Related Cases (1)
Related Novels (2)
Related Chapters (4)
The God of Logic
Words: 1472 · Source Novel:: The Dying Phosphor
Jiao Ziwen, a minor clerk in the Wei army, smolders with contempt for the world's irrational rules. Believing himself a deity of pure reason, he designs an experimental murder. He befriends soldier Dou Li, lures him out of the camp, kills him, and conceals the body with mathematical precision. He feels no guilt—only the cold ecstasy of a perfect equation.
The Logic of the Impossible Thread
Words: 3216 · Source Novel:: The Noose of Virtue
On the final day, Ximen Ming delivers the logical death blow. He recalls a minute detail from Ziyu's code: every morning, without fail, Ziyu would tie a single ritual thread around his left wrist before the hour of the Rabbit as an act of humility, a thread that would be removed only after sunset. The coroner confirms that the victim's wrists bore no such thread, but deep ligature marks from a rope. Ximen argues that a man so pathologically disciplined could not have violated his own cardinal rule to commit suicide—the thread would have been on his wrist before any noose. Someone else strangled Ziyu first, then staged the hanging in a hurry, unaware of the missing silk thread. The logic is airtight: the absence of the thread is the proof of murder. The true culprit, the court archivist who supplied the forged diary entry out of obsessive love for Ziyu, breaks down and confesses. Dou Lian is freed, and Chu is left to reckon with the unsettling truth that extreme discipline can be the gentlest mask for extreme derangement.
The Trial Before the Ancestral Tablets
Words: 3124 · Source Novel:: The Noose of Virtue
Under the stern gaze of Chu's royal ancestors, the trial commences in the great hall. The prosecution presents a chain of evidence that seems unbreakable: the pendant, the public quarrel, and a scrap of silk from Ziyu's journal detailing Dou Lian's supposed violation of sumptuary laws—a motive of blackmail. The court murmurs condemnation as Dou Lian's silence is taken for guilt. Ximen Ming, permitted to defend, begins a cross-examination that focuses not on the physical evidence but on the victim's interior world, reading aloud entries from Ziyu's diary that reveal a man who punished himself with fasting for an accidental glance at a slave girl, and who calibrated his every breath to ritual. The prosecutor scoffs, calling it the portrait of a sage. Ximen replies softly, "No, it is the autopsy of a soul already hanged long before the rope touched his neck."
The Mentor's Jade Pendant
Words: 2784 · Source Novel:: The Noose of Virtue
Qu Shen's investigation draws him into the cloistered world of Chu's warrior-aristocracy, where Ziyu's mentor, Dou Lian, looms as a paragon of austerity. A jade pendant carved with Dou Lian's clan insignia is found tangled in the victim's sash, and a witness reports a heated argument between master and disciple the night before the death. The state prosecutor, eager to close the case before the King's scrutiny, arrests Dou Lian for murder. In his cell, Dou Lian refuses to confess but will not explain the pendant, uttering only that Ziyu's virtue was a "perfected blade that cut only its wielder." Meanwhile, a foreign logician named Ximen Ming, summoned from the minor state of Shen by Dou Lian's family, quietly begins to dissect the prosecution's narrative.