In May, the caravan making its way forward passed through Zizhou one by one, crossed Wangyuan Bridge, passed Shiling Ridge — where the Jurchen army had finally been forced into a ragged retreat — and crossed the vast, rugged mountains that had seen battle after battle… By the twenty-second day of the fifth month, they passed through Jianmen Pass.
Returning here after more than a year away, Ning Ji found that many places had changed beyond recognition. Wherever the mountain roads could be widened, they had been widened as much as possible. What had once been garrison outposts scattered throughout the mountains had now been converted into rest stops for merchants and travelers, and work stations for the personnel managing the road — now that the southwest’s trade situation had opened up, no road out of the pass was ever wide enough, and so a fair number of staff had been assigned to keep order along this stretch of mountain road leading out from Jiange.
Most of these staff members were stern and rather fierce in manner, requiring everyone passing through to strictly follow the designated route, forbidding any lingering in the narrower stretches. They spoke in loud voices and enforced the rules quite roughly, especially toward outsiders who didn’t know any better, carrying themselves with a faint air of arrogance — the unmistakable superiority of “people from the southwest.”
The scholars traveling with the caravan out of Sichuan hadn’t thought much of it on the way in, but having now spent some time touring Chengdu, they’d started grumbling that these were just petty officials “riding on borrowed authority” — mere clerks putting on more airs than even the high officials back in Chengdu. Some of them quietly took note of these incidents, planning to publish them later as observations from their trip to the southwest, once they got home.
The field hospital where Ning Ji had once stayed had by now been converted into a quarantine and inspection station for incoming migrants. Many of the commoners arriving in the southwest had to pass through a round of inspection here — mostly migrant laborers, dressed in identical uniforms, usually led by a group leader, watching everything around them with curiosity and a certain wariness. According to the scholars, most of these “poor souls” had been sold into service to come here.
Along the road there were numerous memorial sites commemorating the battles of the southwestern campaign: here such-and-such a battle had taken place, there another… Ning Yi paid careful attention to this kind of “public image” project. After the fighting ended, extensive records had been compiled, and in truth, every single battle throughout the entire southwestern campaign had been brutally fierce. After the Huaxia Army verified, researched, and compiled these accounts internally, memorial markers were carved at the corresponding sites — since there were only so many stone carvers available, this project was still ongoing, and as the group traveled along, the occasional sound of chiseling could be heard ringing out.
During the great battle in the southwest, the mountain road at Jiange had seen absolute chaos — roads destroyed, transport capacity strained — especially in the later stages, when the Huaxia Army fought the retreating Jurchens for control of the road itself. The Huaxia Army sought to cut off the enemy’s escape route and trap them, while the trapped Jurchens fought back with desperate, suicidal ferocity. Both sides fought with a kind of frenzied abandon, and the bodies of many soldiers were never even recovered or identified in time — and even when identified, there was no way to transport them back to be buried properly.
Later, once each side’s dead had been roughly sorted by allegiance, they were cremated together, their ashes buried in the earth or scattered across the mountains. Because of this, these fallen soldiers have no graves anywhere else — these mountain memorial markers serve both as their monuments and, in truth, as their actual graves.
Fortunate indeed are the loyal bones laid to rest in these green hills. Toward each of these memorial sites scattered through the mountains, people of every allegiance showed a comparable degree of respect. At night, while resting at their lodgings, people would go to the nearby memorials to burn incense and kowtow, sending up curls of smoke. Every so often, someone burning paper money would be stopped by a passing patrol, and if the argument escalated into a shouting match, the offender might be hauled off and locked up in the mountains for a day.
While the caravan lingered in the mountains, Ning Ji went to burn incense twice himself. He wasn’t particularly fond of the incense-burning ritual — he much preferred honoring the dead with a plate of sliced pig’s head and some wine to share. A middle-aged scholar traveling with them, noticing how endearing he looked, kindly explained to him the proper steps for honoring the spirits and paying respects — sincerity of heart was essential, the steps had to be precise, and each gesture carried its own meaning, and so on, otherwise the heroes here, however open-hearted they might be, could still end up offending the spirits down the line. Ning Ji looked at him the way one might look at a simpleton.
“I don’t believe in gods. There are no gods in this world.”
