“If telling yourself that you’ve inflicted a thousand wounds upon yourself to wound the enemy a hundred times makes your defeat feel more bearable, then by all means, gloat away.”

Pei Shaohuai had no interest in engaging with Xie Jia’s maddened provocations. He remained as he always had — composed in bearing, carrying himself with unhurried refinement.

He swept the settled dust from his wide sleeve, found a chair, and sat down.

The more Pei Shaohuai maintained this manner, the more it made Xie Jia grind his teeth in hatred and clench his fists.

“Given your intelligence, you ought to have figured it out by now…” Pei Shaohuai said, deliberately mirroring Xie Jia’s own cadence, “The fact that this official has come here means your masters have already been driven out of Fujian. This place can no longer shelter filth.”

There was no escaping death — so why not use what little time remained to speak and secure some future for those he held dear?

Xie Jia’s chest was so full of festering hatred that he could not contain it. He snarled furiously, “This official has fallen to such a state today because of people like you — so-called sons of great houses! We all enter officialdom through the imperial examinations, so why do you people claim every hilltop for yourselves, while the rest of us can only flounder in the mud?”

He tore at the crimson official robe on his body, each word soaked in bitter resentment: “For the sake of this fleeting moment of glory before others — do you have any idea how many humiliations I endured?”

“You don’t know… of course you don’t.” Xie Jia muttered to himself, his voice gone hoarse. “A fifth-rank Prefect directly under the imperial court — to you, it was something you could reach out and grab, and yet the Emperor still felt you were being shortchanged. You were born the descendant of a meritorious family. You never had to agonize over a few coins of tuition. Your studies were guided by renowned masters — you never had to lie awake through the night turning things over and over, with the Four Books and Five Classics even haunting your dreams. Your official career was smoothed by the patronage of your elders and teachers — you never had to hit wall after wall, then doubt yourself over and over, kneading yourself into whatever shape the world preferred. You have never known poverty, confusion, or obstruction at every turn, and so you do not understand — you understand nothing. You sons of great families — you already walk a broad and well-lit road, and yet someone still walks beside you holding a lantern to light the way. How could you ever understand what it feels like to be trapped in pitch darkness, with cold that cuts to the bone and gnaws at the heart?”

Xie Jia continued, “The world believes that Da Qing’s imperial examinations washed away the old five clans and seven great houses, and that names like the Wei of Guanzhong and the Pei of Wenxi in Shanxi have long since been swallowed by the tides of history. But the moment you truly step into officialdom, you realize that a hundred-legged creature does not fall even after death. Even Grand Commandant Li once remarked that ‘the sons of ministers and nobles, having practiced for the examinations since childhood, need not even be taught — they absorb the workings of the court by nature.’ Given such a landscape, what path is left for scholars of humble birth? Where is there any future for them?”

Xie Jia let out several cold laughs — whether mocking the world or mocking his own dead ends — then continued, “A farming family sells off the plots of land beside their house to scrape together enough for a desk and a bed of books beneath the window. I came through days that bitter. I told myself again and again: ‘Forty years of studying law and reading books, and above the black magistrate’s cap hangs a clear sky.’ No matter what, it would be worth it… And in the end, after years upon years of draining every drop of the family’s sweat through bitter study behind closed windows, whatever so-called talent one has in the imperial examination still amounts to nothing more than a ‘door-knocker’ — and the moment the examinations are over, it becomes utterly worthless. It is not that I refused to serve the nation. It is that the world left no door open!”

Pei Shaohuai knew that Xie Jia came from a farming family and had passed the imperial examinations in an earlier year as a ranked jinshi.

A farmer’s son sitting the imperial examinations — that was never an easy thing.

“Do not dress a lack of virtue as a lack of doors. Do not dress what you did for yourself as what you did for the nation,” Pei Shaohuai said. “The way you speak so grandly, someone who didn’t know better might think you were the top-ranking Zhuangyuan of the dynasty, demoted and sent away to some distant post.”

In an imperial order, what fairness was there to speak of? If one were to point to unfairness, the Emperor himself — standing above ten thousand and below only Heaven — was the greatest unfairness of all. And yet even within such a world, there were countless scholars of humble birth who had seized this “thin rope” of the imperial examinations and pulled themselves upward inch by inch, crying out for the people in voices that shook the deaf awake.

Whether fallen on hard times or living under duress — none of it was justification for Xie Jia to treat human lives carelessly and make the common people suffer.

“How much ‘I had no choice’ do you think it would take to wash the blood from your hands? You never did a single thing for your fellow villagers and neighbors — what right do you have to invoke your farming origins, let alone speak of fairness? You are nothing more than the very executioner you once despised.” Pei Shaohuai looked at Xie Jia and added, “You speak only of how Grand Commandant Li of the Tang dynasty lamented that the prominent officials of the court were mostly sons of noble families. Why do you omit that Grand Commandant Li himself acted with fairness in appointing scholars of merit, and stepped forward to open a path for men of humble background — bringing wave after wave of men of vision into the court, so that ‘eight hundred men of solitary poverty wept together, as all gazed southward toward Governor Li of the Yai region’?”

