“…From the early years when newspapers were first opened up, to when we took control of Chengdu, and especially since the People’s Government was established last year and drew the whole realm’s attention — Chengdu’s newspaper industry, one could say, has flourished tremendously. By our count today, all the various newspapers — including the small tabloids circulating privately — number over two hundred and fifty in Chengdu alone.”
“This is the prosperity brought about by opening things up last year, but by now it’s also given rise to a lot of disorder. Some outside scholars, flush with money, write articles that the big papers won’t publish, so they simply start their own little tabloid instead. Some papers deliberately work against us — they publish stories without any investigation, and they look like factual reports, but they’re pure fabrication, entirely meant to smear us. We’ve shut down a few papers like this, but there are still more…”
“There are also ones that don’t seem to be working against anyone in particular, but are simply reckless — take the Tiandu Gazette, for example. The name sounds proper enough, but plenty of people privately call it the ‘Troublemaker’s Gazette’ — strange tales, rumors, all sorts of wild and fabricated news. Every issue looks legitimate enough, but you can never tell which parts to believe. Truth and fiction get so mixed together that even the truth starts to look false…”
“So, these matters need to be brought under order — but we need proper justification for it. First, we need a more detailed set of regulations to govern all this. It’s not that we’re forbidding people from writing tales of the strange and supernatural, but you need to clearly label it up front, so as not to mislead readers. Describing facts and expressing opinions need to be kept distinct — they can’t be blended together entirely. Drafting this set of regulations is exactly what we’re going to be discussing next. We’ll try to put together a first draft within the next half month…”
The next morning’s meeting was held by the Ministry of Propaganda, taking up a conference room on the second floor of the newly built conference building. The meeting venue was bright and clean; through the glass windows on one side, one could see the yellow-green leaves in the treetops outside, raindrops gathering on the leaves and slowly dripping from their tips.
This was the most important meeting the Ministry of Propaganda held in August, chaired by Yong Jinnian, with Shishi taking notes off to the side.
“…We already issued a document on this matter last month, so a great many comments have come in, and they’ve already been filed and organized item by item.” As Yong Jinnian spoke, he reached over and patted the uniformly printed compilation booklet beside him, which had already been placed at the hand of every attendee below.
“…So going forward, this is going to be painstaking, slow work. Every day, we’ll spend half a day in extra meetings, going through it item by item, discussing our views, and then summarizing and discussing again. If anyone has new ideas along the way, feel free to speak up at any time. In short, this will serve as our basis for managing the newspaper industry for many years to come, so everyone needs to take it seriously and do their very best.”
“All right, let’s move on now and begin discussing the most important part — item one…”
Droplets of water traced their way down the bright windowpane, their paths winding unpredictably, sometimes merging with other drops and hurrying along faster, sometimes lingering on some spot on the glass, reluctant to fall. At this moment in the conference room, few people had the presence of mind to notice this small, curious scene.
The newly built conference building had five floors in total, and at this moment, people were gathered in many of its meeting rooms. Most of these meetings were dry and tedious, yet those attending still had to muster their fullest concentration to participate and understand everything being discussed. They were, in effect, weaving together things that could potentially affect every corner of the southwest, and even the entire realm.
If the disturbances of this world were likened to a storm, then this place was one of its very cores. And in many years of peace to come, it would very likely turn out to be the largest one of all.
The autumn rain paused briefly.
Not far away, on the street outside, carriages still clattered past, stopping beside the platforms; from the large carriage compartments, people filed out one after another, crisscrossing forward and back, left and right, across the open square outside. Faintly, from the trees after the rain had stopped, came the sound of children’s voices calling out.
The first meeting ran the entire morning. After lunch, the core figures of the meeting — including Yong Jinnian and Li Shishi — held another closed-door session to go over things once more, in order to re-organize the direction and framework for the discussions over the coming half month.
After the meeting ended, Yong Jinnian and Shishi chatted, smiling, about the news that Yong Jinrou was pregnant.
