South Water Gate, Linjiang Prefectural City.
The Yudai River flowed through here.
This was the city's most important water checkpoint for transporting goods to and from the outside world.
The Jintang Battalion, one of Linjiang's three guards, was stationed here. Its compound stood against the city wall like a riverside stockade, with wharves and towers from which all passing vessels were inspected.
Now, however, none of its usual noise and bustle remained. The gates were tightly shut, leaving every grain barge and passenger boat stranded outside the city.
The soldiers on the walls and towers looked tense, their hands gripping sabers and spears.
In a reasonably spacious hall at the center of the compound, a dozen or so armored officers waited restlessly, their hands resting on their sabers.
Every so often, one of them rose and strode outside to gaze in a certain direction from the parade ground.
Others stole glances at the lean-faced, composed middle-aged man seated at the head of the hall.
He wore no armor, only a loose brocade robe, and sported a handsome, meticulously groomed long beard. With his refined bearing, he looked less like a military officer than a learned scholar.
This scholarly middle-aged man was Tao Gongwang, commander of the Jintang Battalion.
Unlike the White Scale Guard and Iron Wall Guard, which were largely controlled by the Wei Family and Xiang Family, the city's two great powerful clans, the Jintang Battalion had fallen into the hands of a dozen or so smaller clans.
The three most powerful among them were the Guo Family, to which Guo Wei and Guo Zhen belonged, the Yang Family, and the Tao Family.
Of the three, the Tao Family was a little weaker than the other two.
Yet precisely because the Guo Family and Yang Family fought over the