The first rays of dawn had just barely begun to cast a faint white shadow over the bluestone slabs of the eastern district of the capital. At this hour, the Moonlight Pavilion should have been quiet, but today it was so packed that one could hardly find a place to stand.
Rumors were circulating through the city that war on the northern frontier was about to break out, with military dispatches from the front being vague and half-hidden.
Though the common folk of the capital longed for peace, their hearts were weighed down by a heavy stone.
Life had to go on, but the tea houses and taverns were doing more brisk business than in times of peace.
Everyone hoped to pick up definite news from the north in these haunts where people from all walks of life gathered.
On the second floor of the building, square tables were squeezed together with long benches, packed tight and dense.
Waiters, with gray cloths slung over their shoulders, carried steaming brass kettles, weaving and shoving through the gaps in the crowd.
All because the wooden sign hanging outside was clearly inscribed with several large characters—"Iron Mouth Old Li Emerges from Seclusion Today."
That old fellow had been lying low for over half a month, letting it be known that he had come across a remarkable piece of news and was waiting for today to give the fine gentlemen and elders of the capital a real treat.
...
At the quarter mark of the hour of the Dragon (7:15 AM), the waiter downstairs struck a gong to signal the start.
In the center of the building, on a half-man-high rosewood platform, Old Li crept painstakingly up to it.
This wiry old man had broken his routine today. Instead of the shiny silk gown he usually wore to show off his prestige, he had put on a plain and ordinary garment.
Holding a coarse porcelain teacup with a chipped rim, he stood behind a long lacquer-flaked table.
He was in no hurry to start; he lowered his head, leisurely skimmed the tea foam, and took a sip.
At this, someone in the hall below couldn't wait any longer, pounding on the table and hollering.
But Old Li wasn't annoyed. He grabbed the well-polished warning block from the table, raised it high, and slammed it down hard.
Crack!
The sharp sound of wood meeting stone exploded through the hall, cutting off the buzz of noisy chatter from all corners.
For an instant, inside the entire Moonlight Pavilion, you could only hear the occasional rumble of carriage wheels on the street outside.
Old Li cleared his throat, but instead of reciting the usual opening poem of a storyteller, he lifted his chin and, with a dry, raspy voice, bellowed a wild, desolate tune from beyond the passes.
The sound was hoarse and mournful, carrying the bleak air of a northern desert wind sweeping over withered grass, like a lament for the wandering souls that could never be brought back from the desolate plains. It sent a shiver down the spines of the audience.
After singing the final line, he leaned forward over the table, and his normally narrowed eyes cracked wide open.
"Distinguished audience, today we won't start with the rouge and perfume of the pleasure quarters, nor the civil and military tales of past dynasties! Today, Old Li is going to tell you all a true story blown in from the north—titled, 'The Vicious Hound Devours Its Master, And the Vermin Inside Moves the Bricks'!"
The listeners below heard the title and their spirits shot up. Those who were halfway through shelling sunflower seeds stopped; those holding tea cups stopped drinking. Everyone stretched their necks forward.
Old Li tucked both hands into his sleeves, his lips moving swiftly but his words heavily articulated.
"Let me tell you: eight hundred thousand li from here, there lived a famous and powerful Squire Zhang."
"This Zhang family was a wealthy, noble clan that had risen over generations. Their fertile fields and grand estates covered nearly half the land under heaven. But next to the north wall of their mansion leaned a barren mountain where cold winds howled all year round."
"And what might have lived in that mountain? A pack of wild dogs, their eyes green with hunger."
"Those wild beasts didn't produce anything. They specialized in descending from the mountain during the lean autumn and winter seasons, digging at the walls and biting to death the guards the Zhang family hired to protect their home."
"Squire Zhang was a shrewd man. He spent a huge fortune of real gold and silver, hiring blacksmiths to forge solid iron rods for every guard on the north wall."
"Whenever those wild dogs dared to come near, they'd get a heavy blow from an iron rod—no mistakes, no returns."
"The tea guests below nodded in agreement. Some coarse market dwellers even slapped the table and cheered, applauding how decisively the Squire handled matters."
But then Old Li's tone suddenly shifted. His face dramatically contorted into an expression of greed and wickedness.
"But who could have imagined that the Eldest Young Master of the Zhang family was a filial son rarely seen in a hundred years!"
