Past the hour of the rooster, the sun gradually sank behind the western hills.

The summer breeze, gentle and muggy, settled over Fuzhou along with the gray of nightfall. In this crowded city of jutting, pointed rooftops, lamplight began to flicker on one by one, at first scattered like specks of light, gradually joining together into long strings along the streets.

Creaking little boats passed along the streams between the houses, and people in light summer clothes, fanning themselves, walked along the not-too-wide streets of Fuzhou, brushing past vendors, carts and horses, and sedan chairs.

On the east side of the city, the jujube-blossom horse pulled its cart along the road heading east through Huaiyun Ward, now settled into evening. Not long after dinner, the muggy streets of the ward still had plenty of people about, and the two young men sat on the driver’s bench, riding slowly onward through the dusk.

“Yesterday afternoon, we went to rent a stall in Silver Bridge Ward.” Ning Ji cracked the whip and spoke with practiced seriousness. “Nothing happened, but thinking back on it now, there’s no honest merchant. That petty official from the street office, sharp-mouthed, monkey-cheeked — probably saw how flush I looked and signed the contract eagerly enough at the time, but who knows if he’ll try to pull something sneaky once we actually show up.”

“But aren’t we the merchants here?” Qu Longjun, seated beside him and dressed up as “Long Aotian,” said with a smile.

“…Huh?” Ning Ji scratched his head, then after a moment, “Well, when he rents me the stall, he’s the merchant then. Don’t go picking holes in what I say — this is something we need to be prepared for. Look how chaotic everything is out there right now, everyone’s short on money, hearts turned black — who’s to say when we show up, they won’t just tell us the two good stalls we agreed on have been given to someone else, and hand us two bad ones instead, or suddenly demand more money on the spot. All of that’s entirely possible…”

“Mm.” Qu Longjun nodded. “If that really happens, what do we do?”

“Then we’re not scared of them either — actually, that’d be a good thing. I’ll tell you, just like we rehearsed — you slam the table, act the part of the expert, and I’ll go rough up the men from the street office, and we’ll make a name for ourselves properly right off the bat. Heh heh, people bully the meek just like horses trample the docile — if we don’t want to be pushed around later, we need to establish ourselves with our fists from the very start!”

Dinner had just finished, and the streets leading out of Huaiyun Ward were fairly busy, the carriage moving slowly. Ning Ji spent the ride thinking through what might come next — in his younger years he’d rarely needed to think this way about things: as a boy, he’d had his older brother and sister-in-law to help him do good deeds, and a gang of scoundrel friends to help him with mischief; once he got a bit older he’d simply gone off to war, following a bunch of higher-ups and listening to the staff’s strategizing, hardly ever needing to put his own supposedly brilliant mind to use for planning. It was only after arriving in Jiangning, becoming the “big brother” to others, and now taking on the role of “young master” himself, that he’d finally been forced to start anticipating and worrying about all sorts of things on his own.

He had already exhausted his full imagination on the matter.

“So listen, when we actually get there, don’t act your usual mild, easygoing self — people won’t be scared of you if you’re like that, understand? You need to be fierce, savage!” Ning Ji said to Qu Longjun, cracking the whip again and shouting ahead: “Uncle, auntie, make way! Hot water coming through! Hot water—!”

The middle-aged couple walking ahead, fanning themselves, turned back to look, and seeing two fine-looking young men on the carriage, moved slowly aside toward the edge of the road.

“See, that’s how it’s done — you’ve got to shout loud!”

“Got it, got it.” Qu Longjun laughed, her eyes crinkling, apologizing bashfully to the couple ahead while glancing left and right. Spotting a large yellow dog by the roadside watching the two of them, she put on a stern face and gave a fierce, scolding shout: “—Woof!”

“Ruff.” The yellow dog wagged its tail, tilting its head in confusion.

“Ehehe.”

“…Heh heh.”

The lamplight flickered along the road ahead, and the two of them on the carriage burst out laughing, holding their stomachs.

The carriage left Huaiyun Ward, taking a newer road near the eastern city wall. Following this somewhat wider road southward, they crossed a bridge called Gold and Silver Bridge, and on either side one could see two roads strung with festive lanterns, lined with shops, thick with pedestrians. Divided by Gold and Silver Bridge, one side was called Gold Bridge Ward, and the other, Silver Bridge Ward.

