Laihu County lay southwest of Ji Prefecture, while Gucheng County lay to its southeast. From Ji Prefecture to Gucheng County, one could arrive within a day if moving quickly, and precisely because it was so close to Ji Prefecture, the rebellion in this area was not nearly as severe.

Going from Gucheng County to Laihu County would take at least three days. Li Diudiu calculated it in his head — he would reach Gucheng County in a day, and that same night he had to find the Confucian temple that Wang Heita had told him about, then set out the next morning for Laihu County.

Three days to reach Laihu County, then head straight back to Ji Prefecture city, which would take roughly another two or three days. That way, he could be back within seven days.

But trouble had come along the way. If the first group of pursuers could catch up to him, then perhaps a second group would soon follow — and whoever came next would surely be far more skilled in combat than that one-eyed man.

Li Diudiu sat on the back of his donkey, pulled back his sleeve, and looked at his arm. The heavy blade of the one-eyed man had grazed it; though it hadn’t cut to the bone or sinew, the gash was large and looked gruesome.

The boy seemed to have shed his fear. After a moment of silence, he opened the deerskin pouch at his waist. Inside were the wound medicines his master had prepared for him — he always carried them — along with others that Xiahou Zhuo had given him, a fair number of little bottles and jars.

He took out his waterskin and rinsed the wound. The searing pain made Li Diudiu’s handsome brows knit together.

After rinsing it with water, he switched to wine — liquor he had taken from the shop where he’d just eaten. When he’d left, he hadn’t forgotten to leave the meal money on the table.

He bit open the cap of the wine flask with his teeth. Twice, Li Diudiu tried and failed to work up the nerve to pour it directly onto the wound.

“Donkey, donkey, it hurts so much.”

Li Diudiu took several deep breaths, then gripped the saddle — the donkey’s saddle, to be precise — with his uninjured hand, closed his eyes, and poured the strong liquor onto the wound. In that instant, his eyes flew wide open.

Ever since childhood, traveling far and wide with his master, he had suffered no shortage of small injuries; his master had deliberately hardened him, not wanting him to grow into a whiny, fussy child, so ordinary pain meant nothing to Li Diudiu.

But this strong liquor scouring the open gash — even reaching what felt like exposed bone — made him feel as though he might die in the next breath.

His teeth had already bitten through to blood. Without thinking, Li Diudiu tipped the flask up and gulped down several mouthfuls; the fiery liquor burned down his throat, and strangely enough, the pain seemed to ease a little.

He wasn’t sure if it was just his imagination or if it truly helped, but he seized the moment to grab the needle and thread he’d prepared. Traveling the martial world, carrying a curved needle and thread was both common practice and common sense.

Gritting his teeth, Li Diudiu stitched up his own wound, one stitch at a time. When the pain grew truly unbearable, he took another swig of wine, breathing in great gasps through his mouth, talking to himself as he sewed.

“It’s fine, it’s fine, just a few more, hah… hah…”

“Hah… almost done.”

“Hah…”

Gritting it out, he managed to sew roughly twenty-some stitches — crooked and uneven, but the wound was closed at least. He sprinkled on the wound medicine, then bit one end of the bandage between his teeth and wound it round and round with his free hand.

Once it was tied off, Li Diudiu let out a long breath.

There was the smell of wine in his mouth, and the smell of blood too.

Suddenly Li Diudiu tipped his head back and burst out laughing, not even sure why. Laughing and laughing, he toppled off the donkey’s back with a thud, landing on the ground, panting in great heaving breaths.

He watched clouds drift past overhead; the sky had already begun to dim. It looked like he wouldn’t make it into Gucheng County’s town before sunset today.

He wasn’t sure how long he lay there like that, dazed and hazy, with only one thing on his mind.

Thinking of his master.

His master was so strict with him, so stingy in his ways, and yet he had never once let Li Diudiu suffer an injustice. His master had once said: an elder may educate a child by the harshest means, but must never let that child suffer a grievance — the pain of enduring discipline and the pain of enduring injustice were two entirely different things.

Many adults thought that if they scolded a child and were wrong to do so, well, wrong was wrong, but since it was their own child, for a parent to go and apologize to a child — that was too humiliating.

Are adults people, and children not people?