Even his look of contempt for others managed to come across as endearing, and the middle-aged scholar earnestly lectured him further. “Young man, you’re full of youthful bluster, but you shouldn’t speak so recklessly. Have you seen everything there is to see in this world? How can you say with such certainty there are no gods? The spirits watch from three feet above our heads… and besides, speaking so bluntly like this could easily offend other people too…”
Ning Ji thought to himself: I already told you there are no gods, and here you are going on and on about how there are — how is that not offending me? But after what had happened at the little courtyard last year, he already knew the world was full of foolish people who simply couldn’t be reasoned with, and he no longer bothered arguing the point.
The middle-aged scholar found his reaction endearingly naive — youthful and full of spirit, yes, but not the type to talk back and argue stubbornly like other children — and so he continued on at some length…
Along the way, people paid tribute to these fallen heroes in various ways, but for Ning Ji, aside from a few memories stirring in his heart, none of it moved him particularly deeply. He wasn’t yet the age for that kind of reflection. As he burned incense, he simply said to them, “I’m heading out now,” then left Jianmen Pass, turning back to wave at the mountain range behind him. The leaves on the mountainside rippled like waves in the wind.
Beyond Jiange, this was still Huaxia Army territory.
The southwestern campaign — the final decisive battle between the Seventh Army and the Jurchen western route army — had secured for the Huaxia Army a vast stretch of territory running from Jiange to Hanzhong, which in practical terms had made things considerably easier for the flow of goods out of the southwest. Since ancient times, leaving Sichuan had always meant a choice between the river route or the land route, but in truth, neither the water route through Yibin and Chongqing nor the land route through Jianmen Pass had ever been easy going. In the past, with the Huaxia Army unable to exert control beyond the pass, merchants leaving Jianmen Pass had essentially taken their lives into their own hands — the saying that greater risk brings greater reward notwithstanding, this had, on the whole, still been detrimental to the flow of resources in and out.
Now, the Huaxia Army had established two hub points just beyond Jiange. The first was near Zhaohua, right after leaving the pass, where goods heading both in and out could be gathered and consolidated. Though many merchants still preferred to go all the way into Chengdu themselves to get the most transparent prices, in order to improve transport efficiency along the Jiange mountain road, the official Huaxia government-organized horse teams still delivered a great deal of ordinary goods to Zhaohua every day, and had even begun encouraging people to set up small, low-tech workshops there, to relieve some of the transport burden on Chengdu.
Since Chengdu’s major development was itself only a year old, the layout at Zhaohua could, for now, only be described as just starting to take shape. With large numbers of people pouring in from outside gathering in this area beyond Jiange, the place looked notably dirtier, messier, and more run-down compared to Chengdu’s development zones. Workers arriving from outside typically had to stay here for about three days — they had to pay a fee to have a doctor check them for any serious illness, take a hot bath, and if their clothes were too worn, they were usually required to change, with the Huaxia government issuing a uniform set of clothing, so that after entering the mountains, many people ended up looking essentially identical.
Ning Yi had once complained at home that the clothing wasn’t particularly attractive, looking rather like prison uniforms, but his elder aunt had shot him down by pointing to the cost involved.
Beggars in ragged clothes were not permitted into the mountains, though this wasn’t entirely without recourse. A number of factories in the southwest recruited cheap labor right here, and once someone signed a so-called “indenture contract,” the cost of quarantine and new clothing upon entering the mountains would be covered by the factory instead, later deducted from their wages.
“…You know, say what you will, but Zhaohua at least still has some conscience to it.”
The talkative scholar traveling with them, “great things ahead” Lu Wenke, remarked to Ning Ji with some feeling: “The Huaxia Army helped provide a standardized indenture contract that every household buying labor has to use here. The contract’s fixed at five years — if the factory covers your costs upfront, you work off the debt afterward, and once your wages have paid it down, if you still want to leave before the five years are up, you can pay a sum to buy your freedom early. That said, outside of Zhaohua, there are also ten-year and twenty-year contracts, with better conditions and bigger promises, meant for people with real skills to sign onto… But there are unscrupulous ones too — twenty-year contracts with nothing spelled out in them at all. Anyone who actually signs one of those is in real trouble…”
“If the Huaxia Army issued a standard five-year contract, they ought to require that only this one be used,” said the middle-aged scholar who’d earlier tried to teach Ning Ji about honoring the spirits — his name was Fan Heng — frowning as he considered the matter. “Otherwise, what’s the difference between that and taking off your trousers just to fart?”
“Who knows what they’re thinking. Honestly, for those common folk with nothing to their name, making it this far and signing a contract is already the better outcome. You’ve all heard what it’s like out beyond this region, I’m sure.”
