Pei Shaohuai and Yan Chengzhao walked out of the Quanzhou government office. Bao Bantou immediately led men to seal the front and rear gates with official strips.
Not only the government office — the Quanzhou Maritime Trade Office and the Salt Transport Office were sealed as well, awaiting the court’s appointment of upright officials to take up their posts.
The Embroidered Guards carried a stretcher. Xie Jia’s body was covered with white hemp cloth, yet inevitably a corner of his robe showed, and the townspeople recognized it. What surprised Pei Shaohuai was that some common folk along the road wept for him — but upon reflection, it made sense. Xie Jia had bled the various parts of southern Fujian dry while enriching the prefectural city alone, and beneath money, there was no shortage of those who played the “devoted son.” Perhaps they were not even weeping for Xie Jia — perhaps they wept for themselves.
It was enough to show that this prefectural city had reached a state where governing it could no longer wait.
Pei Shaohuai walked alongside Yan Chengzhao on the road and said quietly, “Yan Commander is still the more thorough thinker.” Pei Shaohuai had gone alone to meet with Xie Jia and spoken with him in private — that alone would have been enough for the censors at court to point their fingers. To then add the charge of “using private means to force a fourth-rank official to take his own life” would have left him, once the rumors ran wild, vulnerable to attacks he could not even imagine.
Furthermore, what Xie Jia had confessed before his death would not only set the court’s imagination running — it would also put the opposing faction on careful guard.
Whereas Xie Jia “attempting to assassinate Pei Zhizhou” and dying under the blade of the Pacification Commission Commander was an entirely different matter to speak of.
“This one does not know what Pei Zhizhou is referring to.” Yan Chengzhao stepped up into the carriage first.
Inside the carriage, Pei Shaohuai rested both sleeves on the armrests. The edge of the ledger hidden in his sleeve pocket became faintly visible. His attempt to conceal it was swift and subtle — but the man sitting across from him was Yan Chengzhao. Nothing escaped those hawk-like eyes.
Yan Chengzhao was, after all, the Emperor’s loyal guard, and he was unaccustomed to keeping things from the Emperor. He furrowed his brow in discomfort. After a brief moment, he simply closed his eyes and feigned sleep — out of sight, out of mind. Yan Chengzhao understood that Pei Shaohuai must have extracted something from Xie Jia’s mouth, and that his deliberate concealment from him amounted to deliberate concealment from the Emperor. Though Yan Chengzhao did not know the reason, he trusted that Pei Shaohuai was not acting out of private gain.
That trust had been built over two or three years of working side by side.
Yan Chengzhao’s finishing stroke with the blade was, in the end, largely meant to help Pei Shaohuai conceal what was hidden in his sleeve.
By the time they returned to Shuang’an from Quanzhou, the sky had already darkened.
After returning to his residence, Pei Shaohuai hurriedly ate a few mouthfuls of food and then locked himself in his study.
By candlelight, he first read through Xie Jia’s handwritten ledger several times. Page after page, the handwriting varied in age — it was plain that entries had been added and words struck out at different times, and the edges of the pages showed irregular wear. All of this suggested it was not a fabrication.
Moreover, each entry could be matched against the canal transport records of Quanzhou port, and Pei Shaohuai found himself inclined to believe it by five or six parts out of ten.
He cross-referenced it carefully against the Salt Transport Office’s falsified general ledger and was able to roughly determine where the Maritime Trade Office had been diverting its funds — yet the more Pei Shaohuai looked, the more puzzled he became. Every entry pointed toward the Crown Prince: some into the imperial estates registered under the Crown Prince’s name, others into the official estates of the Three Excellencies and Three Mentors.
The Crown Prince resided directly under the Emperor’s eye. Even if he had truly received these funds, where would he spend them?
Moreover, when Pei Shaohuai had probed Xie Jia earlier that day, Xie Jia had blurted out “success makes the king, defeat makes the bandit” — which in itself suggested that the mastermind behind all this was not the Crown Prince.
If it truly were the Crown Prince, the Emperor need only examine the Eastern Palace’s accounts to detect the irregularity. In that case, what would be the point of the Salt Transport Office going to such lengths to falsify its ledgers?
He read through everything again, checking for anything he might have missed. The result was the same.
Pei Shaohuai could not work it out — was the Crown Prince being wrongly implicated, or was the Crown Prince playing a deeper game?
When he finally looked up, the window paper had already gone pale. He had been turning over ledger after ledger without realizing that night had become morning.
The drowsiness hit him all at once.
Pei Shaohuai put the ledger away and had intended to half-recline on the long chair for a short rest — but Shi Yue came and knocked on the door, persuading him back to the bedchamber.
