It was an ordinary sort of day, neither cold nor hot, the air dry.
She’d been so busy the day before that Huo Wu Rong had planned to sleep in properly this morning. Instead, early in the morning, she heard someone calling outside her window: “Huo Ninth Brother, Ninth Brother…”
It sounded exactly like some curse summoning her soul to the underworld.
Truly at her wit’s end, Huo Wu Rong got up, and without any regard for her disheveled hair and unwashed face, shoved open the window and cursed outward: “Chasing my soul, are you? Your family sure raised you well! Would you die if you spent one day without me at your Nanzhong Guild Hall?”
The errand boy calling from outside jumped in fright. Huo Wu Rong, unashamed as ever, made him the one who turned bashful instead.
Remembering the matter at hand, he scratched the back of his head with an awkward grin: “Team Leader Huo, forgive me, I really was just flustered and forgot my manners. Don’t hold it against me, I’m just a clod of dirt helping out in the kitchen — one smack from you and I’d shatter…”
Annoyed by his rambling, Huo Wu Rong gritted her teeth and cursed: “Are you the teapot for some lonely old man’s memorial rites? Talk any more and I’ll cut your tongue out — say what your mother sent you here for, get to the point!”
The fellow stuck out his tongue, then straightened up and said: “I’ve troubled Ninth Brother to make a trip — it really is urgent. Sixty-some traveling scholars from the south are arriving tomorrow, and there’s also the Great Madam’s birthday celebration coming up in the fifth month. Our southern variety-show performers are about to arrive too — there’s simply too many people, the place can’t hold them all. Our proprietor’s idea is that you’ll have to take the lead on this one…”
Somewhat irritated, Huo Wu Rong raked a hand through her hair, shut the window with some annoyance, and went back inside. In the end she changed clothes and strode off with the errand boy, walking with a man’s gait.
Yandu’s forty-six wards and markets — travelers coming and going from north and south, idlers and beggars, temples and waterways, food vendors and peddlers, performers and craftsmen, all manner of guilds and societies, wrestling troupes, tattoo artists, football players, treasure-gambling dens, temple fairs, refined musicians… The true dragon’s seat, the center of the realm under heaven — bustling with people coming and going, and where there were many people, folk customs took shape, societies formed, and guild leaders emerged.
Throughout the dynasties, the role of guild leader had always functioned the same as that of a trade elder — heading up various trades. In the oldest days, guild leaders only balanced and managed the odd jobs of plasterers, tailors, and framers.
But when the Great Liang dynasty arrived, at the turning point of the change of dynasties, the trade heads who should have taken charge instead fled. It was then that a capable, responsible man emerged in Yandu — an old guild leader named Yao Chunfeng.
This old gentleman was no ordinary man — his family had long managed the guild of yin-yang diviners across Yandu. Starting with his father’s generation, they’d organized the spirit mediums and fortune-tellers of every street and alley, divided up territories, set standard fees, regulated the fringe trades, and gradually earned respect and prestige.
By the time it reached Yao Chunfeng’s generation, he inherited the family trade and continued managing the fringe occupations, and through a lifetime of diligence and shrewdness, he upheld — even surpassed — his father’s reputation.
Yet no one expected that, like a great stone falling suddenly from heaven, the dynasty would change, a new emperor would ascend the throne, and the Great Liang dynasty would arrive.
It was at that very moment, amid chaos and war and natural disaster, that the trade heads with real means failed to unite and instead all fled.
It was the small guild leaders of the fringe trades who, under Yao Chunfeng’s leadership, began quietly helping their neighbors.
In those days no one dared go out. If a household ran out of food, they sought the small guild leaders to pawn things. If someone fell gravely ill, they sought the guild leaders. If someone died and the family needed to bury them outside the city, they sought the guild leaders…
The city may have looked dead, but the guild leaders, carrying their lives in their hands, were like threads that, under Yao Chunfeng’s leadership, kept Yandu stitched together with some remaining vitality, gradually reviving it.
By the time the war settled, order was restored, and laws were laws again, every trade, guild, and society in Yandu was deeply grateful to and trusting of the guild leaders.
As for the former trade elders and heads, they were simply cast aside.