The scholars, who loved speaking in riddles among themselves, chatted for a while, then began holding forth on various problems the Huaxia Army faced in occupying Sichuan — how the flow of goods in and out couldn’t be resolved, how Sichuan was only suited to holding a defensive corner and unfit for real ambition — and eventually drifted into stories from the Three Kingdoms era, quoting the classics and gesturing grandly as they spoke.
Over the course of the journey, the more-than-hundred-strong caravan gradually split into small cliques of like-minded people. There were five scholars altogether — Lu Wenke, Fan Heng, and the others — who mostly stuck together, chatting idly along the way. Ning Ji’s cover identity was that of a young doctor from a family with a tradition of medical learning — though he’d always been a poor student back at the school in Zhang Village, his fundamentals weren’t bad, and he had no trouble at all reading and writing. Combined with his endearing looks, this group of scholars naturally took him as one of their own, always calling him over to chat and gossip, and every so often someone would share a bit of pastry with him. Scholars and men of letters might mostly be poor as church mice, but anyone able to travel around with a caravan like this generally still had some means to their name.
Once he’d joined the caravan, Ning Ji could no longer eat his fill the way he used to at home. With over a hundred people traveling together, meals were organized collectively by the caravan, mostly big communal pots — and frankly, the food in this era was genuinely terrible. Ning Ji could use “still growing” as an excuse to eat a bit more, but given the sheer speed of his metabolism after all these years of martial training, actually eating his fill would have been alarming to witness.
His cover as a doctor turned out to be quite convenient. On a long journey like this, most people had no choice but to walk the whole way on foot, and after a few days, blisters were inevitable — and with over a hundred people traveling together, there were often minor mishaps too, like a twisted ankle. With his medical skill, his willingness to get his hands dirty without complaint, and his harmless, endearing face, Ning Ji quickly won the goodwill of most of the caravan, which meant that over the course of the journey… he ended up scoring an impressive amount of free pastries.
This mindset really didn’t fit the image befitting a future “number one martial artist under heaven,” and every so often, when he thought about it, Ning Ji felt a bit ashamed of himself — but there wasn’t much he could do about it.
Mosquito meat is still meat, after all — what else was he supposed to do, out here on the road…
All the way to Zhaohua, aside from tending to various minor ailments for people, he mostly kept company with these five scholars. Fan Heng, the middle-aged scholar who’d tried to teach him about honoring the spirits, was fairly well-off, and whenever they passed a cheap eatery or a snack stall, he’d buy something to feed Ning Ji, so Ning Ji simply put up with him.
Traveling a little behind the group, and often setting up camp nearby, was a father-and-daughter pair of traveling street performers. The father, Wang Jiang, had some martial training under his belt — a middle-aged man with a sturdy-looking build, though his face already showed the unnatural flush of some underlying illness. He often performed bare-chested, thrusting an iron spear against his own throat as a stunt.
—Hard external training, if practiced without care, brought terrible suffering in old age. This middle-aged performer already had all sorts of health problems building up, the kind of issue that took decades to accumulate and was extremely difficult to untangle once it had set in. Ning Ji could see it clearly, but there was nothing to be done about it — it was like a tangled ball of countless threads, where the order in which you pulled them mattered enormously, and only the finest physicians in the southwest could really treat something like that. Having spent his time honing battlefield medicine, and not yet even fifteen, any prescription Ning Ji might write would only kill the man faster, so he chose not to say much about it.
The performer’s daughter was named Wang Xiuniang, seventeen or eighteen years old, with darker skin, a well-proportioned figure, and sturdy thighs. She wore her hair in two braids and hadn’t learned any real martial skill from her father — truthfully, he didn’t have much to teach in the first place. Her real skill was tumbling — she could do a hundred somersaults in a row. Besides tumbling, the father-daughter pair also performed a monkey act, with a well-trained monkey named Wangsheng. This trip to Chengdu had apparently earned them quite a bit, and they seemed cheerfully set on performing along the whole way as they made their way back to Jiangnan.
Street performers usually knew a bit of bonesetting too, but not long after setting out, Wang Xiuniang twisted her ankle doing a somersault and came to Ning Ji for treatment. The sprain wasn’t serious, but after that, Wang Xiuniang started finding excuses to come pester him — bringing him wild fruit after they set up camp each evening, sharing some with the others too, sometimes saying things like “Little Brother Aotian is just so adorable” while reaching over to pinch his cheek. Before long, the scholars had all gotten to know her as well, and could chat with her comfortably.