Selectively citing only what served his own argument — that tactic carried no weight before Pei Shaohuai.

And setting aside the ancients, Pei Shaohuai himself was surrounded by upright officials who had come from humble backgrounds and yet devoted their hearts entirely to the people. Xu Zhannian was precisely that — someone who had walked step by step to reach where he stood today.

Master Duan had been rendered disabled midway through his studies and cast aside by his own clan. He had endured a half-life of hardship and setback, and yet he could still say, “the fault does not lie in the mountain” — and in teaching the few of them, he had never once allowed a trace of personal grudge or private resentment to enter.

Speaking of meritorious nobles — Pei Shaohuai’s father, Pei Bingyuan, had taken a shortcut in his official career, entering the Imperial Academy on Xu Zhannian’s recommendation. But his accomplishments and his clean name had not been built on a single shortcut.

Pei Jue had returned from an obscure small county in Chengdu to the capital. Even with his ruthless methods and his failure in guiding his son, he had merely maneuvered within officialdom and played the factional games with precision — he had never dared use the common people as bargaining chips to claim credit for himself. Otherwise, would the Emperor have allowed him such a dignified retirement?

Even within an unjust world, one still had the choice of holding fast to oneself.

“What the world is — that is the world’s affair. What you do, and how you do it — that is your own affair. It is not that the world achieves great fairness and everyone then finds peace. It is that people press forward one after another, and the world gradually draws closer to great fairness.” Pei Shaohuai challenged Xie Jia directly: “Everything you have done has cut off how many common people’s means of survival, has destroyed how many scholars’ paths into officialdom. You conducted yourself without fairness, and yet you demand that the world give you fairness — what kind of reasoning is that?”

If Xie Jia continued along this line of argument, Pei Shaohuai had no further interest in tangling with him. His eyes settled into a cold, cutting edge as he said, “The one thing above all that you should never have done — was bring suffering upon the common people.” That, there was no excusing.

They were the hardest and most powerless people in this world.

“Pei Zhizhou speaks so easily. Could it be you think that after two years outside the capital, you actually understand what it is to be a locally posted official?” Xie Jia was still giving voice, word by word, to how difficult his road through officialdom had been — even facing death, he was determined to hold onto the conviction that he had done no wrong. He went on, “Do you know that above the county sits the directly governed county, and only then the prefecture, and beyond that the directly governed prefecture, and only then the administrative region? Do you know that counties, prefectures, and administrative regions are each divided into six grades and nine tiers? Da Qing has over two thousand counties and over six hundred prefectures and administrative regions — from the very bottom to the very top, each with a register of sequence. If one wishes to go from the very last county, step by step, all the way up to the position of Prefectural Magistrate — with one evaluation completed every year, and not a single delay — a lifetime would barely be enough to make the journey.”

The promotion of officials posted outside the capital was never a simple matter of rising from seventh rank to sixth or fifth. One waited for vacancies, advancing through the ranked sequence of counties and prefectures.

There was no shortage of men who passed the jinshi examinations in their forties and fifties, and then spent the rest of their lives as county magistrates.

“So for the sake of this moment of outward glory, you dared to hang the heads of your entire family from your belt and become someone’s running dog?” Pei Shaohuai asked.

“Imagine that one day, when you are mired deep in the mud, a masked man suddenly appears and tells you that as long as you obey, you can bypass the over a thousand county posts ahead of you and assume a prefectural position directly. And when you are still half-doubtful — an official dispatch arrives from the court, you leap ahead of others, and you truly become a prefectural official…” Xie Jia spoke of how he had fallen, saying, “At that moment — every man for himself, or Heaven will destroy him. Since it is the great houses who rule, I learned to be shrewd and compliant. What of it if I bowed my head and played the homeless stray? What use is a clean name out in the wilderness? You are still a nobody in court. Better to be a dog with a name than a nameless spring — what is wrong with that?”

To bring a stray dog to heel often begins with tossing it a piece of meat — once it has wolfed it down in frenzied hunger, it will always be salivating for the next.

When Pei Shaohuai saw that Xie Jia took pride in being a dog, he knew there was no further point in arguing with him.

So Pei Shaohuai simply followed along with Xie Jia’s own words and offered him a hypothetical: “Even if things had gone according to plan, you and your kind would have been witnesses to your master taking his throne without proper legitimacy. Do you think he would have let any of you keep your lives?”

Those who knew of a master’s dishonorable deeds were always the first to die.

“Success makes the king, defeat makes the bandit…” Xie Jia stopped abruptly mid-sentence. He realized he had let something slip. His teeth shook with fury and his jaw trembled slightly as he pointed at Pei Shaohuai: “You were probing me!”

Pei Shaohuai had gotten what he came for. His expression remained calm.

A cunning and vicious schemer like Xie Jia — even if he did not know precisely who his master was, he ought to have gleaned from the tasks his master had handed down roughly what kind of faction the master represented and what his objectives were.

