Under Gui Yuanshu’s counsel, Gan Daode held back the order to kill — though he had no real desire to release any of the craftsmen either.

But there is something in human nature that fears any small thing marring a great fortune when it stands on the very edge of arrival.

The coronation was only days away. To have blood spilled at this juncture was hardly an auspicious sign. Gan Daode would not tempt ill luck himself.

At this moment, what he could least afford was for the ceremony to be disrupted — so he would not be the one to invite misfortune.

Li Chi followed Zheng Shunshun away from the Prince’s residence and back toward the main ceremony venue, apparently without further suspicion falling on them.

But the scare had been severe enough to leave Zheng Shunshun and the others genuinely shaken. Had they been found out, none of them would have walked away.

Which was why Zheng Shunshun’s admiration for Li Chi had reached its absolute limits. Li Chi was the lord of Jizhou. He was Prince Ning.

What kind of man of that rank and standing goes personally into danger like this?

By any reasonable expectation, a man of Li Chi’s position should not even be in Wulai City at all, let alone creeping into Gan Daode’s study.

“Are you all right, my lord?” Zheng Shunshun asked before he could stop himself.

Li Chi smiled. “I’m fine.”

Gui Yuanshu said: “There can never be anything like this again. It was far too dangerous. If something had truly gone wrong…”

Li Chi smiled and shook his head. “Things don’t go wrong that often.”

Accidents, by their very name, are things beyond anticipation. And today, the only thing that had genuinely taken Li Chi by surprise was the one thing he never could have expected: that hidden in Gan Daode’s study was a fighter of that caliber.

“Did you find anything?”

Gui Yuanshu asked.

Li Chi nodded. “Quite a lot. Gan Daode had his troop deployments and other military secrets hidden inside a book — the middle pages carved out like a small box.”

Gui Yuanshu looked Li Chi up and down but could not see anything on him.

“Couldn’t bring it out?”

“How could I have brought it out?” Li Chi smiled. “I hid it.”

Gui Yuanshu said: “I see — you’ve left it concealed somewhere in the residence, and I’ll retrieve it when I get the chance.”

Li Chi shook his head. “No.”

He lifted his hand and tapped his temple. “I hid it in here. I read everything, then stuffed the book along with the clothes I was wearing into the cesspit behind their latrine. A shame, really.”

Gui Yuanshu said: “Since Your Highness has memorized it all, there’s nothing to regret.”

Li Chi said: “What I regret is the soft armor I had on. Without it, that man’s blade really would have gotten me — it cut clean through even the armor, just short of drawing blood. That armor was valuable… gone into a cesspit.”

After slipping out of the study, Li Chi had immediately melded back into the group around Zheng Shunshun. Before setting out, he had arranged for Zheng Shunshun to wear two long robes, one inside the other.

His original thinking had been simple enough: if he were spotted inside the study and had to come back, he could swap into Zheng Shunshun’s inner robe. What he hadn’t planned for was actually taking a hit — though he never relied on a single contingency.

“The troop deployments Gan Daode can rotate,” Li Chi said. “But the officer assignments within his army, the names of his commanders, his sources of revenue, his farmland holdings, the locations of his granaries — none of those can be so easily changed.”

He smiled. “It’s fortunate that I am such a clever person.”

Gui Yuanshu sighed. “Has His Highness’s household grown accustomed to this by now?”

Li Chi asked: “Accustomed to what?”

Gui Yuanshu said: “Accustomed to His Highness’s way of conducting affairs. The way that keeps everyone else permanently on edge.”

Li Chi said: “No, they’re not accustomed to it. But they can’t do anything about it.”

Gui Yuanshu: “…”

Li Chi smiled. “You’ll all get used to it in time too. And if you can’t get used to it, you’ll just stop worrying about it. Ha!” He laughed. “But what I found in there — the most significant thing wasn’t the Slayer King’s Army’s deployments or the names of their commanders.”

Li Chi glanced back toward the residence and murmured, almost to himself: “We’ve all underestimated Gan Daode. He’s been wearing a false face from the beginning.”

Gui Yuanshu was taken aback. “He… what do you mean?”

