The night was deep and dark, and only a solitary lamp burned in the study.
Qu De-tao pushed aside a thick stack of case files and listened to his trusted subordinate’s report.
“Over the past few days, Du Youde hasn’t visited any pleasure houses, purchased any additional property, or even served anything but simple meals at home.”
His subordinate spoke in a low voice. “However, a merchant visits his residence every five days to deliver ordinary goods. Yesterday, he brought a box of ‘medicinal herbs,’ supposedly to nourish Old Madam Du’s health. The transaction was recorded as thirty taels.”
Qu De-tao raised his eyelids slightly. “What’s suspicious about thirty taels’ worth of medicinal herbs?”
“We sneaked in under cover of darkness to inspect it. There really were medicinal herbs in the box, but only a thin layer on top.”
The subordinate handed him a confidential report and continued quietly, “There was a false bottom underneath. The box contained herbs when it was delivered, but its weight was wrong when the merchant left. Our men secretly examined it and found that three hundred taels in silver notes had been added inside the false bottom. Du Youde had slipped them in to send away with the merchant.”
Medicinal herbs worth thirty taels on the books, with three hundred taels in illicit silver notes hidden inside.
A cold glint flashed through Qu De-tao’s eyes.
This was no delivery of medicine.
Du Youde was laundering his ill-gotten money in batches through a third party.
“It seems Du Youde is more cautious than we thought.” Qu De-tao gave a cold laugh.
◇◆◇◆◇
Two days later, without alerting anyone, Qu De-tao secretly summoned Du Youde to a secluded side courtyard.
There were no instruments of torture and no courtroom.
Qu De-tao simply placed three things on the table:
—a roster of 113 people, three mutually contradictory military registers, and two signed receipts for death benefits.
“Du Youde.”
Qu De-tao spoke calmly. “If all you did was embezzle some military pay, this case would end with you. You would be executed after the autumn harvest, and your wife and children would be spared.”
Du Youde was drenched in cold sweat, but he forced himself to remain silent.
“But if you know who these 113 fictitious positions were ultimately being kept for…” Qu De-tao leaned forward slightly, his words pressing down on Du Youde like a weight. “Then you’d better tell me now. This is no longer a crime you can bear alone.”
Du Youde’s psychological defenses collapsed instantly.
He crumpled to the floor and tremblingly confessed a secret.
He had no idea who the 113 fictitious positions were ultimately being maintained for. The only absolute order he had received was that he had to maintain exactly 113 vacant positions every month—not one more, not one less.
He had pocketed a small portion of the money for his own use. The rest was handed over on the first and fifteenth days of every month to an accountant known as “Old Yuan.”
Qu De-tao leaned back in his chair and watched Du Youde tremble like a leaf.
The man was not innocent.
The 113 fictitious positions, the monthly embezzlement of military pay, and the military households that had never truly existed—any one of these was enough to cost him his life.
But he was indeed not the mastermind behind this web.
He did not even know whom he was maintaining those 113 vacant positions for.
He was merely one of the lowest knots in the network.
Someone was pulling him along, yet he had no idea where the thread led.
Qu De-tao looked at Du Youde. His expression suddenly softened a little, and his tone became gentler.
“You did embezzle military pay, and you did falsify military registers. Both are true. My letting you return home today does not mean those crimes never happened.”
He paused, tapping his fingertips lightly on the tabletop.
“I’ll give you three days. Within those three days, correct every account you’ve tampered with. If you dare to run, the confession on this table, along with your entire family’s household registration, will be sent straight to the Ministry of Justice’s prison.”
Du Youde’s face turned deathly pale. He hurriedly kowtowed.
“Please show mercy, Your Excellency! Please show mercy!”
“As for Old Yuan, I won’t ask about him for now.”
Qu De-tao gathered up the confession and looked at him coldly. “Just go home and continue performing your duties as usual. Do whatever you normally do. If you suddenly become clever and change your habits, I’ll take it as a warning that there’s still something you haven’t told me.”
As though granted a new lease on life, Du Youde kowtowed repeatedly before leaving the courtyard in profound gratitude.
He believed that by being “frank” and “distancing himself” from the larger scheme, he had successfully persuaded the formidable old censor to focus only on military corruption.
However, the moment Du Youde stepped through the courtyard gate, his trusted subordinate slipped silently into the room.
“Your Excellency, are you really going to let him go just like that? What if he alerts the others—”
“He wouldn’t dare,” Qu De-tao replied coldly.