The night market culture of Wu had always thrived, whether previously in Bian Liang or later in Lin’an — both had no shortage of bustling markets that stayed lively all night long. Now, with the new sovereign taking refuge in the south in Fujian, the resources of the Wu dynasty were far diminished from before, but the military and civilian population brought along was still more than enough to fill Fuzhou and the other major cities.

At this time, Gold and Silver Bridge lay close to the eastern edge of Fuzhou, and the roads around it, along with the bridge itself, were part of a renovation project the new sovereign had overseen two years earlier upon his arrival. Since the two wards of Gold and Silver were connected by waterway, making cargo transport convenient, Silver Bridge Ward had long served as the city’s wholesale center for aquatic products. After renovation, the previously neglected Gold Bridge Ward now had brothels and taverns springing up, while the latter half of Silver Bridge Ward remained a market for seafood, but the section closer to Gold Bridge Ward had added stalls selling sundries and food. Every night, this area lit up with festive lanterns, and vendors selling fried small fish, dough figures, shaved ice, and iced drinks set up along the road, making it a rather accessible night market spot for the surrounding neighborhoods.

This was the spot Ning Ji and Qu Longjun had picked to set up their stall.

By Ning Ji’s reasoning, having come to Fuzhou originally intending to sightsee and, incidentally, to find some way of making trouble for that old scoundrel Tie Tianying — to lop off his dog head and kick it around like a ball — he figured that during this “ball-kicking” period, they couldn’t afford to run into any of the several Zuo family people from the southwest who were also in the city, lest they intervene on Tie Tianying’s behalf and sour relations, or later, back in the southwest, badmouth him.

And by ordinary logic, since clever little schemers like Zuo Wenhuai, so favored by the young Emperor after arriving in Fuzhou, would surely be living it up in the wealthy districts, they’d need to avoid showing their faces too often in the more central, prestigious market areas of the city.

The area around Gold and Silver Bridge, with its cheaper prices and mediocre security, would let them avoid the Zuo family people while giving them more chance of running into Tie Tianying. After thinking it over carefully and feeling confident in his calculations, Ning Ji had come to Silver Bridge Ward and rented two prime stall spots at premium prices from the petty official of the street office.

He’d also mentally prepared himself to fly into a rage if they tried to swindle him.

However, once they actually entered the market, none of what he’d anticipated came to pass. Most of the night market stalls at this hour had already been set up since evening; the two of them, having only come out after dinner, arrived somewhat late, and the petty official Ning Ji had described as “sharp-mouthed, monkey-cheeked” was waiting for them at their reserved spots, his expression rather sour as he grumbled at the two of them for their lateness.

—The two prime spots Ning Ji had paid a premium for were, of course, just marked-off sections in the middle of the road, identified by the paving bricks; the previous vendors had just moved out, and since the two of them had arrived late, the neighboring stalls might well have encroached on their space. To avoid a dispute on their very first day, this petty clerk had simply waited around at the spot for a while, then told them where they could temporarily stable their jujube-blossom horse, before trudging off, radiating the resentment of an overworked civil servant.

Ning Ji stared, dumbfounded, then exchanged a glance with Qu Longjun. “Such good service… does he think he’s from the Huaxia Army or something?”

Qu Longjun laughed instead. “You’ve misjudged the man, haven’t you? Actually, it’s not that strange…”

As she helped set up the stall, she explained a few things to him. This kind of local street administration didn’t always maintain especially good order in many small towns — going back a few hundred years, the people running such things had often been little more than local hooligans. But over the two-hundred-some years of the Wu dynasty, with commerce booming, according to historical records, chaos had broken out over such matters in Bian Liang more than a hundred years after the dynasty’s founding, prompting the court to specifically reorganize the street administration, using over a thousand discharged soldiers as its foundation — which was how order was finally established in the commercial life of Bian Liang.

Before the calamity of the Jingping era, commercial order in the major cities of Wu had largely been maintained by these “city management” units made up of discharged soldiers — even the famous elder statesman Zong Ze had once, at one point, overseen the affairs of the street office. Through the Lin’an period, these practices had continued to be passed down as well; the court had always put considerable effort into managing the cities.

Ning Ji had gone off to Xiaocang River as a child, and everything he’d seen on his way out from the southwest — first the human trafficking under Dai Mengwei’s territory, then the brutal bloodshed of the Li Yanfeng family in Tongshan, then the splits and continuous great battles within the Fair Party in Jiangning — had almost never shown him the kind of order he’d known back in the southwest. Encountering such a decent, well-meaning civil servant here caught him somewhat off guard.

“There must be a catch somewhere! Can’t let our guard down!”