He slept straight through the upper half of the morning. After midday, Nanny Chen reminded him: “Son-in-law, be careful when you head out early tomorrow — mind you don’t run into the young lad carrying the blood for discarding.”
Tomorrow was the day of the Wang Chuan Festival.
In a daze, Pei Shaohuai felt how quickly the days had passed — the twelfth month had come again, the north wind was blowing cold southward, and it was time to set sail.
The Wang Chuan Festival was a ritual held before seafarers set out — a form of the ancient exorcism rite known as Nuo. Nuo meant the driving out of plague demons.
Each clan wove bamboo into the shape of a vessel, pasted it over with five-colored paper to form the hull, and set up a seat for the deity inside. The paper boats were first carried to various temples for prayers, then taken to the shore to be burned.
There was also the custom of collecting the blood of pigs, dogs, chickens, and cattle, sealing it in buckets, and running it at full speed to the seaside to be poured into the surging waves. Only the strongest and most fortunately blessed young men were chosen for this task. Every household had to stay out of the way, lest they encounter something inauspicious.
All of it served a single purpose — to send misfortune away with the paper boats and the blood, so that the merchant vessels heading out to sea would travel safely and steadily all the way.
Pei Shaohuai acknowledged Nanny Chen: “I understand.”
The following day, Pei Shaohuai delayed his departure by half an hour, and naturally did not run into the fortunately blessed young man carrying the blood. On his way back at noon, however, he came across a troupe performing the Nuo ritual drama.
In front of a temple, a stage had been erected for the performance. Along the long street beyond, scores of Nuo deity performers danced and paraded their way through.
The Nuo ritual drama flourished most in Jiangxi, though it existed in other regions as well, each with its own customs and rites. One thing was always the same: dark robes and crimson skirts, heads crowned with Nuo deity masks, performing to movements that recalled ancient hunting dances — spear raised, shield thrust, exaggerated and comical.
In the great flowing procession, there were no fewer than several dozen Nuo deities. Their wooden lacquered masks were painted in vivid colors, some beautiful, some grotesque — there was the Crown Prince deity, imposing and regal; there was the Heavenly King, with wide, bulging eyes; there was the yaksha, with a fierce and frightful face; and there was even a seventh-rank county magistrate, grinning and genial.
When one bout of battle-dance concluded, the children swarmed around the Crown Prince deity, chasing after him, calling out “Crown Prince deity! Crown Prince deity!” — all scrambling to touch him and share in the auspicious fortune emanating from his form.
Chang Zhou, who was driving the horse alongside, remarked: “That Crown Prince deity dances beautifully — the man under the mask must surely be a seasoned old master.”
Hearing this, Pei Shaohuai was still for a few moments before something clicked — what had eluded him through the long night before last suddenly had a new answer. The Crown Prince deity’s mask was the most magnificent and imposing of all — who would not wish to wear it?
Pei Shaohuai turned the thought over quietly: the Crown Prince may not be the one pulling the strings from behind, but is it possible he truly did receive this sum of money — and that the other side was being so generous in sending it simply in order to put on the mask of the Crown Prince deity?
As for whether that mask was handed over willingly by the Crown Prince himself, or whether someone had schemed him into wearing it — that remained unknown.
In all his years at court, the number of times Pei Shaohuai had dealt with the Crown Prince could be counted on two hands. He could not claim to know him well.
Pei Shaohuai had never wished to involve himself in the affairs of the imperial household, and yet somehow he had sunk deeper into them without noticing. There was nothing to be done — in a world where imperial power was held entirely in one man’s hands, it was not a matter of the ruler choosing his ministers alone, but of ministers choosing their ruler as well. For the realm to have peace and the people to prosper, both a wise ruler and virtuous officials were indispensable.
The drums and music gradually fell silent. The Crown Prince deity reached into his robes and produced a great handful of preserved fruits to distribute among the children, who scattered away in delight. With a moment to rest, the Crown Prince deity lifted his mask — and just as Chang Zhou had said, beneath it was an elder with hair gone white.
Several days later, the seals were removed from the Lin, Chen, and Shangguan family residences in Quanzhou. Their households were searched, inventoried, and their assets turned over to the imperial treasury.
The matter was overseen by the Regional Commissioner, with Pei Shaohuai and Yan Chengzhao in charge of supervision.
Pool after pool of copper coins in underground vaults — that was no longer surprising. What did astonish Pei Shaohuai was the silver storage vault: round, plump silver ingots shaped like winter melons were stacked in rows on shelving, making the chests of broken silver beside them look pale by comparison.
Each silver melon was the size of a man’s embrace and could not be lifted bare-handed.
In the adjacent gold vault, solid horseshoe-shaped gold ingots lay heaped in clusters.
