I'm Competing With The Male Lead For A Woman - Chapter 19

When else should I brew it if not now?

Su Tan was stunned when she heard this.

For a moment, she felt that Xiao Jin’s words made sense. After all, when a corpse is left in a dark room for a long time, it inevitably starts to decompose and emit a foul smell.

At this point, a cup of honeysuckle tea would naturally be excellent.

However, a reasonable thing like this seemed very unreasonable when done by Xiao Jin. The reason was that Xiao Jin appeared to be a mysterious and unpredictable person who didn’t follow the rules.

From the moment Xiao Jin stood outside the door and asked her to put away her silver needles as if she had a premonition, Su Tan felt that Xiao Jin was not only mysterious but also very dangerous.

So she had always been wary of Xiao Jin.

However, Xiao Jin herself had no idea that Su Tan’s evaluation of her was so high. If she did, she would probably be a little proud.

In the original novel, Su Tan was a very strange person.

Su Tan was originally a famous divine physician in the Yao Kingdom who had cured countless common people with her superb medical skills. After the country fell, she transformed into the male lead’s murderous accomplice and an antidote cheat in the later stages.

In fact, being able to use poison was not scary. Being able to neutralize poison was not a divine skill either.

The truly ruthless thing was to kill and save people at the same time.

Thus, two people, who both thought the other was up to no good, looked at each other for a long time before simultaneously looking away and minding their own business.

One held a cup of honeysuckle tea, and the other held a silver scalpel. They both thought to themselves, Something is off.

Chu Shao held the tea cup. The steam from the cup blurred her face. But until the tea got cold, she just held it and didn’t seem to have any intention of drinking it.

This was because Chu Shao had been observing the corpse on the white cloth.

From the moment Su Tan started the autopsy until now, she had noticed that Su Tan started with the throat, then the back of the neck, the heart, and the abdomen.

But, she had missed a crucial point.

And when she began to investigate the cause of the assassin’s death, a hint of confusion appeared on Su Tan’s face.

“The sword wounds on this person are extremely light and thin. It only left a bloody mark on the windpipe. He died immediately without being poisoned. He must have been killed by a master of the sword.”

Xiao Jin held her cup and drank the tea, her face expressionless.

She had invited the second female lead to help her with an autopsy, not to reenact the scene.

She was the person involved. Of course, she understood all of these things. Did she need to listen to Su Tan recount them again?

Su Tan continued, “But what’s strange is that to have such precise sword moves, a person must have swung their sword at least ten thousand times to reach this level. But it is said that on the day you were assassinated, Your Highness, there were no other people present except for a dozen guards. I wonder where this master came from.”

Su Tan looked at Xiao Jin with a probing look. But she was confused as to why Xiao Jin was mysteriously staring at Chu Shao.

She was very confused. She turned her head and looked at Chu Shao again, only to find that the other person seemed unmoved and was still observing the corpse on the white cloth.

The scene was very strange.

You look at me, I look at you. No one was able to make eye contact.

In the end, it was Xiao Jin who broke the silence first. She put the lid back on the teacup and calmly explained, “Actually, I killed all of them.”

“…”

Su Tan’s face was plastered with, “Do you really think I’ll believe that?”

After a moment of silence, Su Tan put down the scalpel and said, “Your Highness, I just said that the sword moves that killed this person were extremely fast and skillful. Only a martial artist who has practiced sword skills for decades could have made such a precise move.”

In other words, you were not even a fetus decades ago, so what are you trying to show off?

“Doctor Su, what is known as talent cannot be measured by time.”

Xiao Jin said such an arrogant thing so calmly, seemingly not considering the fact that she was sitting in a wheelchair.

Of course, her conscience would not feel uneasy about this arrogant statement.

After all, the master who was a gifted sword wielder and had practiced for decades wasn’t her, but another person with many secrets.

Xiao Jin guessed that the female lead had some kind of cheat, a cheat known as having an overly bright protagonist’s halo.

Su Tan didn’t know this. She just felt that she had met shameless people, but she had never met anyone as shameless as Xiao Jin.

The assassin’s fatal injury was on his neck. The most you could do, Xiao Jin, sitting in a wheelchair, was to stab him in the heart. How could you, sitting down, use a sword to make such a wound?

Furthermore, the situation assumed above did not take into account Xiao Jin’s consumptive disease.

If it were included, and Xiao Jin could still do all of this, it would truly be a medical miracle, a feat worthy of being recorded in medical history.

Even though Xiao Jin was the Prince of Yan of Northern Qi, Su Tan was so fed up that she wanted to retort.

Just then, Chu Shao, who had been silent, put down her teacup and smiled at Su Tan. “Doctor Su, have you ever heard of a swordsman in the Great Yao named Shen Lang?”

Su Tan was stunned when she heard Chu Shao’s words and didn’t answer.

Xiao Jin, on the other hand, knew that there was such a person in the original novel.

Legend has it that Shen Lang was the top swordsman in the Great Yao. He carried a three-foot-long sword, came and went as he pleased, and slept wherever he got drunk. His sword moves were unrivaled in the world. He had created his own set of sword techniques called “Flying Flow.”

The so-called “Flying Sword” was the ability to integrate sword techniques into anything, even a flower or a leaf, to take a person’s life.

However, this person didn’t have many scenes and died early. The author wrote very little about him. If his name wasn’t pleasant to the ear and his personality wasn’t unique, Xiao Jin would have probably forgotten about him.

