Waking from unconsciousness, the light outside the window belonged to some unknown hour. He had the impression there had been a heavy rain, but it had stopped by now—a cool breeze drifting past, leaves rustling, the air pleasantly refreshing. At the same time… there was also a hollow, gnawing hunger and exhaustion that seemed to run through his entire body.
Someone was sleeping beside him, her hand holding his. Feeling a quiet peace settle over him, he sank back into deep sleep once more.
When he woke again, the wind outside had picked up, seeming to blow through a bamboo grove somewhere, but the sunlight was good, and along with birdsong, beams of light poured in through the window in shafts. Sitting by the bed was… Tan’er, dressed in plain white mourning clothes, blowing on a bowl of medicinal broth in her hands, then spooning a mouthful into her own mouth first before leaning over. Seeing that his eyes were already open, she didn’t make any great fuss—only after finishing feeding him that spoonful did she pick up a gauze cloth beside her to wipe his mouth, then take his hand and press it to her cheek, faint traces of tears showing on her face.
“What’s wrong?”
“Father has passed away.”
“…How long have I been asleep?”
“Three days.”
The Six-Path-Breaking technique Lu Hongti had taught him, though far from an ordinary second- or third-rate internal art, could strengthen the body under normal circumstances—but used too heavily, it also took a great toll and did real damage to the body. Only now was he finally able to piece together, with any clarity, everything that had happened before—the sudden arrival of the Liangshan men, that whole bloody clash, and everything that followed. There were things in his heart he wanted to ask, but for the moment, the words wouldn’t come.
“Why have you been keeping watch here the whole time?”
“Grandfather said the living matter more, so I’ve been coming by whenever it’s time for your medicine…”
What Ning Yi was really asking was about the Su family—with so many people, and now with Su Boyong’s passing, there would certainly be a large-scale memorial hall set up, and given Su Tan’er’s position, she would naturally be expected to keep vigil there. But it seemed Su Yu had granted her the privilege of stepping away whenever she needed to. Su Tan’er’s feelings for her father, while perhaps not especially deep, were real all the same, and she was surely grieving now too—only, set against the near hundred lives lost across the whole Su family, the death of a single father seemed to weigh rather less by comparison. It was hard to say exactly what she was feeling in this moment; having gone through all of that, with a funeral transformed into a blood feud, she had grown quieter, if anything, in front of the one husband she now had left to lean on—showing none of the wild swings between joy and grief one might expect. Only now, as Ning Yi finally woke, did tears well faintly in her eyes.
There was no such thing as intravenous drips in this era—while Ning Yi lay unconscious, the medicinal broth and rice porridge alike had surely been fed to him spoonful by spoonful by Su Tan’er herself. Now that he was awake, she’d switched to a proper spoon, feeding him one mouthful at a time. Through his three days unconscious, his mouth had been a mix of blood and various medicinal broths, the taste strange and foul, but Su Tan’er hadn’t shown the slightest concern about that. She herself had only just given birth, and had gone through so much on top of it—fear, running, being caught in the rain—and now she still had to attend the memorial hall and look after her husband. Even with the old master mindful of her health and urging her to rest as much as possible, whatever spare time she had left over was surely very limited.
After feeding Ning Yi his porridge, he had her come up onto the bed to sleep beside him. The two of them lay curled together, and only then did Su Tan’er finally begin to sob quietly in his arms. Ning Yi, still unable to move much at this point, glanced around instead. “We’re not at home?” The surroundings here weren’t the courtyard at the Su estate at all.
“Grandfather said, if we wanted to move out, we should go ahead and move out. He’s been thinking about matters at home lately, but… I expect things will be different from now on regardless… I thought you probably didn’t want to keep living there forever anyway, and besides, you’re heading to the capital soon, so we moved out.”
Ning Yi listened, somewhat puzzled—he didn’t know the details behind this. In fact, back in that courtyard, when Su Wenji had stepped forward to push Su Tan’er out to face the danger, though he’d been the only one to speak up, there had been no shortage of others murmuring agreement around him at the time. Su Tan’er, well used to reading people, could hardly have missed that. If it had been some ordinary matter—petty squabbling, even something serious enough to warrant dividing the family—that would still all be within the bounds of being one family. But standing in that courtyard, facing life and death with a blade at her throat, looking at these blood relatives of hers, Su Tan’er could hardly help but feel some resentment, some disappointment, in her heart.
After everything she’d done for this family, with the Second and Third Branches benefiting no small amount from it, in the end these very relatives hadn’t been able to protect themselves in the slightest—hadn’t even been willing to try. And for all their foolishness in selling her out, it wouldn’t even have saved their own lives; anyone could see that Liangshan had come fully intent on wiping out the Su family in blood, and handing themselves over would have accomplished nothing at all—if anything, it likely would have gotten them cut down all the faster. And yet, even for such a futile, empty hope, they had still done it.
Sometimes, what wounds a person more than cruelty is foolishness. If it had truly been the result of careful deliberation—concluding that betraying her held some real value, and then making the hard, resolute choice to cut their losses—Su Tan’er might have found some meaning in her own sacrifice. But in the end, faced with a matter of life and death, they had still made such a foolish decision. In that instant, she had even come to understand, if only dimly, the reason why Ning Yi hadn’t wanted to let Yun Zhu marry into the family.
“Miss Nie is fine too, her injuries weren’t serious—she just caught a chill from being out in the rain that day, and she’s gone home to recover. At her place… that Jin’er girl seemed to have some hostility toward us…”
So much had happened these past few days that she spoke of this matter now with a certain flatness in her tone. Ning Yi was silent for a moment. “…That’s good, then.”
