If a large force were mobilized to apprehend Ye Xiu, his extensive network of information would likely alert him immediately. By the time the officials set out from Zhenwu Temple, Ye Xiu would already have received the news and fled. In such a vast Jinling Prefecture, capturing him again would be exceedingly difficult.0

To catch Ye Xiu, the fewer people involved, the quicker the action.0

Zhang Yuelu and Qi Xuansu decided to act on the spur of the moment to capture him. When executing this plan, they even used their aliases Wei Wugui and Tantai Chu, leaving Ye Xiu’s intelligence network clueless.0

That was why the Green Phoenix Guard feared cases involving random or spur-of-the-moment killings far more than meticulously planned crimes. The latter, being intricately linked like beads on a string, tended to fall apart if one link was broken. In contrast, spur-of-the-moment crimes left far fewer clues.0

This time, Zhang Yuelu and Qi Xuansu’s plan to capture Ye Xiu bore some resemblance to such cases. Just the previous day, they had been focused on extracting information from Ye Xiu. Even earlier that morning, they...0