Chapter 249
Chapter 249
At the beginning of the last century.
No one knew whether it was still the Guangxu era or already the Republican era.
In Lincheng, there was a wealthy household by the surname of Luo. The master of the house was Luo Baichuan, a local man of considerable fortune.
There were more than thirty mouths to feed in Luo Mansion. In those days, anyone who could support that many people naturally had both money and influence.
Luo Baichuan had taken seven concubines. With that many women under one roof, conflict was inevitable. After the First Concubine, the legitimate wife of the household, passed away, the remaining concubines stirred up trouble and quarreled every day, turning Luo Mansion into a place where even the chickens and dogs knew no peace.
Naturally, all that fighting was over his favor. As for Master Luo Baichuan himself, he was the sort of man who thought with the lower half of his body. He spent his days indulging in wine, women, and pleasure, and he had no mind to manage much of anything. As long as they did not come to blows, he ignored the disputes between his women.
But eventually, something did happen. According to the records, the one involved was the youngest concubine-the Seventh Concubine.
One morning, a maidservant went to draw water from the well. She had just leaned over and was about to lower the bucket when she saw a pair of eyes staring straight up at her from inside the well.
The owner of those eyes had a deathly pale face and was floating on the surface of the water, her eyes wide open as if she had died with a grievance unresolved. It was none other than the Seventh Concubine of the household.
The maidservant was, of course, scared out of her wits. She immediately screamed and shouted, summoning the other servants, then sent someone to notify the master, saying that the Seventh Concubine had drowned in the well.
When Luo Baichuan rushed over and saw the scene, he was badly shaken as well. His young concubine had died with her eyes open. She had certainly been murdered.
But how was he supposed to handle it?
The concubines had always fought bitterly over his favor. The death of the Seventh Concubine had to have been the work of one of the others.
Now that a life had been lost, they ought to report it to the authorities and let the magistrate decide.
But if they reported it, the murderer would definitely be arrested. One concubine was already dead. If another was taken away, and with the deceased First Concubine counted as well, he would have lost three wives.
After thinking it over again and again, Luo Baichuan decided not to report it. He merely warned the other concubines, then hastily arranged the funeral rites and had his young concubine buried.
No one dared gossip about the affairs of a great household, and so the matter came to an end.
But the only thing that ended was the matter of the Seventh Concubine’s death. The tragic fate of the entire Luo Mansion truly began the moment she died.
Among the seven concubines, the Seventh Concubine had been the youngest, so she was often bullied by the others. On top of that, she had given Luo Baichuan a daughter. In an era that valued sons over daughters, giving birth to a girl was almost worse than giving birth to no child at all. As a result, her already-low status in Luo Mansion sank until it was nearly on par with that of the servants.
Even the mother had been looked down upon. After she died, her daughter, Luo Xiuzhu, naturally received no kindness from anyone in Luo Mansion.
According to the records, Luo Xiuzhu lived a miserable life in Luo Mansion, worse than that of a servant. As for exactly how miserable, the documents did not specify. After all, this had happened a hundred years ago. The fact that Boss Lin had been able to uncover even this much was already no easy feat.
In short, after her mother’s death, Luo Xiuzhu basically never had a single good day. Her father, Luo Baichuan, later married two more women and had no time at all to pay attention to her.
Perhaps the deceased Seventh Concubine knew her daughter was suffering too cruelly. Or perhaps the Seventh Concubine herself had died with her eyes open and her injustice unavenged, leaving her resentful spirit unable to disperse. One year after her death, strange things began happening in Luo Mansion.
As for what those strange things were, the records did not say. One reason was that too much time had passed. But the most important reason was that the people of Luo Mansion all died later on, every last one of them. Not a single survivor remained to pass down what had happened inside the mansion…
There were more than thirty people in the Luo Mansion, and after Luo Baichuan took two more concubines, the total came to exactly forty.
With forty people in the household, someone was bound to come and go every day. And since the Luo family was a wealthy household, they inevitably had guests to receive. Yet strangely, from a certain day onward, the gates of the Luo Mansion never opened again. No one ever stepped out.
During that time, guests came to call. They knocked, but no one came to answer. The entire Luo Mansion seemed like a haunted house.
A month passed. For an entire month, the gates of the Luo Mansion did not open. It was winter at the time, and later, nearby residents would occasionally catch a foul odor. At first, it was faint, but as time went on, the stench grew stronger and stronger. Someone finally recognized it and said it was the smell of corpses-the stench given off by rotting bodies.
A large crowd gathered outside the Luo Mansion. The closer one got to the estate, the thicker the corpse stench became.
Some said something terrible must have happened inside the Luo Mansion. Someone had to have died in there, and because no one had dealt with the body, the smell had begun to spread.
But this was a wealthy household. Who would dare barge in to take a look?
No one dared. So everyone discussed it and decided to report it to the authorities first, and let officials go inside to investigate.
Someone reported it that very day. When the authorities heard that something had happened to the Luo family, they immediately took it seriously and sent a large number of men to inspect the place.
As for what exactly was found inside the Luo Mansion, the records actually described this part in great detail.
According to the records, when the authorities arrived, several hundred people had gathered outside the Luo Mansion. The moment the gates were opened, the faces of those hundreds of onlookers changed drastically. One after another, they vomited uncontrollably, screamed, and soon scattered in every direction, as if they had seen a ghost in broad daylight.
Why was there such an absurd scene? Because… all forty people in the Luo Mansion were dead!
The corpses lay sprawled across the ground in all directions, their postures bizarre, their expressions twisted and ferocious. Since the bodies had already begun to stink, they had clearly started to rot. They were crawling with maggots, and rats were darting through the scene.
It was nothing short of a living hell.
Because it was winter and the temperature was very low, it had taken a full month for the bodies to begin decomposing and giving off that stench.
That was why such an exaggerated scene occurred, with hundreds of people vomiting at once.
And what those hundreds of people saw were actually only the bodies of the servants of the Luo Mansion. According to the records, several of the Luo Mansion’s concubines had each been stabbed dozens of times and were found collapsed in the main hall. The one who had hacked them to death was none other than the master of the Luo Mansion, Luo Baichuan.
Luo Baichuan was the only one who died by hanging. He was found in a side room-and that side room was where the Seventh Concubine had lived while she was alive.
Later, after the coroner examined the bodies, a conclusion was reached. Aside from the concubines, who had been hacked to death by Luo Baichuan, everyone else in the Luo Mansion had been frightened to death. There were no external injuries on their bodies, nor any signs of poisoning, yet every single face was contorted in terror, as if they had seen something horrifying right before they died.
As for Luo Baichuan, he had hanged himself.
There was also something very strange about the case. The Luo Mansion had forty people, but after the incident, the bailiffs only found thirty-nine bodies. The final body was never found.
And the missing body belonged to Luo Xiuzhu, the daughter of the Seventh Concubine.
The records even specifically noted that whether Luo Xiuzhu was dead or alive had never been determined at the time, and afterward, no one ever saw Luo Xiuzhu again.