Chapter 213

Fujian trading junks at the Yongjiang River estuary in Ningbo Prefecture were soaked in tung oil as Shen Xitang's leather boots stepped over the charred fragments of the *Records of Four Brightness*. Xiao Heng's scabbard shattered a disguised model of a Batavia fortress, revealing the *Malacca Secret Treaty* inside a bronze secret casket—right beside the clause on the goatskin scroll concerning the "cession of the Zhejiang maritime transport route," the Dutch VOC emblem, the Portuguese armillary sphere, and the hidden darts flag of the Yongshang Merchant Guild intersected in a ferocious tangle! "Look at this treaty-making tide," her finger armor scraped across the marginalia of the *Chongzhen Calendar Treatise* field-of-influence chart. "This portent of 'the hurricane destroying the masts during the frost's descent in the seventeenth year of Chongzhen' was precisely the night before Zhang Mingzhen burned the defense maps of Shuangyu Port..." Amidst the conch horn's blast at the fourth watch, when six hundred iron 32-pounder cannons disguised as cargo crates fired simultaneously, the gilded inscription "Wanggongchang Special Make" blazed bright as blood on the Tianfeng Pagoda spire, shattering the last lock-key of the Great Ming's maritime borders into a crimson-sanded fissure upon the universal maps of the European colonial powers!