A month and a half later, in Yuzhou City.
Cao Lie dragged himself with great difficulty out of that supremely comfortable bed. He felt there was a demon living in it that had put a curse on him — if he didn’t sleep a certain number of hours each day, he simply couldn’t get up.
He felt he had the will to exorcise demons, but lacked the power to act on it.
Every daily battle with this demon ended with his own surrender. He knew it wasn’t that he lacked the desire to win — he simply lacked the ability.
Truthfully, these past two years had been the most comfortable of Cao Lie’s life. He drifted through his days in Yuzhou as leisurely as a little bird.
The task Li Chi had entrusted him with was to oversee the largest weapons workshop in the Central Plains, located in Yuzhou. This workshop produced over half of the Ning Army’s weapons and equipment, so its importance was self-evident.
Yuzhou was also the Central Plains’ greatest grain-producing region. Its harvest not only met the needs of Yuzhou’s own citizens but supplied grain provisions for at least half of the Ning Army.
The reason Li Chi had kept Cao Lie in Yuzhou was his unparalleled ability to coordinate affairs there. Things that other officials might struggle greatly to accomplish, Cao Lie could settle with a single word.
Though the Cao family had long since ceased to shine as brilliantly as before, their influence remained. That enormous influence came from the thousand tangled threads of their commercial connections.
When Yuzhou had just begun to recover, the silk industry started up again — but due to various factors, prices skyrocketed. Without waiting for Li Chi to say anything, Cao Lie personally summoned every merchant household and made it plain: Cao family’s silk trade would not raise its prices. If they insisted on doing so, the Cao family — which held a monopoly over Yuzhou’s land and water transportation routes — would see to it that not a single bolt of cloth from any silk merchant in Yuzhou ever made it out.
Cao Lie’s stance made these businessmen understand: the time for war profiteering had passed.
The great bed’s demonic power was formidable, but Cao Lie eventually broke free. When he rose to wash up, he feigned surprise upon discovering it was already nearly noon — a performance he went through every single day.
While he was eating, a servant came in to announce that someone from the Court of Justice had come to call.
Visitors from the Court of Justice always meant serious business, so Cao Lie quickly set down his chopsticks and went to wait in the study.
Half an hour later, a wanted criminal was placed under confinement in the Cao family’s rear courtyard, with Cao family guards keeping watch in rotating shifts around the clock.
After seeing off the men from the Court of Justice, Cao Lie sat alone in his study, deep in thought.
Though the Court of Justice’s men had not said explicitly when this criminal would be needed, they had revealed the man’s identity to Cao Lie.
This man was none other than the Deputy Prefect of Yuezhou — a trusted aide of Xu Ji. He had been seized by the Court of Justice, yet was not being held in their prison. The more Cao Lie thought about it, the more something felt off.
Cao Lie was a sharp man. Within moments, he had puzzled out what lay behind it.
He guessed: this criminal wasn’t needed *now* — he would be needed *after* the Prince of Ning proclaimed himself Emperor. And even then, not immediately. It might be several years into the new dynasty before he’d be used. So this man would need to be kept in his custody for at least a few years.
Just thinking about it gave Cao Lie a headache.
The Prince of Ning intended to let Xu Ji grow powerful — and then cut him down at the most critical moment.
Think about it: by then the dynasty would be several years old. The civil and military officials who had followed Li Chi across the battlefield would have already enjoyed years of comfortable living. More than a few might have grown complacent. They were all meritorious subjects — difficult to deal with if they needed to be punished.
So using someone of Xu Ji’s stature as a warning shot would be far more effective than lecturing those meritorious officials directly.
People who were arrogant about their achievements would be no small number — every one of them had clawed their way through mountains of blades and seas of blood. Li Chi didn’t want them, after achieving fame and glory, to end up being removed for violating the law.
Thinking all this, Cao Lie thought about himself.
He couldn’t help but feel a measure of relief.
Because from the very beginning, Li Chi had been protecting him.
On the surface, Li Chi looked like a greedy fiend — constantly appropriating Cao family assets for public use. But in reality, that was plugging people’s mouths. By any normal reckoning, the Cao family’s vast holdings — half of which were assets that couldn’t bear the light of day — should have been entirely absorbed by the Prince of Ning. Yet Cao Lie still held such a substantial fortune. Wasn’t that proof enough of Li Chi’s regard for him?
And so Cao Lie had to think about his own future.
The Cao family’s most visible assets were still overland and river transport. After a long period of reflection, he decided to write Li Chi a personal letter.
The letter’s content was roughly this: *My lord’s campaign in Shuzhou has an overextended supply line, and the attrition of provisions along the route is enormous. I therefore wish to hand the Cao family’s land and water transport operations to military management, so as to maximally support the western campaign’s logistics.*
After writing it, Cao Lie sat deep in thought for a long while — then tore the letter up and threw it into the brazier.
He called toward the door: “Please summon the senior managers from the business. Tell them I’m going on a long journey and need to give them instructions.”
Then he muttered to himself: “I’m carving off this much flesh and handing it to you. The least you can do is praise me to my face — and even that’s not enough. I’ll need to eat at your table for several months to call it even.”
The next morning, Cao Lie set off with his retinue at first light. That demon in the comfortable bed must have been astonished — today’s Cao Lie was remarkably hard to beat.
