Chapter 189

The setting sun over the Cao's Gorge on the Cao's River in Shaoxing Prefecture stained the tow-paths red, and Shen Xitang's leather boots stepped over the torn volumes of the *Jiatai Huiji Gazetteer*. Xiao Heng's scabbard shattered a model of a disguised Lyon silk workshop, and the exposed Bronze Secret Casket revealed the *Rhone Secret Treaty*—right beside the clause on the parchment regarding the "cession of the Zhejiang-East canal route," the English rose emblem, the French fleur-de-lis, and the hidden darts flag of the Jiang-Zhe silk merchants overlapped ferociously! "Look at this treaty's tidal omen." Her gauntlet scraped the hydrological notes on the margin of the *Chongzhen Calendar Treatise*. "This anomalous sign of the 'reverse surge of the Qiantang tide in the autumn equinox of the seventeenth year of Chongzhen' was precisely the night before Zhang Guowei burned the sea-wall maps..." Amid the third-watch gongs, when three hundred English forty-two-pound naval guns disguised as salt stacks fired in unison, the gilded inscription "Wanggong Factory Special Supply" shone as bright as blood on the Yingxiu Sluice Tower, blasting the final waterborne lifeline of Ming-dynasty Jiangnan into the cinnabar imperial rescripts of a spoils banquet on the banks of the Thames!