Chapter 355: Scale

These are all my words.

Hui Yu widened his eyes and saw the newly arrived black-clad figure rummaging left and right, taking valuable gold, silver, and jewels from the shelves and stuffing them into a small cloth bag he had prepared in advance.

Wait, something's off.

A typical thief entering such a treasure vault would grab whatever he could, desperate to fill a sack and cover himself in rings and finger guards.

But this black-clad man carried only a small cloth bag, and his demeanor was calm and unhurried—he selected only high-value items, barely glancing at anything cheaper.

He didn't seem to be here to steal—he seemed to be searching for something specific, using theft as cover.

In the darkness, Hui Yu glanced at Li Cheng, who opened his mouth and silently formed the words: "Sikong Lan of the Brocade Guard."

Historically, the Brocade Guard's jurisdiction included, but was not limited to, serving as the emperor's bodyguards, monitoring civil and military officials, managing imperial prisons, delivering documents, and supervising examinations—its nature resembled a law enforcement and judicial institution.

As the Ming system stiffened, corruption spread within the Brocade Guard—offices were sold, positions bloated—and it inevitably decayed until the Ming's collapse.

A funny thing is, the terrifying image of the Brocade Guard as "imperially sanctioned, killing even gods" in later artistic works stems largely from Chiang Kai-shek.

During the Republic era, progressive intellectuals, furious at Chiang Kai-shek's secret police dictatorship, could not openly criticize him, so they used criticism of Zhu Yuanzhang's Brocade Guard to indirectly lampoon the rampant secret police agencies of their own time.

Zhu Yuanzhang had been a monk, bald; Chiang Kai-shek was also bald. Both established their capitals in Nanjing, both launched northern expeditions, both purged their meritorious ministers.

So criticizing Zhu Yuanzhang was roughly equivalent to criticizing Chiang Kai-shek.

And in this altered Wu Xia universe, Emperor Yong'an ascended the throne as a youth and immediately seized the Brocade Guard as his tool, abolishing the policy that allowed high-ranking civil and military officials to pass down Brocade Guard hereditary posts, halting the trend of warriors becoming civil bureaucrats.

He also widely recruited children of fallen soldiers into the Brocade Guard, giving them the best environment for martial training and scholarship, and allowing them to study martial secrets preserved in the imperial palace.

This new generation of Brocade Guard was utterly loyal to the throne. Emperor Yong'an stripped away most of the Brocade Guard's unnecessary functions, assigning them solely to patrol the realm, monitor tax collection, and use the Great Memory Restoration Technique on any official or gentry who dared evade taxes.

With these loyal hounds, Emperor Yong'an finally managed to collect taxes that past emperors had failed to gather, giving him the financial power to implement infrastructure projects, tax reform, maritime opening, and colonization.

It had a strange, almost uncanny resemblance to how the U. S. Secret Service was originally created to combat counterfeiting.

Sikong Lan, one of the nine Brocade Guard members sent to the island, was under twenty and already a peak Post-Heaven cultivator; his "Snow-Treading, Cloud-Picking Step" was a top-tier lightness skill, his figure gliding like a ghost between the shelves.

After searching for a while without finding his target, Sikong Lan scratched his head and carefully pulled a bamboo tube from his robe.

He opened the tube's lid and poured out a small, adorable long-snouted shrew.

The Information Synthesis Glasses—Modified—read remotely: the creature's name was 【Treasure-Sniffing Shrew】, a native species of this world, like the Octopus Sea Monster, with an acute sense of smell capable of detecting precious treasures from great distances.

Sikong Lan held the shrew aloft; it sniffed the air, then turned its head toward the northeast corner of the vault.

"What's he looking for?" Hui Yu asked Li Cheng curiously.

"One Piece, probably."

Sikong Lan moved silently toward the northeast corner of the vault, lifted a double-sided embroidered Shu brocade used as camouflage, and found an iron chest hidden beneath the silks.

The iron chest was heavy and dense, sealed with a complex, intricate lock. Not surprised, Sikong Lan flexed his fingers, pulled out two thin, curved wires, inserted them into the keyhole, and began picking with focused precision.

In the darkness, Li Cheng narrowed his eyes and silently pulled out his drone remote, glancing at the screen.

Strange—if Sikong Lan was stealing from the Tu family vault under Brocade Guard orders, the aerial drone should've detected his accomplices nearby keeping watch.

If he was acting alone, who ordered him to break into that iron chest? The other treasures in the vault alone could grant a commoner lifelong wealth.

As he pondered, a new thermal signature suddenly appeared on the remote's screen.

A third black-clad figure, dressed in night attire, was quietly approaching the vault along the roof ridge.

He clearly wasn't with Sikong Lan; seeing the displaced roof tiles and cut wooden panels, he was visibly shocked and instinctively drew his short sword.

Hidden in the shadows, Li Cheng and Hui Yu barely held back their laughter—damn, so many thieves in one night? Are we playing Dou Dizhu?

Sikong Lan concentrated entirely on picking the lock, using his martial mastery of muscle control to sense the subtle feedback through the wires.

Brother Sikong concentrated fully on prying the lock, using a martial artist's masterful muscular control to carefully feel the force feedback transmitted through the iron wire.

Sikong Lan took a deep breath, opened the chest, and pulled out a flat stone slab?

Li Cheng raised an eyebrow—the stone slab was fan-shaped, as wide as an arm, its crimson hue like blood, reflecting dazzling, mesmerizing colors under the faint moonlight.

Li Cheng raised his brows. That piece of stone was fan-shaped, a full arm's width across, crimson as blood, and under the faint moonlight, it reflected a dazzling, mesmerizing multicolored radiance.

Upon closer inspection, clear growth rings, like tree rings, were visible on its surface.

It wasn't stone—it was the petrified scale of some colossal creature.

Sikong Lan held the scale aloft; such a large object clearly couldn't fit in a bag. He skillfully removed a rope from his person and prepared to tie it to his back.

But a shift in the faint moonlight streaming through the skylight suddenly warned him.

Sikong Lan snapped his head up—and locked eyes with the third black-clad figure.

The latter neither retreated nor shouted for the Tu family guards; instead, he leapt directly through the opened skylight, gripped the ceiling beam lightly, dissipated his momentum, and landed soundlessly on the floor.

Both wore black cloth over their faces; from their eye shapes alone, Sikong Lan did not recognize the intruder.

Seeing the man didn't cry out, Sikong Lan silently unslung his small bag of jewels and placed it on the ground, kicking it toward the intruder.

The meaning was clear: this vault held countless treasures; they were both here to steal—no need to turn violent over competition.

But the third black-clad figure—or rather, Zhang Fuluang of Longhu Mountain—remained unmoved, his gaze fixed solely on the scale strapped to Sikong Lan's back.

From Li Cheng's perspective, the Information Synthesis Glasses—Modified—could extract only one brief message from the scale.

From Li Cheng's perspective, the Information Integration Glasses · Modified, with its scanning skill activated, could only read a single brief message from the scale.

(End of Chapter)

(End of Chapter)