“He thinks I’ve only uncovered his embezzlement of military pay. Right now, he’s concerned only with keeping his position and his head. He absolutely won’t dare to alert anyone and risk exposing the whole operation.”
Qu De-tao walked to the window and watched Du Youde’s hurried retreating figure. His gaze was as deep as a well.
“If we arrest Du Youde, all we’ll get is Du Youde. If we let him go, we’ll find out who comes looking for him.”
His subordinate understood. “I’ll send men to watch his residence immediately.”
“No. Watching his residence alone isn’t enough.”
Qu De-tao waved a hand and calmly issued his orders. “Divide them into three groups. The first will watch Du Youde himself. The second will watch his residence, the military supply depots he frequents, and the account offices he visits. The third… will focus exclusively on places where Old Yuan might appear.”
“Once he gradually lets his guard down, his tail will naturally show.”
“Your Excellency, if Old Yuan really comes to collect the money, should we arrest him on the spot?”
“Not yet.”
Qu De-tao turned around, his voice firm and decisive. “If he enters Du Youde’s residence, let him in. If he takes something, let him take it. Deliberately loosen the first layer of surveillance. Even if he notices he’s being followed and shakes off our men after circling two streets, it doesn’t matter. The second layer of hidden sentries will be waiting at the tea stall farther ahead.”
Qu De-tao tapped his fingertips against the table, his voice low.
“What I want to know isn’t whom Du Youde hands the money to. I want to know where Old Yuan goes after collecting it—which merchant house he enters, and whom he meets there.”
“Understood, Your Excellency!”
Du Youde had no idea that from the moment he walked out of that room, he was no longer merely a criminal.
He had become live bait left dangling in the web.
The fishing line that had been let out was extending, step by step, toward deeper and vaster waters.
◆◇◆◇◆
At the same time, Qu De-tao investigated the death benefits paid to the two “falsely deceased military households.”
The results only made him more vigilant.
This was not a fabricated account for a transaction that had never taken place. The families of both military households had genuinely received compensation.
“One household received twenty taels, but the books record eighty,” the clerk reported quietly.
Qu De-tao looked at the signed receipt. “So they didn’t receive counterfeit money.”
“That’s right. The family members really did sign for it, and they received twenty taels.”
Qu De-tao’s fingertip came to rest on the ledger. His voice turned icy.
“Then it’s the remaining sixty taels that are false.”
The silver itself was real. What was false was the record of where those sixty taels had gone.
Meanwhile, the movements of Old Yuan were gradually coming to light.
He was not an accountant employed exclusively by any one person. Instead, he seemed like a wandering ghost.
Every ten days, he visited Du Youde’s residence. Every half month, he appeared at a particular merchant house. Occasionally, he lingered near several residences along South Street.
After investigation and cross-checking, those properties were confirmed to belong to relatives of military officials.
—Li Tongqing, a military supply commandant.
None of those residences belonged to Li Tongqing himself.
One belonged to his father-in-law, another to a distant relative of his wife’s family, and yet another was merely an estate he managed on someone else’s behalf.
Qu De-tao simply instructed his men to record all these properties.
What truly aroused his suspicion was the steward of one particular residence.
That man had received deliveries on Li Tongqing’s behalf twice.
Both deliveries had come from Guangsheng Trading House.
Li Tongqing’s accounts were so clean that no one could find a fault.
His salary was reasonable, his procurement documents complete, and all goods had been properly inspected and received.
But Qu De-tao shifted his investigation away from Li Tongqing himself and toward his relatives.
“Three years ago, Li Tongqing’s father-in-law returned to his hometown as an impoverished scholar who could barely afford to rent ten mu of poor farmland.”
Qu De-tao gave a cold snort as he studied several confidential reports on the table.
“Three years later, he bought five hundred mu of fertile farmland outside the city. Li Tongqing’s younger brother opened two large merchant houses on South Street. Even his wife now has an estate registered under her name.”
Qu De-tao immediately conducted a spot check of the military supplies handled by Li Tongqing.
Pointing to an account for a leather purchase, he asked the clerk beside him, “This shipment of northern frontier cowhide is recorded as costing three thousand taels. How much were the goods actually worth when they arrived in storage?”
The clerk examined the market-price list obtained through a covert investigation, breaking into a cold sweat.
“Your Excellency… at most, the actual goods were worth only eight hundred taels.”
“The goods were worth eight hundred taels, but the books show three thousand.”
Qu De-tao stared at the figure “three thousand” for a moment.
