Spy Shadow Trio: I Run a Shop in Chongqing

In 1948, Chongqing was roiling with hidden currents. The Kuomintang-controlled areas were shrouded in white terror, and underground Party members walked on the edge of a blade. The foggy lanes, teahouses, newspaper offices, and military and government headquarters of the mountain city had all become battlegrounds. Our Party’s special operations unit, “Kindling,” lay hidden in the heart of enemy territory, wielding radios, coded ledgers, and recruitment as blades to tear through the darkness. Agent Chen Yan, female radio operator Shen Qinghe, and Laoyao, a courier who had once been a patrolman, were three nails driven into the enemy’s heart. The Bureau of Investigation and Statistics, the Central Bureau of Investigation and Statistics, local warlords, and the Gelaohui vied for power on all sides. Intelligence warfare, psychological warfare, and life-or-death gambits unfolded one after another. A coded message, an assassination, a defection: each could alter the fate of the land. Faith burned like a flame in the darkest hour. This is no legend of a lone hero, but a bloodstained epic written with the lives of a group of nameless people. Bullets may go astray, and the human heart is hard to read, but their course never wavers: dawn will come.