At first Ning Ji simply assumed it was because he was cute, but before long he realized the woman was actually after Lu Wenke. Whenever she stood there talking with “great things ahead” Lu Wenke, her hands would unconsciously start twisting at her braid, with all sorts of little fidgety gestures, giving off the rank stench of courtship… Women were all like this — disgusting. Not surprising, really.
Of course, having figured this out, he had no intention of exposing her scheme — if anything, it was a relief. Whenever the woman came over to pinch his cheek, he’d simply reach out and pinch hers right back, pulling her away. In any case, whatever mischief this woman was up to wasn’t aimed at him, and Lu Wenke didn’t strike him as any great catch either — he had no particular interest in how these two would sort themselves out.
…
The caravan stayed near Zhaohua for a day. Ning Ji managed a half-satisfying meal from the communal pot, and separately slipped away from the group to sneak a fully satisfying one on the side, before setting off eastward with the caravan once more.
Beyond Jiange, past Zhaohua, there were now two roads to choose from.
The first followed Huaxia Army territory north along the Jinniu Road to Hanzhong, then continued east along the Han River — from there, one could reach anywhere in the realm. This route was safe and connected to waterways, making it currently the busiest of the two. But heading east into Bazhong instead meant entering a comparatively more complicated territory.
In the past, after the Huaxia Army had broken out from the three counties of Hedeng, with manpower stretched thin, it had shown no strong desire to expand further outward after taking most of the Chengdu plain. Later, when the Seventh Army took Hanzhong, the vast stretch of territory east of Hanzhong had, at the Jurchens’ instigation, been handed over to Dai Mengwei. This was, of course, the Jurchens’ attempt to plant a thorn in the Huaxia Army’s side — but in practice, the ones truly inconvenienced by this blockade along the main road out of Sichuan weren’t really the Huaxia Army of today.
After all, given the Huaxia Army’s momentum last year, riding the wave of their victory over the Jurchens, pushing straight through along the Han River all the way to Xiangyang would have posed little difficulty. The reason they’d let Dai Mengwei be, on the surface, stemmed from the credit he’d built up for having “saved a million common people” — so they’d stayed their hand. But at the same time, the two sides had signed a number of agreements, including Dai Mengwei relinquishing control of the Han River and pledging never to obstruct the flow of trade between east and west — this was the Huaxia Army’s bottom line, and Dai Mengwei himself understood this perfectly well.
The awkwardness of unequal strength lay precisely here — if Dai Mengwei were truly determined to “do whatever ticked you off,” the Huaxia Army would simply crush him outright and absorb the hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people under his control. It might sound exhausting, but if Dai Mengwei really did go that far off the rails, enduring the fallout might not actually prove all that difficult after all.
Dai Mengwei hadn’t gone mad — he was skilled at biding his time, and so he wouldn’t waste effort on a pointless, self-destructive gesture like that. But at the same time, having occupied the trade route, he couldn’t even impose particularly high taxes on it, because while publicly he railed fiercely against the southwest, he also couldn’t afford to trade directly with them — and every faction that did trade with the southwest regarded him as a madman who might snap at any moment. That alone made things extremely uncomfortable for everyone involved.
If all the Huaxia Army exported to the realm were simple commercial goods, that would be one thing — but starting in the second half of last year, they’d begun opening up advanced military hardware and technology transfers to the entire realm. This concerned the lifeblood of the whole realm, and was exactly the kind of critical moment that called for careful, gradual handling.
For instance — say Liu Guangshi himself was in the middle of an important deal with the Huaxia Army, and Dai Mengwei, standing in the way, suddenly went mad — what then? On something this important, you couldn’t just say “trust me.” My dealings with the southwest are genuinely a matter of saving the realm, something truly important…
Dai Mengwei had played the Huaxia Army for his own advantage, leveraging their strength to check the Jurchens, then carving out benefits from the Jurchens’ own hands to counterbalance the Huaxia Army — a whole chain of maneuvers that had, at first, seemed rather entertaining to every faction across the realm, and no small number of people had voiced open support for him. But as more and more factions began forming real, substantive ties of interest with the southwest, everyone started looking at Dai Mengwei with growing unease.
Don’t go mad, don’t get involved, just keep shouting your slogans, don’t actually do anything reckless… wait, how are you even supposed to guarantee that to us?