“Where did the remaining two thousand two hundred taels go?”
The clerk answered in a low voice. “According to the accounts… the entire amount went to the seller, Guangsheng Trading House.”
“And what about Guangsheng Trading House?”
“They claim it was payment for the goods.”
Qu De-tao tapped his fingertips lightly against the table, producing a dull sound.
“Goods worth eight hundred taels, yet three thousand were paid. The extra two thousand two hundred taels acquired the cleanest possible name—payment for goods.”
He turned to the next page.
“Investigate Guangsheng Trading House’s accounts for the past three years. I want to see whose hands those two thousand two hundred taels ultimately ended up in.”
But when Qu De-tao reconciled and traced all the accounts, the true nature of the enormous financial network finally began to emerge.
The two thousand two hundred taels had not simply vanished. They had been divided into several transactions.
One portion went through settlements with small merchant houses. Another was transferred through a money exchange. Yet another took a long detour under the pretext of “carriage and horse repair expenses.”
Finally, several sums of silver that appeared to have no connection with one another converged three months later into a single property purchase.
The buyer was none other than Li Tongqing’s once-impoverished father-in-law.
The illicit money Du Youde had slipped to the merchant and Old Yuan entered Guangsheng Trading House as “fodder subsidies.” The sixty taels skimmed from the false death benefits likewise flowed into Guangsheng Trading House, disguised as “caravan escort fees.”
At last, Qu De-tao brought these separate threads together.
—Illicit military pay and kickbacks from military procurement had both flowed into the same financial channel.
Qu De-tao sent men to investigate the trading house, but the report they brought back only deepened the furrow between his brows.
This was no shady establishment. It was a major trading house with an excellent reputation throughout the northern frontier. It had donated grain to disaster victims and possessed official government transit documents. Its manager, Song Chengyi, was an exceptionally smooth operator who knew how to do business.
Qu De-tao studied the pages covered in red circles and annotations.
“Guangsheng Trading House isn’t collecting money for just one person,” he said slowly. “It’s collecting money for many people.”
His trusted subordinate replied quietly, “Your Excellency, if it were merely a merchant house, it couldn’t possibly swallow so much illicit military money without being robbed by other criminals.”
“Then this can no longer be explained by the existence of a single merchant house.”
Qu De-tao raised his eyes, his gaze sharp as a torch.
“…Which means there must be someone behind it powerful enough to keep the Imperial Army in line.”
Qu De-tao began investigating Guangsheng Trading House’s network of connections in the capital.
The investigation proceeded smoothly—almost suspiciously smoothly.
He quickly discovered that Guangsheng Trading House could operate freely in the capital because several protégés of the Eastern Palace had spoken on its behalf.
Li Tongqing’s ability to hold on to his position as military supply commandant was also connected by countless threads to senior officials in the Crown Prince’s faction.
“So that’s how it is…”
Qu De-tao murmured to himself as he examined the list of names.
Fake military exploits had shielded Wei Chongwu. Vacant military positions had generated illicit funds. Military procurement had produced kickbacks. Guangsheng Trading House had handled the money, and protégés of the Eastern Palace had provided political protection.
A seemingly complete chain had emerged.
Everything appeared to make sense.
This was a factional struggle. The Crown Prince was exploiting corrupt elements in the military to amass wealth and strengthen his own power.
Yet once word of the investigation leaked out, the Eastern Palace reacted faster than Qu De-tao had anticipated.
Several implicated protégés were immediately removed from the duties they had been overseeing.
Some were transferred to other regions. Others claimed to be ill and shut themselves away. One man was found dead in his residence the very next day.
The Crown Prince offered only a cold statement to the public.
“I know nothing of this matter, and I will not permit anyone to act in the Eastern Palace’s name.”
The disavowal was so thorough it bordered on cruelty.
Late that night, Qu De-tao sat alone in his study, examining the intricate relationship chart and the testimonies obtained from the Eastern Palace. Yet his brows grew more and more tightly furrowed.
A sense of wrongness coiled around his neck like a venomous snake.
“…Something’s not right.”
He sprang to his feet and paced back and forth before his desk.
Du Youde knew only that he had to maintain vacant military positions. Li Tongqing knew only how to collect kickbacks. The Eastern Palace’s protégés knew only that they were paid to get things done…
These corrupt individuals, who did not know one another and each pursued their own illicit gains, were all sending things to the same place.
But the strangest thing was that not one of them knew what the money was ultimately meant to be used for.
