A secret meeting in the Ming Palace, the next day it set off a storm in Chang'an City.

After noon, Ma Yu Ma Shaotang, an activist in the circle of gentlemen, was taken down by the officers and soldiers of the Criminal Department who arrived at a dinner party in a certain restaurant.

The prison car escorting him did not return to the cell of the Ministry of Punishment, but was directly sent to the restricted area of Dali Temple.

The participants at the dinner were temporarily detained, and in the afternoon, the relevant personnel of their respective families approached the criminal department to investigate, and most of the detainees were released, but Ma Yu's figure was not seen for a long time.

A little later, the Ministry of Officials and the Ministry of Criminal Affairs jointly appeared in the suburbs of Fenghu County, and the county commander Ma Changchuan was escorted out of the Sanfang Mansion by the Shawl Distribution, and the army was broken into four residences.

Before dinner, on a carriage at the West City Gate, Li Xing and Li Shanchao, the third generation and fourth son of the Songwang Mansion in disguise, were captured on the spot, and the carriage was accompanied by Feng Pingsu, the third generation of the Feng family, another son of Chang'an City.

Two of the three cultivators who escorted them were killed, leaving only the first-level master to be confined and taken to the official road outside the city.

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The carriage was requisitioned at the same time, and the grim-faced one was Li Zhi himself.

Under the guidance of the first-class master, the group left the official road in the Lingtai Township area in the western suburbs and turned into Fengyi Township on the west bank of the poor water.

This place and the nearby towns are the location of Chang'an City in the Western Han Dynasty, so the name of the township is related to the capital of the Western Han Dynasty, and within the scope of Fengyi Township, there is an ancient palace group, surrounded by a high courtyard wall.

Inside it is now Chang'an City, large and small gentlemen occupy it, open a variety of weathering rest, each signboard is very exquisite, such as "Jude", "filial piety", "Xiuren", or "good governance", "Chengping", "Yongping", this is obviously the imperial posture, quite a kind of governance of the world, let the world be peaceful domineering.

It's a pity that in this dark day, most of the young women who come in and out are smearing powder and grease, and they are pretentiously fiddling with their style.

Among them, Xiurentang is the destination of Li Yi's pedestrians, and it is Fu Chen and Li who walk off the carriage with him.

The first-level master spoke a little to the door control, and unlike the closed position of the high door in other places, a crack in the door creaked, revealing a fierce face.

After crossing the person again and looking at Li Zhi and the others, he was stunned for a short time and then angry, but before this person shouted, Fu Chen's figure was already blowing like the wind.

Li stepped forward, casually knocked down the first-level master who led the way, and the back of the palace left him and hid in the door with one of his legs.

The one who opened the door before was actually a first-level master, but in front of Fu Chen, he didn't even have a chance to open his mouth, so he was imprisoned by a finger and fell to the side softly.

This is a quadrangle courtyard type of ancient temple building, the main hall is built on a three-foot high stone pedestal, three rooms in width and depth, more than two zhang wide face, three zhang deep.

There were several people gathered in one of the rooms to have a discussion, all cultivators, and the one in the center was a third-level master.

When Li Zhi and the three entered, several people got up in unison and fled in all directions, but they couldn't last a moment in front of them.

Due to the messy sound of tables, chairs and benches, a person flashed out from behind the huge screen connecting the inner wing, and the astonishment on his face had just emerged, and he was instantly knocked down.

This is a woman in her thirties, and behind her is a three or four-year-old boy, which is the purpose of Li Zhi's trip.

The woman is Li Xing's nominal outer room, and the male baby is his illegitimate child, none of this matters, the key is the string of pure gold keys around the child's neck, which is in charge of a certain treasury in the depths of Xiurentang.

The key was cleverly disguised, hidden within a hollowed-out Buddha statue, and the child was held tightly in the arms of a maid who came later.

Li Yiren rushed to the third entrance of the courtyard, and pushed open the movable bookcase in a certain room, which was a stone door as thick as a foot.

There are some gold and jade ornaments inside, which is an intricately made iron box, which is inlaid into the bluestone slab wall, and covered with ancient paintings.

