When Yuanzhen came to, he couldn’t even tell if it was still the same day. He opened his one remaining eye and looked around. The environment seemed unusual — confined, very confined, his body able to move within only a very small range, and there was a faint swaying motion. For a moment he couldn’t piece together where he was.

After a while longer, it came to him. He was stuffed inside a burlap sack. The swaying was because he was riding in a cart.

“Who’s out there!”

He threw all his remaining strength into struggling, but his body still had no power in it. The voice that came out was hoarse and rough.

“Whoever’s out there is of no concern to you. You being in there is what matters.”

Someone answered him.

Yuanzhen recognised the voice. It was that young Tingwei Bureau Qianban.

The first time he’d laid eyes on the man, he had doubted the fellow was even twenty years old. Now he was this person’s prisoner — and only now did he revise that first impression. Someone not yet twenty couldn’t have outmanoeuvred him.

Ye Xiaoqian glanced at the sack and poked it with the scale rod he was now holding. “Where’s your mouth?”

He kept poking and asking, which had a mildly degrading quality to it.

So Yuanzhen responded with a torrent of abuse.

Ye Xiaoqian listened, then smiled. “Thank you.”

Then he proceeded to knock the scale rod against the location from which the voice had come — several solid strikes, not excessive in force, but the rod was metal, and striking the mouth with metal was naturally quite painful.

After roughly six, seven, eight strikes, the man in the sack finally had the sense to go quiet.

And finally realised, too, that it was his own shouting that had let Ye Xiaoqian find his mouth.

So the man had even said thank you.

“I was originally going to ask where your mouth was so I could cut an opening and pass you some food,” Ye Xiaoqian said. “Qianban Daren was quite right — the great majority of criminals taken by the Tingwei Bureau need a good working-over first. Otherwise they don’t understand the situation they’re in, don’t understand the conditions they’re operating under, and go on thinking themselves terribly important.”

Tao Xiaomi, seated beside Ye Xiaoqian, asked, “Which Qianban Daren said that?”

He had followed Ye Xiaoqian for two full months by now; naturally he knew that “Qianban Daren once said” was Ye Xiaoqian’s habitual expression.

Ye Xiaoqian replied, “The world’s youngest, most capable, most charming, and most handsome Qianban, Ye Xiaoqian, said that.”

Tao Xiaomi asked, “Qianban Daren — how old are you actually?”

Ye Xiaoqian asked back, “How old do I look to you?”

Tao Xiaomi had always been curious, but it had always felt somewhat impolite to ask directly.

If Ye Xiaoqian hadn’t just said that bit about being “youngest,” he wouldn’t have felt comfortable asking now.

Ye Xiaoqian answered, “Eighteen and a half.”

He was plainly answering Tao Xiaomi — but unexpectedly, the sack gave a convulsive twitch.

Eighteen and a half. He had been beaten by someone eighteen and a half years old?

Tao Xiaomi was also taken aback. He’d assumed Ye Xiaoqian was at least in his twenties, simply young-looking.

Ye Xiaoqian glanced at the spot on the sack where he’d been striking. A small patch had turned red. The man’s mouth had been broken open.

“That was a bit too hard,” Ye Xiaoqian said. “Du Tingwei did instruct us that this man must be brought back alive for interrogation. If his mouth is damaged, how are we supposed to question him?”

He poked at Yuanzhen with the scale rod again. “You heard me say all of that — you’re not going to bite off your own tongue, are you?”

Yuanzhen wouldn’t.

Even knowing that he was in this position, that falling into the hands of the Tingwei Bureau would mean nothing good for him — a man like him would not choose to end his own life.

As long as there was a single fraction of a chance to live, he would not surrender it.

“Don’t worry. You think you can goad me into suicide with words like those? Stop dreaming.”

Yuanzhen shot back.

Ye Xiaoqian said, “Let me guess at your plan for keeping yourself alive. The moment you’re brought before Du Tingwei Daren, or brought before the Prince of Ning, you’ll say: you understand Heiwu thoroughly, and if they spare your life you can stay and help them against Heiwu. Am I right?”

Yuanzhen didn’t respond. But in truth, that was exactly what he had planned.

Ye Xiaoqian continued, “You’ll also say: you hold a position of no small standing in Heiwu. You understand Heiwu’s armies. You understand the Heiwu Khan Emperor. You could even draw a map of Heiwu for the Prince of Ning. You may not know the Prince of Ning in great detail — but you understand perfectly what the appeal of an enemy nation’s map would be to him.”

“And you won’t produce that map easily. You’ll stall by every means available, looking for a chance to escape. If no chance comes, you’ll find ways to prolong your life for as long as possible.”

Ye Xiaoqian let out a soft sigh.