"As he watched the wild dogs howl fiercely outside the north wall, he didn't think about how to guard his father's estate. Instead, he thought guarding against the dogs was too much of a hardship and decided—why not make a deal and swear brotherhood with the dog king?"
"Behind Squire Zhang's back, he issued a secret order, confiscating all the iron rods from the guards. He had them taken to the backyard furnace and melted down into iron ingots."
Old Li paced a couple of steps on stage, gesturing emphatically.
"Then he had a steward named Wei, a gatekeeper with a scarred face, and an accountant who specialized in keeping shady ledgers—the three of them teamed up."
"They dug a large dog hole at the base of the north wall, then cartload after cartload, smuggled weapons meant to protect life out through it, swapping them for a few handfuls of dog hair shed by those wild beasts!"
With that, Old Li planted himself in a horse stance and crossed his arms around his chest, making a gesture of hugging gold and silver tightly.
He let out strange cackling sounds from his lips, acting out the wretched, greedy posture of the Eldest Young Master, who would cut off even his own family's foundations for a few handfuls of dog hair.
Once this performance was done, the audience in the hall could no longer hold it in, and a burst of laughter erupted that nearly lifted the roof.
Some were laughing so hard they slapped their thighs; others sprayed a full mouth of hot tea all over the chest of the person facing them.
"Is there nothing but slop in this Eldest Young Master's skull?!"
"What did the old Zhang family ever do to deserve raising a wastrel like this?!"
Curses and laughter flew back and forth. Even the waiters couldn't help but chuckle along.
Just when the crowd was laughing heartily and the atmosphere was at its peak, Old Li's expression suddenly dropped the comedy. He smacked his hand repeatedly on the table.
"Audience, hold your laughs! This Eldest Young Master was meticulous in his business! The amount of iron ingots he sent out, exactly when they were sent, and which route they took—it's all clearly recorded in that ledger of his."
"If you think Old Li is just making this up, then prick up your ears and listen closely: On the night of the fifth day of the third month last year, two thousand catties of pig iron passed through the Green Sheep Gate. On the hour of the Ox on the eighteenth day of the fourth month, five thousand catties of fine steel went through the White Horse Crossing."
"Then on the seventh day of the fifth month this summer, there was the big move—fully thirty large carts. At the drum signal for the closing of the city gates at the hour of the Dog, that steward Wei personally escorted the shipment straight into the mountain hollow!"
A string of dry, plain data suddenly smashed into the lively venue—years, hours, checkpoints, and even exact weights, things that had no business appearing in a storytelling routine. It was so precise, it set the teeth on edge.
Every single word seemed nailed down to reality, carrying none of the usual exaggeration found in folk tales. It sounded more like a sworn confession read aloud in some government court.
The Moonlight Pavilion, which just moments ago was choking with laughter, fell completely mute.
The laugh stopped far too abruptly, severing the deafening noise like a blade.
Those veteran clerks who spent their days walking the streets and knew everything, and those loafers who fancied themselves clever while gossiping in tea houses—all of them were shocked into silence. A chill went up their spines.
On the second floor, in a secluded alcove near the stairwell, two middle-aged men in plain clothes had been idly chatting while nibbling on fried beans. Now, the hands holding those beans froze midair.
Their identities were far from ordinary; they were imperial censors from the Censorate tasked with patrolling the capital region. The one with a beard under his left jaw was named Zheng Juzhong, and the one with a slightly dark complexion on the right was called Liu Zhao.
They had come out this time to investigate a hoarding case in the eastern part of the city, stopping by the Bright Moon Tower for a rest and a few snatches of opera, never expecting to stumble upon such a gruesome scandal as this flaying alive.
A soybean slipped silently from Zheng Juzhong’s hand.
He turned to look at Liu Zhao and was startled to find that this colleague, known for his venomous tongue in court, now had a face drained to a sickly pale, with beads of cold sweat clearly visible on his forehead.
Both were seasoned censors who had spent half their lives scrambling through the cannibalistic arena of officialdom. They were as keen to detect murder plots hidden behind the city’s façade as old wolves catching the scent of blood.
The storyteller’s words—"Squire Zhang," "the North Wall," "iron clubs," "wild dogs"—if taken individually, sounded like nothing more than a joke. But when these hints were fitted into the current political landscape of the court, and combined with the details of a surname Wei and a scarred face, the thunderstorm behind them could rip a hole straight through the heavens.
