Search Results: 'Yang Sanjie'

The Mouth of the Dead

Words: 3145 · Source Novel:: The Debt of Blood

The second Gao son is found drowned in a vat of soy sauce at his own factory, his tongue cut out—the symbolic punishment for perjury, echoing the false witnesses from the 1918 trial. Public rumors explode, reviving the old scandal of Yang Sanjie's lawsuit. Lin Xue, defying her corrupt superior's order to close the case, tracks down Yang Sanjie, now an old woman living in seclusion. Yang Sanjie reveals that the abandoned infant was given to a traveling opera troupe. Lin Xue traces the troupe's route and realizes Shen Yuan was raised in the margins, learning performance and disguise. But when she confronts him, Shen Yuan offers a chilling calm: “I am not the villain. I am merely the verdict they cheated forty years ago.”