In the seventh year of Qianfu, the twenty-second day of the winter month, Xiaohan.

Yanping snow accumulated three feet, frost green tiles, Chen Anzhi stood under the eaves with his hands on his sleeves, looking at the gray sky with his eyebrows and eyes.

It has been a month since the heavy snow day, and a month and a half have passed since the light snow day, and in the past month or so, the snow in Yanping City seems to have never completely melted.

In Chen Anzhi's memory, this is the first time he has seen such a year, so this year's winter feels particularly cold. If it is cold, the cold air will accumulate for a long time. The snow in Yanping has been falling for so long and so much, and the cold air has indeed accumulated enough.

However, the reason why Xiaohan is called small means that it is not yet the coldest time of the year, and when the big cold solar term comes, it is the most torturous and difficult time.

Chen Anzhi couldn't imagine what kind of situation it would be like at that time.

He had been in the Magistrate's House for several months.

Before coming to the Magistrate's House, he never thought that the cold in the Magistrate's House would be so heavy.

It was a chill that made people feel cold in their bones, far from being comparable to heavy snow.

"Lord Chen, Lord Tang asked the lower officials to call you to the dungeon, the prisoner who was arrested yesterday confessed a lot of things, Lord Tang said that Lord Chen may be interested. An eight-rank petty official came to Chen Anzhi's side.

Chen Anzhi's brows furrowed slightly.

In the past few months, half of the hundreds of prisoners arrested by the Magistrate in Yanping City were interrogated by the other party in person.

Chen Anzhi knew Tang Xing's methods, and he didn't want to go to the dungeon to face those bloody scenes, let alone listen to those scalp-numbing screams. But the content of the little official's words made him have to take a look.

When he came to a torture room in the dungeon, Chen Anzhi saw Tang Xing, who was sitting at the table, and the servants were waiting for him to drink and eat. Tang Xing was eating and drinking while enjoying the beautiful scenery in front of him with great interest.

This "beautiful scenery" made Chen Anzhi shudder.

It was a big urn with a bonfire underneath, filled with water, and now the water was boiling and steaming, and there was a man in the boiling urn!

Maybe it's the relationship between the white steam, Chen Anzhi clearly saw that this person's facial features had been distorted, the nose was not a nose, the eyes were not eyes, the face that was as red as a soldering iron had no human appearance at all, and the howls and begging for mercy from his open mouth were even more miserable, not like a human voice but more like the cry of a male duck night owl!

The most hairy thing is that the room is already full of lingering meat smell, the meat smell was originally very fragrant, but at this moment, it was so strong that Chen Anzhi wanted to gause.

In such a situation, Chen Anzhi just glanced at it, and felt like falling into an ice cave, instinctively not wanting to face it and wanting to escape.

And Tang Xing was still able to enjoy it intently, while drinking and eating vegetables leisurely, the faint smile on the corner of his mouth made Chen Anzhi feel that his bones were about to melt.

In his eyes, Tang Xing, who invented this inhumane torture method and named it "Please Enter the Urn", is no longer a human, but a ghost, a devil!

Tang Xing's face at the moment is indeed more like a ghost, because in the past few months, he has been interrogating prisoners in the dungeon day and night, and rarely goes out to see the sun, Tang Xing's face is extremely pale, and he can hardly see any blood, and because he has too little rest, his eyes are full of bloodshots, and they look like two bottomless pools of blood.

Chen Anzhi took a deep breath, retracted his gaze, didn't want to look at Tang Xing, let alone the person who was tortured, and lowered his head slightly and asked straight to the point: "Why did Lord Tang call the lower officials?"

When the Magistrate's House was established, many big families installed their children in the clan to this new yamen, and Chen Anzhi was originally going to serve in the local government, but because the head of the Chen family thought that the situation in the court had been too treacherous recently, and there would be major events in the center in the future, and the Magistrate's House was not simple to look at, so he arranged for Chen Anzhi to enter the Magistrate's Academy.

