Yi Yang closed the roster, his fingertips still resting on its cover as he turned the matter over in his mind.
Six of the eight had been slipped in by Zhang Debiao over the past three years. Their hiring dates were staggered, and their channels of recommendation varied. Some had been transferred from other counties, some temporarily conscripted, and others simply brought in under the pretext of "filling vacancies."
Though Zhang Debiao had not recruited the remaining two directly, every transfer document marking their rise from ordinary jailers to key positions bore his signature and thumbprint.
Yi Yang flipped the roster back to the first page and read through it again. He was not looking for new clues, but confirming something.
Once he had confirmed it, he closed the roster and tucked it back into the hidden compartment.
These were not a few scattered chess pieces, but covert pieces planted through Zhang Debiao as part of a long-laid plan. Zhang Debiao might be gone, but the roots he had buried still lived. They lay dormant beneath the earth, waiting for a particular signal to break through the soil together.
Across all of Yunlin County, only one power had the patience, resources, and nerve to spend three years building such a network of covert agents inside the Heaven Patrol Office's prison.
The Inner City Zhang Family.
Yi Yang leaned back in his chair, his gaze growing unfocused as he sank into thought. What should he do about this?
His first impulse was to write Chen Wuya a letter detailing every irregularity he had discovered today, along with the suspicious points in the roster, and let the higher-ups at the Heaven Patrol Office handle it. Then none of this would have anything to do with him.
That was the safest course, and