“…A few days ago Qu Qing came by, delivering the summary of Zhang Village’s self-inspection, and after the meeting, the Chairman… heh, he practically wanted to send Qu Qing straight back at once, just to… tell him all sorts of things he’d learned about women being pregnant — saying Xiaorou wasn’t so young anymore, and to watch out for this and that. Qu Qing, who’s normally such a rough sort of man, was quite startled by it all, and ran over to the army medical office to ask every midwife and delivery expert he could find, one after another. The midwives, of course, were perfectly nonchalant about it, saying that as long as she’s generally healthy, what could possibly go wrong — our Huaxia Army women aren’t like those delicate young ladies who never step outside their own front gates… Qu Qing didn’t even know who to believe anymore, so in the end he just bought a huge pile of tonics to bring home. Honestly, Xiaorou’s health used to be poor, but after all these years in the Huaxia Army, she’s long since built herself up. She’s teaching classes at Zhang Village now, and every teacher there keeps an eye on her — what could possibly happen to her?”
Shishi laughed too. “He’s a man — what does he know about women’s matters? He’s just fretting over nothing.”
“The Chairman means well by it. It’s just that on this particular subject, he’s being a bit overly cautious.”
Shishi said, “Madam Jin’er never had a child of her own.”
“Mm.” Yong Jinnian nodded. “‘A man without feeling is not truly a hero — and how can a man not cherish his own children?’ That’s exactly right.”
The two of them chatted a bit more, then left the conference building and parted ways, each heading off in a different direction. Shishi walked west along a road lined with tall trees, with few people about, passing through a large gate and crossing a pond set within a simple garden, arriving at a courtyard tucked away among the trees. Figures moved beneath the eaves; inside the courtyard’s rooms, various secretaries were handing off or organizing documents with visitors from outside. This was the very core at the eye of the storm.
At this hour in the afternoon, as long as nothing urgent came up, Ning Yi usually wasn’t too busy. When Shishi walked over, he was sitting in a chair beneath the eaves, holding a cup of tea, lost in thought. On the tea table beside him lay a simple map and some paper covered in scribbles and sketches.
“Meeting’s over?” Without turning to look at her, Ning Yi gazed ahead, smiling as he spoke.
“Scheming something again?” Shishi smiled as she set today’s meeting notes down on the table. There was no particular hidden meaning behind her words — this office saw a great deal of foot traffic, leaving little room for anything private, so on the occasions the two of them met here, it was usually limited to reporting on work, or idle chatter.
“I’m thinking about how to write an article to make that Jia Ding fellow — the one who’s always going against me in the papers lately — cry his eyes out… ah, he’s got so much dirt on him, what a shame I can’t expose it.” Ning Yi tilted his head, breaking into his “I want to cause trouble” smile — Shishi was already well acquainted with this private side of him.
“Don’t go acting recklessly. We’re right in the middle of drafting regulations over here — watch out, or we’ll write up a clause that lets us round up all you anonymous pamphleteers.”
“Don’t try to scare me. I already talked to Master Yong about it — what’s wrong with using a pen name?” As the actual mastermind behind the scenes, Ning Yi rolled his eyes, quite pleased with himself, and Shishi couldn’t help but laugh out loud.
By now the intermittent autumn rain had stopped for quite a while. Looking out from beneath the eaves where Ning Yi sat, through the trees not far off, the falling sunlight cast a golden arc of light over the pond. The two of them sat and watched for a while; Ning Yi poured her some tea, and Shishi cradled the cup in her hands.
“A couple of days ago, Hou Yuanyong said Brother Yu would come looking for me. He really did show up yesterday,” she said.
“Anything interesting come of it?”
“Something’s gone wrong on Yan Daolun’s end…”
Shishi sat turned slightly to the side, speaking calmly about the matters concerning Yan Daolun and Yu Hezhong. Ning Yi listened, then raised an eyebrow. “Whether or not we manage to get a hold over Yan Daolun isn’t really a big deal, but if we can, all the better.”
“Liu Guangshi is in the middle of fighting a war right now — if we delay the goods this long, could that cause a real problem?”
Ning Yi turned to look at her. “What do you think?”
“My first thought, of course, is that you don’t want Liu Guangshi to win too easily. The longer they fight, the more money we make.”
