Tang Pidi felt as though everything from this point onward had been a dream. They had encountered a baffling troupe on the road, saved them, learned of the Carefree Kingdom by pure chance, arrived at the Carefree Kingdom, and were now — also by pure chance — about to receive an enormous gift from the Carefree King.

A gift, yes. Because for no particularly clear reason, the Carefree King had decided that Li Chi was a hero — a warrior of a kind he himself could never be.

The reason he thought this was that the Carefree King’s grandfather, the old Carefree King before him, had one day on a whim written down some of his reflections in a notebook — and those reflections had mapped themselves precisely onto Li Chi.

Tang Pidi looked at Yu Jiuling. Yu Jiuling wasn’t troubling himself with any of this. He only knew that they were about to be rich, and that he wouldn’t have to stand in front of a hundred Blade-Hangmen while they threw knives at him. Was that not glorious? And more than glorious?

Li Chi, however, was somewhat hesitant. He was fully aware of the fragility lurking behind the Carefree Kingdom’s prosperity and civilization — the place had no capacity to resist outside enemies, and its gold and silver were not without limit.

Seeing Li Chi hesitate, the Carefree King seemed to understand his thoughts. He was a very, very fat man, but certainly not a man with a lazy mind. At the very minimum, his mind was not lazy.

“I can see concern in your eyes.”

The Carefree King asked Li Chi: “What are you thinking?”

Li Chi answered honestly: “Prosperity is the pillar that holds up the peace and flourishing of this place. Taking the Carefree Kingdom’s wealth away is like swinging an axe at that pillar.”

“Young man.”

The Carefree King looked into Li Chi’s eyes and said: “If you use the gold and silver you take away to help you sooner realize your ambition of bringing peace to the outside world — do you think the pillar that supports this place becomes more solid, or less stable? Besides, gold and silver, frankly, are not matters that trouble me at all.”

He smiled. “If the outside world remains in chaos forever — the way the records left by our ancestors describe it, people eating people, people killing people, the common folk dying before the kingdom even falls — then this place will sooner or later be discovered. Sooner or later, the people here will become victims slaughtered by those demons.”

He rose to his feet. He was tall.

In a voice tinged with sadness he said: “Look at this place. No one here is willing to use violence — they regard violence as deeply shameful. If a demon were to come, the people here would have no power to resist. If you can make the outside world free of such demons, we can endure here much longer. And if one day the outside world truly has no more war, we can even walk outside and see it.”

The Carefree King let out a long breath. “Do you think this place is large? It isn’t large at all. I don’t even dare walk through the entire mountain settlement too quickly — I’m afraid that if I grow familiar with every corner of it too soon, everything will start to feel dull.”

Li Chi was momentarily at a loss for words.

The Carefree King said: “You understand the outside world better than I do. I understand this place better than you do. My only hope is that one day you will come here and tell me, smiling, that there is no more war out there — that the people outside are no longer like demons. Then our people will be able to walk out and see the world.”

He asked Li Chi: “Does Baocheng still stand?”

Li Chi shook his head. “Baocheng is no more. Now it is called Jizhou. And perhaps one day Jizhou itself will be gone as well.”

The Carefree King fell silent.

“If what you can see here, what you can learn here, will help you greatly in the future… then it is fate. Fate brought you here. Fate lets you take away this heaven-given gold and silver.”

The Carefree King began to walk, talking as he went. “Follow me.”

As Li Chi walked and talked with the Carefree King, he learned what the history of that era had truly looked like — things the people of present-day Chu no longer knew, because the historical records simply did not contain them.

The overwhelming majority of Chu’s people had never heard that something called the Youshan Kingdom had ever existed. The most important reason was that when Chu was founded, all historical records relating to Youshan had been destroyed.

Even those who knew Youshan had existed mostly believed it to be a very small, insignificant kingdom. Perhaps someone like Gao Yuanzhang was the rare exception.

The Carefree King told Li Chi that Youshan had indeed been destroyed by Chu’s armies — but that Youshan had effectively existed in name only long before the Chu armies marched north. This nominal existence had persisted for nearly a hundred years.

The Mongol Empire had ruled a vast territory, and its cavalry had swept southward using Youshan as a stepping stone — because at its root, Youshan was a branch of the Iron Cranes. But Youshan had absorbed so much of the Central Plains culture over so many generations that its people did not want to admit they were of Iron Crane descent.

After the Iron Crane people split, the branch that remained on the grasslands was initially defeated by Youshan. They split again into two factions: one heading northwest, one heading northeast.

The Iron Crane people who went deep into the northeastern grasslands, after several centuries of harsh transformation, became extraordinarily fierce and powerful. When they returned to the grasslands they swiftly defeated every other people and built a unified steppe nation. They spent barely one year consolidating before launching their armies southward.

This time, Youshan could not hold them. The Iron Crane descendants who had founded Youshan were completely overrun by the descendants of the very Iron Crane people their ancestors had once defeated.

But the Mongol Empire did not destroy Youshan. Instead they forced the Youshan emperor to declare his submission, leaving only the city of Baocheng as the dynasty’s capital while the empire seized all other territories.

For the Youshan imperial family, that was nearly a hundred years of the most abject humiliation in their history. Their kingdom technically still existed, yet they were treated like animals in an enclosure, put on display for inspection.

Every generation of the Mongol Empire’s supreme khan would come to look at them, as one looks at animals. It was a humiliation beyond description.

