In the late fourth month and early fifth month, Fuzhou was sinking into a muggy, humid rainy season.

The heavy rain brought by the typhoon had paused for a few days, only to give way to a soft, endless drizzle. This never-ending rain kept the post-typhoon cleanup dragging on and on; pedestrians on the roads all wore straw raincoats, the water on the streets rising and receding again and again, leaving the roads a muddy mess, the paving stones washed to a glossy blue-black sheen.

Occasionally an old, worn-out house would even collapse.

Still, for the people of Fuzhou, who faced a typhoon every single year, this was hardly something they couldn’t bear.

“…You know, ever since the imperial household came to our Fuzhou, they really have done a good number of solid, worthwhile things… They’ve paved several new roads through the city with bluestone, renovated the old buildings, and cleared out a good number of the drainage channels. In the old days, after a hurricane, the place used to be an absolute eyesore, but good days are coming now. As you two gentlemen surely know, there’ve really been quite a few people coming in from outside lately… Give it a bit more time, and buying or renting a house won’t be at this price anymore, you know.”

Ning Ji and Qu Longjun, newly arrived in this unfamiliar land, were staying temporarily at an inn in the western part of the city, in the process of renting a place to settle down for the medium term. The two of them carried themselves with no small air of refinement, and Ning Ji wasn’t stingy with the copper coins he handed out as tips. Every day he covered a meal for the housing broker who spent several days showing them around, and along the way the man had no end of praise for the new sovereign who had come to Fuzhou, singing his praises generously. What he mainly meant to convey, though, was simply this: “housing prices are going up across the whole city.”

Of course, for a pair like Ning Ji and Qu Longjun, who had made plenty of friends and closed plenty of deals along their journey, that was hardly a concern either.

The one thing that gave them some pause was that the security checks in Fuzhou seemed to have grown rather strict of late. The two of them carried a travel permit issued at the Xianxia Pass checkpoint, but even in the few days they’d been wandering around the city, they’d been stopped and questioned several times — and the questions were fairly detailed, which struck them as a bit odd.

After being questioned by street patrolmen a few times, if the questions got too involved, Ning Ji would simply lose patience and hand over some coins to make them go away, and the officers would take the money and leave. The broker traveling with them, and Qu Longjun as well, both felt he was being a bit wasteful about it, but of course neither of them understood that Ning Ji felt no real sense of belonging anywhere outside the southwest, nor did he have any particularly high expectations of this place. Coming to Fuzhou was, on the one hand, a matter of sightseeing, and on the other, he hadn’t ruled out the possibility of stirring up some trouble. For now, he was testing the waters on one hand and thoroughly “corrupting” the local officials on the other.

In his heart, perhaps, some part of him laughed like a great villain: This is it? And they call this “Honor the Sovereign, Expel the Barbarian”? Call this reform?

—Weaklings!

It gave him a bit more confidence about taking down Tie Tianying.

Of course, during all this, he couldn’t afford to be spotted by anyone from the Zuo family.

Ning Ji turned this calculation over in his mind. Seeing how freely he spent, the broker accompanying them soon quietly let them in on the reason behind the recent tightening of security in Fuzhou — telling them about a disturbance in Hou Guan County, and the recent chaos surrounding the army’s relief efforts outside the city.

Fuzhou already had newspapers, but this particular matter hadn’t yet been made public. Rumors circulating privately claimed, in one version, that the army had botched the relief effort, and in another, that the soldiers had been wrongfully accused — which had led the court to begin hunting down troublemakers from the outside martial world with ill intent.

With so little solid information, either version seemed equally plausible to Ning Ji, and he simply filed it away in his memory, not bothering to sort out which was true.

The housing brokerage business was, in essence, an enterprise tied up in the shadier corners of the martial world. While chatting about the security situation, Ning Ji took the opportunity to ask about Tie Tianying as well, and it was only then that he discovered just how notorious this old man’s reputation had become among the underworld of Fuzhou.

Since the new sovereign’s arrival in Fuzhou, Tie Tianying had been the man in charge of the Emperor’s personal safety and overall security in the city; he had personally arranged the palace guard, and had overhauled the entire constabulary system of Fuzhou. Several assassination attempts against the new Emperor over the past few years had all been foiled under his direction, and a few of his manhunts against underworld criminals had made a great stir — at one point a giant hot air balloon had even been raised above Fuzhou, with soldiers using telescopes from above to track the fleeing routes of the criminals below. Several supposedly long-famous underworld figures had ended up cornered with nowhere to run during those manhunts and had died brutal deaths, which cemented Tie Tianying’s reputation among the underworld as something like a “King of Hell.”