Lurking beyond the North Wall were precisely the Helian barbarians, battering the passes in rebellion.
The iron clubs in the guards’ hands represented the heavy iron armor relied upon by the hundreds of thousands of troops defending the North Pass.
That steward surnamed Wei—could it be anyone other than Wei Qian, a retainer of the First Prince’s mansion who had gone silent without a trace in the northern borderlands a few days ago?
That scar-faced watchdog was naturally He Minghu, a traitor general who had been executed after colluding with the enemy at the North Pass.
As for that Eldest Young Master who had secretly traded ironware for dog fur...
Among the current emperor's sons, the only one who could lord over the northern frontier, bypass the military and the Ministry of War’s eyes, and ship tens of thousands of catties of iron in one go...
Who else but the First Prince could take that title?
Even more damning were the shipping records, precise down to the exact hour and intersection.
If this were just a made-up story to fool people, it could never produce such airtight evidence. This was the real deal—solid proof of treason and arms smuggling, deliberately stripped of its cover and, through the mouth of a storyteller, flung brazenly into this crossroads under the emperor’s very nose, in a gathering place of all virtues!
“Old Zheng...” Liu Zhao swallowed dryly, his voice pressed to a whisper, both hands clenching the fabric over his knees until the veins on the backs of his hands bulged. “Someone is using the whole city as their blade.”
Zheng Juzhong’s chest heaved violently. A chill crept up his spine. His underclothes were already soaked through with cold sweat, plastered to his skin.
This wasn’t just handing over a knife—this was drenching a pile of dry kindling with oil and then tossing in a red-hot firebrand.
The Censorate had the authority to report on rumors heard on the streets. If they brought today’s spectacle back and so much as hinted at it in a memorial, they would instantly be dragged into a whirlpool of succession strife that could bloody half the court.
But if they pretended to be deaf and blind, this fire had already caught in the streets and alleys. Within half a day, it would spread through every thoroughfare, into the Censorate, into the Six Ministries. By then, if the censors still acted as if they had heard nothing... once the label of cowardice and avoidance of power was nailed to them, the emperor would be quicker to chop their heads off than to kill a chicken.
On the second floor, the two men’s minds raced, already treading the edge of life and death downstairs. Old Li, however, paid no heed to any of this. Today, his task was to fan the flames until they burned through.
He slammed the coarse porcelain teacup heavily onto the table, spilling tea that soaked the old wooden surface.
His voice rose to its highest pitch, laced with a chilling, bitter edge that was impossible to ignore.
“Those guards, stripped of their iron clubs, had to fight barehanded against those wild dogs with eyes glowing green! One scratch of a dog’s claw left three bloody gashes; one bite of a dog’s tooth crushed a man’s throat clean.”
“Corpses piled up at the base of the North Wall. The guards shouted desperately from atop the wall, begging the head family for help.”
“But what about our Eldest Young Master, who’d traded for his dog fur?”
Old Li’s eyes were wide open. He clasped his hands behind his back and strutted with measured steps, affecting a leisurely demeanor of utter ease.
“The Eldest Young Master was sitting comfortably in the backyard pavilion, enjoying peace. He had an arm around a pretty serving girl singing tunes on each side, and a plate of fresh fruit brought from the south set before him.”
“He listened to the screams from the north, neither panicked nor annoyed. Instead, he tapped his pale fingers on the table to the rhythm and cursed the lackeys below with a laugh!”
“‘What’s all this wailing about! What’s the big deal over a few lowly guards dying? Once this young master collects enough dog fur to make a cloak unlike anything the world has seen and drapes it over his shoulders, that will be the grandest achievement everyone! Faming our old Zhang family name!’”
The Bright Moon Tower was dead silent.
Not a single listener in the entire hall found these words the least bit amusing.
That thick scent of blood pressing straight into their faces, mixed with the absurd cruelty of trading honor for profit, weighed heavily on everyone’s hearts.
Every man who a bit of schooling and could catch the hidden meaning sat pale as earth, not daring even to breathe.
Old Li snatched the gavel from the table. With the dry wrist raised high, he brought it down onto the long bench with all his might.
“If you wish to know how long the Eldest Young Master’s head will stay on his neck, that tale shall be told in a later chapter!”