Once the stall was set up, Ning Ji still made a point of emphasizing this, holding fast to his resolve to play the fool while secretly watching for tricks.

And, as it turned out, his vigilance was not entirely misplaced. As the saying goes, the marketplace is a battlefield too, and before long, trouble did indeed arrive.

Silver Bridge Ward’s night market was lively and crowded. Confident in his wealth, Ning Ji had rented enough space for two stalls for his converted carriage. On the left side of their stall was a small stand run by a heavyset middle-aged woman selling steamed rice cakes. Seeing the newcomers, she came over several times between sales to strike up a chat in her odd local dialect, and upon learning that the two of them had only just arrived from out of town, she began gradually shifting her stall to encroach on their space.

The space of two stalls, for a peddler’s cart converted from a carriage, was only just slightly more than enough — Ning Ji had left a gap so he could move from the front of the stall to the back. But the woman kept shifting her stall closer and closer, and before long had crossed the boundary line the sharp-mouthed petty clerk had drawn between them, nearly blocking the passage entirely.

Ning Ji, sharp-eyed as ever, had no patience for this sort of thing. Passing through the gap, he gave a bump with his hip and shoved the woman’s whole stall back a step. The heavyset woman sold a bowl of rice cake, then cheerfully began moving her stall forward again, and a moment later, as Ning Ji passed through again, another bump of his hip pushed it back once more…

This repeated itself several times until Ning Ji finally couldn’t take it anymore. As the woman was moving her stall again, he bumped her back and said, “Don’t come over here anymore, huh…”

Before he could even finish the sentence, the heavyset woman slammed her hand down and stood up sharply, launching into a torrent of dialect that Ning Ji couldn’t understand a word of, gesturing wildly and demanding to know what he thought he was doing, moving her shop like that.

“Wh-what?” Ning Ji couldn’t quite make it out, but it clearly wasn’t anything good. “Hey, you old woman, that clerk drew the line clearly enough just now, this bluestone right here is the boundary…”

“What boundary, where’s any boundary, you crazy fool, you keep pushing me and pushing me, if you wreck my stall you’ll have to pay for it…”

“Hey! I fu—” Ning Ji jumped out.

“You crazy fool, you shameless little punk…” The heavyset woman jumped forward too, stamping her foot and giving Ning Ji’s chest a shove, cursing as she went: “You @#¥%…”

“I swear, you think I won’t hit a woman? You crazy hag, have you ever seen a fist the size of a rice bowl, I’ll smash your head in with one punch…”

Ning Ji waved his fists, then watched as the woman took another step forward, arms swinging, her ample bosom heaving forward like a battering ram: “You @#¥!¥&*—”

“Come any closer and I’ll beat you to death—”

The heavyset woman’s shouting boomed like thunder, arms flailing, one foot stamping down hard, chest swaying with each movement. Ning Ji was no pushover — with an ordinary big man, or even a violent, foul-mouthed woman, he could easily have left them bloodied on the ground with a few punches. But faced with that heavy, formidable bosom bearing down on him, he found he simply had no way to bring his fist down. The woman’s lower body was rock-steady, advancing relentlessly, and Ning Ji could only jump up and give her a couple of shoves on the shoulder, barely managing to push her back a couple of steps before she surged forward again.

The muggy Fuzhou streets in the fifth month drew a crowd of onlookers who stopped to watch the two of them argue, thoroughly entertained. Beside them, Qu Longjun, holding the fan she used to attract customers, stood there wide-eyed and equally stunned, because the woman’s voice, deafening and unrelenting, showed no sign of stopping. Ning Ji, who had come fully prepared for a bloody, reputation-making brawl, might have used all kinds of maneuvers to keep pushing the woman back, but verbally he was clearly losing, his face flushed red, unable to recover.

The woman’s voice rose and fell in a singsong rhythm, bouncing forward as she chanted:

“You’re a great fool, nobody loves you, you eat your rice with dog shit for a side dish. You’ve got a rotten skull, filthy mouth, hair like a mop!!!”

“You…”

“—Scare people to death! Turtle-body-born-and-married-a-mosquito-larva, damn little punk! Beat you till your pants fall off! Bunch of nerve! You’ll get yours!”

“I…”

The brief but fierce confrontation lasted only a moment. When a customer came by looking at the rice cakes, the heavyset woman spun around, instantly all smiles, and hurried back to her stall. Ning Ji, meanwhile, waved his empty fists uselessly in the air.