Even just discussing this Tie Tianying now, the broker, with his own underworld background, spoke with genuine, heartfelt fear — in Fuzhou, once you’d caught this man’s attention, there was hardly any hope of a good outcome for anyone in the underworld.

Following the thread of the topic, Ning Ji casually brought up the name “Tongfu Inn,” and the broker looked at him for a good long while before finally breaking into a knowing smile. “So Young Master Sun is also one of us, on the road…”

He then quietly told them that a few days earlier, after the soldiers’ incident in Hou Guan County, Tie Tianying had sent his men out in all directions and had arrested no small number of habitual offenders and major thieves within the city as a result — and the Tongfu Inn, just two days ago, had already been raided and shut down by the government troops.

Ning Ji remembered the information he’d picked up over a month ago near Pucheng County, and felt a cold sneer rise inside him.

Weaklings.

The local gangs here really were pathetic — not a single decent fighter among them.

Still, no matter — he was a peaceable man these days, and wandering around sightseeing with Qu Longjun was plenty enjoyable in its own right. If he were still back in Jiangning stirring up trouble with Little Baldy, he’d probably be driven half to death by how spineless these Fuzhou “comrades” were…

For now, it seemed he’d just have to look forward to the next typhoon.

Once he’d finished gathering this information, Ning Ji made a decision for the next stage of their plans, and on the first day of the fifth month, the two of them rented a house in Huaiyun Ward, near Boatyard Gate on the east side of the city. They signed the lease.

The house wasn’t especially large, but there was a small courtyard in front where they could park the carriage, and a stable beside it where they could keep “Bald Donkey.” Behind the house ran a small stream, with blue stone steps leading down to it for washing clothes. Perhaps because the place had been empty for a while, the front courtyard was overgrown with weeds and rather muddy, and the rooms showed signs of long neglect — but the moment the two of them opened the windows and saw the view of the river beyond, they fell in love with the place at once.

Over the following days, Ning Ji spent his daytime hours hammering and banging around the courtyard, repairing the roof, patching up the walls, digging drainage channels, and leveling the ground. Having once been a soldier, and later a physician requiring great patience, he found the repetitive labor of construction work anything but tedious. Often he would stand on the roof in a straw raincoat, gazing out at the surroundings through the curtain of rain. The rain-soaked city of Fuzhou was old and quiet, row upon row of houses and one courtyard after another stretching off into the distance in the rain, people walking through the wet streets either at ease or in a hurry, occasional figures emerging from the little lanes by the riverside, the trees and flowers in the rain lush and green as if painted in ink wash. It all gave him a feeling he had never quite found back in Jiangning.

The young man’s heart felt at peace.

Of course, perhaps this all had something to do with the person traveling with him at this time as well.

Once the house they were living in had been settled, Ning Ji took charge of the hammering and repair work, while Qu Longjun handled the household shopping and logistics. As a young woman, she had seemed reserved and withdrawn when she’d first appeared in the southwest, but in fact, having been trained from childhood to be a “thin horse” — a companion bred for refined company — and being well-read besides, she possessed remarkable social skills, often even surpassing the more outgoing Ning Ji, and displaying far more tact and discretion in many situations.

While Ning Ji hammered away at the house, she would go out and purchase whatever daily necessities were needed. If something was too heavy, she’d also arrange to have it delivered to the house. Beyond that, she handled the laundry, cleaning, and the three daily meals with great care and order, and as time passed, the house gradually grew tidy and put together.

The city of Fuzhou was muggy and humid; the rain fell on and off, soaking Ning Ji as he worked outdoors each day. Every evening, Qu Longjun would boil water and mix it to a comfortable temperature in a wooden basin, bringing it to the room for Ning Ji to soak his feet. At such times she would also remove her own shoes and dip her fair, bare feet into the water without any hesitation, and occasionally their toes would brush against each other in the water, leaving Ning Ji feeling something soft and warm inside.

Ever since their reunion, through their time living together in the mountains, and all the way to this journey, they’d occasionally had moments of contact like this, even embraces at times, and all of this closeness had come about quite naturally; they had never really discussed it in any depth.