Li Chi said: “He’s formidable. Not just in terms of his personal martial skill — he is formidable in every regard. Yet he has been playing the part of an uneducated, dim-witted thug. Which makes me suspect that when he marched on Jizhou, it was never truly to join forces with the Shanhai Army. It was only after he failed to take Jizhou that he fell back to Dragon’s Head Pass and attempted to coordinate with the Shanhai Army from the inside. If I’ve read it right — he deceived a great many people.”

Li Chi continued: “In that book I also found a number of letters — correspondence between Mu Fengliu and Gan Daode. You don’t yet know who Mu Fengliu is; I’ll explain later.”

Li Chi said: “For now, you only need to know that Mu Fengliu, single-handedly, sowed instability across the entire north of the Central Plains — and was also the internal agent of the Black Martial people within the region.”

Li Chi said: “Gan Daode deceived even Mu Fengliu. Mu Fengliu believed he was nothing more than one of several puppets — a man of no real ability and limited intelligence. In reality… my guess is that when Gan Daode marched on Jizhou, the first person he intended to kill was Mu Fengliu. Gan Daode simply had the misfortune of running into us.”

Li Chi thought back on the man in black and was quiet for a moment before continuing: “That man in black is of the same sect as Gan Daode. In the documents I found, there was also a list of names — men deemed reliable in the Holy Blade Sect. Gan Daode is the eldest disciple. His martial brother is called Hu Yin, which should be the man in black.”

Gui Yuanshu searched his memory. Something about the Holy Blade Sect felt familiar — and then it clicked, like a lamp suddenly lit. He recalled seeing that name in the archives of the Court of Judicial Review.

Zheng Shunshun remembered too. He looked at Gui Yuanshu and said: “Sir — the Holy Blade Sect. There’s a record of them in the Court’s archives.”

He searched his memory and said: “During the Dingkun reign of Dachu, the imperial palace was infiltrated by assassins. Over a hundred members of the Inner Guard were killed. Even the secret guards trained in the Dachu Imperial Sword technique were left gravely wounded.”

At those words, Li Chi’s expression changed sharply. He had heard it mentioned many times: the Dachu Imperial Sword style was said to be unmatched in the world.

For even those who had mastered it to be left gravely wounded — the assassins must have been extraordinary.

“It was mutual destruction,” Gui Yuanshu clarified. “The secret guard and the leader of the assassins fought ferociously. The assassin’s leader proclaimed himself an heir of the Holy Blade. The two of them battled to a standstill, both taking grievous wounds — and the Holy Blade heir eventually retreated. Of the assassins he had brought, sixteen were killed… and yet over a hundred of the Inner Guard fell with them.”

“Afterward, the Emperor of the time was furious and ordered a thorough investigation of this so-called Holy Blade heir. It took a full year before any significant leads emerged.”

Gui Yuanshu looked at Li Chi. “As it turned out, the Holy Blade heir had been concealing his identity for years — he was a descendant of the imperial Zhou bloodline. In the world’s reckoning of renowned blades, the people placed the Sage of Zhou’s blade first among all under heaven.”

“Though Great Zhou had fallen, the common people still revered the Sage. The first hundred-odd years of Dachu had not interfered with this.”

Gui Yuanshu said: “But during the Dingkun period, the Emperor — for reasons that are unclear — issued an edict forbidding all worship of the Zhou Sage. Most of the Sage’s temples, known among the people as Confucian shrines, were subsequently allowed to fall into ruin.”

“This may be exactly why the Sage’s heirs felt it was a desecration of the Sage — and of the sage himself — and so sought to assassinate the Emperor.”

Li Chi nodded, then recalled: “Could it be that the man in black just now was wielding the Zhou Sage’s holy blade?”

Gui Yuanshu said: “When I was there, I heard the man in black tell Gan Daode that his blade was unusual — that wounds made by it would not heal. So I deliberately observed his injury. You had said you threw a blade that may have caught him. His wound had clearly been carved out by his own hand, which confirms what he claimed was not an exaggeration.”

Li Chi sighed. “What a terrible waste.”

Gui Yuanshu said: “He obviously understood the holy blade’s power, so treating the wound immediately made sense — that was only prudent, not a waste.”