The iron box is one foot wide and three feet long, and inside is a neat paper account, Li Zhi is not allowed to open it to see, and he knows that the book inside is all the accounts of Nan Wuting and the two annotations of silver.

There is also a hard-shelled small paper booklet, which is a specific list of every gathering of people in Nanwuting in the past thirteen years, Wu Chengsi, Wu Sansi and others are on it, and the former appears more frequently.

Li Zhi smiled, it seems that the woman in her thirties is the lady Gui who has not been found everywhere.

In fact, I learned from Ma Yu that there was a secret hiding room outside Li Xingcheng, and its whereabouts were ghostly and abnormal, even the secret guards who were keeping an eye on several of them, and they had never discovered such a secret place.

Originally, Li Zhi didn't plan to get involved, but after hearing the news that a master-level cultivator had taken Li Xing out, he started to explore his interest, so this line happened.

After his divine sense detected that the gold ornament hanging on the boy's neck had another secret, he knew that he might have really found a very secret existence.

Sure enough, after seeing the deep hiding here, I thought of the appearance of Mrs. Gui described by the Wu family, and the facts were clearly revealed.

Putting away everything in the warehouse, Li Zhi walked back into the hall, "Mrs. Gui, right?" Some time ago, Qu Liang hid you very deeply, and he didn't see the slightest information from his brain, originally I thought you had transferred your hiding place in time, but it turned out that he didn't know where you really went! ”

He had never seen Qu Liang at all, and the so-called soul searching technique was naturally just a casual remark, in order to verify what he thought.

Sure enough, when Li Zhi finished asking, he instantly noticed a trace of ridicule in Mrs. Gui's eyes.

He immediately changed his tone and smiled: "Oh, no, I remembered it wrong, it seems that Qu Liang committed suicide by taking poison in the prison, and there is no soul search, because there are no interrogation opportunities at all, and people die!" It seems that you moved the hideout in time to be more reliable! ”

Mrs. Gui's face was stunned, and she couldn't figure out what Li Zhi's intentions were when she spoke upside down.

Li Zhi smiled at her, "It seems that you know a lot about the interrogation situation at that time, so there is only one possibility, the real person behind Nan Wuting is not Qu Liang, but you, Mrs. Gui, right?" ”

Li Zhi turned around and glanced at Fu Chen, who pointed out with a wisp of the wind, which had already restrained the man's body in an instant.

Li Zhi turned his head and smiled: "I suddenly discovered that you are actually also a cultivator, and there is a poison hidden at the root of your teeth, which should be similar to the hidden thing in Qu Liang's mouth, so I had to make a surprise move!" ”

He stepped forward and shrugged his nose to sniff, then turned around and walked to an old man who fell to the ground on the other side: "You and Mrs. Gui are in the same school, Mrs. Gui's mouth is very tight, and I am not good at persecuting women, so I can only find some answers from you!" ”

After speaking, he stroked out a palm, lightly touched the man's eyebrows, and saw the clear color in the man's eyes, and turned into a daze in a few breaths, Li Zhi withdrew his hand and turned back.

"Mrs. Gui, I forgot to tell you that the soul searching technique mentioned before is indeed coaxing you, but it does exist, no, I already know that you and this person were born in the Sun Moon Peak, and your name is not Mrs. Gui, but surnamed Xiao, after the Lanling Xiao family, the niece of Xiao Shufei, the emperor's concubine, the big name Xiao Sidi!"

As soon as Li Zhi's words came out, Mrs. Gui's complexion changed dramatically, but unfortunately she couldn't move her tongue, and she could only see a strong desire to express words in her rapidly rotating eyes.

The Lanling Xiao family is on the ground in Dengzhou, one of the five surnames and seven clans, but because of the suppression of Concubine Xiao Shu, it has now retreated to the border of Hebei to recuperate, and it is also a joint protection measure for the Xiao family from the Shandong Shi clan.

Xiao Shufei, the concubine of Gaozong Li Zhi, the Lanling Xiao clan of the Southern Dynasties, and a descendant of the Qiliang royal family, after her accession to the throne, she was promoted to Concubine Shu and once favored the harem.

