Dawn after the ford did not bring clarity. It brought a slow, grim accounting. The sun rose on a landscape of exhaustion: burial details moving with the stiff, methodical slowness of men burying pieces of themselves; the endless, low groan of the wounded from the medical tents;
And the hollow-eyed silence of the survivors who scrubbed blood from their armor in the icy river, not meeting each other's gazes. The victory stank of open graves and regret.
In the command pavilion, Vice-Minister Wang sipped tea that had been brought from the south, its delicate floral aroma clashing violently with the camp's pervasive smell of wet mud, smoke, and dried blood. He presided over a brief inquiry. The findings were neat, bureaucratic, and false.
"The fire was an act of Jin sabotage, likely in retaliation for their defeat at the ford," he announced to the assembled staff officers, his dry voice filling the tense quiet. "Their agent, the merchant Lao Fen, evidently fled upon the mission's completion. His warehouse was cleaned out. This demonstrates a continued, insolent enemy presence behind our lines. All supply officers will submit to a full audit of their ledger books and personal effects. Security around the Commission's quarters and all supply depots is to be doubled." His eyes, like chips of polished slate, swept the room. "We will root out this infection of disloyalty."
The message was clear. The "infection" was not the Jin. It was anyone who operated outside his meticulous, strangulating control. As the officers filed out, Commander Xin saw the Minister's gaze linger on the retreating back of Surgeon-General Lin, who had attended in blood-stained field clothes, saying nothing.
The victory was a ledger entry. The cost was a silent, screaming column in the minds of every soldier who had crossed that river.
Deep within the medical compound, in the central surgical tent now cleared of the previous day's carnage, a different kind of operation was beginning.
The air still held the stench of the antiseptic wine, vinegar and blood, but now it was mixed with the smell of old paper and tense concentration.
The lanterns were shuttered, casting a low, focused pool of light on the campaign table. Upon it lay the three ledgers from Lao Fen's strongbox.
Lin Wei, Scholar Zhang, Sly Liu, and Young Kuo stood around them. Ox Li stood like a menhir at the tent flap, his bulk blocking sight and sound. The world outside ceased to exist.
"The cipher is commercial, but sophisticated," Scholar Zhang murmured, his fingers tracing columns of neat, cramped characters.
He had ink and blank scrolls ready. "Numbers for quantities, aliases for names, poetic references for locations… 'Crimson Hawk' for the Jin. 'Pine and Crane' for the Ministry of Revenue in Lin'an. 'The Garden' for the Northern Expedition army."
He began to translate, his brush whispering across the paper. As the aliases resolved into real names and the transactions clarified, the temperature in the tent seemed to drop.
"Entry: 11th day, 8th month," Zhang read, his voice growing taut. "To Crimson Hawk contact, via Willow Market node. Goods: Twenty bolts of Suzhou silk. Intelligence: Route and guard schedule for Song grain convoy, Red Valley pass, slated for 20th day. Payment received: Two hundred liang of gold" He looked up. "The ambush on our supplies last month. The one that nearly starved the left flank."
Lin Wei's face was impassive, but his mind was cross-referencing dates, locations, outcomes. The system, absorbing the new data, began drawing faint, glowing lines of correlation on his mental map, connecting dots of disaster to entries in the ledger.
"[DATA CROSS-REFERENCE: LOGISTICAL DISASTER (RED VALLEY) - ORIGIN IDENTIFIED. SOURCE: INTERNAL TREASON.]"
"Continue," Lin Wei said.
The entries spilled out, a cascading diagnosis of a fatal sickness.
There were payments to a Song quartermaster named Heng for information on troop rotations, a sale of Jin arrowheads to a Song captain, paid for with a map of the army's picket lines, and so on.
Then, the entries grew more chilling. Not just goods for secrets, but strategic shaping.
"Entry: 3rd day, 9th month. To Pine and Crane intermediary. Message: 'Gardener reports the western sapling grows too straight, too fast. It draws the sun from the older boughs.' Payment for expedited courier to Lin'an."
Zhang's hand trembled. "The 'western sapling'… that could be General Niu Gao. His successes after Three Rivers Gate. This was a report to someone in the Ministry, designed to trigger the investigation. That got the Commission sent here."
The most damning entry was the last one translated before the raid. "Entry: 5th day, 10th month. To Crimson Hawk, via secure channel. Intelligence: Fording points at Stone Sentinel River. Depth charts for main crossing inaccurate; eastern scout detachment inexperienced. Recommended action: Hold at blockhouse, exploit panic in smoke. Payment: Pending, upon measured delay of Song cavalry."
Sly Liu let out a low whistle. "They didn't just know we were coming. They knew how we'd screw it up. They paid for the scout who gave Niu Gao the wrong map. They knew about the green troops."
Young Kuo's face was white. "The battle… the men who died… it was sold. Like grain."
Lin Wei finally moved. He placed a finger on the last entry. "This isn't corruption. It is coordinated, top-down treason. A joint operation between Jin intelligence and a faction within the Southern Song court. Their goal isn't just profit. It's the deliberate failure of this campaign."
He looked at their horrified faces. "We have been diagnosing the symptoms—the bungled assaults, the missing supplies, the political attacks. These ledgers are the biopsy. The cancer is metastatic. It's in the logistics corps, it's in the capital, and it's talking directly to the enemy."
The dilemma was a trap with three jaws.
"We take this to the Generalissimo," Young Kuo said, a desperate hope in his voice.
