Gao Yu stood at a distance watching Lu Chonglou and Ye Xiaoqian walk back side by side, his brow furrowed. Every avenue felt blocked.

And the plan itself had a fundamental flaw: the attempt to kill Lu Chonglou alone made it look, on the surface, like a watertight scheme — yet that very neatness was its greatest weakness.

In a convoy of over ten thousand people, if everyone survived unharmed except the commanding officer — who happened to die of *bad water and unfamiliar food* — who in their right mind would believe that?

In Gao Yu’s view, to avoid suspicion, at least several dozen other deaths were needed. And at least half of those would need to be Court Adjudicator’s Office agents — since they were Lu Chonglou’s personal guards.

A mass of people dying from illness was far more credible than a single man dying of illness.

But Xu Ji’s greatest hesitation was provoking the Court Adjudicator’s Office — his wariness of them seemed to go down to his very bones.

Gao Yu knew the perils of serving under Xu Ji well enough. The rewards were generous, certainly, but there was one enormous drawback: the people beneath Xu Ji tended to treat whatever small authority they held as if it were a divine mandate — inflating that tiny power tenfold.

And in this operation, between Gao Yu and Xu Ji sat Wen Jiu.

That was what galled Gao Yu the most. Without Wen Jiu in the picture, he could operate more freely. Wen Jiu clung rigidly to Xu Ji’s instructions, issuing orders to Gao Yu down to the last word.

And even if Gao Yu followed those orders to the letter and succeeded, the credit would be Wen Jiu’s — for Wen Jiu had merely moved his mouth. If Gao Yu failed, the fault of course was his, and Wen Jiu would receive no worse than a reprimand for insufficient oversight.

So Gao Yu had concluded, after much deliberation, that he could not follow Xu Ji’s idealized demands to the letter. Several deaths were needed, and from the same symptoms — only then would everything be truly airtight.

Furthermore, the first case should not appear near Lu Chonglou. It should appear elsewhere first.

His eyes drifted to the two small bottles on his bed — the ones Wen Jiu had left behind before departing, containing the drug compounded by Madame Mi.

Gao Yu didn’t trust Madame Mi either. Her origins were too mysterious.

He had once asked Wen Jiu about the drug’s effects. Wen Jiu had explained: within the first two days after ingestion, there would be no noticeable symptoms. Starting on the third day, mild feverish symptoms would appear, lasting two to three days before developing into a serious condition. From onset to death was approximately five to seven days — and in those final days, the victim would suffer severe vomiting and diarrhea, eventually dying of total exhaustion.

Given that window of seven days, Gao Yu reasoned that the first case could perhaps appear among the men in his own immediate circle.

He looked out the tent flap. Several of his personal attendants were standing watch outside.

If one of them died, a later investigation by the Court Adjudicator’s Office would likely find no trail leading back to him.

*Brothers, don’t blame me for being ruthless,* Gao Yu said in his heart.

—

Elsewhere in the camp.

After eating, Ye Xiaoqian asked Lu Chonglou a question out of nowhere: “How well does my lord hold his drink?”

“You know my family brews wine,” Lu Chonglou replied.

Ye Xiaoqian smiled. “So my lord can hold his liquor?”

“When it comes to martial arts, you could put down ten of me. When it comes to drinking, I could put down ten of you.”

Ye Xiaoqian shook his head. “I don’t believe that.”

“Care to find out sometime?”

“What I don’t believe,” Ye Xiaoqian said, “is that I could only put down ten of you.”

Lu Chonglou: “……”

Ye Xiaoqian glanced around and lowered his voice. “My lord — whenever we pass through a town from now on, send someone out to buy wine.”

“Drinking on campaign is a grave prohibition,” Lu Chonglou said. “And I’ve gone over a month without buying wine. Sending for it only after we leave Yuezhou — won’t that seem strange?”

“Do you know how many times a person can encounter something unusual before it stops seeming unusual to them?”

Lu Chonglou shook his head. He’d never had the leisure to ponder such things. His mind was perpetually occupied with governance, with the lives of ordinary people — even his worry about his own survival was squeezed in between those thoughts. Most of the time he was thinking about how to help people live better lives under this new state, how to make people trust this new order.

“The Qianban said: no more than seven times.”

“Truly, which Qianban raised you…” Lu Chonglou muttered.

Ye Xiaoqian just smiled. “My lord will find out eventually.”

He returned to the topic. “If every day you see me writing in the dirt when I relieve myself — on the first day you think I’m unwell; on the second day you think I’m definitely unwell; but by the seventh day, you’ve stopped wondering about it. You’ve simply accepted: *this person is like that.* If someone else sees me doing it and starts gossiping, you’d even defend me — ‘he’s always been this way; look, yesterday he was tracing the Dengque Terrace stele, and the day before that, the Shangyangdai stele.'”

