Chapter 318
Chapter 318
Back in the hotel room, I did not speak for a long time. I still could not process the enormous change in Lin Yin.
I had always believed that what I said at the Lin residence had changed her. I thought I had helped her understand right and wrong and preserve her conscience despite Lin Jinhua’s orders, which was why his scheme had not gotten us all killed.
But once we learned the truth, it became clear that what we believed was only that: what we believed.
Lin Yin had had her own plan from beginning to end. The tall, thin man had actually told us one more thing just now.
Du Yunting had asked him to pass this information on as well.
When Lin Jinhua previously asked Du Yunting to perform Life Extension for his son, he had said that most of the Lin family’s businesses would eventually be left to Lin Xiaohua.
Why?
Because the deeply rooted obsession with carrying on the family line demanded it.
Even ordinary families believed they had to have a son and that the family’s assets had to be inherited by him.
That went doubly so for a wealthy family. Lin Jinhua had only one son and one daughter, and Lin Yin was a woman. No matter how much of his conscience he had to cast aside or how many other people’s lives he had to sacrifice, Lin Jinhua was determined to keep Lin Xiaohua alive so the boy could one day inherit the family fortune.
From Lin Yin’s perspective, however, she was already an adult and capable of managing the family businesses, while her younger brother was still a child. Yet their father, Lin Jinhua, had his heart set on leaving everything to Lin Xiaohua.
As for his daughter, he refused to show her even the slightest favoritism. He would not give her so much as an opportunity to rise.
If I were Lin Yin, I might have thought her father was terribly biased too.
So Lin Yin had long since begun harboring other intentions. She had been searching for a way to make the family fortune fall into her hands.
The solution she devised was to let Lin Xiaohua die. As long as he died, she would be the Lin family’s only remaining descendant, and her father would have no one else to leave the fortune to.
So she secretly swapped Lin Xiaohua’s medicine. What she had not expected was for Lin Jinhua to exhaust every possible method and come up with a way to perform Life Extension for his son. And Lin Jinhua had never imagined that his own daughter, Lin Yin, had already formed plans of her own for the sake of the family fortune.
Because Lin Jinhua failed to notice the change in Lin Yin, he trusted her completely in the plan he devised with Du Yunting. He sent her to monitor us and poison us.
Lin Yin’s brilliance lay in how well she disguised herself. She deceived everyone and used Lin Jinhua and Du Yunting’s scheme as cover to quietly carry out her own.
And her plan required her to do nothing at all. She only had to play the role of an innocent, kindhearted girl.
When we took Lin Jinhua away last night, if she had truly wanted to stop us, she could simply have stayed behind. Once we left, she could have called the Lin family’s bodyguards and sent them to the construction site entrance to keep us from taking Lin Jinhua inside.
But she had not done that, which meant she never intended to stop us.
Her plan must have been for us to kill Lin Jinhua.
She came with us because she wanted to wait at the construction site entrance for us to finish him off.
And she desperately wanted Lin Jinhua dead. Otherwise, she would never have risked going into the construction site.
She likely entered at around the same time we emerged from the ghost realm, while she must have pushed Lin Jinhua from the building when I took Xiuzhu and the vengeful spirit to the rooftop.
We could not know exactly what happened in between. But if I carefully pieced things together, Lin Jinhua had been terrified at the time. When we headed to the rooftop, he probably had no intention of following. He must have tried to leave the construction site first and secure his own safety.
But as he tried to escape, Lin Yin had already arrived. Father and daughter must have exchanged a few words.
Lin Jinhua was a tall, powerfully built man. It would have been almost impossible for Lin Yin to attack him head-on. She must have ambushed him, catching him off guard when he was not paying attention…
Of all the people Boss Lin could have died at the hands of, it just had to be his own daughter.
He had brought his fate upon himself. We had warned him that evil deeds would bring retribution, but he refused to believe us.
This was karma catching up with him in this very lifetime.
Still, even across five thousand years of history, Lin Yin murdering her own father was an utterly explosive act.
That woman was ruthless beyond belief.
“After we installed the pinhole camera in the villa’s kitchen, she put on that display of inner turmoil. Those tears of hers were more convincing than anything an award-winning actress could have produced.”
Song Xiaotian laughed bitterly at himself. “In the end, every one of us got fooled by one woman. She’s the real winner now. She gets to inherit a fortune beyond imagination.”
Seventh Master sighed. “The human heart… It truly is unfathomable. I did not see the slightest thing wrong with her. She could even bring herself to deal such a ruthless blow to her own father. I cannot understand how she managed to do it.”
I suddenly remembered what Pan Xiaorou had said to Song Xiaotian when she returned to Lanjiang City.
I had to admit, Pan Xiaorou was an excellent judge of character. Apart from misjudging Song Xiaotian, her insight was frighteningly sharp.
She had been the only one to see through Lin Yin’s hypocrisy.
Now that the truth of Lin Jinhua’s death had come to light, there was no reason for us to stay any longer.
I booked everyone tickets back to Lanjiang City for the following afternoon. We would leave tomorrow.
There was still one thing we had to do tonight, however: return the saber to the veteran.
The saber truly had saved my life. When the dead of the Luo Mansion chased me through the ghost realm, Anning had rescued me with that blade.
But our purpose in borrowing it had been to destroy the great Ghost of the Luo Mansion.
Who would have expected us to resolve a century-old hatred without fighting at all?
I was quietly proud of that.
I had gone from fearing the ominous hexagram I cast before the trip to resolving the entire affair and performing Exorcism for Xiuzhu and the vengeful spirit. I had not only passed the Ancestral Master’s test, but also gained a great deal, exactly as he had said I would.
When we arrived at the veteran’s home, he was watching television with his family.
They welcomed us warmly, and after we exchanged pleasantries, the veteran led us to his room.
I hastened to present the saber to him with both hands. I thanked him and told him that we had finished what we came to do.
But the veteran did not take it. He thought for a moment, then asked, “Young men, can you tell me what exactly you do?”
We froze, uncertain how to explain it to him.
Veterans were men of faith and conviction. In their time, they had feared neither devils nor gods, and I worried he might look down on us if I told him the truth.
But when an old senior asked us a question, honesty was only proper.
“Actually… we sell Stigmatized Properties. You may not believe this, but some of those properties really are vicious… and some are haunted.”
“I see.”
The veteran smiled and nodded. “I’m no stubborn old fool. Quite a few people have come to borrow this saber from me before, so I do believe in these things. Since this is what you do, you can keep the saber.”