Night fell upon the Eternal Flame Academy compound like a black velvet, swallowing up the colors of the day and leaving only shadowy shapes. The Eastern Instructor's Pavilion, already isolated during the day, now felt like an island stranded in a sea of darkness. The only light came from a few flickering oil lamps in the windows, including in three adjacent rooms at the end of the ground-floor corridor.
Inside his room, Hu Yanzhen sat on the edge of his hard military bed, cleaning his Mauser C96 semi-automatic pistol with deft, repetitive movements. The sound of cloth rubbing against oiled steel was the only sound in the room. He couldn't get the image of the wilting white chrysanthemums out of his mind. The threat felt more real, more foul than enemy gunfire on the open battlefield. There, at least you knew where the danger was coming from. Here, the danger whispered, hiding behind polite smiles and quiet corridors. He got up and checked the lock on his door for the third time, then tested the wooden window latch. It was solid, but it gave him no sense of security.
In the next room, He Xiang refused to give in to fear. Her room was simple, containing only a bed, a desk, and a small wardrobe. She deliberately kept to her normal routine. She had arranged a few personal belongings on the table: an old book by Lu Xun, a small picture frame containing a faded portrait of her parents, and a small, delicate jade, a gift from her mother. It was a silent act of defiance. They had violated her office, but she would not let them violate her personal space. But when she sat down to read, she found herself reading the same paragraph over and over again, her ears straining, listening to every creak of wood and sigh of wind outside.
In the third room, Lee Junshan was not cleaning his gun or trying to read. He stood in front of the open window, letting the cold night air fill his lungs. His fists rested on the window frame as his mind worked incessantly, mapping out a web of possibilities. The flowers and the note… they were not impulsive acts. They were calculated. The calligraphy was learned. His knowledge of the flower's symbolism was very specific. It implied an enemy who was intelligent, patient, and ruthless. Was this a warning from the Oda faction? Or was it Colonel Ji Jin using more cunning methods than he had anticipated? Or, more disturbingly, were the two working together? He stared at the darkness outside, where rows of pine trees loomed like menacing sentries. This academy wasn't just sick; it was rotting from the inside.
About an hour passed in tense silence. Hu Yanzhen finally put down his pistol and picked up a German infantry tactics manual, trying to force his mind to focus. The silence of the night was broken only by the chirping of crickets and the whistling of the wind through the pine trees.
Then, a sound.
It was very soft, barely audible. Not a loud bang or a crash, but a sound that shouldn't have been there. The creaking of floorboards as they were slowly stepped on, coming from the direction of He Xiang's room.
Hu Yanzhen froze, the book in his hand stopping in the middle of the page. His ears, trained by years in the field, immediately recognized the sound. It wasn't the sound of a building settling or rats. It was the sound of careful footsteps.
In an instant, all his tiredness disappeared, replaced by cold adrenaline. Silently, he put down his book, grabbed his gun from the table, and checked the magazine in one fluid motion. He didn't turn on the lights. He moved in the darkness of his room, his shoes making no sound on the wooden floor. He reached his door, pressing his ear against the cool wood. He waited, holding his breath.
Silence. Maybe he heard wrong.
Then the sound came again, this time clearer. The sound of wood scraping against wood, like a cupboard door being forced open.
Enough already.
With one swift movement, Hu Yanzhen unlocked the door and slipped out into the dimly lit corridor. The air feels colder here. The oil lamp at the end of the corridor flickered, creating dancing shadows. He Xiang's bedroom door, which should have been tightly closed, was now slightly ajar, a dark gap gaping in the wall.
His heart was pounding. He gestured to Lee Junshan's door, rapping lightly with his knuckles in the pattern they had agreed upon for emergencies, before turning and approaching He Xiang's door with his gun raised. He pushed it open with the tip of his boot.
The sight inside made his blood boil.
The room had not been ransacked, but violated. Its contents had not been stolen, but desecrated. The dresser drawers had been pulled out, his clothes thrown to the floor. His lieutenant's uniform lay in the middle of the room, the dirty print of a boot visible across his chest, a deliberate insult to his rank and honor. Lu Xun's book had been thrown into the corner, its pages torn out. The framed photo of his parents lay face down.