“I… damn it… if I could just understand what she’s saying, I’d chew her to death…”

Furious beyond words, having suffered what felt like the greatest humiliation of his life, he turned around to see Qu Longjun already approaching a woman passing by: “Miss, are you interested? Take a look…” It seemed the shouting match between Ning Ji and the heavyset woman had actually drawn in some customers — a dark-skinned but well-dressed young lady had glanced repeatedly at some of the items on their stall, and Qu Longjun smiled and went over to greet her.

Ning Ji stood there with his hands on his hips, furious, but a moment later Qu Longjun’s sale had gone through — she flashed a warm smile, talked the young lady across the way into paying fifteen taels of silver for a self-defense dagger, and turned back around to find Ning Ji glaring at her with an expression like an angry pig’s snout.

“I’m going to kill that woman’s whole family—”

“We made money—”

“Are you even listening to me, that dead fat woman…” Ning Ji pointed back toward the rice cake stand.

The heavyset woman looked up from behind her stall: “You eat your rice with dog shit!”

“Damn it, if it weren’t for the fact that I know you don’t know kung fu…”

“We made a fortune—” Qu Longjun held up the silver in her hands to show him.

Ning Ji glanced at her, then said in a low voice, “You’re a woman, you go argue with her, I can’t understand what she’s saying.”

“Pfft — I can’t either, I can’t out-argue her either.” Qu Longjun couldn’t help laughing. “Just look at the silver, maybe that’ll cheer you up.”

“What use are you, then!” Ning Ji took the silver and tucked it into his pocket, walked back, and started bumping the woman’s stall with his hip again. The woman, in the middle of a sale, kept squeezing her stall forward again a while later, and this childish standoff went on for quite some time, with the two occasionally trading fragments of insults: “You eat your rice with dog shit.” “Nobody loves you.”

After a while, the woman even started bragging and explaining to Ning Ji: “Bet you can’t understand, heh heh, I’ll tell you — ‘eat rice’ means eating a meal, ‘dog shit’ means, well, dog poop. So ‘you eat rice with dog shit’ means you eat your meals with dog poop as a side dish. Ha ha ha…”

Ning Ji jumped up. “You eat your rice with dog shit, you eat your rice with dog shit!”

The marketplace was noisy and full of all sorts of characters, and perhaps because Ning Ji couldn’t actually go around killing people, their occasional shouting matches, lost in the general din of the crowd, didn’t amount to much of anything. After a while, once Qu Longjun stepped in as diplomat and went over to buy a couple of bowls of rice cake from the heavyset woman, chatting with her for a bit, the standoff over territory gradually eased.

According to the news Qu Longjun brought back, the woman wasn’t actually a local — she’d come to Fuzhou from Xiamen to make a living, and had been doing business in the market for two years now, something of a veteran. Ning Ji, for his part, expressed absolutely no interest in this information, and instead emphasized to Qu Longjun that if the woman knew any kung fu at all, he’d have killed her with one punch long ago. Qu Longjun could only laugh and try to soothe him.

Either way, the two of them had officially begun their life running a stall in the city of Fuzhou. Perhaps because of the dim lighting at night, the outrageous banners hung on either side of the cart hadn’t attracted any complaints, at least for the time being.

Ning Ji kept a fierce, murderous expression on his face all evening, thoroughly displeased. A couple of women who liked his type came over to chat and ask about prices, and Ning Ji, who disliked women more than anything, brushed them off with an entirely uncooperative tone, while the handsome and amiable Qu Longjun, by contrast, closed several more sales.

The goods on their cart were all small items Ning Ji had looted from various battlefields, and no small number of them were genuinely valuable, but seeing that all of Qu Longjun’s customers for the evening had been women, it was hard to tell whether they were genuinely there to buy things, or simply drawn in by Qu Longjun’s looks.

“You’re selling your looks, you’re seducing them,” Ning Ji pointed out as they exchanged the goods and payment.

“Women are easy to charm — if you won’t do it, I’ll take over, young master.” Qu Longjun’s fan opened with a flourish, and she smiled, thoroughly enjoying herself.

By around the hour of the pig that night, someone who looked like they might be trouble from the underworld finally showed up.

It was a fierce-looking man in his twenties, dressed in short, close-fitting clothes, perhaps having just eaten a late-night snack of fried fish at the stall at the end of the market. He walked over picking his teeth with a blade of straw, greeting people in the market along the way. He dragged a stool over from in front of a stall, walked up to Ning Ji and Qu Longjun’s stall, and sat down. “Heard you two are from out of town?”