Later, he failed in the court struggle with Wu Zetian, was deposed as a concubine, and was imprisoned in a dark room with the deposed queen Wang, and was later cut off by Wu Zetian's hands and feet, soaked in a wine vat, and finally tortured to death.

The limbs are chopped off, the eyes are gouged out, copper is injected into the ears to make them deaf, drugs are poured into the throat, the tongue is cut off, and the vocal cords are destroyed so that they cannot speak.

Then they are thrown into the toilet, and some have to cut off their noses, shave their hair, shave off their eyebrows, including their eyelashes, and then apply a medicine to destroy the hair. sacs that make hair. After the sac falls off, it will no longer grow, and it will never grow hair again, and it will be pulled out one by one, and some of them will be pulled out together.

If the skin falls off, or dies during the execution, the executioner will be ridiculed and even lose his job. There are also those who died during the execution, and those who did not die were put in the toilet and made into human beings.

The most famous in history is that the Empress Dowager Lu of the Han Dynasty made Mrs. Qi into a human being, and arranged for a special person to "take care of her", and then discarded her in the latrine and let her die in pain, cut off her ears, and even scratched her face. This was one of the very cruel tortures that Empress Lu invented to deal with Madame Qi.

Wu Zetian did not finish making these for the two daughters, in order to show his hatred for the two, he ordered to change the Wang family to the python family, and the Xiao family to the Xiao family, until Tang Zhongzong ascended the throne before the two surnames of the python and the Xiao family were restored to their original surnames.

Xiao Sidi is the daughter of Xiao Shufei's second brother, after the Xiao Shufei incident thirty years ago, in order to protect the ancestral business of the Xiao family in Lanling, her second brother and father separated from the Xiao family, and they have not known their whereabouts since then, when Xiao Sidi was just born.

Li Zhi learned from this that Concubine Xiao Shufei's direct family lived in seclusion in Sun Moon Peak in Longxi, where there was a small cultivation sect called Fenghuo Chang, which was a hidden sect that not many people knew.

When Concubine Xiao Shufei was fifteen years old, she married Feng Hantang, the third son of the Beacon Fire Sect Master, Feng Hantang's mother was the Qu family, a subsidiary of the Lanling Xiao family, and her eldest brother was Qu Liang.

As early as when Concubine Xiao Shu was popular, Qu Liang was recommended by her to enter the official mansion, at that time, in order to avoid the later queen mother, this relationship has been concealed, but coincidentally, when Wu Shi Tong was the governor of Jingzhou, he was included in the Wu family.

Until Concubine Xiao Shufei was tortured to death, Qu Liang and the Xiao family began to secretly arrange, and Nan Wuting was closed by Wu Zetian's order, and Qu Liang, who was already a veteran of the martial arts family at that time, began to take over secretly.

Xiao Sidi's husband died of illness more than ten years ago, and the entire beacon chief was taken over by Xiao Sidi and Feng Hantang's senior brother Tong Li, and with Qu Liang's secret funding, he trained some high-level masters.

And the more than a dozen cultivation sects that Qu Liang came forward to privately fund for Nan Wuting are nominally affiliated with the martial arts, but in fact they are a nail planted by Qu Liang for Wu Zetian, which is a new force that intends to borrow the martial queen to ascend the throne in the future and provoke right and wrong for it everywhere.

Because Qu Liang knew that it would be difficult to reach a powerful cultivation sect with his identity, he secretly used the martial arts mission card to take over Nan Wuting, and under the guise of protecting the safety of the martial family and the future imperial power of the martial queen, he organized such a terrifying group of cultivators.

Qu Liang had a very high reputation in the martial arts family at that time, and even the brothers Wu Yuanqing and Wu Yuanqing did not dare to offend him, and controlled nearly eighty percent of the old forces under the Wushi Tong Sect.

The name of rebuilding Nanwuting is to create an opportunity for Wu Zetian to suppress after Gaozong's death, and to launch an attack at the right time to encroach on the forces of the royal family surnamed Li little by little.

It is ridiculous that in the past ten years, including the two Wu Sansi brothers, no one dared to ask Empress Wu for verification, so that after the matter was revealed in advance, a series of dazzling blows from Gaozong's side made Wu Zetian almost capsize in the gutter.