Once the southwest developed complicated ties of interest with every faction, Dai Mengwei increasingly became an eyesore. The entire realm had been trampled underfoot by the Jurchens for over a decade, and only the Huaxia Army had ever defeated them — now everyone was desperately hungry for a piece of the southwest’s power, and in the face of such real, tangible benefit, ideology counted for very little. A common target eventually becomes a target for everyone’s condemnation, and condemnation by the masses tends to fizzle out on its own — no one understood this better than Dai Mengwei himself.
And so, in the second half of last year, a rebellion broke out within Dai Mengwei’s own territory. A general named Cao Silong, opposing Dai Mengwei, rose up in arms and split off a portion of the territory bordering the Huaxia Army.
Though this General Cao opposed Dai, he wasn’t particularly fond of the neighboring Huaxia Army either. He righteously declared his acceptance of the Wu dynasty’s true succession, his willingness to accept the command of Grand General Liu Guangshi and others, and called for correcting the wrongs of the age and crushing every rebel — but beneath all this grand, hollow sloganeering, the one concrete thing he actually did was agree to accept Liu Guangshi’s command.
Liu Guangshi had been spending money like water in the southwest, putting a broad smile on Master Ning’s face over it, and in light of this matter, he sent off an extremely reluctant letter, hoping the Huaxia People’s Government might understand General Cao Silong’s position and let the matter go. Master Ning wrote back in reply — though grudgingly, since the client was the one asking, this particular favor had to be granted.
And so, between the Huaxia Army, Dai Mengwei, and Liu Guangshi, a kind of free-port enclave sprang up — a patch of territory that not only hosted Liu Guangshi’s own presence, but also gave Dai Mengwei, Wu Qimei, Zou Xu, and other parties unable to trade directly with the southwest a bit of room to conduct their own quiet, under-the-table dealings. Goods coming out of the southwest could pass through this stretch of ground and end up fetching an even higher price elsewhere — and in order to protect his own interests there, Dai Mengwei kept this particular area rather well maintained, with security along the entire trade route reliably upheld. It was, frankly, a rather ironic state of affairs.
“…On the surface, Cao Silong is Liu Guangshi’s man, having recognized Liu as his lord after rebelling against Dai Mengwei — but in reality, we suspect he’s always been Dai’s man underneath it all. Old Dai really is a cunning old fox on this one…”
As they drew close to Bazhong, Lu Wenke, Fan Heng, and the others once again fell to holding forth on the state of the realm with Ning Ji, this time on the subject of Dai Mengwei.
Most scholars leaving the southwest typically took the Hanzhong route. Lu Wenke and Fan Heng, upon arriving, had been quite cautious, since the fighting had only just settled and the situation remained unstable — it was only after spending some time in Chengdu that they’d formed some judgment about the broader state of the realm. They were the sort of scholars who believed in reading widely and traveling ten thousand li, and having seen the Huaxia Army’s southwest, they now wanted to see other territories as well; some even hoped to make a name for themselves somewhere outside the southwest, which was why they’d joined this caravan heading out of Sichuan. As for Ning Ji, he’d simply picked this particular caravan at random.
“Lord Dai currently holds Ankang and Shiyan, both along the Han River. I hear the people there live reasonably well. Lord Dai governs by Confucian principle and has accomplished a fair amount, so along the way we intend to go see it with our own eyes. What are your plans going forward, young brother Long?”
The main purpose of this caravan leaving Sichuan was to pass through Cao Silong’s territory, stop at a county town north of Bazhong, and then decide on the next leg from there. When Lu Wenke asked Ning Ji his thoughts, Ning Ji shrugged. “Either way’s fine by me.”
“Then why don’t we travel together the rest of the way — it’s good to have company,” Fan Heng said with a smile. “We’ve already discussed our route among ourselves — from Bazhong we’ll swing north, pass by Mingtong Academy, then board a boat at Ankang and head east through the Jing-Xiang region. Aotian’s still young — traveling with us would suit him best.”
“Either way’s fine by me,” Ning Ji said again, his mind already on the big meal he’d enjoy once they reached the next town, not particularly picky about the route for now.
On the afternoon of the first day of the sixth month, the group made their way through the narrow, crowded mountain roads and entered Bazhong.
Everything within the city was utter chaos.
A great many caravans had gathered within this small walled town. Outside one crudely built new inn after another, serving boys with towels slung over their shoulders and heavily made-up women of the night were both loudly hawking for business, and the smell of horse dung on the ground was thick and unpleasant. To someone who’d spent a lifetime traveling far and wide, this might have looked like a sign of thriving prosperity — but to this group, having just come from the southwest, the order here felt considerably worse by comparison.
