Chapter 123
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Daylight had yet to break through fully as he left the flower boat. The Crown Prince was still sleeping with Yuan Meng in his room, so Fan Xian decided not to call after him. The reason he had left so quickly was because he had only just come to the capital. It was not proper to visit prost.i.tutes, and furthermore, he presumed that the Guo family would soon come to raise a fuss, so he got ready to return to Fan Manor and watch the proceeding scene.
He had not really done anything with Lili the previous night. It was not because he was some kind of Daoist master, but simply because, psychologically and physically, he had developed an obsession with cleanliness that had ruined the mood. He found it difficult to be with a woman who had been touched by another man, and in his previous life, he had seen plenty of notices about preventing s.e.xually transmitted diseases, so he was scared of catching one. There were no condoms in this world, so while there may have been no harm in visiting a brothel, actually doing something there would no doubt have its dangers.
But this didn’t all happen without a consequence. Fan Xian looked at the unsightly bulge in his pants and sighed mournfully. He had some regrets from when he was in Danzhou, and one of them was that nothing had ever developed between him and Sisi. When the sedan chair reached the corner gate of Fan Manor, the three servants and their master quietly called for the gate to be opened, and slipped inside, telling the guard at the gate not to say anything. When the guard saw Master Teng and the young master from Danzhou, he did not dare intervene, and simply went back to sleep.
Fan Xian crawled into bed to catch up on sleep. When he woke up, morning had broken. Putting on his wooden clogs, he walked to the front courtyard. When he heard a loud racket, he guessed what might have happened, and feigned a puzzled expression.
It was said that that morning, the city magistrate Mei Zhili was napping in his study when he unexpectedly heard the sound of a drum. He was rather annoyed, and wondered what sort of hooligans would dare to interrupt his slumber. But there were court rules he dared not neglect, and so he made his way to the court where, after a bout of yelling, he was presented with an accusation.
When Mei Zhili read the paper the accusation was written on, his heart skipped a beat. Neither the plaintiff nor the defendant were ordinary people. The plaintiff was Guo Baokun, a man of some renown, the only son of Guo You, Director of the Board of Rites and now an editor at the palace. The defendant was Fan Xian, son of Fan Jian, a.s.sistant minister of
the Treasury. Fan Xian was accused of stopping Guo Baokun in the street the previous night, starting a