"And force him to choose between his loyalty to the throne and the evidence that the throne is complicit in murdering his men?" Lin Wei shook his head. "It could shatter him. Or, believing his loyalty must be to the institution, he might surrender the evidence to Vice-Minister Wang to handle 'through proper channels.' Wang is either part of this or will protect those who are. We would be arrested, the ledgers would vanish, and we would die of 'camp fever' in a stockade."
"We go to Wang directly, expose it all!" Kuo insisted.
"The first entry in his new ledger would be our execution for forgery and sedition," Sly Liu snorted. "The only medicine for a truth this ugly is a quick burial."
"Then we do nothing?" Ox Li rumbled from the entrance, the first words he'd spoken.
"No," Lin Wei said, his voice dropping to the calm, lethal register of a surgeon selecting a scalpel. "We do not expose the cancer. We use our map of its vasculature. We starve it. We poison it. We shall kill it from the inside."
He pointed to the ledger. "We know the nodes. Quartermaster Heng. The 'Pine and Crane' contact. The Willow Market network. We don't cut them out—yet. We use them. We feed them false information. We let them steal from us, and we make sure what they steal is poison."
He laid out the test. A simple, elegant surgical strike. Using Liu's one remaining, uncompromised courier, they would let slip a phantom: a heavily guarded but vulnerable shipment of high-quality steel spearheads, taking the old, disused "Oak Road" north in three nights. The information was tailored to be irresistible—a critical, tangible asset for the Jin war effort.
Then, they waited.
Two days later, a breathless scout reported to Commander Xin. A Jin cavalry detachment, light and fast, had been spotted moving into the thick woods overlooking the Oak Road. They were lying in ambush.
Lin Wei, through Commander Xin, passed a simple, verbal message to Niu Gao, whose cavalry had been idling in disgrace: "The foxes are in the chicken coop on the Oak Road. The chickens are armed."
That night, under a clouded moon, Niu Gao's riders did not take the Oak Road. They circled wide and came down from the hills behind the waiting Jin. It was not a battle; it was a slaughter. The Jin, expecting slow, burdened wagons, were caught completely unaware by a whirlwind of screaming horsemen. No Song lives were lost. Fifty Jin cavalry from the strike force were cut down. Morale, dented at the ford, received a small, hard boost.
In the surgical tent, Lin Wei received the report. The system confirmed it with cold finality.
"[HYPOTHESIS PROVEN: ENEMY INTELLIGENCE NETWORK ACTIVE AND COMPROMISED.]"
"[COUNTER-INTELLIGENCE PROTOCOL: VALIDATED.]"
They had their proof. And they had their weapon.
As night fell again, the two wars continued in parallel.
In the lamplit surgical tent, now a command post for a shadow army, Lin Wei pinned a new map to the canvas wall. It was not of the Jin north, but of the Song rear. He marked it with small, black ticks: Quartermaster Heng (confirmed tumor). The Willow Market node (excised). The "Pine and Crane" conduit (unknown, in Lin'an). Supply Route: Red Valley (compromised). Route: Oak Road (now sterilized).
"This is the patient," he said to his small, grave council. "The Northern Expedition is the body. The corruption is the septicemia. Our job is no longer just to stitch the wounds the Jin make. It is to keep the heart beating while we filter the poison from its blood. We will identify every compromised quartermaster. We will discover every tainted route. We will feed the network just enough truth to be credible, and lethal falsehood to make it bleed. We preserve the army not just for the battle ahead, but from the rot within."
The directive in his mind, which had evolved from Survive to Win the War, now crystallized into a new, starkly precise command:
"[PARADIGM LOCKED: SYSTEMIC WARFARE.]"
"[PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: PRESERVE HOST ORGANISM (YUE FEI'S ARMY) FROM INTERNAL PATHOGEN (TREASON NETWORK).]"
"[METHOD: CONTROLLED FEEDING OF DISINFORMATION. ISOLATION OF COMPROMISED NODES. MAINTENANCE OF CRITICAL FUNCTION.]"
"[STATUS: OPERATION 'CHEMOTHERAPY' - INITIATED.]"
Across the camp, in the neat, ordered confines of the Logistical Oversight Commission's headquarters, Vice-Minister Wang was writing. The report of the successful counter-ambush on the Oak Road lay before him. It should have been a point of pride.
Instead, it filled him with a cold, professional fury. It was too clean. Too precise. It spoke of intelligence his own agents did not have, of initiative that had not been channeled through the proper forms.
He dipped his brush in vermillion ink, reserved for the most urgent communiqués. His message to his patron in the Ministry of War in Lin'an was brief and deadly.
"The recent minor tactical success on the Oak Road, while welcome, underscores a deeper concern. The action was predicated on unsanctioned intelligence gathering and execution, bypassing the chain of command. It originates from the same clique surrounding the Surgeon-General Lin, whose autonomy and unorthodox methods grow increasingly disruptive. Their influence corrupts military discipline and fosters a culture of dangerous self-reliance. Recommend immediate authorization for detainment and interrogation of the Surgeon-General and his key personnel, to ascertain the source of their intelligence and to realign their operations with imperial doctrine. The integrity of the command structure demands it."
He sanded the ink, sealed the scroll with his personal chop and the Commission's stamp, and handed it to a waiting courier. The man vanished into the night, riding south towards the capital where the "Pine and Crane" awaited.
In the dark, two riders carried scrolls in opposite directions. One carried a map of a disease. The other carried a warrant for the doctor. The race was on. And the next move would not be on a battlefield, but in the silent, paper-filled spaces between, where victories were undone with a signature and men were erased with a sentence.