His swaggering manner made it obvious he was some kind of protection-racket thug. Qu Longjun’s gaze flicked over, and in an instant her expression turned cold and aloof, disdainful. “Little brother, deal with this.”

Ning Ji came out from inside with a stern face.

The fierce-looking underworld type gave a cupped-hand salute and laughed. “Good, I’d heard the market had a couple of young brothers here selling fine goods, and sure enough, quite the impressive pair. Do you two happen to know about the saying ‘Southerners belong in the south, Northerners in the north’?”

Ning Ji’s brow furrowed!

The man smiled. “Ha ha, this is something you two surely know already. After the calamity of Jingping, Wu lost half its territory, and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, were forced to leave their homes and come south to Lin’an and other parts of Jiangnan. But the locals of Jiangnan weren’t exactly happy about it, and often drove the newcomers away. Throughout the ten years of the Jianshuo era, conflicts between northerners and southerners were a common sight across Jiangnan — and how could such things be any less common in today’s Fuzhou?”

“Wh-what do you mean…” Ning Ji stared at him.

“You two surely know already.” The underworld man sighed. “We’re outsiders too, having come to Fuzhou, and the locals here don’t necessarily look kindly on us either. Brother Chen Hua here, my family originally from Lin’an, currently a foot soldier of the Golden and Silver Hall of the Return-to-Peace League — hearing that you two brothers had come from afar, I thought I’d come by and say hello. The two of you, times being what they are, we outsiders need to look out for one another. If you two run into any trouble going forward, feel free to mention my name, Chen Hua of the Return-to-Peace League.”

Having said his piece, the man waited for Ning Ji and Qu Longjun’s response, then reached into his robe as if to pull something out. Ning Ji, hearing all this, broke into a laugh instead. “Got it. Let’s shake on it, then.” He extended his right hand.

Chen Hua’s left hand was in the middle of reaching into his robe, and instinctively he rose halfway and extended his right hand as well for the handshake. The next instant, his backside dropped back down onto the stool with a thud. His left hand pulled a red paper out from his robe but failed to hold onto it, and it fell to the ground. A moment later, his body twisted, one knee dropping to the ground, his right hand — held fast in Ning Ji’s grip — cracking audibly, his face turning a deep shade of red.

Behind them, Qu Longjun stood with her hands folded behind her back, a faint, unreadable smile at the corners of her mouth, the very picture of a mysterious master aloof from the world. Not far off, at the rice cake stand, the heavyset woman craned her neck, mouth agape, watching the whole scene.

Ning Ji held onto the man’s hand a moment longer, and Chen Hua reached up with his left hand to slap frantically at the back of Ning Ji’s hand. “Got it, got, got, got it… understood, understood.”

Ning Ji still didn’t let go. He frowned. “Didn’t you say Tie Tianying keeps Fuzhou under tight control? He lets you people form a gang like this?”

“…Huh?” Chen Hua thought about it, then his face crumpled into a bitter expression. “Th-things like this happen everywhere, young hero, wherever you go. We’ve got our gang so if something comes up, we can sit down and talk it out, and if trouble happens, we can find the right people. As far as that… that Lord Tie is concerned, having a gang around is still better than not having one, right, young hero?”

“I see, that does make sense.”

Ning Ji nodded, and Chen Hua kept slapping at his hand. “Young hero, ease up, ease up, it’s about to break, young hero, I only came over to say hello, just to say hello, if you don’t like me I’ll just leave…”

“Hey, don’t go.” Ning Ji pulled him back up, then reached out and threw an arm around his shoulders. “Come with me, let’s have a proper chat.”

He steered the man, arm around his shoulders, back toward the stall. Passing through the gap between the stalls, he gave a sideways glance and, with a bump of his hip, shoved the heavyset woman’s stall back again as he dragged the dejected-looking Chen Hua inside.

“So tell me… who’s your boss? What gangs are around here… and you all, do you fight much around here? How do these fights usually go…”

The night remained muggy and humid, the marketplace noisy as ever. After a while, having gotten sincere answers out of the other man, Ning Ji had once again, as was his habit, quickly made himself a new friend in the underworld. Once Chen Hua had finished explaining everything and left, Ning Ji looked over at the heavyset woman across the way, her mouth twitching, her expression bewildered, and gave a “hmph,” raising an eyebrow.

“Eat your rice with dog shit…”

The heavyset woman turned her head aside and let out a grumble…