When you were needed, you were nowhere to be found — now that it’s time to collect the guild fees, you show up? Sorry, but not this time. Now Yandu, in every direction, belonged to Old Yao’s territory when it came to the guild-leader trade.
In short, one thing was clear: those who did great and virtuous deeds, even if they didn’t seek power, would still earn everyone’s trust once the deeds were done.
Where there were great guild leaders, there were also lesser ones.
At the end of the first year of the Yong’an era, Old Yao held the Great Liang dynasty’s very first incense hall ceremony, taking in nine adopted sons that year — Huo Wu Rong among them. Even though everyone now knew she was a girl, by old custom they still called her Ninth Brother.
Huo Ninth Brother of the northern ward — that was a well-known figure in Yandu.
Dressed in a brown short jacket, feet in fast boots with cowhide-tendon soles, a square cloth wrapped around her head, a wine gourd hanging at her waist, and a palm-sized bamboo tag carved with double fish, worn smooth and glossy from handling — this was the guild leader’s attire.
Even though Huo Wu Rong was a woman, she dressed the same way.
As she walked with the senior errand man from Nanzhong Guild Hall, weaving through the streets and alleys, the two of them inevitably ran into all sorts of peddlers carrying goods on shoulder poles and in hand-carts. Huo Wu Rong was well-liked in the neighborhood, and the locals treated her warmly, everyone eager to exchange a few words with her.
This, naturally, slowed their pace considerably, leaving the errand boy stamping his feet in impatience.
Wu Rong had a sweet tongue, and never waited for others to greet her first — she always spoke first. Coming across old man Song, who sold vegetables on a shoulder pole, she called out with a bright smile: “Oh, Uncle Song, coming into the city? How’s everyone at home? That cough medicine I recommended last year — did it do any good?”
Vegetable-seller Old Song brightened at the sight of Wu Rong and immediately set down his load to greet her warmly: “Isn’t this Ninth Brother? Ah, it worked, it worked! Thanks to you putting in a good word, when I went to the herbal shop I just mentioned you sent me, and the seated physician let me have the thirty-coin lung-clearing powder for just eighteen coins — only charged me the cost price. The whole family’s very grateful. Your auntie even said, come harvest time, she’ll brew Ninth Brother a good jug of wine. Oh? Off to do some big business today, Ninth Brother?”
By guild-leader custom, for those who carried goods on shoulder poles and made their meager living hand to hand, one wasn’t to skim so much as a drop of oil from their thin profits.
The wine gourd at Wu Rong’s waist was meant for people like this — if they were truly grateful, a guild leader might receive up to three and a half taels of wine a year from small vendors. Wu Rong wasn’t interested in talk of getting rich; even if they earned a thousand strings of coins, to her it was all just scraping by.
She simply exchanged pleasantries with the old man, praising his produce: “Oh, these melons of yours really look good — look at those vine stems, picked before dawn, weren’t they? It’s already this time of day, you should have sold out ages ago. Why are you still wandering around?”
Old Song, delighted, immediately complained: “The way you put it, Ninth Brother — it’s the season, everyone’s melons look the same. It’s just that these are especially good right now, but I got into the city late today, so I suppose I’ll have to carry them all back home as they are.”
He finished and looked at Huo Wu Rong hopefully. Wu Rong laughed at this, reached into the basket, and pulled out the smallest melon — no way around it, a guild leader never gave out information for free; that was the rule.
Holding the little melon, Huo Wu Rong turned and called out to the street corner, and an idle young man came running over. Wu Rong took the bamboo tag from her waist and handed it to him, instructing: “Quzi, yesterday I passed by the west alley and saw a funeral being held — the mourners’ procession stretched half the street. The family’s in long robes, well-fed, and right now they’re setting up cooking pots. Go quickly and pick up some work there — and bring Uncle Song along too. Tell them I said so — Old Song’s vegetables are fresh and he’s an honest sort. Have them use his melons for the cooking-pot setup for three days.”
Hearing this, the young man was delighted, and without even needing Old Song to carry his own load, gathered a group of idle hands and headed off with Old Song to the west alley to find work and earn some money.
Only a few years after the war ended, the streets and neighborhoods were full of households living alone, with no extended family to call on. Whenever there was a family event, goods were easy enough to buy, but hired help was hard to find — and people were wary of hiring just anyone.