Ning Yi smiled, and after a moment, shook his head. “If it really worked out that way, that would certainly be a wonderful thing, but the truth is, we’ve already sent an enormous amount of military supplies to Liu Guangshi’s side — honestly, even if we gave him nothing else from here on out, he could still hold out well into next year. After all, he’s got plenty of money and isn’t stingy with it, and this northern campaign against Bian Liang has been quite thoroughly prepared. So a delay of a month or two really doesn’t matter much overall. Liu Guangshi isn’t going to fly into a rage over this.”
“…Then if that’s not the reason, it must be something else…”
Shishi said this quietly, without revealing the suspicion in her heart, since it might touch on a great deal of confidential intelligence work that couldn’t be disclosed. Ning Yi could hear the caution in her tone, but he only shook his head and smiled.
“It’s not much of a secret. The General Staff’s early war-game projections already included this exact possibility.”
He cradled his teacup, gazing toward the pond ahead, and said, “In a chaotic age, when the realm collapses and heroes rise up together, dragons and serpents crawling out of hiding — in the earliest stretch of such times, every snake, worm, rat, and ant gets its turn on the stage. Some genuinely have real ability, some simply seize the moment, and some are purely lucky — raising a flag of rebellion is enough to make a name for oneself. It’s the same chaos we saw when the Central Plains fell.”
“But going forward, the snakes and worms will start biting each other inside the gourd — whether one’s truly a mule or a horse will finally have to be proven. This is when the rules and true logic of a chaotic age start to dominate everything for real. Power grows out of the barrel of a gun — whoever’s a coward, whoever merely looks impressive but is bluster and weak-legged underneath, will gradually get filtered out. That filtering has already begun.”
Having said this, he took a sip of tea. Shishi nodded, recalling everything Yu Hezhong had said the night before — the passing of blame up and down, everyone grabbing their own share… In truth, she had already seen all of this clearly for herself.
“…Actually, yesterday, I told Brother Yu he should bring your sister-in-law and the children to Chengdu.”
“See, you didn’t even need intelligence support to sense that possibility yourself.” Ning Yi laughed. “And what did he say?”
“He… can’t bear to part with his two bosom companions here. He said this past year and more has been the happiest stretch of his life…” Shishi looked at Ning Yi, saying this helplessly.
Ning Yi nodded. “As long as nothing major happens, he can keep living the good life for now — but once Liu Guangshi is out of the picture, he probably won’t have such a comfortable life anymore.”
“He’s got money, and he’s put it into building factories and workshops. On top of that, he’s taken up connections with Yan Daolun and that crowd, bringing people in from outside.”
Ning Yi took a sip of tea. “That’s actually rather clever of him…”
“He’s teamed up with Li Rulai and his people too…”
“Cough, cough, cough…” Ning Yi set his teacup aside and coughed several times, pressing his forehead, unsure whether to laugh or scold. Finally he said, “This… well, this… never mind. In the future, talk him into doing business with more of a conscience — there’s no end to how much money one can make… maybe nothing major will come of it after all…”
“Yesterday he told me that if this business with Liu Guangshi succeeds, Yan Daolun will give him a gift of thanks, and he said he wanted to invest it into Li Rulai’s business for me too. I was thinking — could we perhaps put in a preemptive record now, so that if something happens to Li Rulai, we could turn the tables and use that as a lesson for Yu Hezhong, treating that money as the price of the lesson?”
Ning Yi thought it over, then shook his head.
“Better not to. Once something reaches your level, the truth becomes impossible to untangle. If you throw yourself into it to pull him out, you’ll have done your duty by loyalty, but who’s going to believe you? If circumstances were different, in order to protect you, we might instead have to kill him… I’m not saying that’s what would happen here — this matter should be containable — but still, why bother?”
Shishi nodded. “Then I’ll think of some other way.”
“Mm.”