Another month and a half later, Shuzhou.
By now it was already the fourth month, and Shuzhou’s scenery was beautiful as an immortal realm on earth.
The Ning Army’s two hundred thousand troops had been encamped at the foot of Meishan for some time — neither advancing nor withdrawing. Yet it was not the Ning Army that suffered; it was the Shuzhou army in the Meishan stronghold, which had been under siege for half a year.
Originally there had been over four hundred thousand Ning Army troops at the foot of Meishan, but after spring came, Shen Shancao had led two hundred thousand away. She had swung around the Meishan camp and Mei City, striking northwest. If all went well, she would soon join up with Tang Anchen, who was driving southeast from the northwest.
Li Chi, meanwhile, had once again made full use of his talent for being a hands-off supervisor, spending his days at the foot of Meishan in comfortable idleness.
When the weather was fine, he and Gao Xining would go hiking and sightseeing. Every worthwhile spot within a hundred li had been walked.
The Ning Army drilled as normal each day beneath Meishan — everything at wartime readiness, except for the actual fighting.
When Cao Lie arrived at the Ning Army camp in Shuzhou, he saw that Li Chi seemed to have put on a bit of weight. He understood immediately that Li Chi had been living very comfortably these past six months.
And truly, Shuzhou’s climate was nourishing.
Unlike other places, Shuzhou’s cuisine could satisfy almost every palate.
A northerner visiting Yuezhou would marvel at the variety and refinement of the food — but before long, find the flavors too delicate, far removed from what northern tastes were used to.
Go to the northwest, and the food was mostly beef and mutton. For people from Ji or Yuzhou, it would feel the same as when they first arrived in Yuezhou — novel and delicious at first, but after a while, they’d pine for the taste of pork.
Shuzhou was different. People from all corners of the realm — nine in ten — could find food to their satisfaction here. And eating it day after day, they’d feel neither resistance nor weariness.
When Li Chi noticed that Cao Lie had actually lost some weight, his first thought was: *Did you ruin your family’s business? Have you fallen on hard times?*
Behind the Ning Army camp there was a stone-stepped mountain path. The mountain was about thirty li from Meishan, so it offered no tactical advantage. At the top there was a pavilion, a Daoist temple, and a Buddhist monastery — but with the war on, almost no civilians came up.
Li Chi’s idea was to take Cao Lie to eat something good at the Daoist temple: the vegetarian cuisine there was exceptional, and he wanted Cao Lie to try it.
Cao Lie said: I’ve come ten thousand *li*, and you take me to eat vegetables? That doesn’t look like I’ve fallen on hard times — it looks like *you* can’t afford anything better.
Li Chi tossed Cao Lie a bow and said: you want meat? The mountain is full of it — shoot what you want.
In the pavilion, Li Chi sat watching Cao Lie take aim at a wild rabbit in the distance. Watching that clumsy stance, he felt an unexpected pang of sympathy for the man.
It wasn’t as though the Court of Justice hadn’t been sending Li Chi reports on Cao Lie. Every month a letter came from Yuzhou. More than once the letters mentioned that Cao Lie seemed to have grown somewhat listless — sleeping until noon every day, no longer practicing martial cultivation, barely socializing. With the merchants of Yuzhou, big and small, he wouldn’t meet unless absolutely necessary. With the official circles of Yuzhou, even less.
*Lazy and gluttonous* would describe half of Cao Lie’s life; the other half was *idle and aimless*.
But this was exactly why Li Chi felt for him.
Cao Lie was using this way of living to tell everyone: *I’m just a wealthy good-for-nothing with no ambitions.* He’d stopped cultivating. Stopped socializing. Of his old habits, the only one he’d kept was his frequent visits to the pleasure quarters.
Cao Lie wasn’t doing this to make Li Chi feel at ease — he knew Li Chi had never doubted him. He was doing it to make the Prince of Ning’s civil and military officials feel at ease. Because with the Cao family’s holdings as large as they were, how many people would be watching? And given the Cao family’s former background, even if Cao Lie didn’t dare do anything, there were those who would say he should be eliminated.
Li Chi watched that man somehow fail to hit a rabbit sitting perfectly still, and quietly sighed to himself.
A man who was idle and gluttonous and perpetually drowsy, spending his evenings in the pleasure quarters.
And he’d lost weight.
“Let’s go to the riverside.”
Li Chi called out to Cao Lie.
Cao Lie turned: “Is that your subtle way of mocking me for missing?”
Li Chi shook his head. “No.”
Cao Lie was about to say he didn’t believe it when Li Chi added: “Not subtle at all. I’m telling you directly — you’re useless right now.”
Cao Lie snorted, handed the bow to a nearby Ning Army soldier, and walked toward Li Chi. “And fishing is supposed to show I’m not useless? I suspect you want to go fishing just to watch my uselessness from another angle.”
Li Chi said: “I’ll fish, you watch. Once I catch something, I can mock your uselessness without even needing to look.”
Cao Lie: “Since you want to get your hands dirty yourself, why didn’t you go catch that rabbit?”
Li Chi said, very calmly: “Things you can’t catch, I don’t need to bother with.”
Cao Lie paused.
Then Li Chi smiled at him and said: “Things I can catch, I can give you whenever I like.”
And so Cao Lie smiled too.
—