“Look over there…”
As the group made their way toward a nearby cheap inn, Lu Wenke tugged at Ning Ji’s sleeve and pointed across the street.
Along that long stretch of road, crudely built shacks had been set up one after another, some fenced in with railings on the outside — looking, altogether, like rows of makeshift jail cells lining the street.
The shacks were full of people.
Men and women with gray, gaunt faces and ragged clothing, and children of every age in between — some slumped listlessly on the ground beneath the open, unpartitioned shelters, others penned inside the fencing. Some of the children wailed loudly, sucking their thumbs, or chased each other around in an environment that looked no better than a pigsty. The adults watched it all with hollow, vacant eyes.
It wasn’t quite like a prison, but to say they were entirely free wouldn’t have been accurate either.
“Who are they…” Ning Ji asked, frowning.
“This is exactly what we talked about back in Zhaohua — the beggars who managed to make it that far still counted themselves lucky. Those people at least had a choice — sign a five-year contract, and maybe pay off the debt within half a year, work five years in a factory, and still come out with a decent sum saved up. These people here, they lost everything in the chaos of war. Some of them were told, out here, that they’d be taken to the southwest, that the southwest was a wonderful place — and they signed contracts for twenty, thirty, even forty years, for wages that don’t come to even a tenth of what you’d get in Zhaohua… What choice did they have? For the sake of the elderly and the children back home, what else could they do but sell themselves?”
“If you ask me, this is entirely the Huaxia Army’s fault!” the middle-aged Fan Heng said as he walked alongside them. “They claim to uphold the rule of law, to honor contracts, but in practice there’s no humanity in it at all! If there’s a standard five-year contract in Zhaohua, then simply require that every contract be the same! Once these people arrive in the southwest, the terms they’ve signed are utterly outrageous — the Huaxia Army ought to step in and see justice done, correct every single one of these contracts, and if they did, the common people would surely rally behind them in gratitude! That so-called Master Ning — even back when I was in the southwest, I said as much — he’s a muddled fool. If I were the one handling this, within a year I’d set the world right again, and the southwest would earn itself the finest reputation imaginable!”
“Perhaps it’s meant to be left to them to sort out for themselves…” Ning Ji murmured quietly, looking at those hollow, vacant eyes. His heart went out to them — he could kill an enemy without hesitation, but looking into eyes like that wasn’t something he could easily stomach.
The street was noisy and crowded, and Fan Heng, still in the middle of denouncing the Huaxia Army, didn’t quite catch what Ning Ji had said. A scholar walking ahead of them named Chen Junsheng turned back and said, “Transporting people is no simple matter, though — where do you all suppose these people came from?”
The question seemed rather complicated, even a bit pointed, and the five of them had apparently touched on it before, or perhaps heard some rumors about it along the way. At the question, Lu Wenke, Fan Heng, and the others all fell silent for a moment, until Fan Heng finally spoke.
“Go take a look… and you’ll understand.”
There seemed to be more behind his words, and the group continued on ahead. Ning Ji, growing a bit curious, asked Lu Wenke as they neared the inn, “Where are we going to look, and at what?”
Lu Wenke turned his head and said quietly, “There’s been talk going around for some time now that most of the workers who’ve been coming into the southwest lately were sold off from Lord Dai’s territory… With so many workers coming in, some no doubt do come from Lord Dai’s lands, but whether they make up the majority, no one can really say for certain. We discussed it along the way and decided we ought to come take a look for ourselves. Truth be told, Lord Dai is a man of deep learning, and although he’s at odds with the Huaxia Army, the fact that he saved several million people from the Jurchens’ hands during that time of grave danger is an achievement that can’t simply be erased. We’re rather reluctant to believe such a thing could tarnish him.”
“Ah.” Ning Ji nodded. If he ever ran into this Lord Dai himself, he’d naturally just cut him down with a single stroke of the sword — as for passing judgment on the man’s merits and faults alongside these others, that wasn’t something he had any interest in doing, so he offered no further opinion on the matter.
Perhaps because of the sudden surge in traffic through the town, the newly built inns within Bazhong city were about as crude as camping out in the open, the air stuffy and hot, tinged with an inexplicable smell of excrement. That night, when Ning Ji climbed up to the rooftop to look out over the town, seeing the disorderly shacks along the streets and the people penned in like livestock, he felt, for the first time, the true weight of just how far he’d left Huaxia Army territory behind.
A pang of homesickness crept in…