Yuan Shikai's agents moved through the sprawling, chaotic metropolis of Shanghai like phantoms. They were not spies in the traditional sense; they were saboteurs, instruments of their master's new, brutal philosophy. Their target was not a military installation or a political figure. It was a nerve center, the great telegraph switching station in the heart of the International Settlement, a humming, buzzing hub of copper wire and brass fittings that connected the capital in Beijing to the southern provinces, the great port of Hong Kong, and the world beyond.
They did not carry bombs. That would be crude, obvious, and traceable. Instead, they carried a device of Yuan's own design, built in secret in one of his Tianjin workshops. It was a heavy, cylindrical object, powered by a series of powerful, state-of-the-art batteries: a portable, high-intensity electromagnet.
Under the cover of night, they infiltrated the station. Posing as maintenance workers, they gained access to the main switching room, a cavernous hall filled with towering racks of connection boards, the air a constant crackle of electrical energy. Their work was swift and silent. They activated their device. It emitted no sound, no flash, only a deep, silent, and powerful wave of pure magnetic force.
The effect was instantaneous and catastrophic. Every delicate magnetic switch, every telegraphic relay on the connection boards, was instantly "wiped," their polarity scrambled into a useless, chaotic mess. All communications—civil, military, and financial—passing through the Shanghai hub were severed in a single, silent moment. The city, and by extension the entire southern half of the Empire, was plunged into an information blackout. Yuan Shikai's agents had successfully carried out the first act of his new terror campaign, Operation Pandora. Their goal was to create chaos and fear, and they had succeeded beyond their wildest expectations.
What Yuan Shikai, in his arrogant isolation, did not know was that this specific switching station was also the secret hub for one of Spymaster Shen Ke's most sensitive and vital intelligence networks. It was the primary conduit for all information coming from his agents monitoring British naval movements out of Singapore and Hong Kong. With a single, silent pulse of magnetic energy, Yuan's agents had not just disrupted the Empire's commerce; they had blinded the Emperor's own Spymaster to a critical external threat.
In the Forbidden City, the news arrived not by wire, but by a frantic, breathless messenger who had ridden his horse to exhaustion. A senior official from the Ministry of Communications, his face pale with panic, burst into the Emperor's private chambers, forgoing all protocol.
"Your Majesty! An emergency!" he gasped, prostrating himself on the floor. "All telegraphic communication with the south has been severed! Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hong Kong—all of it is dark! There are reports of… of chaos at the main Shanghai station. We believe it is sabotage!"
Qin Shi Huang, who had been in a state of deep meditation, opened his eyes. His initial reaction was not panic, but a surge of cold, clarifying rage. This was not a random act. This was a direct, insolent challenge from the "ghost" in his court, an assault not just on his infrastructure, but on his ability to command his own empire.
He dismissed the frantic minister with a wave of his hand. He was alone now, in the silence of his chamber. He closed his eyes once more, his fury focusing his Dragon's Spark to a fine, sharp point. He extended his senses, pushing his unique perception out from his body, across the hundreds of miles that separated him from the crisis. He was not trying to read a person this time. He was trying to read a machine.
In his mind's eye, the telegraph network of his empire appeared as a vast, glowing web of energy. He saw the brilliant, pulsing light of Beijing, and the smaller, but still vital, nodes of the other great cities. And he saw the break. In the place where Shanghai should have been a shining nexus, there was a dark, dead knot, a tangle of lifeless threads.
He pushed his perception deeper, focusing his entire being on that single point of failure. He moved past the city, past the building, into the switching room itself. He could "see" the damage, not with eyes, but with a sense that perceived the fundamental forces of the universe. He saw the scrambled magnetic signatures on the thousands of tiny relays on the connection boards. He understood, with a supernatural clarity that no engineer could ever possess, that this was not damage from a bomb or a fire. This was damage from a powerful, focused magnetic pulse. It was a unique energy signature, one he had never encountered before. It was the "scent" of a new and unknown weapon.
He knew his engineers on the ground would be baffled. They would take days, perhaps weeks, to manually test and reset every single one of the thousands of relays. He could not afford to be blind for weeks. He could not afford to be cut off from his southern armies, from his fleets, from his spies. He would have to intervene.
He gathered his will, focusing his own immense internal energy. He reached out with his power, a river of focused intent flowing from his mind in Beijing to the broken machine in Shanghai. It was an act of incredible, delicate precision, like a surgeon performing an operation from across a continent.
With an immense effort of will, an effort that caused a single, ruby-red drop of blood to trickle from his nose, he began to "comb" the scrambled magnetic fields of the switching station's connection boards. He did not touch them physically. He imposed his own perfect, orderly will upon the chaos, forcibly realigning the magnetic polarity of each tiny switch, one by one, thousand by thousand, restoring them to their proper state.
In the chaotic, lamp-lit switching room in Shanghai, something miraculous happened. The dead relay boards suddenly flickered to life. A single telegraph key began to chatter. Then another, and another. Within moments, the entire room was once again filled with the familiar, comforting crackle of information flowing through the veins of the Empire. The engineers, who had been staring in helpless confusion at the dead equipment, looked up in stunned, disbelieving awe. They would speak of it for years to come as an inexplicable, divine miracle.
But in his private chamber in the Forbidden City, Qin Shi Huang was left panting, the immense effort leaving him feeling weakened and drained. He wiped the drop of blood from his lip, his expression one of cold, hard triumph. The ghost in his machine had finally made a mistake. A fatal mistake.
He had used a weapon with a unique and identifiable signature. And the Emperor was the only man in the world who could possibly have detected it.
He did not yet have the kind of proof that would stand up in his own court. He had no documents, no witnesses. But he now possessed something far more powerful: the personal, supernatural certainty of the truth. He knew what kind of weapon had been used—a powerful, portable electromagnet, a piece of advanced technology that could not be easily bought or built. And he knew there was only one man in his entire Empire with the resources, the industrial capacity, the scientific knowledge, and the sheer, arrogant audacity to build and deploy such a device. His Minister of Industry. Yuan Shikai.
The hunt was no longer a matter of suspicion. It was now a matter of time. The Emperor had his traitor. Now, all that was left was to build the cage.