“If I actually said that,” Lu Chonglou replied, “it would be an insult to the two great masters who created those works. Between defending their honor and acknowledging that you’re unwell — obviously you’re unwell.”

Ye Xiaoqian laughed.

“From tomorrow on, my lord sends someone out to buy wine. Seven trips is all it takes. After that, no one will think anything of it.”

“Then what?”

“I’ve been thinking it over,” Ye Xiaoqian said. “If someone wants to kill my lord, the best method is poison.”

“So?”

“My lord just needs to let people grow accustomed to seeing you send for wine. They’ll start looking for ways to poison it. We can’t predict how the enemy will administer it — so we give the enemy a channel. If they use it successfully, they’ll kill my lord.”

Lu Chonglou: “……”

“And if I actually end up dead?”

“Then that confirms my theory was correct.”

“Thank you. And thank the Court Adjudicator’s Office for sending you to protect me.”

“My lord, please don’t mention it — this is what we do.”

“Who said I was being polite…”

Still, Lu Chonglou acknowledged that when you couldn’t determine how the enemy would strike, giving the enemy a method to pursue was actually quite viable.

So he nodded. “I’ll handle the wine. But you have to keep me alive.”

Ye Xiaoqian reached into his robe and produced a small case. He opened it and held it out. “Does my lord know what these are?”

Before Lu Chonglou could speak, Ye Xiaoqian continued: “These are the silver testing needles the Court Adjudicator’s Office uses. Once my lord brings the wine back, I use a needle to test it — and I’ll know immediately if it’s poisoned.”

“What if they don’t use poison but some other substance the needles can’t detect?”

“Then my lord is done for.”

“Actually… I could just not drink the wine at all.”

Ye Xiaoqian paused, then burst out laughing. “Right! Why didn’t I think of that?”

“I am now quite certain,” Lu Chonglou said, “that the person who most wants me dead is you.”

—

Over the following days, Lu Chonglou followed Ye Xiaoqian’s plan and sent men out to purchase wine at each town they passed.

At first, Gao Yu found it strange — but after several trips, he accepted it: Lu Chonglou simply liked his drink. Early on, in Yuezhou, he hadn’t bought any because he didn’t want local officials reporting back to Xu Ji. Once in Liangzhou, where the local officials had no reason to pick a quarrel with a passing officer from another region, he felt safe buying.

And so the plan to poison Lu Chonglou’s wine began slowly taking shape.

—

Longzhou Township sat along the Xutuo River — a large town, its permanent population comparable to a modest county seat, locals said around thirty thousand people. It was a river crossing, and boats and merchant caravans passed constantly; one could say it was a place where all manner of people rubbed shoulders.

After the Ning Army brought order to Liangzhou, commerce had revived. In Longzhou Township, you could find virtually any kind of business.

At this moment, on the second floor of Longzhou Township’s largest tavern, Madame Mi and Wen Jiu sat by the window looking down.

The grain convoy was passing along the main street below. It would make camp at an open area at the far end of the town.

Wherever the convoy passed, local county officials would come to pay their respects and try to provide whatever military escort they could.

Lu Chonglou and the local county magistrate and other officials were walking together along the street, chatting. Wen Jiu watched Lu Chonglou, his eyes narrowing slightly.

“Found a method?” Madame Mi asked.

She was always that way — cold and remote. In this world, nothing but silver could stir her interest.

The reason she cared so much about silver was because she had experienced something that others never had. After nearly dying once from having no money at all — too weak from severe illness to even buy medicine, left to treat herself day after day with acupuncture she administered with her own hands — she had vowed never to be in such straits again. Perhaps because of her robust constitution, or because her years of working with medicinal herbs had left traces of medicinal qi within her body, she had somehow survived.

But that experience had never left her. It was her nightmare — enough of a nightmare to make her want to kill. She never spoke of the precise details of how she had survived that ordeal. She didn’t even let herself think of it.

“I have a method,” Wen Jiu said, watching the officials and Lu Chonglou recede into the distance. He rose. “Give me the drug, Madame. I need to prepare.”

Madame Mi drew two paper-wrapped packets from her sleeve. “These are the backup supply. If you fail, finding the ingredients to compound new ones in a place like this will be difficult.”

Wen Jiu smiled. “Madame Mi, rest assured — this time, Lu Chonglou will die.”

He turned and went downstairs, his footsteps brisk.

Madame Mi sat by the window, watching the distant figure of Lu Chonglou. A single thought moved through her mind, over and over.

*If you must blame anyone, blame yourself for looking too much like that beast. Everything that has happened to me — that beast is the cause.*

*The first time I saw him, he too was dressed just like this, perfectly respectable and proper…*

—