The days of entering the Magistrate's House have become the darkest and darkest years in Chen Anzhi's life.

The outlook on life he has built up over the past decade or so is suffering from a surging impact.

"Can you know this person, Lord Chen?" Tang Xing motioned for Chen Anzhi to sit down and chat slowly.

Chen Anzhi didn't sit down, and when he heard Tang Xing ask, he went to look at the people in the urn seriously. Before, because it was just a quick glance and the white vapor was rich, he didn't recognize the other party, but now when he took a closer look, he suddenly felt very familiar, and when he confirmed the identity of the other party, he couldn't help but be surprised.

"This is the steward of Chen's Yanping City Bookstore!"

Chen Anzhi reluctantly pressed the vibration in his heart and responded to Tang Xing in a deep voice. He hadn't been involved in clan affairs for too long, he hadn't met each other much often, and he hadn't communicated with each other before, and the other party's face was distorted now, so he didn't recognize him at the first time.

At this moment, Chen Anzhi had already realized that it was not good.

Sure enough, I only heard Tang Xing continue unhurriedly: "The other party has confessed just now, and the Chen family has the intention of plotting against him! In the poetry collection published by the Chen family, there are many anti-poems. Not only that, but he often heard that the head of the Chen family had many dissatisfied words with His Majesty in private, saying that His Majesty was a faint monarch!"

Tang Xing's tone was very flat, but the meaning he expressed was very determined.

Every word he said was like a knife, deeply inserted into Chen Anzhi's chest, making the latter blush: "This is a bloody mouth! It's completely empty! Chen's poetry and books are heirlooms, specializing in etiquette and law, and the most important loyalty, how can they rebel?!

"Lord Tang, how you arrest people, who you arrest, and how you torture, the officials can't control it, but if you want to pour dirty water on Chen's body, this is wishful thinking, Chen's is not a soft persimmon, you will pay the price!"

Tang Xing was sprayed by Chen Anzhi, and he didn't care at all, he Shi Shiran put a confession on the table, and said lightly:

"The confession is here, how can it be said that the official slandered? There are all the human and material evidence, and the official is just impartial. Lord Chen, you say, with this person and this confession, should the magistrate be investigated, should the magistrate perform his duties, and interrogate Lord Chen?"

The word "interrogation" fell in his ears, and Chen Anzhi turned his head to look at the big urn, and couldn't help but feel cold all over his body.

At the beginning of the establishment of the Magistrate's Yuan, the emperor made it very clear that the cases of the Liu, Pong, Zheng, and Lu clans showed that many officials had disregarded the general righteousness and perverted the law because of the struggle for power and profit, and they regarded the big with the small, and now there was a problem with the rule of the imperial officials, and it was time to rectify it.

Since the Imperial Court is based on the top, then the Magistrate's Court is based on the bottom, so there is a Wanmin box in front of the Magistrate's Yuan, and the officials and people who have grievances or know which officials have committed illegal acts can put pleadings and documents into the Wanmin box, and the Magistrate's Court will verify the relevant matters, so as to achieve the goal of returning a clear court to the Qing Dynasty and giving the people a bright and prosperous purpose.

The emperor's words are naturally no problem, and the prime minister took the lead in agreeing, and the officials couldn't say anything.

But the more righteous and awe-inspiring the government says, the more dark and despicable it is to actually do things.

After the magistrate's office began to run errands, the Wanmin box in front of the door became an excellent channel for some people to tell the truth, so officials with disagreement with politics reported and exposed each other, officials with personal vendetta slandered each other for bad character, and the ruffians who were arrested by the officials claimed that the officials had accepted bribes and wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to make a fortune hooligans fabricated facts.

Before that, only the officials of the Imperial Historical Observatory could hear about it, and even if they said something wrong, they didn't have to bear any responsibility, but at that time, even if everyone was fighting for power and profit, they all had official status, and they had to pay attention to the bottom line after all.

