That day, less than half an hour after the brief clash at the Stone Dragon Martial Arts School had ended, the former top expert of Yangzhou, "Mountain-Pushing Hand" Stone Dragon, was dead. Yuwen Huaji's soldiers fished his body out of the well at the home of his close friend Tian Wen, the Confucian scholar renowned throughout Jiangdu for his poetry and prose.
Unfortunately, Yuwen Huaji's men found no trace of the crucial Longevity Formula manual on Stone Dragon's corpse. And as it happened, Tian Wen had also gone missing. The governor of Yangzhou, Yuchi Sheng, immediately dispatched troops to help Yuwen Huaji's men seal off the city's four gates and begin a massive search. Before long, they caught the old scholar sneaking around and trying to escape.
But fate had other plans. That damned scholar Tian Wen had no idea that, while he was fleeing, a pickpocket in Yangzhou had cut open the back of his clothes and stolen the manual.
After a frantic and swift investigation, especially once Yuwen Huaji's men and Yangzhou's soldiers had rounded up all the city's thieves and their gang leaders and tortured them for information, they soon got a lead:
The Longevity Formula had most likely been stolen by Yangzhou's two finest pickpockets, both around fifteen or sixteen years old. One was named "Kou Zhong," and the other "Xu Ziling." Someone had seen them hanging around Tian Wen before he was arrested. And since the two still hadn't been caught, there could be no other explanation: the manual had to be in their hands.
So!
Once they had their targets, the governor of Yangzhou dispatched even more troops to seal off the city and began searching every household as if he meant to dig the entire place up. He seemed determined to capture the