Chapter 281: Blood in the Wheat Field

Evening.

The reflection of the setting sun sank into the river delta, and dusk began closing in from all sides.

The Witcher’s afternoon of investigation had ended.

“Master, did you see Whistleshaw? What did he say?” Linus pressed Orin impatiently. “Why did he absent himself for a week without reason? He must give a reasonable explanation.”

Orin and Kantila exchanged a glance. Under the dim lamplight, their faces turned grave. “He cannot give one, Mr. Linus...”

“What do you mean?”

“The door to your assistant’s home was wide open, and the place was empty. Not only was he gone, so was the old mother who depended on him.”

Linus Pitt’s face filled with disbelief, his brow furrowing.

Orin faced the others and said in a low voice, “You know our senses are different from ordinary folk, keener. I smelled a faint trace of blood in his home. Following the scent, I found several patches of dried blood on the floor ... left there six or seven days ago. This was clearly no simple disappearance.”

“And the door had been broken open by force. The lock was badly deformed,” the Witcher analyzed. “There were clear kick marks on the door, and outside the house, hoofprints and footprints were scattered everywhere. At least seven or eight people broke in. Bandits, or thugs.”

“Intruders, blood from six or seven days ago?” Linus Pitt’s mouth opened slightly. He froze for a moment, and his voice turned dry. “Then my student met with an accident as soon as he got home?”

“Is his life truly so bitter?” The scholar sighed, his expression full of regret.

Whistleshaw, a diligent, hardworking, honest child from a farming family, had endured every difficulty to enter Oxenfurt Academy. In two more years, he would have graduated. Then he could have found a respectable job and taken his old mother out of poverty and hardship. How could such a change happen so suddenly?

“Is my student still alive? Is there still a chance he survived?”

The Witcher answered with silence.

Linus clenched his fist and gritted his teeth. “Masters, please help me rescue Whistleshaw and his family.”

“I have not finished ... regrettably,” Orin said in a low voice, shaking his head. “Whistleshaw and his family have both been killed. We tracked the suspicious traces around the house and, in a wheat field thirty yards away from the building, dug up the bodies of mother and son...”

“A young man in his twenties, killed by blunt-force trauma to the back of the head. His appearance matched your earlier description of Whistleshaw. There was also a woman around forty, disabled in the left leg, dead from the same cause. She should be his sick mother.”

When Orin finished, he reached his hand toward the scholar and opened his clenched fist. In his palm lay a bright golden Oxenfurt Academy student nameplate.

Whistleshaw

First Year, Department of Natural History

Linus Pitt took the nameplate with trembling fingers. Grief and regret drowned his gaunt face. His body quivered slightly, and his eyes faintly reddened.

“Professor Linus, my condolences ... After taking the keepsake, we buried the poor mother and son where we found them.” Kantila explained, “We set up two wooden markers.”