After the establishment of the Magistrate's Yuan, everyone became anonymous, and ordinary people were not responsible for exposing and slandering others, and there were many people who had no bottom line, so the trend of whistleblowing and false accusations prevailed and intensified.

At this time, if the magistrate's office carefully screens the documents in the people's box and does it impartially, then it will naturally be able to control the situation and guide things in a good direction.

But what does the Magistrate's House do?

But if there is a report involving officials, Tang Xing will first summon the officials to the magistrate's court without saying a word, and if they don't come, they will be arrested directly. After the officials arrived at the magistrate's court, Tang Xing would come forward to "invite the king into the urn."

However, all the officials who entered the Magistrate's Yuan, few of them were able to get out unharmed, and the vast majority of them would be "confirmed" for various crimes.

The reason couldn't be simpler, Miki's subordinates couldn't ask for anything, the officials who couldn't survive the harsh punishment would rather confess their guilt in order to be freed from the pain of life worse than death—even if they were not guilty.

In just a few months, hundreds of officials, large and small, have been imprisoned by the Magistrate's Court.

Yanping City was in the wind for a while.

Up to now, some clever hooligans and criminal scum in the prison have come to their senses: as long as they sue the right officials, they may make a denunciation and come from the prison;

In this situation, Tang Xing, the core real power figure of the Magistrate's Yuan, has become a cool official and a devil who makes officials fearful.

Chen Anzhi didn't think that he had entered the big urn and would not have a nervous breakdown before he was cooked.

Even if he could grit his teeth and persist until the end, Chen Anzhi also knew that according to Tang Xing's temperament, the other party would grab his hand and draw a charge on his confession when he was delirious! This kind of thing is not uncommon for him these days.

He knows very well that Tang Xing has no bottom line at all!

If the other party wants to deal with any official, he only needs to give an order to the ruffians below, and the Wanmin box will naturally issue a report on the current situation, and then he can interrogate people in a grand manner.

Just like now, if the Chen family's bookstore manager will be arrested and imprisoned in the Magistrate's Court, someone will inevitably denounce him, and as long as the manager is here, what kind of confession does Tang Xing want is not handy?

As an official of the Magistrate's Yuan, how could Chen Anzhi not know that Tang Xing had created a variety of torture methods in the past few months in order to better extort confessions by torture? In addition to "inviting the gentleman into the urn", there were also such things as "sudden roaring", "accepting at sight", "iron cage cell boss", and so on.

"Tang Xing, what do you want?!" Chen Anzhi asked sharply while standing.

Rebellion is the most vicious and most fearful crime in the world, and what other crime can be more serious than coveting the emperor's throne within the imperial dynasty?

Before the Magistrate's Court, the families fought with each other, and they had to desperately set each other, collect charges for each other, and work hard to collect evidence of each other's crimes.

If Tang Xing really wants to confirm the crime of the Chen family's rebellion, it is naturally not so simple, after all, the Chen family is a big family with a profound background; but the Chen family is not strong, and it ranks last in the family, if the Magistrate's House goes all out to deal with the Chen family, with Tang Xing's current crazy style, the Chen family will definitely not be happy if he does not say that he will fall immediately.

But since Tang Xing is talking to him about this matter unhurriedly now, it means that there is still room for negotiation in this matter, and the other party is likely to just want to achieve a certain goal.

"Why don't you sit down and talk, Lord Chen? Tang Xing smiled indifferently, but how his face looked so infiltrating, "The official has been talking with his neck tilted, but it is not very comfortable." ”

Chen Anzhi had no choice but to sit down reluctantly.

"That's right, as long as Lord Chen is willing to cooperate with the official, our colleagues will have a fight, and if you look down and don't see you when you look up, why bother making a fuss?"

Tang Xing handed Chen Anzhi a glass of wine, and he didn't hide it, and directly got to the point, "A few days ago, Your Majesty wanted to promote Shuyi to a first-class concubine, but Chen's official in the Ministry of Rites said that this was not in line with etiquette. This official doesn't understand, why does the Chen family have to meddle in the affairs of His Majesty's harem?"