Elder Kai's dragon-head cane struck three muffled blows against the damp rock face. The wall of coral reef and spirit-conch shells slid open without a sound, revealing a narrow passage barely wide enough for one person to pass through. The salt-tinged sea wind was sealed out entirely; within the passage drifted a faint mingling of sandalwood and spirit-herb, while night-pearls embedded in the stone walls cast a soft radiance that illuminated the secret chamber at the far end — no more than ten square metres in total.

"This was the Demon Demon Suppression Bureau's covert foothold in the Eastern Sea back in the day. No one knows of it except me and Old Zhang." Elder Kai leaned his cane against the corner of the wall, drew a conch-shaped spirit-instrument from within his robes, and pressed it into a hollow in the stone. At once, a complex lattice of water-element script surfaced across the ceiling of the chamber, forming a barrier that blocked all spirit-sense from penetrating within.

The jade slip contained a registry of the spirit-corrupting pellets that Baizhen Pavilion had tributed to White Tiger Hall over the years — the quantities were staggering. The beast-hide scroll documented in meticulous detail how Gordon Jin, vice-hall-master of White Tiger Hall, had covertly obstructed the Demon Demon Suppression Bureau's investigations and even intervened to destroy evidence. Most damning of all: a silk cipher-letter rendered in special blood-ink, depicting a clandestine meeting between the deputy director of the Xuanmen Bureau and Victor Jin — the time, the location, the contents of their conversation all perfectly legible.........

I laid every cipher-letter stolen from the Blood Scale Manor out onto the stone table.

Elder Kai held a magnifying lens close, his nose nearly touching the jade slip. "See this line of tiny script? 'By order of the Mysterious Armour Edict, the third-month quota of Gui-Water spirit-vein material is to be transported through Xuanwu Hall's hidden channels.'" His finger traced a string of intricate seal-script. Beneath the lens, the edges of those glyphs faintly radiated a thin, dark miasma.

My heart plummeted. It was an open secret that Xuanwu Hall controlled the Xuanmen Bureau's channels for transporting spirit-materials — yet the "Gui-Water spirit-vein quota" and "hidden-channel transport" mentioned in the cipher-letter carried a distinctly sinister taint. Gui-Water spirit-veins were power-lines running through places of extreme yin; orthodox cultivators gave them a wide berth. And yet Baizhen Pavilion required precisely such extreme-yin materials to refine their Rank-Scaled Powder.

"Elder Kai," I said, pointing to a blurred seal-mark in the lower left corner of the cipher-letter. "Is that the token-mark of Xuanwu Hall?"

Elder Kai set down the magnifying lens. His expression grew as heavy as a sky about to break open: "No question about it. Xuanwu Hall's Mysterious Armour Edicts come in three grades. This is the highest — the Black Armour Edict. Only someone of hall-master rank can invoke it." He paused, his gaunt fingers drumming against the stone table.

"Who is the current hall-master of Xuanwu Hall?" The organisational chart of the Xuanmen Bureau flashed through my mind in an instant. Arthur Wen — that deputy director who perpetually wore a mild smile and whose words never left a single gap to exploit — had been hall-master of Xuanwu Hall before his rise to deputy director. The realisation struck my mind like a thunderbolt. My grip on the Wave-Blade very nearly failed me.

"Deputy Director Wen?" The words left me before I could stop them. "He came up from hall-master of Xuanwu Hall. And now with the director in seclusion, he's handling all bureau affairs in an acting capacity......"

Elder Kai fished a wine gourd from his robes and took a long pull, his throat working visibly. "Thirty years ago, the Demon Demon Suppression Bureau investigated Baizhen Pavilion. Halfway through the investigation, we were suddenly ordered to stand down. The one who gave that order was Arthur Wen — who had just been promoted from hall-master of Xuanwu Hall to deputy director." His eyes sharpened to a blade's edge. "Looking back now — what kind of coincidence is that?"

The intelligence from the cipher-letters locked together in my mind like pieces of a puzzle: Baizhen Pavilion had used White Tiger Hall's enforcement authority to crush dissent, then employed Xuanwu Hall's transport channels to obtain spirit-materials for evil cultivation — and the arc of Arthur Wen's ascent from Xuanwu Hall-master to deputy director aligned perfectly with the timeline of Baizhen Pavilion's expansion. What chilled my spine most was a marginal annotation at the end of one cipher-letter, written in refined blood: The progeny of Lord Wen shall inherit the ancestral undertaking.

"Progeny of Lord Wen?" I murmured. "Wen Mingyuan — the ancient deviant cultivator?"

Elder Kai slammed his palm against the stone table so hard that half the wine sloshed from the gourd. "You know of Wen Mingyuan?"

I nodded. Among the system archive's records on ancient deviant cultivators, Wen Mingyuan stood as one of the rare few who had, beginning from a mortal body, cultivated all the way to the Soul Transformation stage. He had specialised in manipulating yin-cold spirit-veins, and his bloodline descendants were born with a natural affinity for extreme-yin materials. The Gui-Water spirit-vein quotas mentioned in the cipher-letter were plainly being used to nourish Arthur Wen's inherited bloodline.

"He is acting director now," I said, rising to my feet and pacing the length of the secret chamber. "If we hand Lance Liu's recording and Baizhen Pavilion's cipher-letters to the upper echelons of the Xuanmen, we would be delivering the evidence directly into Arthur Wen's hands."

Elder Kai gave a bitter laugh. "That's exactly how the Demon Demon Suppression Bureau was finished off back then. Old Zhang and the others uncovered the collusion between White Tiger Hall and Baizhen Pavilion. The moment the evidence reached the Bureau, they were accused of embezzling spirit-ore by the very next morning." He raised a hand toward the old photograph of the Division hanging on the wall. "You see those faces? Half of them disappeared in the course of 'investigations.' My wife is among them...."

The thought of it caught me off-guard. Everett Li had told me not to pry too deeply into certain old matters — but I had never imagined that Elder Kai's wife had fallen victim to this same affair. I looked at the high-spirited faces in the photograph, and then the image of Old Zhang leaning on his cane playing chess in the residential courtyard drifted through my mind. A sharp ache moved through my chest. If we recklessly handed over the evidence, what awaited us was very likely the same fate that had claimed the Demon Demon Suppression Bureau — denounced, suppressed, our very bones left without a resting place.

End of Chapter 56: The Secret Chamber