Hot flashes

The entire capital city was like a giant beast suddenly awakened from its slumber, opening its eyes.

The commotion at the city gates did not begin at Desheng Gate. Almost simultaneously, the first boulder rolled down from the depths of the barbicans of all nine city gates.

The sound was muffled and heavy, like a sigh from the ground, drowned out by the firecrackers on New Year's Eve. Only those standing at the foot of the city gate could hear the dull echo of the boulder hitting the snow.

Logs were pushed out of the hidden soldiers' cave, one after another, and laid across the inside of the city gate, like rows of fallen fences, completely blocking the entire gate.

The kerosene was poured down from the city wall, seeping down through the cracks in the bricks and leaving dark, damp streaks on the surface. A pungent smell of tung oil filled the air, mixed with snowflakes, making people's eyes sting.

By the time news of the city gates being sealed reached the ears of the various powerful families, their people had already entered the city.

The twenty-odd "workers" of the Zheng family at the canal wharf were the first to notice something was wrong.

As planned, after midnight, they retrieved the leather armor and weapons hidden at the bottom of a box from the cargo hold at the dock. Just as they were about to sneak into the city, they discovered that several fortified posts had appeared at the entrances to the streets and alleys around the dock.

Behind the deer fort stood soldiers in full armor, the Imperial Guard—black armor, red tassels, their swords already drawn.

The captain leading the group rode on horseback, looking down at the people emerging from the cargo hold, his torch held high, illuminating the dock area brightly.

He did not order an attack, but instead had the fortified barricades pushed forward a few feet, narrowing the exit even further. The private soldiers of the noble families on the dock were trapped between the cargo hold and the pier, with the fortified barricades and the swords and spears of the Imperial Guards in front of them, and the canal frozen with a thin layer of ice behind them, unable to move forward or backward.

Some people tried to escape across the ice, but their boots slipped on the ice, and they fell flat on their backs. Before they could get up, the Imperial Guards dragged them back from the shore with grappling hooks.

Some people wanted to retreat back into the cargo hold and hide, but the cargo hold door had been locked from the outside, so people inside couldn't get out and people outside couldn't get in.

The granaries and armories of the capital were surrounded around the same time. At the forefront were the group of people that the Cui family kept in the capital's garrisons. The leader was a military officer surnamed Sun, who had the Ministry of War's transfer order, the Ministry of Revenue's approval document, and the Ministry of Personnel's seal. On paper, everything seemed legal and compliant.

He led about three hundred men, pushing dozens of large carts, and drove in a grand procession to the gate of the Taicang granary in the east of the city. He told the old official guarding the granary that he had come to collect grain on orders from the Ministry of War.

The old clerk took the transfer order, glanced at it, and handed it back to him, saying, "Please wait a moment, General Sun. I'll go get the warehouse key." Then he turned and went into the warehouse, never to come out again.

After waiting for about the time it takes to drink a cup of tea, what came to General Sun was not the key, but a group of imperial guards who surrounded the warehouse from both sides.

The leader was Zhao Heng—Zhao Ting's cousin, a few years younger than Zhao Ting. He looked young, but his methods were even more ruthless than Zhao Ting's. He didn't waste any words with General Sun, or even greet him, and directly ordered his men to remove the tarpaulin from the cart.

Underneath the tarpaulin wasn't grain, but neatly stacked firewood. Oil was poured over the firewood, and the moment the torch was thrown up, flames shot into the air, turning half the sky red.

General Sun's men were forced to retreat by the firelight and thick smoke, eventually finding themselves surrounded by the Imperial Guards. Of the three hundred or so men, not a single one escaped.

When Sun was brought before Zhao Heng, he was still protesting his innocence, saying that he had the Ministry of War's transfer order, the Ministry of Revenue's approval document, and the Ministry of Personnel's seal, and that everything was legal.

Zhao Heng took the stack of documents, flipped through them, then squatted down and tore them page by page into pieces, stuffing them into General Sun's mouth. "It's legal," Zhao Heng said softly, as if chatting with an old friend, "Then eat it, don't waste it."

By the time the commotion in Taicang reached the other granaries and armories, those people had no time to react.

The Imperial Guards' control over key locations around the capital was not a spur-of-the-moment decision; it was deployed at least a month in advance.

Zhao Heng received a secret order at the beginning of the twelfth lunar month. The order contained only one line: "The military arsenal, granaries, and canal wharves in the capital region shall all be rotated before the thirtieth day of the twelfth lunar month."