If the Crown Prince really were the mastermind behind this network, at least one of his closest confidants should know the whole picture.
Yet after all his investigations, every person he had uncovered was merely a “knot” responsible for one small section of the operation.
If the Crown Prince wanted to amass wealth, he had plenty of cleaner, safer methods at his disposal.
Why maintain dead men in the military registers for so long?
Why keep exactly 113 vacant positions, neither more nor fewer?
Why link military procurement, death benefits, and merchant houses together?
If all of this was merely about money, why go to such lengths?
“This much risk… It doesn’t seem like it’s just about greed,” he murmured.
Someone was using the Eastern Palace’s name.
The Crown Prince himself might simply be a shield, placed within this web to take the arrows.
If even the Eastern Palace was merely a smokescreen being exploited…
Then was Guangsheng Trading House really transporting only silver?
Or was it carrying something else as well?
Qu De-tao’s gaze slowly shifted to another file on the table.
It contained records of Guangsheng Trading House’s caravans entering and leaving various locations over the past three years.
He took out a red pen and began tracing the routes of Guangsheng’s caravans onto another map—the map of the Great Sheng garrisons along the northern frontier.
Then he overlaid the dates of past Imperial Army redeployments, grain and fodder shipments, and Wei Chongwu’s secret departure from the camp years earlier.
The red lines and the military routes overlapped with a suffocating degree of precision.
Military pay.
Death benefits.
Military supplies.
Three sums of illicit money that had originally seemed entirely unrelated had all left traces in Guangsheng Trading House’s accounts.
And on the other side lay the northern frontier.
On the eve of an Imperial Army rotation, a Guangsheng caravan had happened to stop at a nearby relay station.
Three days before grain and fodder allocations were made, Guangsheng’s carts carrying leather goods had passed through the frontier gate.
During the very days Wei Chongwu had secretly left the camp, Guangsheng had recorded a “large-scale transaction” in the area for which no physical goods could be found.
The pen in Qu De-tao’s hand stopped. A drop of red ink fell onto the paper, like a spot of blood.
He reviewed the documents once more, and cold sweat slowly seeped down his back.
Money was flowing.
And information… seemed to be flowing as well.
“Is this trading house really only laundering money for other people?”
For the first time, he realized that perhaps he had never been investigating a case of corruption within the Imperial Army at all.
He was investigating a web concealed beneath trade routes, military pay, and official connections.
As for what lay at the other end of this web, he still did not know.
But he knew that the other end lay in the northern frontier.
The pen remained suspended in Qu De-tao’s hand. The drop of red ink had already dried on the paper.
Yet his expression was even more grave than it had been when he first uncovered the enormous money-laundering network.
He recalled the succession of military orders Prince Su had issued over the past several days.
At first, he had thought Xiao Yuan was merely scrambling to deal with the death sentence imposed by the imperial decree demanding that the lost territories be recovered within three months, desperately grasping at whatever measures he could to save his life.
The Imperial Army’s camps had been dismantled.
A large camp originally stationed west of Linbei City had been forcibly divided into three new camps: one to the southwest, one to the northwest, and one to the south.
Even the most inconspicuous military tents had been changed from eight men per tent to four.
Thirty thousand northern frontier troops had been reorganized, breaking away from the original garrison structure and establishing a new system of “Nine Divisions.”
Meanwhile, the eight thousand Imperial Army soldiers had been “politely” kept away from all core military operations.
Taken individually, every military order had an entirely legitimate justification—preventing epidemics, enforcing military discipline, and improving tactical mobility.
But now, as Qu De-tao placed the web he had uncovered in the Imperial Army case beside Prince Su’s military orders on the same desk—
His brows slowly drew together.
…This was not merely a military reorganization.
Qu De-tao rose and walked to the large table nearby, spreading out the military deployment map of Linbei City once more.
Under the candlelight, the ink markings were mottled and uneven.
The large camp west of the city had been divided into three. Troops had been dispersed, banners exchanged, and the relationships between their ordinary stations and their wartime command structures deliberately shattered into fragments.
On paper, those thirty thousand soldiers still wore armor issued by the imperial court and carried the military registers of the official garrisons.
But once the war drums sounded, the structure governing them would be the “Nine-Division Wartime Command System” that Prince Su had established with his own hands.
If anyone sent intelligence from the northern frontier back to the capital—or beyond the passes—
The reports would merely state things like “six thousand soldiers of Hanchuan Garrison, four thousand of Linzhou Garrison, two thousand of Heguan Garrison.”
