The great army moved forward at a steady pace. It was the height of summer warmth, and Shu Province stretched out like a painting on all sides — beautiful scenery at every turn.

Yu Jiuling sat in the carriage with his legs dangling over the edge, watching. He wasn’t looking at the scenery. He was staring at the rear end of the draft horse pulling them.

Li Chi glanced at him. “What are you looking at?”

Yu Jiuling said: “Liege — am I sick?”

Li Chi’s heart tightened at once. He immediately reached out to take hold of Yu Jiuling’s wrist to feel his pulse. He was no master physician, but he was studious, and had acquired a fair grasp of the art.

Yu Jiuling shook his head. “Not that kind of sick.”

Li Chi still wasn’t satisfied; he raised his hand and pressed the back of it to Yu Jiuling’s forehead. “No fever,” he said.

He raised a finger and pointed at the horse. “Liege — look at that horse’s backside. Does it have, just slightly… a certain allure?”

Li Chi stared at him.

He sighed. “You don’t have a fever. You have a different kind of heat.”

“That’s not right though,” Yu Jiuling said. “Even if I do have that kind of heat, it shouldn’t be pointed at a horse’s—”

Just then Gao Xining came over from behind, climbed up into the carriage, and asked: “What did yours come down with?”

Yu Jiuling said: “Came into some money.”

Gao Xining extended her hand. “Hand it over.”

Li Chi: “…”

Gao Xining said, in all seriousness: “I need to help you save up properly. Save enough and I’ll find you a wife.”

Li Chi: “That’s just you wanting spending money.”

Gao Xining: “Before we’re married, I’m saving it for you. After we’re married, I’m still saving it for you.”

Li Chi: “My thanks.”

Gao Xining settled in beside Li Chi, looked ahead, and after a moment murmured to herself: “Why is that horse’s backside so enormous.”

Yu Jiuling snorted out a laugh.

Riding on horseback, one naturally cannot observe the swaying of the horse’s haunches as it walks. Only from a carriage, watching like this, does one begin to appreciate that Yu Jiuling’s sentiments were not entirely without basis.

They were still roughly two days’ travel from Meicheng. An army on the march naturally cannot move at the pace of a light-traveling rider.

The vast column pressed forward, its vanguard already a dozen li ahead while the rearmost units hadn’t yet departed.

Since entering Shu Province, there had been far fewer difficult battles than anticipated.

Before crossing into Shu, Li Chi and his generals had all agreed: given the terrain, taking the province would be a brutal, grinding struggle. There would be many hard fights, many desperate fights, many battles that would cost them dearly.

And yet from start to present, though the campaign had been lengthy by any measure, not a single truly savage battle had been fought.

Tantai Yajing had advanced with remarkable speed; after destroying Yan Yusheng’s Shu forces, taking the entire southwest of Shu Province was only a matter of time.

So the mood in the army was relaxed, full of idle chatter and laughter as they marched.

In the carriage, Yu Jiuling turned to Li Chi and said: “I’ve heard the hotpot in Meicheng is the finest in the world. Once we take it, we absolutely must go have a proper meal.”

Li Chi replied: “You’ve been staring at a horse’s backside, and now you want hotpot. If the horse knew, it would probably think you were eyeing it for the meat.”

Yu Jiuling laughed. “That won’t do. A backside that magnificent — I wouldn’t want to slice any of it off.”

Gao Xining: “Jiuling, you’re… feverish, aren’t you.”

Yu Jiuling: “Just a touch, just a touch…”

“Report!”

At that moment, a rider came galloping up from ahead, visibly dusty from hard travel. Reaching the carriage, he leaped down from the saddle and unslung the pack from his back, drawing out a dispatch which he presented with both hands to Li Chi.

“My liege — a military report from General Tang.”

Li Chi accepted the dispatch and said: “No need to rush back to your post. Go to the rear carriages and rest. I’ll have someone bring you something to eat.”

The dispatch rider bowed his thanks and went to rest.

This was an urgent report sent by Tang Pidi when he left Qing Province, dispatched via the military courier relay.

Now that the Central Plains had come under Ning control, the courier network had been reorganized across the land — a relay station every hundred li, with riders switching horses and riders at each stop, the message carried without pause, day or night.

A report from as far away as Qing Province could arrive in just one month; by comparison, a full army marching from Qing Province to Shu Province would take a year.

The old Chu dynasty’s courier network had been far inferior — both in station count and in staffing. Li Chi’s primary concern was the northern and western frontiers, so two or three years ago he had already had Lian Xiwu build a denser network of relay stations in the northwest and north. For urgent frontier news, word could reach the new capital of Chang’an in only a dozen or so days.

Li Chi was also planning to build two great military highways in the north — one from the Western Frontier to Chang’an, one from the Northern Frontier to Chang’an. If completed, the speed of troop deployment to the borders could be doubled.

Constructing the Western Frontier road, however, would require cutting through one stretch of extraordinarily treacherous terrain. The Chu dynasty had originally tried to build it out, but the work had dragged on and off for decades and never been completed.

Road-building was an enormous undertaking, and carving a path through mountain passes above all else. In the latter days of Chu, with everything in a state of decay, such projects had merely become a vehicle for officials to line their pockets. The result was that the Ministry of Works eventually ran out of silver to continue.

In the time of the father of Pei Qi’s predecessor, Yang Jing, the Ministry of Works had finally had enough, and submitted a memorial requesting an investigation into where the funds for the Western Frontier Road had gone.

The old Emperor assigned the case to the head eunuch, Liu Chongxin. The officials from the Ministry of Works, together with the regional officials in the Western Frontier area, reportedly offered Liu Chongxin bribes totaling several hundred thousand taels of silver.

