I traveled back to the Southern Song Dynasty and was actually outmaneuvered by Yue Fei.

Chapter 114: Consumption

April 12th, Lin'an.

Feng Yi stuffed the three counterfeit copper coins transferred from Xiuzhou into the three official documents that were routinely delivered by Deshou Palace.

The official document was a routine notification sent by the Inner Palace Attendants Department to the patrol stations and the duty offices of the Palace Guard. It was inconspicuous and not even noticed by the secret sentries of the Imperial City Guard.

However, the recipients were all old contacts that Zhijia had set up in various places in Lin'an back then. One was a pipa master in the Jiaofangsi in Wazi Lane, another was making paper lanterns in a lantern shop at the end of Yujie Street, and the third was a stable boy at the post station in the west of the city.

Feng Yi recognized all three of them.

In the tenth year of the Shaoxing era, when Zhijia was still working at the Imperial Observatory as a water clock expert, he once led these three people to a short meeting by the well platform behind the Deshou Palace.

That was the first time Feng Yi had learned that Zhi Jia had planted so many clues in Lin'an.

After the meeting, Zhijia said to Feng Yi, "These people will receive a copper coin one day. If you are still alive, please help me transfer the copper coin to them."

Feng Yi had initially thought Zhi Jia was just mentioning it casually, but now he knew the significance of that copper coin.

After sending out the three official documents, Feng Yi returned to his cramped duty room in Deshou Palace and took out his chipped copper coin from under his pillow.

Before he died, Zhijia handed the copper coin to him and said, "This coin is the key to the Lin'an bus route. If the bus route breaks, give the coin to the person who can catch it, and that person will come looking for you."

He stuffed the copper coins back under his pillow, closed his eyes, and waited for a response to the three official documents.

On April 14th, the bell tower of Baima Temple added a short tremor to the twelve chimes at dawn.

This is the first comprehensive test of the Level 3 early warning system conducted by Xiangyang.

The signal was sent from the clock tower, transmitted segment by segment by the Han River bell line, connected by the fast boat of Li Bao at Guazhou Ferry, and then delivered into Lin'an City by human messengers from the direction of Zhenjiang.

Previously, secret messages from Xiangyang to Lin'an took at least seven days to arrive, but the copper bell signal, transmitted from Baima Temple to Lin'an, took less than three days.

In the evening, Qin Keqing received confirmation of the test results in the small house in the side courtyard.

She opened the booklet and wrote down the date and test results, her pen pausing for a moment on the line "White Horse Temple → Lin'an: Test passed".

Then, a line was added to the footer: "The willow catkins on the south bank of the Yangtze River are gradually decreasing, and the end of spring is approaching. There have been no unusual events at Qin Hui's residence recently. This evening, an unfamiliar blue cloth carriage made a brief stop at the back gate of Qin's residence. We are trying to determine its direction."

After Qin Keqing finished writing, she closed the booklet. Just then, the cat jumped down from the windowsill and rubbed its head against the back of her hand.

Qin Keqing looked down at the calico cat and remembered that last summer when she met with the deputy commander of the Imperial Guard at the old site of Shunhe Tea Shop, the cat had also been sitting on the windowsill waiting for her to come back.

At that time, she was still using her identity as a female worker in a laundry shop to move through the surveillance network of the Imperial City Guard.

......

In early April of the thirteenth year of the Shaoxing era, in Lin'an.

Qin Hui's purge has been going on for nearly three months. Since the fifth day of the first lunar month, the Imperial City Guard has arrested more than a dozen former low-ranking veterans of Yue Fei's army in various wards of Lin'an.

But the results are minimal.

The people on the list seemed not to exist.

At the end of March, Dong Xian, whom Wan Qixie had been keeping an eye on in the Ezhou area for more than a month, suddenly disappeared.

A man who was under house arrest in the backyard of the Military Commandery vanished overnight under the constant watch of twelve scouts from the Imperial City Guard.

There were no holes in the back wall of the military governor's office, and the guards at the main gate did not see anyone enter or leave. Even the servant who delivered his meals every day said, "The dinner is still left at the door and no one has touched it."

Wan Qixie sent men to search the entire yamen, and finally found the entrance to an old tunnel that had been bricked up under the floor tiles of an abandoned blacksmith's shop in the east courtyard.

