The night watch drum at the hour of Yin pierced the curtain of rain. Suddenly, the needle of Shen Xitang’s Magnetic Pith Compass pointed toward the Imperial Ancestral Temple.
Xiao Heng tore away his soaked sleeve, revealing the incomplete tattoo of the *Xuanji Manual* on his arm. In the flashes of lightning, the missing dragon vein markings glowed with a bloody hue, gradually aligning with the layout of the canal’s Lodestone Array found in the secret files of the Directorate of Armament.
"Commander, have you ever wondered," Shen Xitang asked, her silver needle etching burn marks into the sand table of the Imperial Ancestral Temple, "why Han Tuozhou insisted on burning down the Directorate of Armament in the twelfth lunar month of the sixteenth year of Chunxi?"
Chapter 80