The two of them sat quietly for a while, then Shishi said, “…Do you really think Liu Guangshi will lose? I mean — is dragging this out for a month or two really just to stiff him on a couple of payments? I thought there might be some bigger strategy behind it…”
“Stiffing him on two payments is already a great deal — that already counts as a big strategy,” Ning Yi said, smiling. “As for Liu Guangshi, of course we have no solid proof, but based on the intelligence coming back from the front lines — even though Zou Xu has betrayed his former side, he still enforces extremely strict discipline among his own troops. Chen Shiquan and Yin Zong, the two big landowners, have practically been bled dry by him — he’s gambling everything he’s got on this one throw. His troops do have real combat strength, and after Liu Guangshi crossed the river, his string of small victories has gradually been turning into major ones. We think Zou Xu is holding something back…”
“Personal grudges are one thing, but when it comes to grand strategy, Zou Xu genuinely has real ability. From the very first clash, what he’s been aiming for has always been total victory. We’re too far from Bian Liang right now to predict exactly where he’ll play his winning hand, but setting emotion aside and speaking purely as a matter of prediction, ninety percent of the people at headquarters who know him personally would bet on him winning.”
Ning Yi turned his head. “So right now, we don’t know how he’ll win, but our guess is that he will.”
“…Can’t we intervene somehow, to let them keep fighting a bit longer?”
“The distance is too great. We tried helping Liu Guangshi early on, patching up some of his weaknesses. But look at Yan Daolun and his crowd, and you’ll understand clearly enough… On the level of real grand strategy, Liu Guangshi is a bloated, enormous fat man, riddled with weaknesses from head to toe. We can’t possibly patch every single one of them, and all it takes is for Zou Xu to land one solid punch on any one of them to potentially kill him outright. We have no way to help him predict which weakness will get hit, so early on I kept pushing for speed — get the goods over quickly, pay quickly. But now… let’s delay it two months, since two months is two months. If he somehow manages to survive against all odds, we’ll just keep doing business — after all, this whole mess was caused by his own people, not ours.”
Ning Yi paused. “So this is what you’d call bad teammates. Going forward, setting aside the other small warlords no one can quite figure out — once real fighting breaks out, Wu Qimei, Tie Yan, and Liu Guangshi are most likely to be the first ones knocked out. My guess is, if He Wen is still standing after the martial arts tournament in Jiangning, then Wu Qimei and Tie Yan are next in line for the axe.”
Having said this, he tapped his finger against the small map on the tea table. Shishi looked down and saw that the little map was indeed marked with quite a few symbols, apparently representing various factions, all arrayed around Jiangning — the markings Ning Yi had made in the direction of Bian Liang were even fewer than those around Jiangning.
“So that’s what you’ve been thinking about.” She smiled faintly. “Jiangning’s gotten this lively, hosting a martial arts tournament no less — I hear that fat fellow Lin is going too. You actually want to go join in the excitement yourself, don’t you?”
Ning Yi sighed. “Just idle thoughts, that’s all.”
“It’s been so many years since you’ve been back — I wonder what it’s turned into now.”
“After a few massacres, I doubt it looks anything like it used to,” Ning Yi said, gazing at the map. “Still, there’s someone helping keep an eye on things there… they should be arriving soon, I’d guess…”
He said this gently, and Shishi assumed he was talking about the rumored work team dispatched to Jiangning, and began reminiscing with him about their memories of the place. Afterward the two of them stood beneath the eaves and chatted a while longer.
This was a peaceful autumn afternoon in the courtyard, figures moving about nearby, their voices calm and unremarkable — but Shishi knew full well what kind of information would end up passing through this place. At this moment in August, the rectification of the Seventh Army, top to bottom, was underway; the scheme against Liu Guangshi was underway; the push for the Ministry of Education’s “Benevolent Learning” program, inside and outside the city, was underway. Departments large and small, countless projects of every scale, all converged here in the end.
And even the great meeting concerning the future development of the newspaper industry for years, even decades to come — a meeting that included the Ministry of Propaganda — had only just begun, not yet significant enough to even become material for a formal report.
At the very eye of the storm, things were always calm. Sometimes they would simply talk about small, everyday matters, while sunlight fell across the small pond, and a fish stirred the surface, releasing a single bubble. Only far from here — at a scale of tens, hundreds, even thousands of li away — would the storm’s true sweeping force erupt into real destruction. There, cannon fire roared, blades and spears drew blood, and rivers of red spread across the land as people braced themselves, ready to clash.
That was the scene already unfolding north of the Yangtze. And soon, this same enormous storm would descend as well upon a place long left behind —
— the ancient city of Jiangning.