The Azure Mountain

Chapter 74: The Jianghu

Red Clothe Lane at night was drenched in vivid color.

Lanterns and festoons stretched from one end to the other, as if every night were a wedding celebration, every evening a feast to drown one's sorrows — red sleeves beckoning from every balcony.

Golden Workshop had earned its fame by gilding each of its pillars with gold leaf and gold dust against a backdrop of crimson, and by setting gemstones into the coffered ceiling of the Thousand Autumns Pavilion — a dazzling blaze of gold and brilliance.

This kind of extravagance was commonplace in Jinling, but in Luo City, Golden Workshop was the only place to do it.

In a shadowed corner outside Red Clothe Lane, Wu Yun melted silently into the darkness. Chen Ji placed his hands on a wall ledge, pushed off with barely any effort, and landed steadily on top.

Another light leap, hands closing around the extended corner of a building's eave, and he swung himself up onto the rooftop.

His right leg was injured and couldn't bear much force, but with twenty-six furnace fires now ignited, his arm strength alone was more than enough for climbing.

Chen Ji crouched down and quietly surveyed his surroundings. Below, streams of people flowed like a river. Above, row upon row of gray gabled rooftops rose and fell like gentle hills.

Each roof ridge was like a mountain spine — the side facing Red Clothe Lane was the lit, sunny slope; the other was the dark, shadowed side.

Once he confirmed no one else was up here, Chen Ji moved carefully along the dark side of the rooftops, stepping lightly on the gray tiles so as not to alert anyone below. Fortunately, Red Clothe Lane was noisy enough to mask faint footsteps.As he walked, his gaze swept over the ridge line and down into the lane below.

Chen Ji on the gray tiles walked through the night; Baili and the Prince Heir walked through the lamplight. They were like two parallel lines destined never to cross.

He watched their steps, hoping to see where the Prince Heir was headed. He prayed it wasn't Golden Workshop — it would be dangerous there.

Just then, a street vendor came through with a carrying pole, and Commandery Princess Baili stopped. She picked out a compartmentalized snack box from the vendor's wares — filled with maltose candy and vegetables tossed in plum sauce, speared on bamboo skewers. She walked and ate.

Amid the crowds and the crimson glow, Baili and the Prince Heir were both dressed in white, like two pieces of mutton-fat jade hidden in a turbid current — strikingly conspicuous.

The next instant, Chen Ji heard tiles shifting both ahead of him and behind.

He whipped around and saw two black-clad men with long sabers at their belts climbing up via ladders from below.

On the desolate rooftop, Chen Ji froze. The two men in black also froze.

These elite operatives — whether from the Secret Spy Division or the Military Intelligence Division, he couldn't tell — had climbed up to get a commanding vantage point over Red Clothe Lane, to observe and keep watch... and had stumbled right into Chen Ji!

In a flash, both men drew their blades without a word and advanced from front and rear, boots scraping across the slanted tiles.

Chen Ji cursed his luck. When he'd first climbed up, he'd worried someone else might have the same idea, so he'd made sure the rooftop was clear before ascending.

At the time, he had even wondered: such an excellent observation post, and nobody had thought to occupy it? The Military Intelligence Division and Secret Spy Division really had terrible tactical awareness on a local scale.

As it turned out, they hadn't failed to think of it — they had simply arrived late!

Below, the red-lit lane carried on with its songs and dances of false peace. Above, the night seethed with killing intent. None of the three made a sound or called out — each seemed equally afraid of being discovered by outsiders.

Chen Ji broke into a sprint, forcing himself to ignore the pain in his leg, making himself run as normally as possible — trying to escape the encirclement before the two men could close in and avoid the peril of being attacked from both sides.

But these two were seasoned fighters. Reading his intent, they instantly adjusted their trajectories, coordinating front and rear to seal off his escape routes.

The rooftop was only so large. Chen Ji had nowhere left to retreat — unless he jumped straight off the building.

He stood at the eave's edge. He looked at the six-meter drop, then thought of his injured leg, and after a moment's deliberation, stepped back.

In the time it took him to hesitate, the two elites had closed in, swinging their blades simultaneously in horizontal cuts!

Two long sabers came at him like shears, the red glow of the lane below reflected on their steel!

In that breath, the blade techniques carved into Chen Ji's very bones seemed to awaken instinctively — as if the sound of a hammer striking an anvil erupted inside his chest. With lightning speed, he swung his blade twice — once forward, once backward.

Chen Ji was faster than both of them. His strikes came later but landed first. The trajectory of his blade was like a white deer gliding through a forest — effortless, natural, as though it had always been.

Two clear rings of steel on steel, swallowed by the din of Red Clothe Lane. One man's forged-steel saber snapped clean in two — the severed blade clanged onto the sloped tiles and slid over the edge into the dark courtyard below. The other man's saber wasn't broken, but it was slapped clean out of his grip.

Chen Ji froze. Both elites froze again.

All three sets of pupils contracted sharply, as though they had just witnessed something impossible.

