Chapter 272: Imperial Guard Arrives
Wang Yao said calmly: “He is called Zheng Zhao, Lu Su’s military advisor official. His wife had a serious illness and needed expensive medicinal materials to sustain her, but his salary couldn’t support it. I took advantage of the opportunity when he came to the apothecary to buy medicine for his wife’s treatment to get to know him, then gradually won him over.
Last December, his wife was dying and needed century-old ginseng to stay alive, but century-old ginseng was too expensive; he couldn’t afford it at all. I took the chance to give him one hundred taels of gold. To save his wife’s life, he accepted it. Later, I made it clear to him. He asked about my needs and provided intelligence on the Western Chu Army’s deployment north of the river.”
“Are you still in contact with him now?” the man asked in a deep voice again.
Wang Yao gave a bitter smile. “One hundred taels of gold is enough for him to use for a long time. He doesn’t lack money now, so of course he won’t come to me. I haven’t gone to him either. I’m worried about being discovered.”
The man nodded, then took out a silver plate and flashed it at Wang Yao. “I am Shen Tong, one of the executive officers of the Imperial Guard.”
The Imperial Guard was an internal affairs organization established by Cao Cao, with the same functions as the internal guard established by Gan Ning, but the Imperial Guard was more secretive, and the eight executive officers inside were all ruthless and terrifying, striking fear into those who heard of them.
Wang Yao trembled all over in fright. This Shen Tong was actually a notoriously infamous executive officer of the Imperial Guard. His mind suddenly turned—something was wrong! The Imperial Guard only dealt with internal matters and never external ones.
He looked at Shen Tong in confusion. Shen Tong seemed to understand what he was thinking and said indifferently: “I am here to carry out a mission.”
Wang Yao’s face turned pale instantly. He had come to eliminate him.
Shen Tong looked at him again and said in the same flat tone: “My mission is that if you have betrayed us, I will kill you without hesitation.”
Wang Yao’s heart finally settled a bit. He hadn’t killed him, which meant he believed he hadn’t betrayed and had passed his examination.
“How did you cross the river?”
This was also a question; the river surface was completely sealed off.
“I crossed the river from Jiangling.”
At this time, the carriage slowly stopped, and Wang Yao realized he was back at the apothecary entrance.
“You go!”
Shen Tong’s gaze was calm. As he got out of the carriage, he said calmly again: “Someone will come to find you in the next two days. The password is ‘flowers good moon round’; your response is ‘moon round flowers good’. Don’t get it wrong.”
Wang Yao nodded lightly, got out of the carriage. At the apothecary entrance, a waiter was watching him, looking a bit nervous. He was not a waiter but an internal guard.
Wang Yao watched the carriage leave. When passing the waiter at the entrance, he said in a low voice, “Don’t contact me first; I’m under surveillance.”
The waiter nodded with an accompanying smile, as if greeting the shopkeeper.
Wang Yao knew very well that people from the Imperial Guard were not easy to deal with, and Shen Tong certainly wouldn’t trust him so easily. Among these patients, it was very likely that surveillance watchers sent by Shen Tong were hiding.
Wang Yao went back to his room and wrote a note, then found an opportunity to secretly slip it to the internal guard disguised as a waiter.
In the afternoon, Li Qun handed Wang Yao’s note to Wang Xiaoman.
Wang Xiaoman frowned deeply. An Imperial Guard executive officer in Chaisang City was too absurd.
He immediately went to report to Pang Tong. Pang Tong was not his superior, but he was the overall planner of this matter, including being in charge of the intelligence scouts in Jiangdong.
Pang Tong thought for a moment and said: “Let’s go see the Marquis of Chu!”
Soon, the two arrived at Gan Ning’s official residence. Pang Tong reported the matter, saying with some concern: “Cao Cao actually sent an executive officer from the Imperial Guard. Dealing with Wang Yao feels like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. This subordinate suspects his mission is far more than that; he has a more important task.”
“Like what?” Gan Ning asked.
“Like… assassinating the Marquis of Chu.”
Beside him, Wang Xiaoman’s eyes suddenly widened in shock at the idea of assassinating the Marquis of Chu.