But if it came recommended under a guild leader’s name, that was a guarantee of good conduct — assurance that the workers were diligent, honest, and trustworthy. As for Old Song’s vegetables, buying from him was no different than buying from anyone else, and it was simply a favor passed along.
A guild leader was exactly this kind of figure — someone plugged into news from every direction, someone the common folk at the bottom rung couldn’t do without.
But how exactly had Huo Wu Rong become this Ninth Brother among Yandu’s guild leaders?
That story had to start from that one night.
Setting aside earlier events, it must be said — a person’s character truly determines the course of the rest of their life.
That night, when Madam Wang sent the three concubine-born daughters out to find food, Qiqian’er, weak-willed in her past life, not only found food for others but also didn’t dare resist even when she herself was later sold off.
Wu Rong and Liu Ning were different. Once they ran off, they had no intention of going back. And as it happened, right then a meteor came crashing down, and the three girls were forced apart — in their past life, none of them ever found the others again for the rest of their lives.
Wu Rong had fled toward Yandu at the time. Being a girl, and fearing trouble on the road, she stripped clothes off a corpse and disguised herself as a man to make her way there.
Those days were so hard — the city under siege, people being slaughtered, even the old emperor had died.
Yandu was in complete chaos — refugees, opportunistic looters everywhere. This child, like Qiqian’er, had never eaten a full meal, thin and small, wandering around outside the city walls, nearly starving to death, while inside Yandu the streets had begun to breed plague from the rotting corpses.
Corpses piling up daily, chaos everywhere — what was to be done? Someone had to gather up these bodies and carry them out of the city to be burned.
The officials had people to look after their own — but the helpless common folk, who could they rely on? In the end, it fell to Yao Chunfeng, leading a band of guild leaders large and small, pulling seven or eight handcarts, going door to door carrying corpses.
It was on that very day, when Huo Wu Rong was so starved she felt she might eat herself, that she finally saw living people coming out of Yandu. She staggered over, hoping to beg for some food, and just then a cart wheel got stuck in a deep pit — she squeezed in to help, and ended up joining Yao Chunfeng’s corpse-carrying crew.
Compared to simply surviving, carrying corpses wasn’t frightening at all.
The only thing was, this work paid nothing — just one meal a day, and even that came out of Yao Chunfeng’s own pocket.
The corpses had to be dealt with — if they weren’t, how could the living find the strength to start over? And so Yao Chunfeng became the great guild leader — his character earned it, and his deeds proved it.
Back when she was following Yao Chunfeng, there had actually been over a hundred guild leaders. So why was it Huo Wu Rong who eventually rose above the rest?
That had to do with another matter. In times of war, it was usually the elderly who died first, then the children, then the women.
And the women and children who died amid such chaos often died in the most wretched ways, just like along the riverbanks on the refugee roads — without even the last dignity a person deserved.
With the men all scattered and nowhere to be found, who was left to gather these women’s bodies?
Only some ten-odd days after joining the corpse-carrying crew, Huo Wu Rong, through her honesty and diligence, had already earned everyone’s trust. But when it came time to handle the hardest task — carrying the women’s corpses — the other guild leaders grew reluctant.
There was no way around it — guild leaders lived among the neighborhoods, and these dead women were familiar faces, girls and young wives from the neighborhood everyone knew. Since they’d already died so tragically, the least one could do was see them properly dressed. But who would do it?
That night, Huo Wu Rong gritted her teeth and went into Old Yao’s room — no one quite knew how the discussion went, but from that point on, it was Huo Wu Rong who washed the bodies of the women who died so tragically across Yandu, Huo Wu Rong who dressed them, Huo Wu Rong who carried them down into the earth…
This work occupied her, busy for a full three months, until the realm was finally settled and the new emperor at last ascended the throne, and everyone let out a breath of relief. Old Yao held his incense hall ceremony and took in nine adopted sons — Huo Wu Rong was ninth in line, and from then on, in the world of the streets, she was known as Huo Ninth Brother.
Huo Ninth Brother, like the other guild leaders, was formally recognized by the authorities, and grateful members of the public came in droves, banging gongs, personally delivering plaques of honor to her door.
This was the foundation of a guild leader’s standing — one so solid that no one could shake it.