Gold-Breaking.

Chen Ji had once asked Feng Huai what that technique was — the one that struck the blade and made his wrist ache. Feng Huai had answered: Gold-Breaking — a technique using precise force to find a flaw and snap the blade. If not for Whale's exceptional material, it would have been broken too.

And now, a lowly clinic apprentice who should have been scrambling to flee under a two-man assault had lashed out on forged instinct — and in a single exchange, used a short herb-cutting knife from the clinic to snap one saber and knock the other flying. Had Chen Ji not been slightly rusty using Gold-Breaking against an actual opponent for the first time, both blades would have broken.

The two men exchanged a glance. Something felt deeply wrong about tonight. Running into a bladesman of this caliber on this deserted rooftop was strange enough — but why had the man tried to flee at first? And why was he even more shocked than they were?!

What they didn't know was that during his bouts with Feng Huai, Chen Ji had always felt like he couldn't bring out his full strength. Feng Huai was utterly flawless, constantly dominating and pressuring him. Sparring against someone like that bred nothing but a helpless sense of defeat, to the point where Chen Ji had wondered whether he simply had no talent for the blade.

But the moment his opponents were anyone other than Feng Huai, everything felt different.

The two men looked down at their broken saber once more. A sliver of fear crept in — but having come this far, there was no retreating.

Armed with the iron will forged in the bitter cold training camps of the north, both men simultaneously discarded their ruined blades and drew concealed daggers from their belts.

They moved in perfect coordination — one feinting, one striking hard; one phantom, one real — blocking every possible escape route.

But Chen Ji suddenly realized that compared to Feng Huai, these two men were riddled with openings.

As two daggers thrust at him from front and behind, Chen Ji simply shifted his body a fraction, dodging both trajectories. His left hand shot out and clamped around one man's wrist like an iron vise, preventing the dagger from being retracted.

His right hand flicked upward in a gentle motion, and the blade's edge severed the other man's wrist tendons. With a clatter, the dagger fell onto the gray roof tiles and rolled over the eave into the courtyard below.

The man whose tendons were cut retreated at full speed.

Chen Ji hauled the other man forward by his wrist like a puppet, pressing tight against the retreating black-clad figure, body driving blade. The short knife plunged into the heart, the spleen, the liver — one thrust after another — and the final stroke cut across the throat.

The other man, his wrist locked in Chen Ji's grip, could only stumble along, unable to find his footing. He watched helplessly as his comrade was stabbed again and again, powerless to intervene.

Before he could even formulate a plan to break free, the cold blade light suddenly reversed direction, flashing across his neck under the moonlight.

A fine spray of blood spattered across Chen Ji's charcoal-smeared face. He slowly released his grip and let the man sink to his knees and topple over.

Chen Ji searched the bodies. He knew Jin Zhu's agents all carried copper whistles that mimicked bird calls for signaling — but these two had none.

'Shopkeeper Yuan's men.'

......

......

His leg wound throbbed. During the fight, he hadn't noticed, but now Chen Ji realized the struggle had torn the old wound open again.

He wiped the blood from his hands, trying to keep a firm grip on the knife — but it was no use.

He lowered his head, tore a strip from the hem of his clothes, and wound it around his hand. When he looked up again, his gaze traveled over the roof ridge and into Red Clothe Lane. Somehow, several Jianghu fighters had gathered around the Prince Heir and Baili, and they were all chatting animatedly.

He watched as Commandery Princess Baili and the Prince Heir reached Golden Workshop's entrance. Yan'er emerged from inside with a smile and welcomed them in.

Golden Workshop after all.

Chen Ji sighed inwardly. He stood motionless on the rooftop, rapidly scanning the surroundings.

He couldn't worry about the Prince Heir and Baili now. He had to find Shopkeeper Yuan first.

Inside Red Clothe Lane, more and more people filed into Golden Workshop, but Shopkeeper Yuan's figure never appeared. Had he not come yet, or was he already inside?

'Wait.'

Chen Ji spotted figures shifting in the darkness beyond Red Clothe Lane. Over a hundred Secret Spy Division agents, sabers at their belts, split into two groups to surround the lane from both ends. Among them, Jin Zhu had donned light armor — his usual genial smile gone, replaced by the bearing of a commanding general.

And farther out, Chen Ji saw five hundred Trouble-Resolving Guard cavalry with their horses' hooves wrapped in cloth to muffle sound. Every rider wore a bamboo hat and straw cloak, standing motionless in the dark beyond the lane, spears at the ready.

The man at their head sat with a horizontal blade resting across his saddle, unmoving as stone.

Lin Chaoqing.

Lin Chaoqing was here too!

Chen Ji marveled at Jin Zhu's caution. The man had barely traced the missing firearms lead from the Imperial Workshop before — without hesitation — collaborating with the Chief Punishment Division and pulling the Trouble-Resolving Guard all the way from the Mengjin Military Camp!