And amidst the chaos, there was a lone sound. The sound of broken ceramics crunching under someone's boots. He Xiang's small jade, which had been placed carefully on the table, was now shattered into pieces on the floor, smashed deliberately.
At that moment, the door to He Xiang's room opened from the corridor, and He Xiang herself entered, having just returned from the bathroom at the end of the pavilion. She froze in the doorway, her eyes widening as she saw Hu Yanzhen standing with her gun drawn in the middle of her ruined room.
"Yanzhen…?" she asked, her voice shaking, before her gaze swept across the room.
Her expression changed. Confusion was replaced by shock, then by something much colder and harder. She did not cry. She did not scream. She simply stared straight at her soiled uniform on the floor, then at the shards of her jade. Her face was a mask of pale, controlled rage. Her private space, her final refuge, had been desecrated.
"They're here," she whispered, more to herself than to Hu Yanzhen.
Lee Junshan's door opened and he stepped out, his face calm but his eyes as sharp as a hawk's. He looked at Hu Yanzhen, then He Xiang, and finally into the mess of the room. He entered without a word, his steps careful not to disturb anything. She did not look at the chaos with emotion, but with the eyes of an investigator scanning a crime scene.
"Lock the door," she said quietly. Hu Yanzhen obeyed, closing the door softly and locking it from the inside, trapping the three of them inside the visible evidence of their feud.
Lee Junshan crouched by the jade shard, examining it without touching it. "This is not a robbery. Nothing of value was taken, if anything. This is intimidation. An escalation of the flowers from this afternoon."
"We must report this!" Hu Yanzhen said, her voice shaking with anger. "We report it to Ji Jin. Let him see what kind of coward is running around his academy!"
"No," He Xiang said firmly, her voice now steady. She stepped inside, carefully picking up her uniform from the floor, and began to brush the dirt off with her hands. "That's what they want. They want us to panic. They want me, the 'weak female instructor,' to run for cover. That will prove to Ji Jin and the others that they were right, that this place is not for me."
Lee Junshan stood up, his eyes scanning the boot prints on the floor. "He Xiang is right. If we report it, what will happen? Ji Jin will set up an official investigation committee. There will be interrogations, endless reports, and in the end, the conclusion will be 'an unfortunate incident by an unknown cadet.' The investigation will be a tool to monitor us, not to find the perpetrator. We will be caught in their bureaucratic web while our real enemy laughs in the shadows."
He paused, his gaze meeting Hu Yanzhen's, then He Xiang's. "They are doing this for two reasons. First, to intimidate us into backing down. Second, and this is more important, they may be looking for something. Something related to our mission. They want to know what we know."
The realization dawned on them. This was no longer just a culture war against conservatives. This was an active hunt. They were being hunted.
The three of them stood in silence in the middle of the ruined room, surrounded by symbols of transgression. The oil lamp on the table flickered, its unstable light making their shadows elongate and dance on the walls, as if they were ghosts in their own room. Outside, the wind blew stronger, its sound like an evil whisper passing through the window.
The threat from outside, so real and brutal, had destroyed any remaining doubts between them and forged them into an inseparable whole. They are no longer three individuals with different agendas; they were one unit under attack, one fortress under siege.
Lee Junshan broke the silence, "Enough with the defensiveness," he said. He looked at Hu Yanzhen, who was still gripping her gun tightly, then at He Xiang, who stood tall amidst the ruins of her belongings. "Starting tonight, everything changes. We will not wait for the next attack."
He stepped into the center of the room, his feet deliberately avoiding the jade shards. His eyes glinted with a cold, dangerous light under the lamplight.
"Our secret investigation begins now. Here. Within these walls. We are no longer just instructors trying to implement reform. We are hunters in our own house. Every cadet, every instructor, every staff… everyone is a suspect until proven otherwise. We will turn over every stone and interrogate every shadow. We will find this snake and pull out its fangs, before it can bite again."
The oath was made in the shattered room, a promise made on the shards of memory and under the shadow of threats. The knock in the middle of the night had failed to divide them. Instead, it had lit a fire. The Eternal Flame was no longer just the name of the academy; that was their spirit of resistance. And that night, in the isolated pavilion, the fire began to burn fiercely.
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*****to be continued