"So, did you find anything about those people?" asked Lu Tong Xiao without raising his head from the official paperwork on the table. He was currently in his study, sitting in front of a wide mahogany table, holding the wooden brush with his long fingers. The interior of his study room was simple at a glance but every single furniture was meticulously crafted from the carefully chosen materials.
Sitting on a couch, Gu Jin took his time to swallow the tea and replied, "I didn't expect you to get your hands on this batch of tea when even His Majesty couldn't. How about you share half of it with me?" It was a rare type of Wulong tea that was grown in the high altitude mountains and in order to maintain the quality of it, it was harvested at the interval of 3-5 years. Due to its rarity, not even the emperor could drink it as often let alone other royalties.
"Depends upon the worth of information you've gathered," said Lu Tong Xiao while dipping the wooden brush in the exquisite looking inkstone.
"Stingy!" Gu Jin glared at Lu Tong Xiao which the latter didn't care about.
"I am already being generous enough by letting you drink it right now," said Lu Tong Xiao as he added the paper in his hand to the stack of the reviewed paper. "Now tell me what you found about them."
Gu Jin was not only one of the richest merchants in the Xin kingdom, but he also gathered intelligence for Lu Tong Xiao because of his widespread connection inside and outside the kingdom. Of course, he didn't do it for free as his demands would always be one of the things from Lu Tong Xiao's precious collection. Appearing serious, he coughed to stress the weight of his words and leaned back before saying, "The men that attacked you, they disappeared like they never existed. I sent my men the same night I received your letter but they found no suspicious activity in that area. The whole house they had used as a hideout was emptied and when asked around, the people in the neighbourhood said that the house had been empty for a long while."
"So you found nothing." Lu Tong Xiao summed up Gu Jin's findings and put down the brush to look at him.
"Are you doubting this laozhi?" Gu Jin looked at him as if the other was underestimating him. When Lu Tong Xiao didn't reply, he smugly smiled and pulled out something from inside his sleeve pocket which he put on the table in front of the man.
Lu Tong Xiao's eyes fell on the object on the table. It was a shiny gold tael, nothing out of ordinary. But he picked it up without a word and carefully looked at it. No matter how one looked, it was just a gold tael people used in their day to day life. He rubbed its surface with his thumb as if he was weighing it and grabbing the inkstone from the table, he suddenly struck the gold tael with it.
Immediately a crack was formed in the gold tael.
"It's not a gold tael," said Lu Tong Xiao, looking at it with furrowed brows.
Had it been a real gold tael, it would not have cracked. Each of the taels in all the kingdoms was plated with the metals they represented. A copper coin is made with some other metals but its outer part was plated with pure copper. Similarly, a silver tael is coated with pure silver and a gold tael is coated with pure gold. And a specific amount of the pure metal was used in each of the taels which would ensure it's malleability and it would not have broken.
So when Lu Tong Xiao hit it with the inkstone, the supposed tael should have flattened at most but unexpectedly it cracked.
Gu Jin who had known about the fake gold taels was not surprised at the sight of its crack but he was surprised at the inkstone which was still in one piece. Things that Lu Tong Xiao collected never failed to amaze him.
"How many of these did you find?" he heard Lu Tong Xiao's cold voice and looked at his serious face.
"A bag full of them. There were silver taels and copper coins as well. It seemed they didn't have time to take it with them when they fled," replied Gu Jin. His men had thoroughly searched the whole place on the very night they had attacked Lu Tong Xiao but instead of those people they found a bag full of fake coins. From the looks of it, there seems to be a secret operation ongoing in their kingdom. And whoever was doing it was not a person they could underestimate considering how no one knew about it and would have continued not to know about them had Lu Tong Xiao not found them.
Seeing Lu Tong Xiao in deep thought, Gu Jin asked, "Will you inform this to His Majesty?" After all, the matter was not a simple one that they could ignore.
Lu Tong Xiao shook his head and said, "We cannot alert anyone in the palace or ministry if we want to catch the culprit. This is not done by someone simple. Someone from the higher up should also be involved in this. I'll have to look into this myself."
He didn't think that such a tricky problem would arrive at this time. It wasn't that they didn't have the cases of fake money in the past. But they were usually done by small-time criminals looking for quick money and it wasn't that difficult for the authorities to find them and stop such activities. And Lu Tong Xiao had a feeling that this case wasn't as simple as it looked like what they had in the past. It wouldn't be wrong to say that he could smell a big conspiracy in this whole thing.
"Send a letter to Gu Sheng immediately and tell him to inspect every entry in the border for any suspicious activity and remind him to not let this news reach anyone's ears," Lu Tong Xiao added.
Gu Sheng was Gu Jin's older brother who was also the General and currently, he was at the border to oversee the military training of the soldiers stationed at the southern border. Xin kingdom was surrounded by Jin and Fan kingdoms. And with the help of Gu Sheng, they could check and make sure whether the fake taels had reached other kingdoms from their own kingdom.
If the fake money was already circulating around in their kingdom, it wouldn't be long before their economy would collapse and they would have to bear a huge impact of it. And if it had been used while exchanging goods with other nations, then the damage would be far worse than what they could imagine.
"There is one more thing that I want you to do," said Lu Tong Xiao as he folded the recently arrived letter and put it inside the drawer.
And Gu Jin had never expected that there would come a day when he would hear such a request from his friend Lu Tong Xiao who he had known for years.