As dusk fell, intelligence agent He sat alone in the archive room filled with rubbings.
He took off his dark red scarf and soaked it in cinnabar water, and the cloth gradually revealed a topographic map of the Western Regions written in pigeon blood.
When the sound of Chen Yao teaching the children to sing the nursery rhyme "Song of the Protector General of Anxi" came from outside the window, he suddenly stabbed the compass probe into his palm, and the blood dripped onto the bronze rubbing and turned into three lines of small seal characters - these were the verses left by the blue-eyed old man before he disappeared in the snowy night scene that Mou Xuan had seen with his supernatural powers in the morning.
"Captain Mou, there is movement in intelligence box number seven!" Guard Yin's shout broke the silence of the evening.
When Chen Yao lifted the curtain and came in to deliver the meal, she saw Mou Xuan standing in the evening breeze holding the translated Khitan secret letter. The edge of the letter had been folded into the shape of a small city-defending crossbow, and the direction the crossbow was aimed at was exactly the direction of the tent where intelligence agent He was temporarily staying.
"The children folded it for you with colored paper." Chen Yao arranged the lotus cakes in the food box into a star formation. On the center cake was a wolfberry that looked like a cinnabar mole - it was the mark she had made when testing for poison at noon.
Mou Xuan picked up some wolfberries with silver chopsticks and looked at them carefully in the sunset. The cinnabar color was permeated with the patina unique to bronze ware.
Suddenly, the sound of paper birds fluttering was heard in the distance, and seventeen Kongming lanterns with excerpts from the Taibai Yinjing inscribed on them rose into the night sky.
Mou Xuan looked at the strange patterns cast by the lights on the clouds, and suddenly pressed the secret letter into Shen Yao's palm.
When those twisted Khitan characters touched the pendant on her wrist, they both saw a scene that had not appeared on the snowy night seven years ago - under the archaeological uniform of the blue-eyed old man, there was a faint trace of a bronze key tattoo, the same as that of Agent He.
"Let Old Yu check the longitude and latitude of all the rubbings tomorrow." When Mou Xuan crushed the wolfberries, the cinnabar on his fingertips left long bloody marks on the intelligence files, "especially..." He paused suddenly, because Chen Yao was using a silver needle to pick open the lotus pastry. On the paper hidden in the pastry was a bronze pile pattern copied by the children with colored pens - the pattern was 90% similar to the key to the ancient city's underground palace that Chen Yao had fought desperately to protect when they first met.
The night wind blew up the translated manuscripts all over the ground. One of them floated to the edge of the charcoal basin, and the undeciphered Khitan text was strangely reorganized in the firelight.
Mou Xuan stretched out his hand to grab it, but saw that Chen Yao's wooden tower pendant suddenly burst out with strong light, projecting the words on the tent, turning them into a blood letter written by a general of the Protectorate before his death three hundred years ago - and the handwriting was exactly the same as the comments in the translation manuscript of Agent He in the evening.
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