Sophie White hurriedly took out the letter from the pigeon. It was written by Gregory Gu Jr. She finished reading it in one breath, slapped the table, and exclaimed, "Brilliant! Absolutely brilliant! Only Gregory Gu Jr. could come up with such a clever idea. I refuse to believe Evans Manor will stay indifferent this time!"
On the outskirts of the Capital, in a small village, night fell. Most families there saved money by not lighting lamps, going to bed as soon as it got dark.
"Little Niu, go to sleep now! If you keep running around, the monster will come and gobble you up." A country woman cuddled her disobedient son who refused to settle down for bed.
The child, only two years old, wore patched clothes and nestled in his mother's arms, babbling excitedly, clearly not sleepy at all.
"Little Niu, if you don't sleep properly, Mama really will call the monster to eat you!" The woman put the child on the bed and went to arrange the bedding.
The child lay on the bed, happily munching on his own toes.
Just then, the woman suddenly felt a chilly wind sweep past the door, flinging the window open.
Startled, she was about to close the window when a shadow flashed inside. She shrieked and fell to the ground, and when she came to her senses, she thought she must be seeing things.
But when she looked up, the child on the bed was gone!
"Little Niu! My son!" The woman screamed frantically and rushed out of the house.
The entire village was awakened by the woman, listening to her breathless sobs as she described how her child was lost.
But the whole story was just too unbelievable. Everyone knew about child kidnappers, but no one had ever seen traffickers move so fast that even their shadows couldn’t be spotted, snatching a child straight from someone’s bed.
Everyone wondered if the woman had simply fallen asleep and dreamed it all, mistaking her dream for reality.
But no matter what, the child was gone. So the whole village grabbed torches and went searching for the child.
They searched all night, but there was no trace of the kidnappers. At dawn, in a cave on the mountain behind the village, someone finally found a clue about the child.
A pool of blood, and torn, shredded clothing.
When the woman saw the scraps of clothing, she screamed, “Ah! That’s my little Niuwawa’s clothes! My son!”
Then, sobbing, the woman fainted.
Everyone in the village thought Niuwawa’s case was just an accident, but in the days that followed, more and more families lost their children. The circumstances were almost exactly the same as with Niuwawa.
No one ever saw the kidnappers clearly; the children were just gone.
And when they were found, it was always a pool of blood and the child’s torn clothes.
The clothes were shredded as if by the claws of a wild beast.
A sense of terror swept through the village, and what was most frightening was that these strange child disappearances started happening in neighboring villages too!
"Could it be that some monster is snatching the children!? There are rumors in the capital that the Princess Consort of Qin is a man-eating demon who just gave birth to a little monster and needs to eat babies to replenish her strength." A woman’s voice rose from the crowd. She wore a tattered cloak, her face hidden, blending in so no one could see her clearly.
Her words rippled through the crowd like a stone thrown into a lake, planting seeds of doubt in everyone’s heart. That doubt, nourished by fear, would soon grow into a towering tree...
And so, without anyone noticing, the rumors about the Princess Consort of Qin in the capital began to change...