Otherwise, what would have been the point of all those years as someone’s dog?

It was precisely this line of reasoning that had led Pei Shaohuai to pose the question as he had — catching Xie Jia in a moment of unguarded fury and probing loose the information he sought.

Now that words had been drawn from Xie Jia’s own mouth, Xie Jia was of no further use. Pei Shaohuai had no wish to linger, and he rose and walked toward the door.

A gust of autumn wind brought the first breath of chill. Outside the door, the sky hung grey and overcast. A cold passed through Xie Jia’s body, and in a daze he recalled his boyhood — wearing a threadbare single garment, shivering and huddled in a pile of straw, clutching a worn and incomplete book scroll as he read in bitter cold.

“Wait.”

Pei Shaohuai paused in his steps.

Xie Jia had not made peace with it, but he said it nonetheless: “Pei Shaohuai — don’t you want to know more?” It was plain that Xie Jia still harbored the mindset of making a deal. Everything he had said just now was nothing more than an attempt to win himself more bargaining chips.

“Leave my son a way to live, and I will tell you.”

“Agreed.” Pei Shaohuai answered without hesitation.

All the spirit had drained from Xie Jia. He spoke in a low, dark, hoarse voice: “Beside where you were sitting — that tea table — there is a scroll inside the drawer.”

He had prepared it long ago.

Pei Shaohuai returned to the hall and found, exactly as Xie Jia had said, a thin booklet inside the drawer. He opened it and flipped through the pages — each turning leaf showed variations in handwriting, freshness of paper, and shade of ink. It had been recorded over many long years, an original kept continuously across time.

Its authenticity remained to be verified.

Xie Jia said, “Every large-scale salt shipment that passed through Quanzhou via the Salt Transport Commissioner’s Office — I recorded it all in there. Whether you believe it or not is your affair.”

The Salt Transport Commissioner’s Office had falsified its accounts. If one cross-referenced them against Xie Jia’s records, one could reconstruct the methods used to forge the false ledgers.

Furthermore, from the timing and destinations of the large-scale salt shipments, certain telltale signs could be inferred.

Since the opposing faction had relied on the wealth flowing through Quanzhou’s port to fund and advance their private schemes, it was impossible that they had left absolutely no trace.

“I hope Pei Zhizhou is a man of his word.”

Having spoken those last words — a sharp whistle of steel through the air — Xie Jia drew his sword, and climbed to stand atop the high magistrate’s platform. Behind him on the wall was a mural painted in crimson and deep indigo: the image of sunrise over the vast open sea, where heavy rolling waves bore aloft a great red sun. Above his head hung a placard inscribed with the words “The Mirror Hangs High in Impartial Judgment.”

At that moment, Xie Jia seemed to stand upon the waves — and yet also to hang beneath the placard.

Seeing this, Pei Shaohuai — even though he wore a protective under-armor beneath his robes — stepped back several paces involuntarily to ensure his own safety.

Xie Jia began to cry out like a man possessed: “This position — I climbed to it myself, one step at a time. Even in death, I will die upon this high magistrate’s platform, so that my soul may hang here — not end in some prison cell!”

Even his manner of dying, he had planned for himself.

He drew the cold blade across his own throat — but what Xie Jia had not envisioned was that he did not die with a single swift stroke. Instead he lay dying on the magistrate’s table, eyes wide and staring, making incoherent sounds, one hand pressed to his throat as blood welled and spilled through his fingers. Then he stumbled and crashed down into the dust — his official robe soaked in blood, then smeared further with grime as he rolled, utterly wretched.

In life, he had never become the shape he wished to be. In death, he failed to die in the manner he had imagined for himself either.

Pei Shaohuai tucked the ledger into his sleeve and watched as Xie Jia’s life ebbed away before him, inch by inch. He felt not the slightest pity — only that the scene before his eyes was too brutal and striking to bear looking at without flinching.

On the other side, Yan Chengzhao, who had been standing guard outside the government office, pricked up his ears and gave a slight start — he had caught the ring of a blade.

By the time he rushed inside, Xie Jia had already collapsed to the ground. Yan Chengzhao looked toward Pei Shaohuai, a trace of question in his eyes. He opened his mouth as if to ask, then swallowed the words back down when he saw that Pei Shaohuai had no intention of answering.

Yan Chengzhao furrowed his brow and stood in thought for a few breaths. Then, without a word, he picked up the sword Xie Jia had used to cut his own throat, and together with the scabbard still mounted on the wall, quietly stowed them both into a cabinet. With his back to Xie Jia’s body, he drew his embroidered spring blade single-handed and made one clean stroke behind himself, then returned the sharp blade to its sheath. Yan Chengzhao’s cut landed precisely over the wound from Xie Jia’s self-inflicted slash.

The wound was only half an inch deeper, and far cleaner.

Having done all of this, Yan Chengzhao blew his bone whistle, summoning his subordinates to come in and carry the body away.