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

Chapter 021: The Death of Zhijia

On the third day after leaving Lin'an, Yue Yinping rested at an abandoned post station outside Yuhang.

This post station is an old structure from before the southward migration; half of the tiled roof has collapsed, and the walls are overgrown with withered grass.

In the very center of the courtyard stands a stone well, the well pulley still intact, though the rope is broken in half.

Yue Yinping tied the chestnut horse to the withered locust tree in the corner of the courtyard and unloaded the coffin, placing it under the eaves of the main hall of the post station.

Li Yanxian, along with three Imperial Guards, set up guards at the four corners of the courtyard. Without his orders, they surveyed the terrain and automatically positioned themselves to the left of the courtyard gate, effectively enclosing the courtyard in a tight encirclement.

Yue Yinping squatted by the well and used the well wheel to draw up some well water with ice chips floating on it, then poured it into the manger to feed the horses.

A traveling monk appeared at the end of the post road, wearing a gray robe and carrying a bamboo house on his back.

He passed by the post station without stopping, and did not even turn his head to look at the coffin in the courtyard.

Yue Yinping saw him press his finger on the door frame as he passed through the courtyard gate, then put it down and continued walking forward.

The figure in the gray monk's robe grew smaller and smaller as it traveled north along the post road, eventually disappearing behind the withered bamboo forest.

Something new appeared on the door frame inside the courtyard gate: a bamboo strip about the length of a finger and two fingers wide, caught on a splinter on the door frame.

Yue Yinping took it down. Three numbers were written on one side of the bamboo strip with charcoal.

Three, seven, eleven.

The charcoal ink was very light, the spacing between the numbers was uneven, the horizontal stroke of the number seven was slightly longer, and the end of the stroke was flicked upwards.

She brought the bamboo strip close to her nose; the bamboo strip had been scented with sandalwood smoke, the incense smoke of a temple in Lin'an.

Zhijia is dead.

Yue Yinping gripped the bamboo strips tightly in her palm, the edges of which pricked her hand painfully.

She had only met Ji-ja once.

On the eve of the Battle of Yancheng in the tenth year of Shaoxing, the candlelight in the tent flickered in the wind.

A monk in a gray robe sat in the corner, not uttering a word.

My father said he was the most mysterious person in Yue Fei's army, in charge of a network that stretched across the north and south of the Yangtze River and into the Jin territory.

She didn't ask what the net looked like, only remembering that when the monk left, Yang Zaixing asked him if he was afraid of Jin Wuzhu's 100,000 iron cavalry, and he said "wait".

When asked if the Northern Expedition could succeed, he simply said, "Wait." He uttered only that one word from beginning to end.

That was the first and last time she saw Zhijia.

In the first month of the twelfth year of Shaoxing, Qin Hui's men arrested him, interrogated him for three days, and executed him at Dali Temple.

The last message that Wei Zijia entrusted to Jiang Shixiong before his death on Wednesday was not about taking the Northwest, but that Zhijia was dead, but the net was still open.

Zhou Sanwei wrote these six characters on the very edge of the back of the drawing, in the lightest ink and in the smallest handwriting, as if he had hesitated for a long time about whether or not to tell her, but finally wrote them down.

Zhijia's death meant that Yue Fei's army's intelligence network lost its only brain, causing the complete collapse of Yue Fei's intelligence center.

He spent several years laying out a secret intelligence network spanning the Song and Jin dynasties: secret outposts were set up in temples, docks, ferries, shops, and workshops in many parts of the Southern Song Dynasty, each with its own unique numerical code.

Zhijia is the only one who knows the correspondence between all the numbers. He keeps this network in his mind and recites it to himself every day.

Qin Hui's men shoved his head into a basin of water in the Dali Temple's torture chamber. He choked on ten mouthfuls of water, water entered his lungs, and blood foam gushed from his throat, but he never uttered a sound.