During the count, converting them to taels and mace proved too cumbersome — they could only be recorded for the time being as so many melons and so many horseshoes.
Three great clans, operating under the banner of “merchant-officials,” had held Quanzhou port in their grip for years. The gold and silver stockpiled in their hands amounted to this much — what they surrendered would only be a portion of it. Year after year, vast quantities of silver flowed into Da Qing — yet the imperial treasury ran short of silver, and the common people had none in their hands. It was because the silver had been buried in the underground vaults of these grasping merchants, solidifying into ingot after ingot of silver melons.
This also reminded Pei Shaohuai: after the opening of maritime trade, if the wealth did not flow into the hands of the common people, it would once again be a dead end all the same.
The silver coin policy still required forceful, sustained effort. It was necessary to compel merchants throughout the realm to exchange the silver they had hoarded underground and circulate it back into the world.
Outside Shuang’an Bay, the port opened wide to a thousand sails crowding in. Within the walls of Tong’an, the bustling markets rang with voices and the heavy rumble of carts and horses.
Since the announcement of the opening of maritime trade, the small city of Tong’an had become noticeably crowded.
The official road, still only half-constructed, had already begun to see merchants driving their horses in to sell goods — wave after wave of them, pouring into Shuang’an.
The maritime merchants from Da Qing’s northern regions, who typically set sail a full month earlier than Fujian merchants, learned that the pirates along the Fujian coast had been suppressed. The sea lanes no longer required them to take the long way around, skirting far out beyond the Penghu islands before heading south — they could now sail directly south along Da Qing’s coastline, and the journey was far less dangerous.
There were also maritime traders stopping temporarily in Shuang’an Bay to replenish their provisions.
The port basin, which had once seemed too large when first constructed, now seemed only just barely sufficient.
Shuang’an Port still needed to be expanded further.
Walking the streets of the city, there were more small stalls and peddlers everywhere, and even the teahouses where people gathered to chat over tea had grown crowded. A few months earlier, the porters had been anxious about finding no work — now, employers coming to the alleyways to hire hands were, if anything, more numerous than the porters themselves.
The Qi Family Hall had recently purchased a spacious courtyard, refurbished it into a clan school to provide education for more of their young, and now that the renovations were complete, they wanted to commission a fine wooden plaque.
This matter fell to the twenty-seventh elder.
As it turned out, when he went to the carpentry shop to ask, not only pear wood and sandalwood were unavailable — even southern elm and figured wood had been fully reserved.
“Elder, you’ve come a few days too late. Year’s end is approaching, and there have been far too many people rushing to commission plaques lately,” the shopkeeper explained. He was not the only one who had thought to establish a clan school — and then added, “On top of that, over these past two months, so many goods have poured into Shuang’an that lumber of all kinds has become the most expensive thing going. A shipment of wood I reserved at the start of the year was already intercepted by the new shipyard being built on the east side of the city.”
The twenty-seventh elder thought to try elsewhere.
The shopkeeper smiled: “Southern Fujian is visibly becoming prosperous, and it’s not just this one place that’s thriving. You’ll find the same situation anywhere else you go.”
Whether for repairing vessels, building new ones, or constructing houses and shops, lumber was indispensable everywhere.
And it was not only lumber whose price had gone up in the city — stone had as well.
Even the shopkeeper found it astonishing, and said with amused relish to the twenty-seventh elder: “Would you believe it — there’s actually a day when timber and stone can stand shoulder to shoulder in price with grain? These days, if you’re out walking on the street and your feet tire, there’s not even a loose stone to sit on.”
This drew laughter from all the carpenters busy at their work.
“What is there to find unbelievable? It’s all because we have an upright and clean-handed parent official.” The twenty-seventh elder murmured to himself. After a moment’s thought, having no other option, he paid a considerable sum and commissioned what was still a reasonably decent piece of wood for the plaque.
“Good eye, Elder — if you hadn’t moved on this today, there wouldn’t even be this one left to choose from by tomorrow.”
The twenty-seventh elder came away feeling a little deflated. He hobbled slowly out of the shop toward the prefecture office, still calculating inwardly that this piece of wood was perhaps not quite worthy of the characters Pei Zhizhou had agreed to inscribe — Pei Shaohuai had already promised to write the inscription for the clan school, and today was the day appointed for him to come and collect it.
When he arrived at the yamen, the Pei Zhizhou was occupied elsewhere, but he had specifically instructed Bao Bantou to pass the inscription to the twenty-seventh elder on his behalf.
“Great-uncle, please have a cup of tea first — I’ll go fetch it now.”
When the twenty-seventh elder unrolled the smooth, thick paper, he saw three large characters written upon it: “Hall for the People.” The brushwork carried no flourish of self-importance — it was dignified and measured.
