A divine healer, a general, a young marquis! Who can rival them!

Yang Hu didn't miss any of the goods that Wanjia Silk Shop sent north.

Ever since I managed to sneak into the Wan family mansion by giving Wan a follow-up ear examination, I've been able to see the thread that started from the silk shop very clearly.

Yang Hu's face is recognized by too many people in the city, and Qin Ying is a dead man, so it's inconvenient for her to show up. If we continue investigating this undercover operation, the only person we can use is Liu Ye! She's a new face, and she comes from a mountain village; she's very skilled in these matters.

Liu Ye dressed up as a country girl, carrying a small basket, and squatted outside the warehouse in the north of the city for several days.

She didn't approach, but pretended to wait for someone to rest, and meticulously recorded everything about the warehouse: when it received and shipped goods each day, who was in charge, and which gate each vehicle entered and exited through. She made sure Yang Hu and Qin Ying heard everything in detail.

I already found out the details a few days ago:

The goods from Wanjia Silk Shop were being transported in large quantities to the warehouses in the north of the city, where they were "repackaged." Silk went in, but what came out were bundles of heavy oilcloth. Qin Ying could tell at a glance that they contained knife blanks, arrow shafts, armor plates, and weapons!

In the past few days, Liu Ye has continued to follow up on this batch of goods.

"That bundle of goods, tightly bound, didn't take the main road after leaving the warehouse in the north of the city," Liu Ye whispered in the night. "It was to be out of sight that a few pack mules quietly led it out of the city. About twenty miles north of the city, there's a small courtyard nestled against the mountain. Once there, they unloaded the goods and transferred them to another group of pack animals—fat, fast packhorses."

"Those packhorses, the way they bundled the goods—it's exactly the same as back then…the same way they used on that barbarian bandit who harmed my father!"

As she spoke, Liu Ye tightened her grip on the basket. Her father, an old hunter and pharmacist, was stabbed to death by that barbarian bandit! She would never forget the methods of hauling goods north and binding mules.

"I didn't follow them much," Liu Ye added. "There were people watching from all sides. None of them were ordinary porters. I just lay in the valley for most of the day, watching the mules load the goods and head north, and then I didn't dare to go any further."

Yang Hu's heart sank.

Once the goods arrived at the small courtyard there, after changing horses, they headed north to the border, to the barbarians beyond the Great Wall! This line connected the best silk shop in the city at one end with the barbarians at the other. There were so many links in between, from silk to arms, from mules to horses. Each link had a way of concealing this line so perfectly that it was impossible to find the next link by following any one of them.

"Drag the weapons all the way to the border!"

Qin Ying listened to his voice, her eyes turning icy cold.

"Layer upon layer of checkpoints, pairs of eyes watching, and someone has to give the order, stamp it with a big red seal, and let people pass. This isn't a silk shop; this isn't something some wealthy man like Master Wan could do!"

Her fingers gradually clenched!

"Back then, when I led my troops on the run, all the travel permits had to be signed by the Prefectural Magistrate's Office to be valid! To get a troop of horses loaded with military equipment out of the pass without anyone noticing, that hand had to reach at least... the Prefectural Magistrate's Office."

"The prefectural magistrate was in charge of all grain, documents, and criminal law in the prefecture. With a single word from him, a caravan of goods could pass through customs without hindrance. With a single mark, he could turn a major murder case into the four characters 'fighting to the death,' writing the living into a pile of corpses!"

As she uttered her last words, the hand holding the knife trembled slightly!

Back then, it was this hand that wrote the story of the granddaughter of the Duke of Zhenguo, a noble lady from a military family who was arranged to marry by imperial decree, as someone who died fighting in an ambush while patrolling the border!

Juncheng Mansion!

Yang Hu did not immediately take it as a positive conclusion.

Master Wan was a respectable man in the city. His silk shop was smuggled with weapons under a pretext. Was he an accomplice who knew about it, or was he just oblivious? As for the prefectural magistrate's office, was the magistrate himself the one in charge, or was someone in the magistrate's office with the power to change documents and seals secretly throwing money away with this influence? It's impossible to piece together a complete chain.

The line! He reached the entrance of the prefectural governor's mansion, but the person inside remained a mysterious, shadowy figure.

"A mere prefectural magistrate, does he really have the audacity to pull strings and smuggle weapons by boat through the barbarians?" Yang Hu said slowly, "This isn't just about embezzling a few taels of silver; this is treason, a capital offense punishable by death! Either he's being manipulated and accepting bribes, leaving him no choice; or... he has connections above him."

Qin Ying paused for a moment:

"The hand that framed our Lu family and the Duke of Zhenguo's mansion back then is hiding deep inside the capital."

She said, "A mere prefectural magistrate on the outskirts might not be qualified! But this line from the silk shop to beyond the Great Wall uses the same method as the case from back then: covering up shady dealings under a nice-sounding name, so that even if people see it, they won't understand it."

She looked up at Yang Hu!

"I think these two things are ultimately done by the same person!"

"Don't rush it!" Yang Hu said to Qin Ying. "Examining a person and treating a patient are the same principles. If the lesion is deep in the heart, you might cut it off in one go and kill the person instead, severing the thread. First, feel the pulse, feel it inch by inch, and when you find the end, then you can insert the needle."

In the past few days, while Liu Ye was staking out the small courtyard outside the city, she had already vaguely sensed that something was wrong. The few men at the entrance of the courtyard who looked like porters had a bad eye.

On one or two occasions, I clearly glanced at her several times.

"That courtyard... is being closely watched!" Yang Hu told her, "Just keep an eye on it from a distance, whatever you do, don't get any closer. Do you remember how that kid who handed you the cloth bag drowned in that river back then?"

Liu Ye nodded, sweat beading on her back.

She had faced barbarians and bandits face-to-face in those mountains, and she wasn't afraid of that kind of danger. But she was afraid of this kind of sneak attack, where an adult could be pushed into the river silently and flawlessly.

"You don't need to worry too much." Yang Hu saw the barely perceptible tension in her eyes. "No matter how powerful that hand is, it doesn't know right now that we are the ones watching it. The more it tries to cover up, the deeper and more deadly the thread is. It can hide for a while, but it can't hide forever."

Qin Ying glanced at him but didn't say anything. Instead, she slowly put away the short knife she had been polishing for half the night.

This line, starting from Wan Jia's silk shop, stretched out to the small courtyard outside the city, and then continued to the barbarians beyond the pass.

The hand that hides deepest within, treating weapons as merchandise and people as pawns, is about to be dragged out bit by bit.

But Yang Hu knew very well that the further he went into the pool, the more dangerous it would become.

That hand can control every pass along the way, dominating everything, so it certainly wouldn't sense that someone is hiding in the shadows, probing its depths bit by bit.

This is a contest that neither side can afford to lose; we must be the first to get this hand out from under this heavy oil paper.

The snow continued to fall.

In that small courtyard nestled against the mountain outside the city, inside that house, the pack of fat, strong packhorses were chewing grass under the shed, waiting for the goods wrapped in oilcloth and kept out of the sunlight.