Is an adult’s grievance a grievance, while a child’s grievance is nothing at all?

Grievance was, perhaps, one of the three kinds of pain in this world that cut deepest into the heart.

Grievance, separation, and love.

At this moment, Li Diudiu felt he had suffered some grievance — not because anyone had bullied him, but because this world itself was bullying people.

At twelve years old, for the first time in his life, the thought rose in Li Diudiu of simply overthrowing this wretched Great Chu. Although Xiahou Zhuo had told him countless times that Great Chu was beyond saving, Li Diudiu had never once imagined that he, a subject of Chu, would one day rise up against it.

And yet, thinking it over again — of those now rebelling against Chu, which of them wasn’t a subject of Chu?

Men like Wang Heita — if he could still have lived a tolerable life, he would never have raised his banner and cried out that heaven and earth showed no mercy, that the court had lost all restraint.

“Only when a new dynasty rises will this old rot finally vanish into smoke.”

Li Diudiu understood more deeply than ever before why someone like Xiahou Zhuo, who carried imperial blood in his veins, could speak such treasonous words — words that could see an entire clan executed.

Having lain there long enough, Li Diudiu sat back up. The donkey still stood beside him, grazing on the wild grass at the roadside, glancing at him now and then; there was no telling what had been going through its mind all this while.

Just then, a troop of cavalry suddenly appeared straight ahead. Li Diudiu’s expression changed at once. Injured as he was, and judging by the scale of the formation — at least several hundred riders — there was no possibility of resisting them.

Never mind Li Diudiu; even Ye Zhangzhu, even someone far more skilled than Ye Zhangzhu, could not have withstood an assault of several hundred Great Chu garrison cavalry.

So in that moment, Li Diudiu’s only thought was to flee. But the instant he leapt onto the donkey, the animal threw another one of its stubborn fits and refused to move. No matter how Li Diudiu tugged and pulled, it simply lowered its head and kept grazing, paying him no mind.

Li Diudiu said urgently, “What’s so good about that grass? I’ll buy you meat — just run already!”

The donkey couldn’t have cared less.

In that brief span, the several-hundred-strong troop had already come thundering up. Only now could Li Diudiu see clearly that these riders were nothing like the men who had chased him before — if the assassins pursuing him earlier had been a pack of jackals, then what came galloping toward him now was a pack of tigers and wolves.

At the very front of the cavalry flew two large black banners with gold characters — the larger one bore the character “Chu,” the smaller one the character “Luo.”

Atop a powerfully built warhorse, dark red all over, sat a middle-aged man who looked to be around forty. Seeing Li Diudiu, he reined his horse to a stop, and the several hundred riders behind him halted at once, as sharp and unified as a single war chariot rather than hundreds of individuals.

“Young man.”

The middle-aged man called out to Li Diudiu.

Li Diudiu studied him closely. This middle-aged man wasn’t particularly tall — Li Diudiu himself now stood about level with Xiahou Zhuo’s ear, and this man appeared shorter than Li Diudiu. But there was a cold, hard air about him, like a spear — not tall, yet not thin either; rather, he gave off an illusion of being broad and sturdy, and sitting there astride his horse, he seemed like a mountain.

“My lord.”

Li Diudiu leapt down off the donkey and bowed low.

“Where did you get all these warhorses!”

The middle-aged man’s tone wasn’t especially harsh when he asked, and yet to Li Diudiu’s ears, it felt as though if he didn’t answer immediately, blades and spears would rise like a forest around him and cut him to pieces in an instant.

“Picked them up.”

Li Diudiu answered at once, then pointed back the way he’d come. “Just back there, twenty or thirty li or so, at a town — a lot of people died, and the streets were full of these horses with no one daring to lead them away, so I thought… I’d just take them.”

The middle-aged man looked him over, as if trying to see whether he was lying, but Li Diudiu — someone who, alongside his master, survived entirely on acting skills out in the martial world — was not so easily seen through, even by eyes as sharp as this man’s.

“Picked them up?”

Beside the middle-aged man, a young general spurred his horse forward, studying Li Diudiu carefully as well, then frowned.

“Why do I feel like I’ve seen you somewhere before?”

The man swung down off his horse and walked up to Li Diudiu. “Do you know me?”