Like the name itself: not “First Rank” or “Three Visits” or “Top of the List,” but “For the People” — a meaning that overflowed from the very characters on the page.
“What a fine name this is.” The twenty-seventh elder said happily, “The younger generations of the Qi clan must absorb at least a measure of this official’s great righteousness — only then will they be worthy of the three characters he took up his brush to write.”
At nightfall, on the isolated island outside Shuang’an Bay.
Standing on this island, one could look east and see the bright moon rising over the sea, and look west and see the lights of ten thousand households burning deep in the distance. On the island itself, even the largest torch felt cold and dim.
Tonight a bonfire had been lit, lending the desolate island a measure of warmth. Wang Chu stood before the assembled men, drained his bowl in one draught and smashed it down, then said: “Brothers, as you’ve all seen — the silver has been delivered to your wives and children. It is not a great sum, but it is enough for them to make a home and earn a living.”
Ever since his last meeting with Pei Shaohuai on the island, Wang Chu had given the order to sell off everything that could be sold, converting it into silver to be distributed among the men.
“After tonight, we will no longer call this island our home.” Wang Chu spoke with unmistakable sorrow, yet kept pushing his voice upward, nearly shouting as he issued his final command: “Tomorrow, brothers — follow me to take Xundao Island. There can be no failure.”
“Those who survive come ashore and go home — live quiet lives with your wives and children.”
“Do you see those lights burning on the far shore, night after night without fading? We will never want for work again. There is no need to scrape for a living on a blade’s edge.”
“Those who fall in battle — you will have redeemed your past wrongdoings. Even in the underworld, you can hold your heads high and be a hero among ghosts.”
To have lived as bandits on a desolate island — if they could not exchange that for some measure of merit and redemption, how could they go back to living on land? Wang Chu was going to lead his men to take Xundao Island.
The spy he had planted on Xundao Island had sent word: Xu Wu’s Japanese concubine was a cunning and calculating one. Mori Nikoto had read the situation clearly, weighed her options, and climbed into the bed of the fourth-in-command, helping him to rally the island’s men and restore their cohesion.
With the internal strife behind them, the bandits of Xundao Island were beginning to hatch other schemes once more.
The embers were reigniting.
When Wang Chu finished speaking, the faces of his men below glowed in the firelight. They too raised their bowls and drank deeply, smashing them down as they called out: “We swear to follow Big Brother to the death!”
The voices were full and strong, the morale high — and yet Wang Chu could already smell the trace of disloyalty mixed in among them.
In the dead of night, no one on the island slept. They all waited for dawn, when the order would come to launch the boats and attack.
The sound of waves surged on all sides, crashing and churning without pause — loud enough to swallow a great many other sounds.
At last, a stout-faced man knocked on Wang Chu’s door and entered, reporting: “Big Brother — the second, third, and fourth commanders have taken a hundred-odd men and slipped onto the boats in the night. They’re heading toward Xundao Island.”
“Which boats did they take?”
“Just as Big Brother anticipated — the three largest.”
So it was. There were those who had grown too accustomed to eating from that unclean bowl, whose bandit hearts refused to die.
If they truly defected to Xundao Island, what future would be left for the remaining brothers? And even if there were a future — how could any of them ever hold a clean bowl again?
Wang Chu stared out at the dark night sea. Only a few breaths passed, yet it felt like an eternity. He gave the order without hesitation: “Go. Do it as planned — open fire on their rear holds.”
The rear holds of those three ships had been packed with gunpowder in advance. Fire would set them ablaze in an instant.
The words repeated over and over in his mind — how he had gathered these brothers together, one by one. When Wang Chu finished speaking, his lips trembled faintly, and a cold ran through his entire body, arriving only after the fact — he himself did not know how he had managed to say the words aloud.
Wang Chu had rescued the second-in-command when the man was still a clumsy, impetuous young lad.
So many brothers, living side by side day and night — they had always been openly annoyed when Wang Chu pushed them to learn their characters, but not one of them had ever said “no.” How was it that… this time… they dared? Still without saying “no” — yet their bodies had spoken honestly by boarding the ship, going to pledge themselves to another “Big Brother.”
The stout-faced man was also reluctant at heart, and murmured softly, urging: “Big Brother — perhaps the brothers were only confused for a moment. Why not go after them and try to talk them back?”
“Do as I say.” Seeing the man had not moved, Wang Chu slammed his fist on the table and roared: “Do as I say!”
The moment they had slipped away in the night toward Xundao Island, the bond of all those years together had become a joke.
All under heaven stir in pursuit of gain, and all under heaven bustle in the chase of profit.