The rented house wasn’t large, and aside from the living room, there was only one bedroom, so the two of them had simply grown used to sharing a room. There were two beds inside, with a table between them. After washing up, Qu Longjun would light incense to drive away the night mosquitoes. She would curl up at the head of her bed reading by oil lamp; the two of them would talk from time to time, and she would tell him stories from her books, share things she’d found interesting that day, and sometimes, when Ning Ji spoke about all sorts of tales and ideas from the southwest, she would listen with great attentiveness, occasionally laughing so that her eyes curved like crescent moons.

Ning Ji, not yet sixteen, couldn’t quite put a name to what he felt in his heart, but throughout this muggy season, he hadn’t felt bored for even a moment. On the windless nights of Fuzhou, the girl’s voice and laughter brought him nothing but a deep, refreshing sense of calm. He had almost entirely stopped thinking about Yu Xiaoer. Even without the typhoon, his heart no longer felt any particular restlessness — even when he happened to see Tie Tianying riding through the streets one day with a group of underlings, and figured out from what people around him said who the man was, Ning Ji only thought to himself: “Oh. So that’s just some old white-haired coot, then.”

And as it happened, the feeling was much the same for Qu Longjun.

This was the place they wanted to stop and stay.

But of course, in these days of such calm for the two of them, on the other side of the city, countless other people and events were unfolding amid the same humid, muggy weather…

—

The clouds above hung heavy and gray, the rain still falling, streaming down over the blue tiles of the rooftops and forming curtains of water.

A middle-aged steward walked along the courtyard corridor, leading Yinping and her younger brother Yue Yun toward a room deeper within the compound.

Tongli Pavilion — this was where the Confucian scholar Li Pin now resided in Fuzhou, a place of considerable renown to the outside world. But at this moment, the Yue siblings’ hearts were filled with guardedness and reluctance. Even though Yue Fei and Li Pin were on good terms, and even though Li Pin had once offered them guidance in their studies, the two of them didn’t much feel like meeting face-to-face with him right now.

Over the past several days, the siblings had been running from one government office to another crying out for justice, trying to bring formal charges against the magistrate of Hou Guan County and the military police for the injustice done to Zhong Ergui. The petition had already gone through proper channels up to the Fuzhou prefectural office — indeed, Yinping had already voiced her complaint directly in front of Jun Wu himself. They were hoping for justice to finally be served, and imagined that everyone above them must be run ragged over the matter by now.

When Li Pin summoned them, the two of them assumed it was most likely to try to talk them out of it.

As people who could speak directly with Jun Wu himself, they understood, to some extent, the difficulties faced within the upper ranks of the court over this matter. But in these past few days, faced with the wrongful death of a soldier like Zhong Ergui, they had no interest in giving way to the bigger picture, and thinking back to the ignorance and foolishness of the common people they’d witnessed that day in Hou Guan County, Yinping felt a ball of fire smoldering inside her, ready to burst at any moment. She had even found herself wondering, lately, whether it was even worth it for the army to work so hard and so seriously to help save such people at all…

Before long, the two of them walked down the corridor and found Li Pin in the study within.

In this muggy, humid weather, Li Pin was burning charcoal in his room. This scholar, past his fifties, looked gaunt, dressed in a single layer of clothing, sitting by the stove brewing tea while smearing a bowl of medicinal black paste, faintly smelling of herbs, onto the joints of his legs. Perhaps because the paste had been heated and was somewhat hot, beads of sweat covered his forehead.

Many years before, he had served as an official under the Jinghan court and taken part in the battle against the grain famine orchestrated by Qin Siyuan and Ning Yi. After that affair, he had earned promotion and greater trust, and in the first great southward campaign of the Jurchens, he had defended Taiyuan alongside Qin Shaohe for a full year.

After Taiyuan fell, Qin Shaohe was torn apart by the Jurchens, and Li Pin had survived by sheer luck, narrowly escaping death many times over. Many of the injuries from that time still left him with lasting after-effects — the summer heat and humidity, or the cold of winter, both would set off widespread flare-ups of his rheumatism.

“Uncle Li.”

“Teacher.”

The siblings announced themselves from outside the door. Li Pin turned his head to glance at them, nodding despite the pain evident on his face. “Ah, you’ve come.”

He waved a hand at them, telling them to sit wherever they liked and wait a moment, then rose to his feet and walked into the inner room.

Both of them counted as something close to nephew and niece to him, so he had told the household that they were to be shown straight in whenever they arrived. But since Yinping was a woman, he still made the effort to go change into a proper single-layer robe and tidy his appearance in the inner room before coming back out.

After that, he got straight to the point.

“How’s the lawsuit going? Any results?”