The dawn of hope came nearly a century later. The Mongol Empire’s rule was crumbling. Rebel armies rose to resist across the land. The Youshan emperor assembled a military force, and at its peak, they had recovered nearly a third of Youshan’s original territory.

Then Chu’s armies arrived.

Those Chu armies had no equal. They won every battle they fought, grinding down enemies of whatever strength. What was even harder to believe was that the Mongol Empire’s cavalry — reputed to be invincible under heaven — were defeated by a Chu cavalry force assembled barely a year before.

That was the decisive battle that sealed the Mongol Empire’s fate. A hundred and forty thousand Mongol iron horsemen faced eighty thousand Chu cavalry — and were routed utterly.

The Chu armies marched north, sweeping away the Mongol Empire’s forces like so much dead wood. They swept away the Youshan Kingdom as well, just as it had glimpsed its first ray of hope.

In the eyes of the Chu armies, Youshan was simply a lackey of the Mongol Empire. Why else had it not been destroyed?

And so Chu’s armies received orders to burn everything connected with Youshan — including their capital.

None of this was written down. As Li Chi listened to the Carefree King recount it, the only thought in his mind — a thought entirely unrelated to the Mongol Empire or to Youshan — was this: *why were the Chu armies of that era invincible?*

Because they had faith.

The Chu armies of that time fought for belief. They believed their fighting could end the Mongol Empire’s oppression.

The Mongol Empire’s armies, meanwhile, vast as they appeared, had rotted from within. The Iron Crane people had become the ruling class, had declared themselves the first among all peoples — and then drowned in luxury. Such men could not fight.

Faith.

Li Chi held those two words deep in his heart.

He held even deeper the Carefree King’s words — that if the outside world settled into peace, if the world were rid of those who preyed on others like demons, then the people of the Carefree Kingdom would no longer have to hide in this place that only seemed like a paradise. In truth, they were trapped here, one day the same as the last, year after year.

When the Carefree King opened the doors to the underground palace, Li Chi’s group was struck dumb. This colossal underground palace might have been grander even than the great imperial palace of Dachu’s capital. The great hall they had just entered was so vast it made you wonder if your eyes were playing tricks on you.

Vast — unimaginably vast — so vast that the immediate instinct was disbelief.

The Carefree King said this was only one of more than a dozen halls of this scale in the underground palace. Such a palace would take days of exploration to see in full.

Inside the hall, stone-carved court officials all faced the direction of a throne — but the throne itself held no stone figure. The Carefree King said his ancestors had smashed it.

Yu Jiuling wanted to say: you’re taking the man’s treasury and smashing his ancestral effigy, that’s not very sporting — but thought better of it.

The Carefree King led Li Chi’s group through the main hall and walked for roughly another quarter of an hour before entering a vast stone chamber. This chamber was about one fifth the size of the outer hall.

And in that stone chamber there was nothing but gold and silver — not a single gem or jewel, just gold and silver. Originally they had been packed in crates, but the crates had long since rotted and split apart, and the contents lay scattered across the floor in heaps.

Compared to the Youshan alluvial gold, this was simply on another scale. The alluvial gold was a small mound. There was no comparison.

“In here…”

Yu Jiuling swallowed and asked the Carefree King tentatively: “We can help ourselves to whatever we want?”

The Carefree King looked at him with some surprise. He shook his head. “It isn’t that you can help yourselves to what you want in here. You can take it all.”

Yu Jiuling’s eyes went wide. Even he felt a flash of embarrassment.

He said quickly: “No, no, no — how could we take it all? There’s so much. Converting all of this, it would amount to at least several million taels. It might be close to ten million. If we take it all, you’ll have nothing left to live on.”

The Carefree King sighed. “All of this… is for you. There are four such stone chambers storing gold and silver. One of them is nearly used up — over several centuries, we’ve used less than a full chamber, about seventy percent of one. The other two are full. I expect they’ll last for some time.”

Yu Jiuling: “…”

Now Li Chi finally understood something of why the Carefree King had said he needn’t worry — the silver they took away would not affect them too greatly.

A full stone chamber’s worth of silver had taken several hundred years to spend most of, and there were still two full chambers remaining. A few more centuries would pose no problem.

It depended on population growth. They had started with tens of thousands of people; several hundred years later they had grown to a few hundred thousand, but the growth had not been rapid.

Li Chi had asked about this earlier, and the Carefree King had explained: the land here was only so large, so the founding ancestors had set a rule — try not to have too many children, otherwise there would not be room for everyone.

People could not go outside without danger, and the people here had always been curious about the outside world yet deeply afraid of it. Population had, therefore, been kept in good check.

The social development here was entirely unlike the outside world.

Li Chi looked back at Tang Pidi. Tang Pidi shook his head: “We can’t carry it all.”

Li Chi made a sound of agreement. He said to the Carefree King: “This time, we’ll only take a portion. If it proves insufficient, may we return to collect more?”

Even asking the question, Li Chi felt guilty and ashamed.

The Carefree King said: “It’s all yours now. Come and take it whenever you wish.”

Yu Jiuling thought: now *this* is the most impressive man in the world. What does it mean to treat money as nothing? *This* is what it means.

Li Chi lowered his voice to Tang Pidi: “Seems like we’ve suddenly come into money. And suddenly become friends with the Nairan as well. So…”

Tang Pidi smiled — bright and warm as sunlight.

Even if it all felt utterly unreal — just thinking about it was incredibly satisfying.

Cavalry. An army. Right there in front of them.