Hunting Spies

Hunting Spies is a long military espionage web novel by web author Yin Weizhe, serialized from May 12, 2020, and completed on November 30 of the same year, totaling about 3.46 million Chinese characters and 755 chapters. The story begins in Beiping in 1936: modern-day criminal police officer Chu Mufeng takes a bullet while covering a comrade during an anti-drug mission and wakes up as an investigator in the Beiping Police Department in the twenty-fifth year of the Republic. Drawing on his forensic experience from a previous life and his knowledge of how the era will unfold, he starts with bizarre cases in the alleys and makes his name in one mystery after another, such as the Blood Cicada serial case, and gradually sets his sights on the Japanese spies and traitor forces lurking in the alleys and streets. As the situation changes, Chu Mufeng moves from Beiping to Jinling, and his opponents escalate from scattered sleeper agents to a systematic intelligence apparatus and a hidden conspiracy group; he cracks cases such as the secret-room radio codebook and the Meiyuan floating-corpse case, carries out Operation Falcon to strike at enemy trading firms, and bit by bit builds his own intelligence network. The book combines mystery and deduction with espionage struggle, interspersed with many passages of investigation, surveillance, interrogation, and arrest, focusing on characters' choices and patriotism in a time of chaos, and is often compared by readers to Republican-era spy novels such as Spy Shadow Storm.