Liu Chongxin, needing to report back to the Emperor, left untouched all officials of higher rank who had paid more generously, and only went after those below the fifth rank. Even then, to his own surprise, he arrested over a hundred minor officials — and the recovered stolen silver amounted to nearly a million taels.

The Western Frontier Road project had been dragging on for decades, with successive officials enriching themselves from it before being transferred away — promoted, or simply retiring home as wealthy men.

A Ministry of Works official had once calculated that based on the original budget, the road should have cost around fifteen million taels of silver. And yet decades later, after more than twenty-five million taels had been disbursed, it still wasn’t finished.

Li Chi later had people go and inspect the site himself. What they found was staggering: the methods those black-hearted officials had used to squeeze money out of the project were beyond belief.

Under Chu dynasty regulations, any conscripted laborer or craftsman who died in an accident was entitled to compensation of two hundred taels of silver per person. The founding Emperor of Chu, who established this rule as a measure to protect and show compassion for the common people, could never have imagined that it would one day become a tool for his officials’ corruption.

Those officials, claiming the work was urgent, forced large numbers of laborers to scale sheer cliffsides to chisel away rock — without providing them with proper safety equipment. Some particularly vicious officials even had their subordinates cut the ropes above, sending craftsmen plunging to their deaths.

In the early days of the Western Frontier Road’s construction, the number of fatalities officially reported to the court averaged around thirty to forty per year.

By the later years of Yang Jing’s reign, the reported death toll from the Western Frontier site had reached over three thousand six hundred in a single year.

Even Liu Chongxin, when he uncovered this, was incensed. He declared that these petty local officials were even more vicious than he was himself. That was the first time Liu Chongxin ordered mass executions in the name of legal rectification — and though he only went after officials below the fifth rank, it still brought some measure of justice to those who had died.

After Liu Chongxin’s investigation concluded, work on the Western Frontier Road stopped entirely.

After Li Chi sent Lian Xiwu to the northwest, Lian Xiwu personally walked the full length of the Western Frontier Road site.

His conclusion: the original Chu budget had actually been sufficient, but the fact that the road remained unfinished after decades was not entirely explained by official corruption. The terrain was simply brutal. Craftsmen had to hang from cliff faces to chisel out the passage — hewing a road wide enough for two carriages to pass side by side with nothing but hammers, one blow at a time.

So Lian Xiwu felt that even if construction restarted today, it could not be completed in any short time.

The matter was therefore set aside for now. Li Chi simply didn’t have enough money saved up yet.

Here in Shu Province, Li Chi felt his desire to build roads stirring once more.

More than half the people of Shu lived in rugged, mountain-locked terrain. Without passable roads, their poverty could not be solved. Shu’s natural abundance meant nothing if its goods could not be carried out.

While Yu Jiuling had been staring at the horse’s hindquarters, Li Chi had been calculating what it would take to improve the lives of the people living in Shu’s mountain villages — and where that money might come from.

He certainly couldn’t rely on Pei Qi to bankroll the whole thing.

Even at the height of Pei Qi’s power, stripping him of his wealth might have made it possible. But Pei Qi wasn’t nearly as rich now — Yang Xuanji and Han Feibao had burned through no small portion of his silver.

“Jiuling.”

Li Chi had suddenly thought of something.

He looked at Yu Jiuling and said: “Fetch paper and brush. I need to write two letters.”

Yu Jiuling promptly had someone bring writing materials over, and Li Chi composed his letters right there in the carriage — one to Tang Ancheng, one to General Tantai Qi.

The gist was: a short time ago, some Western Region people had actually had the nerve to conspire with Han Feibao, attempting to attack our northwest frontier. Such brazenness cannot be tolerated.

He instructed Tantai Qi and Tang Ancheng to make appropriate military movements toward the Western Regions — not to conquer, but to extract payment. Let them see how much they were willing to pay for the Ning Army’s pledge not to come and take the money themselves.

If the Western Region peoples were sufficiently generous in their contributions, the matter of rebuilding the Western Frontier Road and constructing roads throughout Shu Province might actually have a source of funding.

Li Chi wrote while Yu Jiuling watched from beside him, and the more he read, the more he felt the urge to laugh.

“Liege,” Yu Jiuling said, “you’re demanding money from the Western Region people, and then building a road that goes straight to the Western Regions — to make it easier to beat them up. How would General Tantai even open that conversation?”

Yu Jiuling cleared his throat and put on a pompous voice: “I, Tantai Qi, am here. You — hand over money.”

“*Why do you need money, great general?*”

“To build a road.”

“*Why build a road, great general?*”

“To come beat you up.”

He muttered out the little exchange to himself, then burst out laughing.

Li Chi thought about it. Somehow it made a certain kind of sense.

He picked up a third sheet of paper. “Jiuling, you make a fair point. Old Tang is in Yan Province right now — I should write to him as well. Have him go tell the Bohai people to hand over money. No money, and he’ll smack them around.”

Yu Jiuling said: “The Bohai people are poor.”

Li Chi said: “Without trying, how do we know just how poor they are? Without trying, how do we know whether they can become even poorer?”

Yu Jiuling fell silent for a moment, then looked at Gao Xining: “Big brother — your man, the way he goes after money…”

He hadn’t finished the sentence before Gao Xining said with great pride: “Devastatingly stylish.”

Yu Jiuling sighed, then snorted with laughter.

“A hundred years from now, all the small nations surrounding our Central Plains will probably be very, very bitter: *We have long suffered under the Ning people!*”

Li Chi heard this and stopped. He stared for a moment, then looked at Gao Xining: “Wife — write that down. Our descendants must remember this for generations. This is *exactly* how it’s done.”

Let all the little kingdoms surrounding Great Ning chant it every day —

*Under heaven, all have long suffered Ning.*

—