News from White Fish City could not be contained forever. Wherever trade routes flourished, news traveled fastest.
White Fish City was only a few days' ride by swift horse from Suining Prefecture, and the news reached the Prefectural City with horses and carrier pigeons alike.
The merchant caravans brought word back first. While unloading at the dock, a boat captain casually told a porter he knew a few things he had learned about White Fish City by carrier pigeon.
That evening, the porter drank half a bowl of cloudy wine and embellished the story for a teahouse waiter. Once the waiter heard it, there was naturally no stopping his tongue.
Most people in the Prefectural City knew what had happened in White Fish City, but since none of them had experienced it firsthand, few believed it. They treated it as a joke.
Until the morning of the third day, when the first caravan from White Fish City entered Suining Prefecture's South Gate.
The drivers had barely unloaded half their cargo before someone in the Tea Stall asked whether the stories circulating in the Prefectural City about White Fish City were true.
An unloading worker wiped the sweat from his neck and said, "Oh, you mean those things. I actually know about them. Most of them are true.
"That Three Lakes Gang? They're long gone.
"I heard their leader, Chen Tao, died in White Dragon Marsh. Even their deputy leader and more than twenty skilled fighters never came back."
"So they were the first to be wiped out."
Someone beside him pressed, "I heard people from the Heaven Patrol Office died too?"
"What people from the Heaven Patrol Office?"
The worker set his empty water bowl on the table and said bluntly, "Where did you get that false news? Let me