It was the finest season in Qingzhou, with verdant mountains and clear waters breathing life into every living thing, the earth itself seeming to pulse with vitality.

Human resilience was bound to the capacity for survival—regardless of circumstance, people forever pushed themselves to adapt.

Yet Heaven, in its way, was fair: having granted humanity the sharpest minds, it could not also give everyone bodies to rival those of tigers and leopards.

For a person to hold any advantage over such beasts, only two paths existed: one was to rely on tools, the other was to draw out the full potential of one’s own body.

Tools—these were the fangs that humanity, through its long evolution, had continuously fashioned anew for itself.

Take the blade, for instance.

Before the reign of Dingkun in Dachu, before the Sacred Blade Sect made its attempt on the Dachu Emperor’s life, scarcely anyone knew of the Sect’s existence.

But people knew that the disciples of Master Zhou existed—for in every corner of the land, someone or other claimed to be among them.

In the common understanding, however, Master Zhou’s inheritors were merely a cohort of wanderers in their wide-sleeved robes, drifting from place to place, proclaiming the sage’s virtues. Nothing more.

Many even held them in contempt, dismissing them as people of no particular talent who simply traded on the Master’s reputation for food and lodging.

So it was that when Emperor Chu of the Dingkun era decreed a ban on large-scale ceremonies venerating the Master, many people cheered.

For there were far too many fraudsters in the world, parading about under the banner of the Master’s lineage—and what they counted on was this: that the mere mention of Master Zhou’s name was enough to ensure no one would look upon them coldly.

Perhaps the Master himself never knew that his virtue and wisdom had furnished not only a livelihood for his legitimate descendants, but an entire vocation for a great many swindlers as well.

Under the flag of protecting the Master’s reputation, they conducted business that would have left the Master spinning in his grave.

The Sacred Blade Sect, however, could not afford such brazenness. They were compelled to conceal themselves.

Even after the news broke that the Sacred Blade Sect had attempted to assassinate the Dachu Emperor, the common people still knew virtually nothing about them.

The Emperor would never publicize such a matter, for the fallout would be immense.

The Emperor of Dachu had in truth been driven to a desperate measure—if not for cause, if not for absolute necessity, why would an emperor issue an edict banning nationwide veneration ceremonies without any apparent reason?

Because the annual rites held in the Master’s honor had become the primary instrument by which local officials across the empire enriched themselves—and it was their most important instrument at that.

In their most audacious year, the national treasury took in nearly nothing.

When the Emperor dispatched investigators to audit the accounts, they discovered to their astonishment that every local government in the land had listed the very same category of deficit.

Enormous expenditures of money, grain, and supplies on the ceremonies venerating Master Zhou—this was the claim that had left every local government in the red. Some dared to report losses of fifty thousand taels, others dared to claim five million.

Had that money truly been spent?

Take, for example, the county in Qingzhou that claimed to be the Master’s birthplace: the annual expenditure on venerating the Master reportedly ran to over a million taels of silver.

Year after year, the county officials sent the same line-item requests to the Ministry of Finance, and year after year, the Ministry’s disbursements increased.

When investigators finally dug down to the truth, they found that only a fifth of the funds disbursed by the Ministry had been spent on the ceremonies themselves—the rest had been divided up between Ministry officials and local functionaries alike.

And this county was among the most impoverished in all of Dachu. Every year the court had been sending subsidies to support it, yet not a single copper of those subsidies had ever reached the common people.

The Master’s name had been used as a pretext for shameless wealth-extraction, and in their scramble to attach themselves to his legacy, local governments competed shamelessly to claim any connection they could.

One district declared itself the Master’s hometown; another insisted it was his “second hometown.” One locality claimed to be where he had lectured; another claimed it as the site of his death.

The common people had seen no benefit from these grand ceremonies—on the contrary, officials everywhere were growing fat and prosperous.

With the entire empire in such a state, how could the Emperor not have been furious?

It was this that drove him to issue the decree banning the ceremonies, defying the moral conventions of the age—yet he could not tell the people that the Master’s own descendants had come to kill him.

As Emperor of Dachu, he could never, under any circumstances, provide any would-be assassin with a legitimate justification for their act.

If the people had learned that those who attempted to kill the Emperor were the Master’s own descendants, acting because the Emperor had banned veneration of the Master—the public mood would have been destabilized, and those court ministers would have gone mad exploiting that instability to submit petition after petition urging the Emperor to restore the ceremonies.