He looked at the sack. “And even if you do begin to draw the map, everything you produce will be false. But no one will be able to prove it’s false.”

This time, Yuanzhen couldn’t hold himself back. He said coldly, “Mountains and rivers don’t move. Take the map I draw, go out through the pass and look around — the truth or falseness of it will be obvious.”

Ye Xiaoqian said, “And you knew I was going to say that.”

Yuanzhen went silent again.

Ye Xiaoqian poked at him once more with the scale rod. “Of course you won’t put the mountains and rivers in the wrong places. But you can put Heiwu’s garrison positions in the wrong places. If you want to doctor it, who is going to stop you?”

“If someday our Ning armies march north, map in hand — your map — they’ll be countered by Heiwu the moment they move.”

Ye Xiaoqian leaned closer, his mouth practically against the sack. “I already tried to lead you into biting off your tongue. Why didn’t you oblige?”

Silence from inside the sack. Yuanzhen was thinking.

Ye Xiaoqian straightened up and tapped the sack lightly, rhythmically, with the scale rod.

“Let me tell you,” he said. “Because bringing back a living you is not what the Prince of Ning wants. It is his private order to me.”

Then he asked again, “Where is your mouth?”

Yuanzhen was frightened. Truly frightened. Because he understood now.

The Prince of Ning did not want the Northern Expedition. But he knew his great generals did. And especially with a man like Yuanzhen taken alive — those generals would grow excited.

But the Central Plains could no longer bear a great war. The Prince of Ning could not directly snuff out the desire for the Northern Expedition in his generals’ hearts. So the only option was to eliminate Yuanzhen.

Yuanzhen demanded in fury, “Then why didn’t you simply kill me outright?”

Ye Xiaoqian answered, “Because the Prince of Ning has always moved from one success to the next. And the Prince of Ning told me: in the eyes of our great generals, every such success is an omen.”

“Successfully capturing you is an omen that the Northern Expedition must happen. But then you took your own life. The generals will think — what a shame. And the Prince of Ning will soothe them: the Northern Expedition is not a one-time opportunity, there is nothing to despair over, let us train our soldiers well, let our people recover their strength — the Northern Expedition is still the work of the next ten years.”

For the third time, Ye Xiaoqian asked, “Where is your mouth?”

Yuanzhen did not make a sound. Did not dare.

Tao Xiaomi spoke up, “I think I know where his mouth is.”

The next instant, a gasp filled the carriage — Tao Xiaomi’s gasp.

“Someone call the physician! The prisoner is trying to bite off his tongue!”

The voice was loud; everyone outside the carriage heard it.

The physician came rushing over. He climbed into the cart and found that the sack holding the prisoner had been torn open — a small hole, its edges soaked in blood.

Tao Xiaomi said urgently, “I sensed he was going to bite his tongue, so I tore the sack open to stop him. But I was a moment too late.”

The physician checked the patient. He saw in Yuanzhen’s eyes terror, refusal, fury — and a thin thread of despair.

Yuanzhen wanted so desperately to tell this stranger of a physician: his tongue had been seized and wrenched out by the man called Tao Xiaomi, and then Tao Xiaomi had forced his jaw shut and bitten it off.

If an ordinary person had witnessed this, it might have haunted the rest of their life.

“This man is crucial,” Ye Xiaoqian said with equal urgency. “Is there any way to reattach the tongue?”

The physician looked at Ye Xiaoqian. His expression was complicated.

What an astoundingly foolish question. How could a Tingwei Bureau Qianban Daren not know the question was foolish?

But the physician decided that Qianban Daren was simply too anxious, anxiety having temporarily robbed him of good sense.

“Daren… once a tongue is severed, it cannot be reattached.”

Ye Xiaoqian let out a long, heavy sigh. “Then what are we to do — this man is from Heiwu, alive he could help us with the Northern Expedition.”

The physician said, “Then I will… see if I can at least keep him alive.”

Tao Xiaomi spoke then, in a rather peculiar tone. “In this condition — you can still keep him alive?”

The physician, in that moment, felt a question form in his mind. The way Tao Xiaomi said those words — it seemed as though he very much did not want this person to stay alive.

So the physician hesitated for a moment, then carefully ventured, “And is that… possible, or not possible?”

Tao Xiaomi said, “You are the physician. You tell us — possible or not possible?”

The physician looked at Tao Xiaomi’s expression. Then at Ye Xiaoqian’s. Then he let out a sigh.

“In my experience, it is most likely not possible.”

Ye Xiaoqian relaxed. Then, in an exceptionally courteous tone, he said, “In that case… what a genuine shame.”

Tao Xiaomi nodded. “A genuine shame indeed.”

—