The tunnel leads to the old brick kiln on the other side of the moat outside the city, and the withered grass at the exit has been trampled flat.

Dong Xian had already run away, and the Imperial City Guard only discovered him after he had been on the run for two whole days.

Qin Hui didn't get angry when he heard the news in the signing room.

He simply sat behind his desk for a long time, his fingers slowly turning the string of plain wooden prayer beads on his wrist.

Then he said to Wan Qixie, "Check every ferry crossing along the Han River from Ezhou to Xiangyang, boat by boat."

Wan Qixie checked.

All the boats at the ferry crossings along the Han River were searched, the hold of every fishing boat was pried open, and every old man who rowed the boat was questioned.

But Dong Xian vanished into the spring mist of the Han River, leaving not even a trace of his clothes behind.

In early April, Wan Qixie shifted his investigation focus to Xiangyang City.

In his deduction report, Tian Ruyi explicitly mentioned that Baima Temple was Yue Yinping's communication hub. The rhythm of the bell tower's chimes might contain coded messages, the lodging records of pilgrims in the rear hall might be unusual, and the head monks in the kitchen might be hiding former members of Yue Family Army.

Wanqixie sent six plainclothes scouts into the White Horse Temple as pilgrims, where they staked out the bell tower, the rear hall, and the kitchen for half a month.

The result was that nothing was gained.

The bell-ringing rhythm of the clock tower is exactly the same as the standard timekeeping of the Lin'an Supervisory Office.

When Yuwen Xu calibrated the bronze bells in Lin'an, he had already incorporated the bell-ringing rhythm of the White Horse Temple bell tower into the hidden bell coding system. The overt rhythm was always standard, while the secret code was hidden in the vibrato and rhythmic changes that ordinary people could not distinguish.

The lodging records for pilgrims in the back hall were all registered under pseudonyms, because Master Mingxin would rewrite the lodging records every night with a new code, and hide the real handover records under the roots of cattails in the corner outside the back door of the kitchen.

There was nothing unusual on the list of head monks in the kitchen. Mingxin's public identity was that of a novice monk officially registered at Baima Temple, and his tonsure date, Dharma name, and master's name were all genuine.

Because Yue Yinping had already arranged for Zhao Shiyi to obtain a complete set of ordination certificates for him in the name of the Grand Master of the Imperial Clan Court before he was even admitted to the White Horse Temple.

The Imperial City Guard had been stationed at the White Horse Temple for half a month, but they hadn't caught a single suspicious person.

These results silenced Qin Hui for a long time.

When he first noticed the Prince of Puan's Mansion using the privileges of the Grand Court of Imperial Clan Affairs last May, he sensed that it was an extremely formidable opponent.

But he didn't expect that in less than a year, these young people would have used every possible space of legitimacy to the fullest extent.

We should use the rules left by the founding emperor openly and honestly, and turn those rules into a shield.

After the wooden box at Fantian Temple was intercepted, the Imperial City Guard followed the clues and discovered the aliases and contact methods of several key figures.

However, all these aliases were fake; the names, places of origin, and occupations were all fabricated by Zhou Sanwei in Shaoxing over eleven years.

Wan Qixie could only search for people using aliases. For each alias, he had to mobilize at least six officers to investigate for several weeks, but all his efforts were in vain.

Over the course of three months, the Imperial City Guard had expended a great deal of energy investigating these aliases, while the real intelligence network of Yue Fei's former troops remained firmly embedded in the wards of Lin'an.

What troubled Qin Hui even more was another fake list.

In the twelfth month of the eleventh year of Shaoxing, after Yue Fei's execution, the death of Zhou Sanwei of the Dali Temple led to the inclusion of seven names of Qin Hui's henchmen and several imperial relatives with vested interests in Qin Hui in this false list, which was then archived as genuine intelligence within the Imperial City Guard.

Wan Qixie spent nearly two years investigating this fake list. Each name he investigated required a significant investment of manpower and resources over several months, and each name he excluded involved offending a number of people in the internal power struggles.

This fake list not only drained the resources of the Imperial City Guard, but also disrupted the already fragile balance within Qin Hui's inner circle. The imperial relatives who were wrongly investigated secretly put pressure on Qin Hui, and Wan Qixie dared not offend them, so he could only try to downplay the incident.

Moreover, although the suspected Qin Hui's cronies were eventually proven innocent, they harbored resentment during the investigation.