Throughout the entire night, Yu Lin burned through dozens of candles for Zhang Yao.
Under her guidance, he ruined countless sheets of raw xuan paper.
Finally, in that moment before dawn fully broke, he used Imperial Annotation Paper to produce the letter that now rested in Mao Heng’s hands.
At this moment, Mao Heng was nearly crushing the edges of the paper in his grip.
Seeing the poor expression on his face, Wang Chong lowered his head and examined the letter once more.
Still unwilling to give up, he asked,
“You really can’t find even the slightest flaw?”
Mao Heng pressed his lips together.
Given his eyesight and his friendship with Zhao Heming, he naturally could see the flaws in the handwriting.
However, the person who created this letter seemed completely unconcerned about whether he could detect them.
Or perhaps, more accurately—
Those flaws had been left there deliberately.
Because the crucial point of this letter was not Zhao Heming’s Tiger Claw Script at all.
It was the paper upon which it had been written.
Imperial Annotation Paper.
Paper reserved exclusively for the Emperor’s use.
And the people who controlled those sheets were the Eunuch Directorate’s Chief Seal Holder and Brush Holder.