Li Diudiu thought to himself, how could he not know him — what a coincidence this was.

He answered quickly, “I know you, Young General. A few months back, my master and I were on our way to Ji Prefecture, and we ran into you along the road. You even gave us some dry rations.”

This young general was none other than Luo Jing. He had no particular memory of it, only a vague sense that Li Diudiu looked familiar.

Li Diudiu offered a reminder. “My master wanted to read your fortune, Young General, but you said there was no need — you said you didn’t believe in gods and spirits.”

A flicker of recognition crossed Luo Jing’s face; he nodded, then turned to the middle-aged man. “Father, I recall a little of it now — this boy and his master are Daoist priests.”

Hearing him say the word “Father,” Li Diudiu felt a jolt in his heart. So this short, stocky man was none other than Luo Geng, the cavalry general whose might shook the northern frontier.

The common folk regarded him with both reverence and resentment — reverence, because without him holding the north, the steppe cavalry and the Black Martial border army would surely have slaughtered the common people again and again without restraint; resentment, because Luo Geng was far too brutal — in his eyes, the lives and deaths of common people mattered less than a single ox, let alone a warhorse.

Luo Geng guarded the northern frontier, but he cared nothing for the common people. What he cared about was the reputation of soldiers, the military glory of Great Chu.

“So it’s General Luo.”

Li Diudiu bowed once more, hastily.

“Hm?”

Luo Geng asked him, “Why do you react this way?”

Li Diudiu said, “My master once told me that in his whole life, there were only two men he truly respected — one was the late Great General Xu Qulu, and the other is the present-day Great General Luo Geng.”

Hearing this, Luo Geng laughed heartily. “I’m not yet a Great General.”

Li Diudiu said, “But in the eyes of the common people, you’ve long since been a Great General.”

Luo Geng sighed. “The eyes of the common people are far cleaner, far clearer, than those of the people in the imperial court.”

Luo Jing bowed slightly. “Father, these words…”

Luo Geng nodded. “I understand.”

He pointed at Li Diudiu. “Give him some silver as payment. These warhorses I’ll be taking along to reinforce the army — a child like you dragging along all these horses is nothing but a burden, and worse, it’ll bring disaster down on you. Are you willing?”

Li Diudiu thought, you must be dreaming.

But how could he say no? Even though he desperately wanted to.

“As the Great General commands. Truly, no payment is necessary.”

Luo Geng would never bully a child like this. He ordered his men to give Li Diudiu several dozen taels of silver — he wasn’t sure of the exact amount, but it was a pouch stuffed full, and Li Diudiu, sharp enough to judge by feel alone, could tell at once it was silver, not copper coins.

So he hurriedly offered a few more words of thanks.

“Let’s move out.”

Luo Geng waved a hand, and the column slowly set off once more.

After a few steps, Luo Geng suddenly stopped again and turned back to look at Li Diudiu. “Your master is a Daoist priest — have you studied physiognomy, the reading of faces?”

Li Diudiu answered, “I haven’t learned it well.”

Luo Jing lowered his voice. “Father, didn’t you say you don’t believe in gods and spirits? Why ask a boy like this?”

Luo Geng shook his head. “My heart’s uneasy. Before we set out for Ji Prefecture this time, plenty of people urged me not to go — said that going could bring great disaster. I came anyway, but even so…”

He looked at Li Diudiu. “Just say it — can you see anything?”

Li Diudiu felt a flicker of panic, but answered earnestly, bowing low. “I already told you just now, Great General.”

His master had always said: the more profound and unfathomable you appear, the better.

Luo Geng said, “I told you too — I’m not yet a Great General.”

He suddenly paused, then burst into laughter. “Good, good, good! I’ll take your good words as an omen! Give him a bit more reward money.”

Luo Geng’s mood brightened, happier than if he’d gained several dozen more warhorses.

Luo Jing, walking beside his father, asked, puzzled, “Father, why put such faith in the words of a mere boy?”

Luo Geng replied, “Once a man has lived long enough, when he’s uncertain how to act, he might do well to ask a child. When you reach my age, you’ll understand — sometimes, the direction a child points to, the judgment a child makes, proves surprisingly useful, because they have no hidden agendas.”

He laughed. “As I see it — that boy just now, he’s quite naive indeed.”