Ma Dayuan’s murder and the conspiracy of Kang Min and Bai Shijing are brought into the open through a calculated deception: an unseen figure employs a technique associated exclusively with Ma’s family, leading Bai to believe that Ma has returned. Under that pressure, Bai identifies Kang Min as the chief planner and connects the murder to Ma’s refusal to expose the secret of Xiao Feng’s birth. The revelation transforms a ghostly encounter into an account of human betrayal and a struggle over Xiao Feng’s identity.

The clue that unsettles Bai

Bai’s fear does not arise simply from the strength of the person confronting him. The figure has used the Throat-Lock Capturing Technique, a supreme skill of the Ma family that, as Bai understands it, no outsider can perform. Because Bai and Ma Dayuan had been friends for many years, he knows the family’s martial art and recognizes the apparent impossibility of its use by a stranger.

In the darkness, Bai can make out a tall figure whose stature recalls Ma’s, but whose face remains indistinct. The person stands silent and motionless. Bai feels a faint pain in his neck and concludes that the figure has touched him with a fingernail. He asks whether the stranger’s surname is Ma, but receives no answer. The lack of explanation allows the clue to gather force: Bai reads the figure not as an ordinary opponent but as Ma returned in monstrous form.

A staged haunting becomes an interrogation

The deception works through Bai’s changing speech. When he blames someone else, he notices that the fingers at his throat loosen; when he stops, they tighten again. Hearing Kang Min address the figure as Ma Dayuan strengthens his conviction that the dead man has come back. He begs Ma to spare him, and the plea gives way to disclosure.

Bai says that Kang Min had secretly read Chief Wang’s will and repeatedly urged Ma to reveal the secret of Xiao Feng’s birth. Ma, however, had been unwilling. Bai then attributes the scheme against Ma to Kang Min. His account identifies both the concealed motive and the division of responsibility: Kang Min was the leading planner, while Bai’s words place him within the conspiracy that killed Ma.

Motive and contradiction

Xiao Feng recognizes the scene as a deliberate performance rather than evidence of ghosts. He understands that a skilled martial artist is impersonating one in order to frighten Bai and Kang Min into confession. The apparent haunting is therefore an investigative stratagem: its force lies not in the supernatural, but in the conspirators’ belief that the figure may be Ma.

Bai’s confession makes Ma’s murder part of the conflict over Xiao Feng’s origins. Kang Min wanted the secret exposed; Ma’s refusal became the obstacle around which the plot against him formed. Xiao Feng, hearing that explanation, asks why Kang Min hates him and seeks to overthrow him, and observes the contradiction in the apparent political aim: if she wanted her husband to become chief, she should not have arranged harm to him. The episode does not resolve every part of Kang Min’s motive, but it shows how the attempted exposure of Xiao Feng’s birth and the murder of Ma are bound together.

Confession and the question of responsibility

Kang Min does not respond with a denial. She challenges the figure to kill her and condemns Ma as a coward who could not undertake great matters. Her words reject the posture of frightened victimhood that has drawn Bai into speaking, while revealing her contempt for Ma’s restraint. Bai’s plea for mercy and Kang Min’s defiance offer sharply different responses to the same supposed return of the dead.

Xiao Feng remains skeptical of the ghost story and presses the inquiry beyond the initial disclosure. He tells Bai that living is harder than dying and asks why he murdered Ma, insisting that the confession is incomplete. The question keeps the episode from ending with the dramatic revelation alone: the staged fear exposes the conspiracy, while Xiao Feng’s demand focuses attention on Bai’s own responsibility. Ma’s death is thus revealed not as an isolated killing but as the outcome of a plot driven by Kang Min’s aim and enabled by Bai’s participation.

Significance in Xiao Feng’s story

The episode links private treachery to the public contest over Xiao Feng’s identity and leadership. The secret of his birth is not merely an item of hidden history: Kang Min’s determination to expose it has helped bring about Ma’s death and has placed Xiao Feng at the center of a conspiracy. The martial technique provides the means to unmask that plot because it carries a family association Bai considers unmistakable; the impersonation turns knowledge of Ma’s skill into psychological leverage.

The revelation also makes loyalty and friendship part of the crime’s stakes. Bai had been Ma’s longtime friend and knew his family’s art, yet he confesses to involvement in Ma’s murder. The episode’s decisive reversal is that the supposed return of Ma is a human ruse, but the guilt it draws out is real: a secret martial clue becomes the instrument by which the truth of the murder begins to emerge.