The Southern Outpost
The body was still warm.
Sun Longzi knelt beside the corpse, his fingers brushing the edge of the uniform coat. The stitching was wrong—too clean. The buttons were brass, polished to court standard. No soldier in the south had time to shine their chest. No real soldier would even bother.
Three men had been found this morning, crumpled near the ravine just south of the Sanzhou border checkpoint. All of them wore Daiyu colors. Two carried swords etched with the official mark of General Wei's western command.
And yet none of them were Daiyu men.
The blood pooled at the base of the hill was real enough. Sticky. Still fresh. But the angle of the wounds—throat to jaw, back to spine—were done with surgical precision. Silent, quick, intimate.
An assassin's work.
Yaozu had trained his Shadow Guard to leave bodies like that.
But Longzi knew this wasn't Yaozu's doing.
This was Baiguang, wrapped in Daiyu's skin.