Zhijia made arrangements the day before his arrest, before he was about to die: he sealed the intelligence contact information in three wooden boxes and sent them to three temples in Lin'an.

Then, he wrote three numbers on a bamboo strip with charcoal and entrusted it to the traveling monk.

The monk caught up with the group, stuck a bamboo strip into the door frame of the post station, and quietly left a message; he knew she would come. He was just waiting.

"Li Yanxian".

Li Yanxian walked over from the left side of the courtyard gate and knelt on one knee.

"Send people to Lin'an, in three groups, to investigate three temples—" She turned the bamboo strips over.

"Jingci Temple, Lingyin Temple, and Fantian Temple. The day before Zhijia was arrested, the monks of these three temples each received a wooden box from a monk. They were waiting for someone to come and collect it with a bamboo strip corresponding to the number."

Li Yanxian took the bamboo strips. "Take them back?"

"Jingci Temple and Lingyin Temple—retrieve them." Her fingers tightened on her knees. "Fantian Temple, check first. If it's still there, retrieve it. If not—find out who took it."

Li Yanxian kowtowed, rose, and left.

Three days later, one of the Imperial Guards returned to Lin'an, followed shortly by a second. The two brought back two wooden boxes.

The third group that went to Fantian Temple returned last; the wooden box was gone, and the incense-offering Taoist priest had been arrested.

"Qin Hui's men." Yue Yinping's voice was flat.

"They got the wooden box from Fantian Temple." Li Yanxian's fingers tightened on the hilt of the knife.

Before the Taoist priest was arrested, Qin Hui's men had already set their sights on Jingci Temple and Lingyin Temple.

But they didn't act; they just kept watch for about three days, then withdrew—on Wednesday, the day he feared death, Qin Hui couldn't care less about the intelligence network; he was purging the Dali Temple.

Yue Yinping didn't say anything more. She folded the two booklets and stuffed them into the lining of her mourning clothes.

There are ten nodes: five in Lin'an, three in Jiankang, and two in Zhenjiang.

With the addition of Wang Zhongchen's tea shop in Xiangyang, Dong Xian's logistics network in Ezhou, and Sun Yan's fleet on the Yangtze River, this network stretched from Lin'an to Jiankang and Zhenjiang, and from Zhenjiang up the Yangtze River to Ezhou and Xiangyang.

However, these networks are only located south of the Yangtze River.

Zhijia's true strength lay north of the Yangtze River. He had established strongholds in Huaibei, Shandong, Hebei, and all the way to Huining Prefecture, the capital of the Jin Dynasty.

Those nodes weren't numbered, only coded. The contact person didn't know Zhijia was dead; perhaps they were still waiting. Every year on the 29th of the twelfth lunar month, they would burn an incense stick.

What part was inside the wooden box from Fantian Temple that Qin Hui intercepted? Nobody knows.

A line broke, but the net remained intact; it just created a hole, allowing the wind to rush in.

That night, in the main hall of the post station, Yue Yinping sat down against the coffin and took out a pot of turbid wine and two rough earthenware bowls from her horse's pack.

She poured a bowl and placed it in front of the coffin. Crushed ice served as the grave, and cloudy wine as the offering. The wine swirled gently in the bowl.

"Master Zhijia, you waited your whole life. You said you'd wait, but in the end, what did you get?"

Her voice was very soft, almost drowned out by the wind, "You wait until Qin Hui's men force you into a basin of water. You wait until water fills your lungs and blood foam rises from your throat. You wait until you die."

Yue Yinping poured another bowl of wine onto the ground in front of the coffin. Her fingers gently pressed the pages of the two books under her sleeve. Zhijia was dead, but the internet was still online—that was enough.

The next morning, Yue Yinping loaded the coffin back onto the horse. Xiangyang was far away, and she reached into the inner compartment while riding.

Zhijia dismantled the intelligence network into three parts and hid them in three temples, thus shattering the network in his own mind. He died in Lin'an City.