"Yesterday, we went with Lady Lin to Famous Scholar Mountain to look for beehives, but the several beehives Lady Lin had her eye on were all gone..."
Bai Junjun and Li Wenli paused upon hearing this, as it seemed... the missing beehives were in their hands.
However, the two wisely kept silent.
The child continued, "Those beehives were really huge, but they grew amidst the thorn bushes, so we didn’t dare to harvest them. We don’t know who was bold enough to take them away.
Lady Lin was very angry and was set on removing all the beehives in the vicinity, but normally the hills here would be full of honey, yet today we couldn’t find a single one."
Bai Junjun thought, it’s no wonder they couldn’t find any, they had scared away all the bees by plundering the nests.
The child, unaware of Bai Junjun’s inner contempt, went on.
"It must have been someone else who discovered this honey-producing spot and scared the bees off; later, Lady Lin had us split up to look, and we were to regroup in the evening.
But when night came, we all returned, yet Lady Lin was nowhere to be seen. We searched and searched all night long but couldn’t find Lady Lin. By then, the city gates were closed, and we had no way to go back and report to the Government."
"So you guys waited outside until the city gates opened and then came back?"
"Yes," the two children said, with sadness, grief, and fear in their eyes.
In fact, they had gone to the Government office early in the morning, but the deputy who heard their story only asked if they had the silver coin needed to file a complaint. Without it, the Government would not process their case.
Even though Lady Lin made some money selling candles, she always found a way to spend the silver she had.
So, their family had barely enough to get by, with nothing to spare.
Because of this, the officials sent them away.
The two children, having nowhere else to turn, could only seek help from Bai Junjun and Li Wenli.
"Please, brother and sister, lend us some silver coins so we can report to the Government. We are willing to work off the debt and serve you in any way we can."
It was said that aside from selling honey, Lady Lin’s main occupation was human trafficking. She trained top domestic service talent and received generous rewards for it.
However, Lady Lin hadn’t sold a single person so far. Whenever someone came to pick laborers, Lady Lin would always smile and say that training talent wasn’t so simple and these clumsy people needed much more training.
In reality, she wasn’t training anyone at all.
All she did was teach everyone to write and lead them up the mountains to dig out birds or go fishing in the rivers.
It was precisely because of this that, despite being a human trafficker, Lady Lin was dearly loved by the "piglets."
Now that Lady Lin had disappeared, every piglet was in a state of panic, their faces showing grief as if the sky had fallen.
The commotion in the courtyard finally alerted the people of Snow Garden.
Groggy from sleep, they came out to see two children with swollen eyes kneeling in the living room, saying something about working like oxen or horses.
"???" Everyone looked utterly confused.
Bai Junjun and Li Wenli, unhesitating, patted the children on the shoulders and instructed the belatedly arriving Ah Dao, "Take good care of them; we will go and look for Lady Lin."
"???" Ah Dao... When had he become a child caretaker?
But the two had already left the house.
Nobody understood what was happening on Famous Scholar Mountain better than they did.
Lady Lin might have accidentally stumbled into Thousand Miles’ territory while searching for beehives and thus been captured by Thousand Miles as a spy.
In the past few days, they had been busy dealing with the rebels and had forgotten that there was such a cancer in the Imperial Capital.
However, this place had some connections with Shopkeeper Yan, and Shopkeeper Yan had some dealings with the Ninth Prince, so perhaps there was an unclear and unspeakable relationship between Thousand Miles and Yuwen Jun as well.