“I heard from Xiao Chan and Juan’er that Miss Nie saved our baby.” As she said this, she burrowed a little further into Ning Yi’s chest, then after a moment remembered something else. “And Xing’er is fine too—she’d meant to come find us but got separated from Miss Nie, and then saw the killing and hid in fright. She ended up not being found at all, which was a blessing, thank goodness.”
Ning Yi held her for a while, then remembered something. “What about the Liangshan people?”
“I heard they went to break into the Jiangning prison. A number of Fang La’s rebels who were supposed to be escorted north were sprung by them, and they killed their way out of the city. The garrison had already closed the gates, but they’d arranged people on the inside, and the east gate was left open for nearly half an hour before it was shut again—by then everyone had already gotten away.” As Su Tan’er told him this, she added, “Mr. Wenren took his men and went after them.”
Ning Yi closed his eyes and nodded. He’d originally intended to go after them himself as well, determined not to let those Liangshan men get away—but having been unconscious for three days, it seemed that chance had already passed him by. In truth, the Liangshan bandits were all seasoned men of the martial world, and the ones who’d come this time were all skilled fighters; Wenren Buer’s men, for all their quality, were still relatively few in top-tier strength, and it wasn’t clear whether they’d be able to seize this chance and pursue them all the way down.
Of course, he wasn’t any great master himself either—his talk of chasing them down to the end had, at the time, been more a fit of grim determination than anything else. It was only when the hostage exchange happened that he’d thought of it as something he could use as a setup later. If he hadn’t collapsed then, he certainly would have pursued them, and figured things out as he went—but it wasn’t as though he’d had any real confidence or plan in doing so. And there was certainly no reason now to think Wenren Buer and the others couldn’t manage without him. For the time being, hunting down the Liangshan men would simply have to be left in their hands.
After resting in bed for another full day like this, his body finally began to recover somewhat, enough that he could manage to get out of bed with effort. That day, a number of people came by to pay their respects or check on his condition—Su Wenzhen, Su Wenfang, and others from the branches close to the First Branch all came by one after another, expressing that no matter what, they would follow him and Su Tan’er from now on. Ning Yi hadn’t particularly wanted to deal with any of it, but from what people said, he gradually pieced together some understanding of the situation. In this incident, the First, Second, and Third Branches had all lost no small number of people, but Su Tan’er’s moving out of the Su estate now amounted to little short of a declaration of a complete break with the Second and Third Branches, and Su Yu’s tacit approval only confirmed it further. Many people were now genuinely having to consider which side to stand on.
Su Yu had, up until now, always worked to preserve the integrity of the Su family as a whole, even as he’d begun consolidating power into the hands of the First Branch. If not for this incident, however distant the Third Branch had grown, they would still have remained one family in any meaningful sense. But once Su Tan’er truly broke with the Second and Third Branches, from then on the two sides would likely retain nothing more than the name of being one family. Even Ning Yi, for the moment, couldn’t quite fathom why Su Yu had chosen to make such a decision.
Besides the various Su family members who came to visit, each carrying their own particular stance, the ones who came in greater numbers, perhaps, were the children he’d once taught at the family school. These children belonged to various households, many of them from the Second and Third Branches, and their elders—perhaps finding it awkward to declare their own allegiance just yet—had sent the children instead, if only to pay respects to their former teacher, in hopes of preserving some goodwill for the future.
During the day, Su Tan’er would go sit at the memorial hall for a while, then return to eat and rest. Toward Ning Yi she remained endlessly gentle, and though her temperament had taken on a certain detached quality from the grief of these past days, in her actions she had already tacitly accepted the course toward dividing the family. And on the Su family’s side, the old master, Su Yu, appeared to be pushing this along as well, which left Ning Yi feeling rather puzzled.
Besides the Su family, the following day, people from the Xue, Wu, and Puyang families all sent over calling cards, either to visit or to offer condolences. The news of the Liangshan bandits’ rampage through Jiangning a few days earlier had already spread far and wide in an uproar. The Su family had been the household hit hardest by it, and the story of how Ning Yi, single-handedly, had held off the Liangshan bandits who’d forced their way into the household, fighting them to a bloody standstill in the pouring rain, then facing them down again in a hostage exchange to finally secure his family’s safety before finally collapsing—all of this had already spread far and wide.
To fight one’s way through such a hopeless situation, alone, and find a way to save an entire family’s lives—such a feat could hardly be captured by words like bravery or cleverness alone. And all the more so given that Ning Yi’s reputation until now had rested chiefly on his poetry—that a mere scholar could accomplish something like this in the direst of circumstances left an impression on everyone’s minds that was, frankly, difficult to put into words.
“They say that more than half the courtesans in Jiangning right now would gladly pay to spend a night with you, just to soothe the spirit of a hero. With a reputation like that, Liheng, you really ought to make use of it…”
On the second day, besides the Su family members and the calling cards, another visitor came by to check on him—Consort Kang Xian. He had already heard that Ning Yi was willing to lend a hand with the Secret Investigation Bureau, and seeing Ning Yi gradually recovering, he wore an expression of both amusement and relief, sipping tea while cracking the sort of jokes favored among scholars.
Of course, there was no need to press the matter of the Bureau while Ning Yi hadn’t yet fully recovered. Kang Xian was, at his core, a proper man of letters—one who prized composure and wit even in the face of war, who admired an unhurried grace, and who equally admired the sort of man who’d draw his sword in righteous fury and repay grievance with directness—and so Ning Yi’s way of handling things only endeared him to Kang Xian all the more. Knowing that Ning Yi, though in no rush to bring up the Bureau himself, would certainly be curious about Liangshan, Kang Xian had Lu A’Gui summoned as well, to brief Ning Yi on what the Bureau currently knew about Liangshan.
It was then that Ning Yi heard a rather unexpected name…