After transmigrating into the book, I helped my mother reconcile with her divorced husband.

Lu Yun frowned: "Seven or eight years? Miss entered the palace seven years ago, and the news that the Emperor and Empress wanted to choose Miss as the Crown Princess also spread around that time. Could it be that this old hag had already been planning this back then?"

Lu Zhiyuan toyed with the wooden figure in her hand: "My fate is in my own hands, not in the heavens. A mere wooden figure, carved with my birth date and time, can become a spirit? Rather than calling it a harmful spell, it's more like a self-destructive obsession. Seven years have passed, and I'm perfectly fine, while she died a violent death."

"Such techniques don't kill overnight, but rather weaken the person gradually," Han Ting said. "The Emperor is ill, the Empress has devoted herself to Buddhism for many years, and Miss..."

Before Han Ting could finish speaking, Lu Yun grabbed his sword and rushed toward the old woman's corpse.

No wonder the young lady's illness has been lingering; it was all that old hag's doing.

Lu Zhiyuan had Liu Ying pull him back and patiently said, "I diagnosed the Emperor's illness; it's a chronic and intractable disease that has nothing to do with the wooden figures buried here. The Empress is in good health and devotes herself to Buddhism because His Highness is grown up and no longer needs her to worry about the affairs of the court and the harem. As for my health, I was born with an illness, and it's already very good that I've been able to recover to this point. One shouldn't be too greedy."

"But--"

“This wooden figure may be useless, but its intent to harm is real.” Lu Zhiyuan played with the wooden figure in her hand: “The old nanny signed a contract of indenture, right? Investigate her background. I… I want to see what grudge she has against the royal family.”

In less than a quarter of an hour, the nanny's indenture was taken away.

The indenture for the Crown Prince's wife differed from that of the Marquis's household, containing far more detailed information. The old woman was from Ganzhou; at seventeen, she and her parents begged their way to the capital. Her father fell seriously ill, and her mother went out begging but never returned. She sold herself on the streets to bury her father and was found by someone from the Crown Prince's household and brought into the palace as a maid. From the moment she entered the Crown Prince's palace, she worked diligently; otherwise, she wouldn't have been promoted to the position of a nanny in charge of affairs.

The people in the household had a similar impression of her as Chunxi: serious in her work and quiet and reserved. She was unmarried and kept to herself.

The contents of this contract alone don't reveal anything.

"Selling herself to bury her father? Is there any record of her father's situation in the household?"

"Have!"

The steward handed over a document—an autopsy report from the government office. Because she had sold herself into servitude to bury her father, the Crown Prince had helped with his burial. It should be noted that the Crown Prince at that time was not the current Prince, but the Emperor.

The old nanny had been sold into the Eastern Palace forty years ago.

The autopsy report stated that he died of tuberculosis; at the time of the autopsy, his lungs were riddled with holes. He had multiple wounds on his body, the deepest reaching the bone. One leg was turned outwards, caused by external injury.

Following the autopsy report was a testimony from the old woman, with half a fingerprint prominently displayed.

The old woman said that my father's injuries were sustained during their escape. The journey from Ganzhou to the capital was arduous, and they inevitably encountered bandits and outlaws. It's understandable that my father was left with numerous scars and a lifelong disability while protecting his wife and daughters.

However, mountain bandits and outlaws would not kill people in this way. In other words, how could they let him leave after he had been hacked to pieces like that? And how could they allow his wife and daughters to arrive in the capital unharmed?

What is Han Ting's background?

The young leader of the Qinghe Gang, protected by his gang members, was still taken to the slave market by some bastard. What merit does the old woman have?

There must be a demon in the abnormal situation.

Lu Zhiyuan instructed her steward to investigate Ganzhou and any events related to the royal family there.

Half an hour later, the steward returned, carrying a thick stack of files. Upon opening them, they found they were all related to Ganzhou. After investigating for two hours with Han Ting, they finally found one file connected to the old woman.

The old woman had been married before.

She fell in love with her husband at first sight when she was sixteen, and they married for less than half a year before he was ordered to go to war and never returned. The following New Year's Eve, when she was seventeen, bandits broke into her home and burned, killed, and looted. She, her maid, and her parents-in-law escaped.

Her in-laws went to the yamen to report the case, but the yamen turned the tables, accusing them of colluding with foreign enemies and being spies who betrayed Beiliang. The so-called evidence was all fabricated using her husband, who had never returned.

Her parents-in-law were sentenced to immediate execution. When she arrived at the execution ground after receiving the news, all that was left was a pool of blood.

Before long, their house became the private residence of the county magistrate.

The old woman gathered evidence and, accompanied by her maid, went to the prefectural government to file a complaint. The complaint was filed in the morning, and the woman was arrested in the afternoon. They charged her with falsely accusing a court official. It was her maid who bribed a jailer to take her place and die.

She fled back to her parents' home, only to find it gone; a fire had burned the house to the ground, leaving no trace of her family of five. Just when she had nowhere to go and was contemplating suicide, her husband returned.

He left as a handsome young man, and returned as a wronged soul in the underworld.

Liu Ying handed over the tea: "Are there really wronged souls in this world?"

Lu Zhiyuan waved the dossier in her hand: "It's written in all sorts of fantastical ways, like vengeful spirits seeking revenge and vengeful ghosts demanding lives. But to sum it up in one sentence: every wrong has its perpetrator, and every debt has its debtor. The revenge was carried out by the old woman and her husband, but they disguised it as ghosts demanding lives."

Liu Ying peeked out and asked, "How did Your Highness figure that out? I also looked at the files, how come I didn't see it?"

Lu Zhiyuan laid all the files together and pointed to a few details, saying, "First, the magistrate's entire family was killed on the night of the magistrate's son's wedding. Their deaths were gruesome; they were all beheaded. This is the same as the deaths of the nanny's parents-in-law. The files also say that the magistrate's son and the bride met by chance on the street. The bride came from a poor background and had a severely wounded and disabled father who had been to the battlefield."

Lu Zhiyuan took out the autopsy report: "Seriously injured, disabled, served in battle, who did you think of?"

Liu Ying said, "It's that old woman's father who suffers from tuberculosis!"

Lu Zhiyuan didn't refute, but took out another file: "The county magistrate's entire family was murdered. The autopsy results showed that they were decapitated with a blunt knife after being poisoned. A blunt knife, yet the knifework was very precise. What does this remind you of? The county magistrate's family was wiped out, but the bride and her disabled father disappeared. The bride died at her husband's home on her wedding day, and no one cared about her disabled father. The file states that the bride was kidnapped by the murderer. Is it possible that the murderer was the bride and her disabled father who attended the banquet?"

The prefect was shot and killed while traveling, and the eyewitness was a disabled beggar. Leaving aside why the beggar happened to be there and become an eyewitness, doesn't this disabled beggar sound familiar? Furthermore, the prefect was traveling to see his confidante. Who is this confidante? Could it be the bride who caused the magistrate's entire family to be killed?

After this incident, the murderer disappeared without a trace. Several months later, the old woman and her parents appeared in the capital. Before she sold herself to bury her father, a tragedy occurred in the suburbs of the capital, in which a family was burned to death, leaving no trace at the scene.

The family that was burned to death were none other than the family members of the prefect who had stayed in the capital. The manner of death of the prefect's mother-in-law's family perfectly matched that of the nanny's family.

There aren't that many coincidences in the world, unless the victim and the murderer are the same person, and the murderer is seeking revenge.