At the mouth of Red Clothe Lane, Lin Chaoqing sat atop his horse and remarked coolly: "Every single one of the Secret Spy Division's Twelve Zodiacs is impulsive and reckless. Jiao Tu and Yun Yang called in the Trouble-Resolving Guard last time and ended up behind bars for it. I wonder what fate awaits you tonight, Honorable Jin Zhu?"

Jin Zhu chuckled: "Can I really be compared to those two? I've already found the Jing Dynasty rats — and not just the foreign spies. I've found the traitor from within as well."

"Oh? You certainly keep a tight lid on things. Not a whisper beforehand," Lin Chaoqing scoffed. "When you showed up at my Mengjin Camp, all you did was carry on about wanting Yellow River carp and bossing my Trouble-Resolving Guard around to go fishing. I assumed eating was all you cared about. But given what happened to Jiao Tu and Yun Yang, my Trouble-Resolving Guard won't lift a finger this time unless you explain exactly what we're getting into."

Jin Zhu smiled: "Commander Lin, don't be angry. You oversee the Chief Punishment Division for all of Yuzhou — of course I ought to keep you informed about why I'm calling in the Guard. So tell me, Commander — what do you think the Jing Dynasty spies want most from our Ning Dynasty?"

"Troop deployment maps. Court secrets. Firearms."

"Exactly. Zhou Chengyi had been trying to turn officials at the Imperial Workshop — proof that their primary target was firearms. So when I arrived in Luo City, the first thing I did was monitor all sales of saltpeter and sulfur. The second was to audit the Imperial Workshop's inventory and ledgers. A few days ago, I discovered that the Workshop's firearms inventory didn't match the books, and several blueprints were missing. Following the trail, I arrested six people — some from the Canal Transport Guild, some from the Workshop — and ultimately traced the missing firearms right here, to Red Clothe Lane."

Lin Chaoqing frowned: "With so many brothels in Red Clothe Lane, which one? You know every establishment here has powerful backers. Surely you don't expect the Trouble-Resolving Guard to raid every single one?"

Jin Zhu grinned: "Earlier, I set a trap at the Chaocang gambling den and captured twelve enemy agents alive. Eleven bit their poison capsules and died on the spot; one survived and turned. He told me that the Si Cao of the Military Intelligence Division had once ordered him to collect a shipment from Golden Workshop. Normally, the Jing Dynasty spies wouldn't be stupid enough to use the same exchange point twice, so at first I only posted a few agents to keep watch — just a quiet chess move. But then today, suspicious individuals suddenly transported another shipment into Golden Workshop. I caught them in the act."

Lin Chaoqing raised no further objections. He knew Jin Zhu was a trusted protege of the Inner Chancellor, with distinguished service. The reason Jin Zhu remained among the lower nine Zodiac ranks wasn't a lack of ability — it was because Jin Zhu was too close to Tian Ma, and the Inner Chancellor wouldn't allow such tight bonds among the top three.

Some speculated that if Bing Hu stepped down in the coming years, Jin Zhu might take his place.

But Lin Chaoqing knew that with the Inner Chancellor's temperament, as long as Tian Ma was alive, Jin Zhu would never get that chance.

After a moment's thought, Lin Chaoqing said: "Honorable Jin Zhu, the Trouble-Resolving Guard is yours to command tonight. Just don't make any mistakes."

"That's all I needed to hear." Jin Zhu made several hand signals to his subordinates.

A dense swarm of Secret Spy Division agents surged into Red Clothe Lane to make arrests. The lane erupted into chaos — customers in every tavern and brothel fled in panic, terrified of being caught up in the dragnet.

They tried to escape Red Clothe Lane, only to find the Trouble-Resolving Guard's cavalry blocking both the north and south exits. There was no way out.

From his perch on the rooftop, Chen Ji suddenly spotted the Prince Heir, Baili, and those Jianghu fighters rushing out of Golden Workshop. Seeing both ends blocked, they charged headlong into the tavern directly opposite — right beneath Chen Ji's feet — hoping to cut through the hall and escape over the rear courtyard wall!

Six agents spotted them fleeing and immediately abandoned their other targets, drawing blades and chasing them into the tavern.

Chen Ji stood at the edge of the eave, looking straight down. He watched as the Jianghu fighters with the Prince Heir reached the rear courtyard and vaulted over the two-meter wall with effortless ease.

The Prince Heir shouted from inside the courtyard: "Hey! Give us a hand — help us over the wall!"

The Jianghu fighters paused. One leapt up, sprawled atop the wall, and reached down: "Grab my hand — I'll pull you up."

But before the Prince Heir could grasp it, six blade-wielding agents had already stormed into the courtyard...

"Run!"

In the next instant, the Jianghu fighters abandoned the Prince Heir and Baili, turned, and vanished into the dark alley on the other side of the wall — gone without a trace.

Chen Ji frowned. Something was wrong about this.

If the Prince Heir was here simply for entertainment, all he had to do was stay put and wait for the Secret Spy Division's inspection. Once things were sorted out, anyone without suspicion would be free to go.

Why risk fleeing?