Gan Ning paced a few steps with his hands behind his back and said calmly: “Does the Imperial Guard have that kind of function?”
“Yes! The Imperial Guard has functions of surveillance and assassination. Grand Commandant Yang Biao died suddenly two years ago from an unknown cause. The Imperial Guard’s assassinations are very ruthless—sometimes extremely covert, but sometimes direct in public settings, always one strike kills.”
At this point, Pang Tong looked gravely at Wang Xiaoman and said: “Whether the Imperial Guard’s people are here to assassinate the Marquis of Chu or not, we cannot have the slightest luck or carelessness. We must comprehensively increase the protection level and find the Imperial Guard’s people.”
Wang Xiaoman nodded silently, feeling the heavy responsibility on his shoulders.
Gan Ning thought for a moment and said: “No need to send any more fake messages to Cao Cao’s side. Once someone contacts Wang Yao, capture them immediately. Use Wang Yao as bait to lure Shen Tong into action.”
The internal guard strengthened the comprehensive protection of Gan Ning’s mansion. The original twelve female guards were tripled to thirty-six, hiding in the shadows, monitoring the movements inside the mansion. Outside the mansion, five hundred internal guard soldiers were stationed, standing guard day and night outside the high walls.
Gan Ning’s outings also had strengthened escorts, with three hundred cavalry closely guarding the carriage he rode in, completely impenetrable.
Five more internal guards were added inside the Jichun Apothecary, all selected to be ordinary-looking, completely unlike internal guards, disguised as patients or people buying medicine.
Han Miao, who had just been recruited into the internal guard, with his distinctive roguish image, squatted at the apothecary entrance full of thuggish aura, completely like a local ruffian ready to extort the apothecary. There were many such people; their way of survival was to squat at the entrances of shops with many customers, looking for opportunities to extort and blackmail, and in the end, the shops usually compromised, giving them some money to send them away.
Han Miao’s mission was to find Shen Tong’s subordinates surveilling the apothecary. This person was very important; finding him would lead to Shen Tong’s hiding place.
After squatting for three days, Han Miao finally had a discovery. He spotted someone who came to the apothecary in three different identities over three days: a merchant, an old farmer, and a sickly patient on the brink of death.
Han Miao’s eyes were sharp. Though these three were completely different and ordinary people wouldn’t recognize them, Han Miao did—this was the same person in disguise.
In the afternoon, at the entrance of an alley across from the apothecary, Han Miao pointed at a patient being helped out by a waiter and said in a low voice to Li Qun beside him: “That’s the patient. Yesterday he was the old farmer, the day before a merchant. Though he changes disguise every day, those eyes of his—I won’t mistake the person!”
Li Qun nodded and gave a look to two tracking experts among his subordinates. “Follow him and find his hideout.”
For Li Qun now, the most important thing was not to catch the wrong person but to avoid missing any.
The patient got on an ox cart and slowly left, while the two tracking experts followed the ox cart and gradually disappeared.
At night, one thousand internal guards surrounded a courtyard house inside the city. The one thousand internal guard soldiers formed three layers, deployed within five hundred paces of the courtyard wall, sealing the courtyard house airtight. Some held crossbow bolts, others gripped spears.
Over a dozen internal guard soldiers who had just flipped over the wall were discovered, and fierce fighting broke out. Dozens of internal guard soldiers used a battering ram to smash open the gate and rushed inside.
The sounds of fighting quickly died down and gradually stopped. Suddenly, an extremely agile black shadow leaped onto the high wall and dashed along the enclosure.
The internal guard soldiers outside had already received orders: “Better to kill the wrong one than let one escape!”
Hundreds of crossbow bolts were fired at once. Such dense crossbow bolts—even Lu Bu would need iron armor to withstand them.
But the black-clad man clearly had no iron armor. No matter how skilled his martial arts, he couldn’t dodge hundreds of military crossbows firing at him. In an instant, the black-clad man was pierced by over three hundred crossbow bolts, screamed, and fell from the high wall, his body bristling with arrows like a porcupine.
Soldiers advanced with torches. This man was none other than the Imperial Guard executive officer Shen Tong.
Including thirteen subordinates, all were killed, not a single one escaped.