“Shen Lang could kill a person without a trace using just a silver thread. Why must Doctor Su be so fixated on the location of the wound?”

Chu Shao smiled and looked at Su Tan gently. “Furthermore, I believe that this person’s cause of death was not the sword cut on his throat.”

Xiao Jin was listening distractedly. She even started to wonder if Chu Shao was possessed by Shen Lang.

As soon as this absurd idea came to her, she looked at the smile on Chu Shao’s face and immediately dismissed the thought.

If that were the case, it would be too terrifying.

It wasn’t until Chu Shao said that the assassin’s fatal injury was not in his throat that Xiao Jin came back to her senses and looked at Chu Shao with a hint of surprise.

Xiao Jin wasn’t the only one who was shocked. Su Tan, who was performing the autopsy, was as well.

Meeting Chu Shao’s gentle gaze, Su Tan couldn’t help but frown. “What makes you say that, Princess Consort?”

As a top imperial physician in the Great Yao, Su Tan had been a doctor for many years. There was no way she could have misdiagnosed such a simple cause of death.

But this time, Su Tan was destined to fail.

Chu Shao smiled and slowly walked to Su Tan. Her robe was as white as snow, making the bright red blood on the ground look even more dazzling.

This person was killed by Chu Shao. But from her expression, she didn’t seem to feel any guilt.

Su Tan looked at the silver-blue flower mark on Chu Shao’s forehead and once again recalled a silver sleeve and the fine snow that was falling outside the Liuli City.

Chu Shao didn’t care about Su Tan’s distraction. She knelt and pointed her finger at the windpipe that was exposed after the scalpel cut open the assassin’s neck.

Chu Shao had cut it open herself, so she knew better than anyone else…

“In fact, the person who killed him deliberately held back a little strength. They didn’t want him to die immediately, so they didn’t cut the most fatal carotid artery.”

After Chu Shao said this, Su Tan realized that because she was so sure that the assassin had died from the sword, she didn’t even look closely at the person’s carotid artery.

Now that she looked closely, the sword wound seemed to have touched the most crucial artery in the neck, but it was actually off by an inch, only cutting the windpipe and making the assassin unable to move.

This was Chu Shao’s mistake.

At that time, she was so excited when she saw the blood splashing everywhere.

But after the extreme pleasure, Chu Shao felt the warm blood flowing between her fingers and found it a little monotonous and boring.

Looking at the assassin’s terrified face, she suddenly came up with a new pastime. She decided to only cut his windpipe and not damage the artery.

Chu Shao was very curious if this person could hold on for a while before she sent him to the afterlife.

However, when she cut off an assassin’s hands with her sword, she caught a glimpse of Xiao Jin’s surprised expression and her slightly raised fingers to cover her wound.

For some reason, when Chu Shao saw Xiao Jin extend her pale, slender fingers to cover the bloody wound, she forgot about the new pastime she had just thought of.

She didn’t even dodge the assassin’s poisoned blade.

This was her second mistake.

Unfortunately, Chu Shao only remembered her first mistake after she had dealt with all the assassins.

She felt a little regretful. She turned around but found that this person had already stopped breathing.

“Normally, if only the windpipe is cut, the injured person would be unable to speak and would lose some ability to move. But they would not die from excessive blood loss unless…”

Chu Shao had a gentle smile on her face. She pointed to the deceased’s slightly opened mouth. “Unless the person was already dead during the time the windpipe was being cut.”

Xiao Jin instantly understood what Chu Shao meant. She looked at Su Tan. “You can check the assassin’s mouth and stomach to see if he took poison beforehand.”

Su Tan had focused on investigating the assassin’s identity when she was performing the autopsy. After listening to the two of them, she realized that she had been looking in the wrong place.

When she checked the assassin’s mouth again, she found that the flesh inside was already rotten.

Before, Su Tan had thought it was normal decay. But when she carefully pulled open the lips, she found small cracks inside the mouth. When she touched it with her hand, it felt a little stiff.

After cutting open the entire throat and mouth, Su Tan finally took a blood-stained aromatic pill from the bloody mess.

She used a new scalpel to cut the pill open. Inside, a slender worm was wiggling. The person was dead, but the worm was still alive, which was a strange thing.

Xiao Jin appeared calm on the surface, but she was a little nauseated.

She was not the original owner who had killed countless people, nor was she a yandere. She was a little disgusted by the sight of a corpse being dissected.

If it weren’t for the pressure of life, who would willingly become a witness to a dissection scene?

However, when Xiao Jin was there and saw the slender worm, she relied on her years of experience reading web novels. Without thinking, she blurted out, “It’s a Gu worm.”

After Xiao Jin said this with certainty, she realized that the two people in the room were staring at her.

Looking at the smile on Chu Shao’s lips and Su Tan’s meaningful eyes, Xiao Jin was a little confused.

Did she say something wrong?

Su Tan stopped studying the worm in her hand and turned to look at Xiao Jin. “May I ask why Your Highness is so certain that this worm is a Gu worm?”

Xiao Jin was silent.

Seeing a worm means it’s a Gu worm. Isn’t that a basic trope in web novels?

Then she found that the two people’s gazes were becoming stranger.

Xiao Jin suddenly realized a serious problem.

Perhaps… the people in this old-school world didn’t have such a high level of awareness. They didn’t have a vast amount of melodramatic tropes stored in their minds.

So, it seemed she had said the wrong thing.