So the Sacred Blade Sect remained to this day an exceedingly secretive organization.

The Shanhe Seal had first learned of the Sect’s existence precisely because of that assassination attempt. The Emperor could conceal it from the people, but not from the Shanhe Seal.

The Sacred Blade Sect, however, was arrogant—they believed no one in the world was more noble than themselves, and considered the so-called princes and nobles beneath them as little more than jumping clowns.

As inheritors of Master Zhou’s legacy, they naturally held the bloodline of the Great Zhou imperial family to be the most exalted thing in the world.

And so even the wealth-laden Shanhe Seal, which fancied itself a power that could control all under Heaven, could not control the Sacred Blade Sect, could not control the inheritors of Master Zhou.

In the eyes of the Sacred Blade Sect, even being approached by the Shanhe Seal was something of an insult.

Over the decades, there had been only one exception: the Blade Emperor.

He had long grown weary of the so-called mission of the Master’s inheritors, and had always been looking for a reason to leave the Sacred Blade Sect. The Shanhe Seal’s overture gave him that reason.

He was the only inheritor of Master Zhou’s lineage who, in all those years, had ever joined the Shanhe Seal.

But after the Shanhe Seal was destroyed by Li Chi, too many secrets had vanished.

Even Cao Lie had no very clear picture of the Blade Emperor’s origins—he only knew that his father had regarded this man with exceptional esteem, to the point even of wariness.

At this moment, in the city known as Wulai, the Master’s inheritors had arrived.

The inheritors of Master Zhou had their own hierarchy of worth. Any descendant of the Great Zhou imperial bloodline could call themselves an inheritor of the Master’s legacy—for the Master’s fame surpassed that of all the Great Zhou emperors across the generations combined, and the name of Master Zhou remained the greatest banner the Great Zhou imperial clan could still fly.

This hierarchy was simply a chain of contempt. The Sect Master, for instance, as the purest-blooded direct-line heir, naturally occupied the highest rung and could look down upon everyone else.

Then there were people like Gan Daode—who, in order to spare his parents and family from being implicated, had no choice but to serve as someone else’s blade and leashed dog.

And how did one distinguish the ranks within this hierarchy of the Master’s inheritors? One needed only to observe their conduct.

Those ordered about on errands outside—regardless of what those errands were—could not possibly be direct-line members. The direct-line sat on high, gazing down at the others as though they were masters of all they surveyed.

So Gan Daode and the black-clad figures, along with all others on active duty outside, were of the lower ranks.

The one now visiting on orders from the Sect Master to conduct an inspection, the Fourth Young Master of the Sacred Blade Sect—the fourth disciple—was a true direct-line heir.

His name was Nan Lan.

A man’s name that sounded like a woman’s name; whether it was because of this name or not, he had a distinctly androgynous air about him.

In a city inn, Nan Lan stood at the window watching the people pass in the street below, looking, as ever, like someone of exquisite and solitary pride—someone who seemed to hold the entire world in mild contempt.

If the Master himself could have seen what his descendants had become, he would likely have smashed through his coffin lid and leapt out to administer his legendary Seven Terminations upon every last unworthy progeny of his.

The world spoke of the Master’s Seven Perfections: music, strategy, calligraphy, painting, the blade, the palm, and virtue.

“Fourth Young Master.”

A subordinate entered with hurried steps, bowing low. “The informant has returned.”

Nan Lan gave a slight nod, his bearing as imperious as a peacock.

“Send him in.”

Shortly thereafter, a young man dressed as a servant came in at a rapid pace. The moment he crossed the threshold he dropped to his knees with a thud.

“An Ciru pays his respects to the Fourth Young Master.”

Nan Lan turned to look. This was a young man who appeared to be in his twenties.

“You are the informant the Sect Master placed near Gan Daode and his associates?”

Nan Lan asked with cool indifference.

An Ciru seemed to be trembling with nerves, kneeling there with a quavering voice. “Yes, Fourth Young Master. I have been stationed at Gan Daode’s side on the Sect Master’s orders, monitoring him for three years now.”

“How has he conducted himself?”

“Adequately. Adequately.”

An Ciru’s answer was itself adequate and nothing more.

Nan Lan was clearly dissatisfied. He turned fully to face An Ciru. “You mean to say Gan Daode has been doing a satisfactory job?”

