Chapter 3

Chapter 3

I don’t remember much about my life before the age of four.

I only recall suffering through a severe fever; after I woke up, many things had become a blur. My father said I was simply suffering from extreme shock, while Luo Yingxue said I was lucky to have survived and that I would be fine once I recovered. Since then, I had lived my life as the legitimate daughter of the Huo Family, never once doubting my identity.

After listening to my story, Shen Xingjian asked only one question: “Where is your mother’s memorial tablet kept?”

“The small ancestral hall.”

I led him to the hall in the rear courtyard.

That was the place my birth mother, Lady Gu, had loved most during her lifetime. She died young, and my only memories of her were a faint scent of sandalwood and the moon-white robes she often wore.

Incense still burned in the hall, and an old portrait hung behind the offering table.

In the painting, Lady Gu held a swaddled infant, her eyes soft and gentle. Curiously, the artist had painted her other hand in a curved, cradling position, as if there should have been another child there who had been erased at the last minute.

My heart trembled slightly. “This painting… it didn’t look like this before.”

Shen Xingjian stepped closer to examine it. He ran a fingertip along the edge of the scroll, picking up a layer of fresh pigment.

“Someone touched this up recently,” he said.

Just as I was about to take a closer look, a flurry of hurried footsteps sounded outside. A moment later, flames flared up against the paper windows of the hall.

Someone was trying to burn the ancestral hall down!

Thick smoke billowed toward us. As I turned, a bronze lamp fell straight from the rafters. Shen Xingjian grabbed my shoulder and pulled me behind the offering table just as the lamp shattered where I had been standing, sparks spraying everywhere.

“Stay still,” he commanded in a low voice.

He kicked open the back window and gave chase, but then I heard a soft click from behind the offering table.

It sounded like a hidden compartment had been jolted open.

I reached out to feel around and indeed found a loose wooden board behind the shrine. Tucked inside was a thin wooden box containing only an old letter and a faded silver baby bracelet.

The paper had yellowed, but the handwriting was still legible.

“My twin daughters, one named Lingning, one named Shuyue. If there is ever trouble in the manor, remember this: the one with the crescent-shaped red birthmark on her right ankle is the elder daughter, Lingning…”

My breath hitched.

Twins.

Luo Yingxue hadn’t been making it up; my mother really had given birth to twin girls.

And on my right ankle, there was a crescent-shaped red birthmark.

Before I could recover from the shock, a dull thud echoed outside. Shen Xingjian had pinned a man in black to the ground in the courtyard. He looked up at me.

“I have a survivor,” he said.

The man was stubborn and refused to speak at first, until Shen Xingjian pulled an inner courtyard waist token from his sleeve.

It belonged to a second-class guard from Luo Yingxue’s courtyard.

“Who sent you to burn the hall?” I asked coldly.

The man gritted his teeth, but finally, a single sentence escaped him: “The Madam said that the dead should stay in their coffins, and old things should be burned along with them.”

A chill ran through my heart.

She wasn’t just burning the hall.

She was burning the evidence my mother had left behind.

Shen Xingjian took the letter from my hand. His expression darkened the moment he read it.

“We’re going to the manor estate,” he said. “Since Nanny Zhou is there and the body was brought back from there, the real clues won’t be found here in the Huo Mansion.”

I looked at him. “My father won’t let me leave.”

He reached out and placed the inner courtyard waist token in my palm, his tone as calm as if he were discussing the most mundane matter.

“Then we won’t let him know.”

Before leaving the hall, I glanced back once more at that fragmented letter left behind about the woman in the coffin.

Lingning, Shuyue.

So, she wasn’t a ghost.

She was very likely my biological sister-one I had never met.

Someone had killed her, and now they wanted me to become a clueless ghost right along with her.