The Imperial Archives had always been a quiet place, a silent repository of history. But in the days following the Emperor's supposed "dream," the silence had curdled. It was no longer a peaceful quiet, but a tense, watchful silence, the kind that precedes an execution. The archives had become the focus of a full-blown witch hunt, and Weng Tonghe was the designated witch.
He sat at his large, dusty desk, a single shaft of light from a high window illuminating the scroll before him. He tried to focus on the tedious task of collating records from the Shunzhi Emperor's reign, but his mind was a storm of anxiety. He knew he was being watched. Outside his small office, in the main reading hall, two of Li Lianying's most formidable eunuchs were now permanently posted. They did not pretend to be working. They stood with their arms crossed, their cold, reptilian eyes following every junior archivist who scurried past, their gazes lingering on Weng Tonghe's doorway with undisguised menace.
Every evening, after he departed for his own modest quarters, his office was subjected to a thorough, invasive search. He would arrive in the morning to find his papers slightly out of order, the bristles on his brushes disturbed, a faint, unfamiliar scent in the air. They were looking for something. A hidden letter, a coded message, a secret compartment. They were looking for any tangible proof of the conspiracy Cixi was now convinced he was masterminding.
His fellow archivists, men he had known for decades, now averted their eyes when he passed. They would fall silent when he entered a room, their conversations dying on their lips. He was a pariah, a man tainted by the Empress Dowager's suspicion, and to associate with him was to invite that same dangerous scrutiny upon oneself. He was utterly, terrifyingly alone.
Li Lianying himself oversaw the investigation, his presence a dark omen in the usually sleepy archives. He would sweep through the halls unannounced, his silk robes whispering across the stone floors. He personally led the interrogations of the other staff.
"The scholar Weng Tonghe," he would hiss, his voice a silken threat. "What are his habits? Who does he speak with? Does he receive unusual visitors? What books has he been reading?"
He was searching for a network, for co-conspirators. He questioned a junior clerk about a delivery of rare ink Weng Tonghe had received, not knowing it was the special pine-soot formula from Shen Ke. He grilled an elderly archivist about why Weng Tonghe had requested access to seemingly unrelated dynastic records, unaware he was gathering data for Ying Zheng. The entire institution was thrown into a state of fear and suspicion, the hunt for evidence grinding away at the morale of the scholars.
Through it all, Weng Tonghe lived in a state of constant, heart-pounding terror. He knew he was innocent of what they truly suspected—plotting an arson attack. But he was guilty of something far worse: he was a secret messenger for the Emperor's faction. He was terrified that some small, careless mistake would be his undoing. Would they notice the faint chemical scent of the treated inkstone? Would they find a stray note, a moment of clumsiness that would expose the entire operation? He felt like a man juggling priceless porcelain vases in the middle of an earthquake.
Yet, amidst the fear, there was a strange, grim satisfaction. The system, the ingenious communication device his new masters had created, was holding up under the most intense pressure imaginable.
The strength of the "poisoned inkstone" method lay in its profound subtlety. It was a ghost in the machine. Cixi's spies, for all their cruelty and experience, were looking for physical evidence. They searched his papers and found only the tedious, impeccably researched, and politically neutral history of the Shunzhi reign he was assigned to write. His calligraphy was flawless, his arguments orthodox. The invisible messages he embedded between the lines of his work remained just that—invisible.
They took samples of the ink from his inkstone, but the special formula was designed by Shen Ke to be chemically almost indistinguishable from standard high-grade ink unless you knew exactly what microscopic trace elements to look for. They tested scraps of his paper and found nothing. His communications were flowing out of the archives right under their noses, delivered by low-level couriers in stacks of official documents, and they were completely blind to it.
Their failure to find any evidence had a perverse effect on Cixi's paranoia. Instead of concluding that there was no conspiracy, she became convinced that Weng Tonghe was simply more cunning, more diabolically clever than she had imagined. Her frustration grew with each passing day. The ghost she was hunting remained infuriatingly elusive, and this only fueled her obsession. She poured more resources into the investigation, assigning more of Li Lianying's best agents to watch the lonely old scholar, convinced that if they just watched closely enough, he would eventually make a mistake.
This, of course, was exactly what Ying Zheng had intended. The witch hunt in the archives was a brilliant feint. While a significant portion of Cixi's internal security forces were preoccupied with chasing a phantom threat, staring at an old man writing history, the real work was happening elsewhere. The new naval office was holding its first critical meetings. Prince Gong was consolidating his political support. Shen Ke was analyzing the stolen ledger in his secret workshop. And Meng Tian was a free agent, his movements less scrutinized because the palace's attention was focused on the wrong man.
One afternoon, Li Lianying made a personal visit to Weng Tonghe's office. He did not speak. He simply stood in the doorway for a full five minutes, staring at the old scholar, his dark eyes filled with a mixture of contempt and frustration. Weng Tonghe could feel the weight of that gaze, and he had to use every ounce of his willpower to keep his hand steady as he continued to write. His brush did not tremble. He gave his tormentor nothing.
Finally, Li Lianying turned and left without a word. Weng Tonghe let out a breath he didn't realize he had been holding, his robes soaked with cold sweat. He looked down at the character he had just finished writing. It was the character for Ren (忍) – forbearance, endurance, patience. He was surviving. The network was surviving. The Emperor's impossible plan, carried out by a handful of terrified, disparate men, was working.