Hearing that tone, An Ciru immediately understood how he ought to speak—for it was plain enough from Nan Lan’s inflection that the Fourth Young Master had a deeply unfavorable view of Gan Daode.

He thought to himself that fools truly were plentiful in this world, just like the attitude of the Dachu court toward its field commanders—using fools to keep the commanders in check.

When the chief eunuch Liu Chongxin had been alive, supervising eunuchs had been posted to armies everywhere. Did those eunuchs understand warfare better than the generals?

At this moment, An Ciru saw the so-called Fourth Young Master for what he was: a castrated, neutered supervisory eunuch sent to keep watch over others.

But he had no recourse—this neutered eunuch was backed by power.

So if he wanted to live, he had no choice but to say what the eunuch-like Fourth Young Master wished to hear.

He hastened to reply: “This man is headstrong and refuses counsel. Once he has decided on something, no one can stop him—he grows more and more reckless by the day.”

Nan Lan gave a satisfied nod. “I will report your words to the Sect Master, precisely as you have given them.”

An Ciru sighed inwardly, thinking to himself what a wretched lot these people were—though he dared only curse them in his mind.

“You say no one can dissuade him?”

Nan Lan asked: “Hu Yin was appointed by the Sect Master himself as the supervising inspector, with authority to oversee and correct. The Sect Master even entrusted him with the Master’s Sacred Blade in order to give him power over Gan Daode. Why has he failed to restrain him or counsel him?”

An Ciru turned things over in his mind many times, thinking carefully about what he could say that would ensure he was not implicated in any of this.

It was evident that Nan Lan had come looking for trouble—quite possibly intending to move against Gan Daode—and the severity of that move would be proportional to the weight of his own testimony.

He was a small figure, and small figures had a harder time surviving. He needed to appear innocent and inconsequential, while still speaking words that hit precisely the right note.

An Ciru considered briefly, then replied: “Lord Hu Yin has remained within Wulai City throughout. When in Wulai, Gan Daode still restrains himself somewhat. But when commanding troops in the field, Lord Hu Yin has had no effective means of overseeing him.”

“Hmm.”

Nan Lan nodded. “Understood. You may withdraw.”

He glanced at one of his subordinates, who immediately produced a coin purse and tossed it to the floor. “The Fourth Young Master’s gift to you.”

An Ciru snatched it up with many expressions of gratitude.

An hour later, within the Qingzhou Prince’s residence, An Ciru was already considering whether he should simply flee. He was only a minor figure—and minor figures did have their advantages, one being that no one paid much attention to them. Perhaps after his disappearance it would be quite some time before anyone noticed.

Nan Lan appeared to want only to move against Gan Daode, not yet to replace him entirely—so if An Ciru were exposed now, Gan Daode would work him into paste.

Just then, a knock sounded at the door, startling An Ciru.

He immediately looked toward the door. “Who’s there?”

“It’s me, Zheng Shunshun.”

The voice outside answered with a sound that made clear its owner was perpetually smiling.

These past few days, serving as a courier in Gan Daode’s entourage, An Ciru had come into fairly frequent contact with the people of the Gui Yuan Sect, and Zheng Shunshun had been quite good to him, bringing him many small gifts.

At this moment, An Ciru suddenly felt as though he had glimpsed a lifeline.

Where else could he run to, after all?

If the Gui Yuan Sect and the others eventually departed Wulai City and returned to Dachu’s capital, if they could quietly bring him along—that would be the best possible outcome.

And so An Ciru immediately put on a smile. “Why, it’s Lord Zheng.”

He grinned and opened the door, greeting him with the warmth one reserved for an old friend.

As soon as Zheng Shunshun stepped inside, he noticed the things being packed about the room, and smiled. “Brother, are you heading out on official business?”

“No, no.”

An Ciru hastily said: “I was simply at leisure today, and with the weather turning warm, I was putting away the clothes I no longer need.”

“Ah.”

Zheng Shunshun gave a casual affirmative and reached into his robe, producing something which he extended to An Ciru. “Our superior asked me to bring this to you. We are leaving soon—our superior said you are our friend, and he hopes to remain in contact in the days to come. Please do accept this gift.”

“Leaving?! Why so suddenly?!”

An Ciru was startled.

In that moment, his mind again turned over many things in rapid succession.

—