The Secret Patterns of Jinling

In the winter of 1937, Nanjing fell. Shen Shuyao, a young student, is forcibly conscripted by the Japanese army as a “comfort woman” in the Safety Zone and locked away in a secret brothel called Shuiyue Xuan. During countless nights of darkness, she unexpectedly overhears Japanese officers discussing military secrets while drunk. The information is connected to the cryptography her late father studied: those seemingly random numbers are actually key to decoding Japanese military operations. With help from underground agent Lu Mingyuan, Shuyao turns her battered body into a weapon, stealing secrets from the enemy’s bedchambers when they are least on guard. She records codes in her embroidery, passes intelligence in a rouge box, and weaves vital information about Japanese troop movements and supply shipments into the patterns of the *Jinling Map*. As the “Secret Stitching Group” grows, the songstresses, nurses, and students in the brothel all become fighters in this silent resistance. But when the Tokko begin investigating the leaks and her closest companions are killed one after another in the interrogation room, Shuyao is forced to walk the edge of discovery. And the Japanese military doctor Nakajima, who always plays “Sakura Song” alone late at night, is he a brutal invader, or an ally with secrets of his own? **“They endured the crimes of their age with their bodies, yet used their intelligence to carve an indelible code into history.”** Based on true historical events, this epic work takes a unique cryptographic perspective to reveal one of the most secret women’s resistance movements of the War of Resistance. Spanning a million words, the novel depicts the full, heroic journey from the fall of Nanjing to Japan’s surrender, telling how a group of women who were humiliated and abused used their intelligence and blood to protect the light in the darkest hour.