Qu De-tao stared at the map, his gaze terrifyingly dark.
Every one of those figures was genuine, and the military payroll records matched down to the last character.
But if this intelligence reached the Northern Di or the mastermind behind the scenes, it would already have become worthless paper.
The court’s original garrison registers could no longer tell anyone which division, under which commander, would lead which group of soldiers into which valley when battle began the following day.
And the eight thousand Imperial Army soldiers, infiltrated so thoroughly that they were like sieves, had been kept on the outer perimeter from beginning to end. They had not even been allowed to approach the core tactics.
His fingertip tapped lightly against the hard wooden tabletop, producing a dull thud.
“…What a wartime reorganization.”
For the first time, Qu De-tao truly felt the immense weight behind Prince Su’s military orders.
Xiao Yuan was not simply making thirty thousand men easier to command.
He was giving those thirty thousand soldiers two identities that would exist simultaneously.
In peacetime, they were official garrison troops appointed by the imperial court, drawing their provisions and pay from the court.
In wartime, they were weapons of war that struck wherever Prince Su directed.
And the most frightening part was that all of this had the Emperor’s decree—granting him authority to “act at his discretion”—as its nominal justification.
Qu De-tao slowly raised his eyes toward the deep darkness outside the window.
He suddenly remembered the calm expression Prince Su had worn when casually tossing the case to him in the first place.
“Having me investigate the Imperial Army…”
Qu De-tao murmured to himself, a bitter, complicated smile appearing at the corners of his mouth.
“Does His Highness truly want to keep me busy, or is he…”
He did not finish the sentence.
Because he had suddenly realized that while he had spent all this time buried in ledgers and witness statements, seemingly pressing forward step by step until he had uncovered this dark network spanning the imperial court and the frontier—
Prince Su had been using the fact that everyone’s attention was fixed on the three-month deadline to quietly take control, inch by inch, of the entire northern frontier’s wartime command.
No one in the world could now say how many trump cards Prince Su still held.
While Qu De-tao was investigating corruption at the first level,
The money-laundering network had already extended into the second.
And Prince Su had already begun another operation at the third.
Only now could Qu De-tao see it.
Perhaps the military orders Prince Su had issued over these past days had never been intended solely to deal with the Northern Di.
Qu De-tao stood before his desk for a long time.
At last, he looked at the densely detailed diagram of the Nine Divisions and slowly uttered a single sentence.
“This move… isn’t meant to win the battle in front of him.”
The candle flame on the desk flickered slightly, making his shadow sway with it.
Qu De-tao fell silent.
Because a thought even more dangerous and earth-shattering than the treasonous network he had just uncovered emerged in his mind—
If Prince Su really could recover all three lost territories within three months,
Would this “Nine-Division System,” which had broken apart the old garrison structure, be dismantled and restored to the arrangement the imperial court wanted after the war?
The soldiers had already acknowledged Prince Su’s banner, his orders, and the commanders he had appointed.
The commanders had also learned how to bypass the court’s garrison system and directly mobilize the soldiers who would follow them through life and death.
Once certain powers were firmly grasped, once a military force had been shaped into this kind of allegiance, it could no longer be easily stripped away with a simple declaration that “the war is over.”
For the first time, Qu De-tao stopped viewing Xiao Yuan as a tragic prince trapped in a hopeless situation, desperately searching for a way to survive.
Instead, he saw a man using these three months of desperation to strip the entire northern frontier’s military power and structure down to the bone, then remake them completely through fire and rebirth.
He finally understood why the Emperor feared Prince Su so much.
Prince Su truly possessed terrifying strength and political skill. But his birth and his status as the Seventh Prince had long since determined that he had no chance of ascending the throne.
The Empress and the Crown Prince’s faction were deeply entrenched. Thirty thousand soldiers on the northern frontier alone would never be enough to shake their foundations.
Unless…
Qu De-tao abruptly stopped that forbidden train of thought.
He pushed open the window and gazed into the northern frontier’s ink-black night sky.
He had come here as the Emperor’s appointed military supervisor. Yet now, for the first time, a deeply unsettling premonition arose within him.
If this war were truly won, if Prince Su really led those thirty thousand soldiers—whose military command structure had been transformed—through these three months alive…
Would someone like him, an imperial envoy who had stumbled upon all these secrets, still be able to return safely to the capital?
The northern frontier’s night wind swept past, making the candle flame waver.
Qu De-tao stared into the vast darkness overhead, his thoughts remaining in turmoil for a long, long time.