Autumn 1939, Linjiang City. Su Xu, deputy officer of the Third Battalion of the puppet army’s Security Corps, appears to help the Japanese collect grain and levy taxes, while secretly sketching the blockhouse defenses inside a cigarette case. Qiao Shouye has been watching him for three days. The battalion’s deputy officer is far too careful about pocketing money. Something’s off. Major Yamada is more direct: he slaps a list of every member of Su Xu’s squad’s family members onto the table. “Mr. Su, you know what happens when one man’s punished for the whole group.” Su Xu smiles and offers him a cigarette, while inwardly calculating what to do with the improved grenade-launcher blueprint tucked into his sleeve. It’s no bigger than a palm, and one line drawn wrong will cost more than just his own life.
During the first test, the shell explodes three zhang outside the Japanese stronghold. Yamada flies into a rage and threatens to shoot him, but Su Xu volunteers to make further improvements. The second time, the shell flies straight into a machine-gun nest. Yamada pats him on the shoulder and calls him “a pillar of the Empire,” but Qiao Shouye turns pale: he’s discovered that this deputy officer once crossed paths with the Military Statistics Bureau outside the city.
Su Xu stubs out his cigarette and tells his contact just one thing: “The blueprint can still be revised three more times. After that, either Yamada leaves, or I do.”
But he doesn’t know that his own older brother has already entered the city with an anti-traitor squad, intent on killing him with his own hands for being a “collaborator.”