Li Chi said: “I meant the blade itself. I shouldn’t have thrown it back. That sword must be worth a great deal.”

Gui Yuanshu: “…”

Li Chi smiled. “Before we leave Jizhou, Gan Daode must die — and I’ll be taking that sword.”

The group chatted as they walked back toward the ceremony venue. Li Chi slipped away from the others unnoticed and made his way back to their compound.

Once there, Li Chi went over everything he had seen with Gao Xining in careful detail.

Li Chi’s memory was exceptional — near-perfect recall — but he was still afraid of overlooking something, since the information could not safely be written down. If it were, and Gan Daode’s people found it, everyone would be in danger.

He was not the only one who could hold this in memory: Gao Xining’s recall was also far beyond that of an ordinary person. Between the two of them, even if one faltered, comparing notes when they returned would fill any gaps.

What captured Li Chi’s imagination most was the Holy Blade Sect. In the name list he had seen, there were twenty-eight entries.

This was clearly not the full count of the sect’s disciples — these were only those considered reliable and available. There were bound to be others unrecorded.

Furthermore, it seemed likely that these people did not all know one another, and that the Holy Blade Sect had different branches operating across Dachu.

Gan Daode, as the eldest disciple of the main line, led the hierarchy. The blade-wielding man was almost certainly the second disciple, Hu Yin.

Beyond these two, Li Chi also noted the sect leader — a man named Chang Kui — and the sect leader’s younger martial brother, and Gan Daode’s junior martial uncle: a man named Jian Li.

From all this, Li Chi began to piece together a rough picture of how Gan Daode had raised his rebellion.

In the beginning, the Holy Blade Sect’s members had lived concealed throughout the land, roaming the martial world while keeping their distance from the affairs of court — a carefree enough existence.

But during the Dingkun reign, when the Emperor forbade the worship of the Zhou Sage and let the Confucian shrines go dark, every member of the Holy Blade Sect had been inflamed with rage.

Hence the assassination attempt — which had come within a hair of killing the Dachu Emperor.

That was the seed of hatred. The sect lost sixteen men, and its leader was gravely wounded — perhaps fatally. The Imperial Guard could replenish its hundred-plus dead by drawing on new recruits; training a Holy Blade heir to that level of skill required at least twenty years of grueling cultivation. For the Holy Blade Sect, the blow was far heavier, and the hatred it kindled ran far deeper — and in time, it grew twisted.

Years passed. Dachu had descended into the chaos it now wore. The descendants of the Zhou Sage’s line decided the moment had come to raise their banner openly, no longer content with furtive schemes of assassination. They would destroy Dachu, overthrow the Dachu Emperor, and restore the Great Zhou realm.

And so the members of the Holy Blade Sect pushed their eldest disciple Gan Daode forward as their figurehead, while the rest worked behind the scenes.

With a network of skilled fighters in the shadows, it had not been especially difficult for Gan Daode to raise his forces in the beginning. And then, by a chance that defied explanation, Mu Fengliu had noticed him and judged him useful — providing considerable support of his own. Thus had the Slayer King’s Army grown so rapidly.

Having traced the shape of it all, Li Chi turned his mind to how he might get his hands on that wound-sealing holy blade.

The blade that does not kill — except that it very clearly did. Wounds made by the holy blade could not heal. The suffering of those it struck, and how they died — one needed only to think on it briefly to understand.

“Tell everyone to be careful these coming days,” Li Chi said. “If the Holy Blade Sect has other members in Wulai City, Gan Daode will certainly deploy them to watch for anything suspicious. We’ll be watched especially, since we’re the outsiders.”

Everyone nodded.

Li Chi said: “The Zhou Sage is worthy of the reverence of ten thousand generations. But these people have earned nothing worth respecting. It was not the world or the Dachu Emperor who forced them into becoming killers and tyrants — they chose it. They want to be emperors themselves.”

Li Chi looked around at all of them. “No unnecessary excursions. Stay here unless something arises.”

He stood and stretched, then ran through the man in black’s swordsmanship once more in his mind.

I’m already looking forward to the next time we meet, Li Chi thought. I wonder if you feel the same.

—