Weaving a New Web

The Emperor's study, once a place of tedious lessons and quiet contemplation, had transformed into the nerve center of a silent, ruthless war. A large, detailed map of the Forbidden City was spread across the main table, annotated with Shen Ke's precise, elegant calligraphy. It was a war map, but the territories marked were not provinces; they were kitchens, laundry houses, and the private chambers of high officials. The enemy units were not armies; they were serving girls, junior eunuchs, and secretaries.

Ying Zheng stood before the map, a small, grim-faced general planning his next campaign. The intelligence extracted from the captured assassin Kaelan was an absolute goldmine. They now possessed a near-complete schematic of Cixi's spy network within the palace walls. They had names, locations, communication methods, and a deep understanding of the enemy's command structure.

His inner circle was assembled. Shen Ke, the scholar, had become a brilliant intelligence analyst, cross-referencing Kaelan's testimony with the stolen green ledger and other palace records. Lotus and Ying, the former assassins, were now his chief counter-intelligence operatives, their knowledge of the Silent Orchid's methods providing invaluable insight.

"The temptation," Ying Zheng said, his quiet voice filling the room, "is to conduct a swift, decisive purge. To arrest them all in a single night. To cut the head off the snake and all its little offspring at once." He looked at his small team. "But that would be a mistake. It would be a crude and noisy affair. It would alert Cixi that her entire network has been compromised, and she would simply go to ground, becoming more cautious, more paranoid. We do not want to merely kill the spiders. We want to take control of their web."

His strategy was not one of simple destruction. It was one of infiltration, subversion, and psychological chaos. He would not order a mass arrest. He would launch a systematic, silent purge, a campaign designed to create maximum confusion and paranoia within Cixi's remaining faction.

He began to issue his orders.

First, he turned to his two former assassins. "Ying, Lotus," he commanded. "You will take Kaelan's information and you will use your own training to confirm the identities of every agent he has named. I want you to watch them. Learn their routines, their weaknesses. I want to know who among them is motivated by true fanaticism, and who is motivated by simple fear or greed. We must know which threads of the web are strong, and which can be easily cut or re-woven."

Their new mission was to become spy-catchers, using their intimate knowledge of their former school to hunt their own kind.

Next, he addressed Shen Ke. "Scholar Shen, your task is to weaponize this knowledge. For every agent that Ying and Lotus confirm, you will prepare a dossier. And you will begin to create disinformation—subtle, believable lies. We will start feeding these agents false intelligence. We will make them report back to Cixi that Prince Gong is planning a trip, when he is not. We will make them report that Empress Dowager Ci'an is in secret contact with a minister she has never met. We will fill Cixi's ears with a chorus of conflicting, confusing lies until she can no longer tell the truth from the fantasy."

Finally, he outlined the role of his most unwilling but now most useful tool: Li Lianying. The disgraced head eunuch, in his new role as the head of the Office of Anti-Corruption, was the public face of the purge, the executioner who did not know he was working for the enemy.

"Li Lianying will be the instrument of their downfall," Ying Zheng explained, a cold light in his eyes. "But he will not arrest them for espionage. That would reveal our hand. Instead, for each agent we target, Shen Ke will use the stolen ledger to find a corresponding, real, and provable financial crime they have committed. And they are all corrupt. Li Lianying will then arrest them on these mundane charges—theft, bribery, falsifying accounts. They will disappear one by one, not as spies, but as common criminals."

The strategy was brilliant in its cruelty. Cixi's agents would begin to vanish from their posts, but for reasons that seemed entirely unrelated to their secret work. An honest observer would simply see a long-overdue crackdown on palace corruption. But Cixi would know better. She would see her agents disappearing, but she would not understand how or why. She would be unable to distinguish between an agent who had been caught for a real crime, an agent who had been turned and was now feeding her lies, or an agent who was simply a common thief. Her trust in her own network, her greatest source of power, would completely collapse.

The plan was immediately put into motion. The silent war began.

A week later, a pretty serving girl in the household of a Grand Councillor—a girl Ying had identified as a 'Willow' from the Silent Orchid—was quietly arrested by Li Lianying's men. The official charge was the theft of several valuable pieces of jewelry from her mistress's chambers. The charge was true; the girl, like many agents, had engaged in petty crime to supplement her income. She was dismissed and sent to the laundry houses, her career as a spy over. Cixi received the report and was furious at the girl's stupidity, never suspecting the real reason she had been targeted.

Two weeks after that, a junior official in the Board of Rites, a 'Scholar' path graduate Kaelan had identified, was suddenly demoted and reassigned to a remote temple on the western frontier. The official reason was a series of errors found in his transcription of ceremonial documents. The errors had been secretly introduced into the documents by Shen Ke's own scribes. The official was removed from his key position, his access to information gone.

One by one, like threads being snipped from a tapestry, Cixi's spies began to disappear. The web she had spent years weaving was being systematically, silently, and invisibly dismantled. And she, in her gilded cage at the Summer Palace, was left increasingly blind, deaf, and alone, surrounded by agents she could no longer trust, her ears filled with a growing chorus of lies that were being fed to her by the very boy she had sought to destroy.