Winter of 1943, Shimen City.
Twenty-four-year-old Shen Bing walked into the puppet Jidong Road Office and became a confidential secretary. No one knew that this quiet woman with good calligraphy was an intelligence agent of the Enemy Industry Department of the Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei Military Region, codenamed "Ice Fish".
Her goal: to find the combat map of the Japanese army's "Kikutsuki Project".
The map is hidden in the study of Special Agent Chief Hideo Takeda - not a filing cabinet, but a calligraphy scroll written with an invisibility potion. Takeda is obsessed with Wang Yangming, who appears to be elegant but is actually ruthless. He posts late at night every week, and the vertical scroll never leaves his side.
Shen Bing is walking on the edge of a knife: Lao Kui, the back rub worker in the bathhouse, is a traffic officer, using heat and philistines to cover the transmission of intelligence; Ye Shaoqi, a major in the staff office, is greedy for money and afraid of death on the surface, but in fact he is a martyr who infiltrated the puppet army three years ago; Mr. Zhong, the clerk, became a traitor on the verge of collapse because his son was taken hostage; Xiao Zhao, a 19-year-old soldier of the puppet army, let her out of the city at a critical moment because of a favor for half a steamed bun.
Seventeen days, a vertical scroll, three intelligence lines, and a life-and-death negotiation at a calligraphy conference.
When the map was sent, Ye Shaoqi fired the grenade, Lao Kui was beaten to death with sticks, and Lao Wang fell on the way to deliver the information. Shen Bing disappeared into the night, walking into the depths of history with those names without tombstones.
This year, no one knows what they did.
Many years later, someone saw her in a cave dwelling in Yan'an. She is still writing, writing the sentence in "The Analects of Confucius": As the years get colder, you will know that the pines and cypresses will wither.