Now that plaque hung in the main hall of Huo Wu Rong’s household — she had over one hundred and eighty of them, large and small.
After holding the incense hall ceremony, Old Yao spent money buying houses in the neighborhood for his sons, setting them up with proper households, and gathered the territories of the trade heads together, hoping to build a thriving enterprise.
Who could have guessed that even doing good deeds would draw those without virtue looking to undermine your standing.
As large numbers of Yandu residents who had fled began returning, Huo Ninth Brother’s troubles finally arrived. Back then, the other guild leaders’ reluctance to carry the women’s corpses had, in fact, partly stemmed from this very consideration — some things, once you touch them, stick to you.
Grieving families whose daughters had died — more than one of them wanted to foist their daughter’s spirit tablet onto Ninth Brother. And the way they phrased it sounded perfectly respectable, too.
We’ll give you a proper dowry, they’d say, we won’t even ask you to support us in old age — just consider it distant kinship. You saw to her body and buried her, that’s fate itself — just marry the tablet into your household… Now wasn’t that infuriating!
But her natal family was gone, and a spirit wrongfully dead, with no husband’s family to speak of — didn’t it deserve incense and offerings too?
If Huo Wu Rong had truly been a man, she’d have spent the rest of her life living among dozens of spirit tablets — well, there’d certainly be no hope of taking a wife then.
As the pestering grew worse, Old Yao had no choice but to hold another incense hall ceremony, and in front of all the guild leaders, trade heads, proprietors, aggrieved parties, ward chiefs, and even witnesses from the government office across all forty-six wards of the city, he revealed Huo Wu Rong’s true identity.
So it turned out Ninth Brother was a woman.
From then on, Yandu gained itself a female guild leader, and not a single person dared step forward to accuse her, saying, you’re a woman, how dare you act as guild leader?
Her accumulated virtue ran too deep — it was bound to be recorded in the city gazetteer of Yandu.
And indeed it was, written up in great detail, becoming something of a legend.
From then on, this female guild leader moved freely through the neighborhoods, able to enter even the inner quarters of households. Her business as guild leader thrived better than anyone else’s, and she never clashed with the other “brothers” over their dealings — she was the most well-liked of them all.
Of course, marriage… was out of the question. Who would dare marry her?
Every proprietor across the forty-six wards treated her as they would a man when inviting her for tea — a woman who could enter the inner chambers of households, who could sit among the banquet circles of the pleasure houses collecting guild fees, who could squat by the roadside chatting nonsense with idlers, occasionally placing small bets for fun…
But whether or not she married simply didn’t matter to Huo Wu Rong. She had become a corpse-carrier just to survive, just to keep living — and yet, through this leap in her life, she had suddenly discovered what it meant to be respected.
For the sake of that respect, Huo Wu Rong had no intention of marrying. She thought of herself only as Huo Ninth Brother.
So it was that Huo Ninth Brother hurried off with the errand boy toward Nanzhong Guild Hall.
But just as they reached the street, a carriage suddenly pulled up, blocking their path.
Huo Ninth Brother froze, staring blankly at the pair of horses adorned in gilded gold fittings, even the wheel nails gilded gold. She swallowed, hugging her melon, and turned to duck away.
Unexpectedly, a voice called out from inside the carriage, demanding: “Wu Rong, I say — you abandoned me, and you never once cried over it?”
At these words, thunder and lightning seemed to crash through Wu Rong’s mind.
Qiqian’er lifted the carriage curtain and leaned her head out, staring fixedly at her fifth elder sister. Having carried this grievance across two lifetimes, she couldn’t hold back and blurted: “Didn’t you even miss me?”
The melon in Huo Wu Rong’s hands dropped and shattered on the ground. Her mouth trembled, and after a long moment she laughed through tears: “Miss you… every holiday, eating alone with three sets of chopsticks and bowls, I’d think about it… Now that I finally have money, what good is it? It’s just me, alone! If you two were still here, I’d have given you thirty-three carriers of dowry each, found you the fattest, wealthiest proprietors in the wards, and made sure you’d never want for food or clothes again…”
Chen Dasheng, standing to the side, pursed his lips at this, thinking to himself — as if I’m somehow inferior to some fat-bellied proprietor. What kind of sister-in-law is this, anyway?