Lately Zhou Pei had been wrestling with the fact that she was fast growing up.

As the young princess of the Prince Kang household, she had turned thirteen last year, and now that the New Year had passed, she was about to turn fourteen. Fourteen wasn’t an especially remarkable age, but for a girl, certain matters were starting to feel pressing and unavoidable—chief among them being that her ever-irresponsible father had, over this New Year, begun considering finding her a consort. He had asked for her opinion once, and had recently been comparing the outstanding young men of Jiangning as candidates. All of this left her feeling a bit troubled.

It wasn’t that she was entirely opposed to the idea of marriage. As a princess, Zhou Pei had received an excellent education from childhood, having thoroughly mastered the Women’s Precepts, the Women’s Instructions, and the doctrine of the Three Obediences and Four Virtues. In this era, it was fair to say that a woman’s education—especially an educated royal woman’s—was, from earliest childhood, entirely oriented toward becoming a suitable wife someday.

Such an extraordinarily privileged upbringing could easily produce certain unlikeable personality traits, but Zhou Pei had turned out reasonably well in that regard. She wasn’t without some anticipation for her future marriage. What sort of man her future husband would be, what it might feel like to build a household together with another man, how she ought to conduct herself once she became someone’s wife—thinking about these things still made her blush and her heart race. But at the same time, it also made clear to her that from now on, she might only ever be “a woman,” nothing more.

By the standard that “a woman’s virtue lies in having no talent,” Zhou Pei fell rather short—she possessed remarkable talent and a quick, sharp mind. Of course, that old saying was something of a hollow lie anyway; it was the intelligent women who truly knew how to run a household, while the genuinely foolish ones were the ones easily taken advantage of. Little Zhou Pei had seen plenty of such foolish women in the princely household growing up, and she had no intention of becoming one of them.

She’d had all sorts of tutors over the years, but the most important one, in the end, had always been Grandfather Consort Kang. The old man was something of an idealist firebrand, and this had left a deep mark on her. From childhood he had taught her and her younger brother about the honor of belonging to the imperial Zhou clan, about carrying forward the teachings of the sages and bringing peace to the world for ten thousand generations—though admittedly, most of this had been directed at her brother, Zhou Junwu. But as a member of the royal family, she naturally believed she too had the right and the duty to such ideals. Their great-aunt, the Princess, for instance, did a great deal of business alongside her consort, secretly supporting the court’s operations in the south—a rather compelling example.

Kang Xian and his wife led by example and taught without discrimination, and as a result, the precociously mature Zhou Pei had absorbed their influence all the more deeply, setting all sorts of ambitions for herself from an early age, and in turn pushing her younger brother to do the same. Though the imperial family kept a tight rein on relatives like them, she believed one should always harbor thoughts of serving the nation in one’s heart—just as their great-aunt and her consort did—and that if one truly wished to, there were always ways to contribute to the country. With an older sister so conscientious, her brother, little Junwu, had grown up rather easygoing and mild by comparison.

The two siblings had grown up this way, with their father simply handing them off to Kang Xian to raise and educate. Zhou Pei’s sense of responsibility grew ever stronger, but her brother was like a piece of soft taffy—embodying the principle that the highest good is like water, yet showing little real progress. His schoolwork was mediocre at best, and he was often a bit muddleheaded. Mention anything about sacrificing oneself for the nation, and the little fellow would stare back wide-eyed, utterly bewildered.

The matter was plain enough—the nation had never asked them to sacrifice anything. Their father spent his days indulging in cockfighting and dog-racing, and the court kept an extremely tight rein on imperial relatives participating in politics; from birth, they’d had no path toward government office or military command. Having grown up steeped in this reality, little Junwu understood it well enough himself. It was only Zhou Pei who held to the belief that where there’s a will, there’s a way. Since childhood, she and her brother had essentially been left to roam free rather than kept on a tight leash, and so she was well aware of how things stood in the world—worried about the state of the realm, always feeling she ought to do something about it, or at the very least push her brother to do something, since he was, after all, a man. Years had passed with nothing accomplished, and Zhou Pei grew increasingly anxious. Her brother was only eleven, after all—there was still time. But now, she realized, time was running rather short.

Marriage, for a woman, was ultimately unavoidable. Even as she blushed and felt her heart flutter over the things her father had brought up, and even amid her own unease, she truly began to realize that once she married, she really would become nothing but “a woman”—managing household affairs, supporting her husband and raising children. There would be no room for grand ambitions. Cases like their great-aunt and her consort were, after all, extremely rare exceptions. What sort of man her own consort would turn out to be was anyone’s guess—consorts, after all, married into the family, and it was said that those willing to take on such a role these days tended to be rather unimpressive specimens…

In short, all her past thoughts and aspirations would truly have to be set aside once she married. Thinking about it now, it all felt rather like a game of house.

Her brother, as it happened, had recently developed an interest in something—unfortunately, nothing at all related to what she’d once hoped he’d take up. It all stemmed from that “barbarian” fellow named Ning Yi. Ning Yi was currently her tutor; calling him a barbarian was perhaps a bit disrespectful, but it was a habit she’d picked up the previous year, and now she only used it occasionally in her private grumbling.

This tutor of hers was known as Jiangning’s foremost talent, and it wasn’t an empty title—his learning was truly beyond reproach, remarkable for someone barely in his twenties. But he was utterly lacking in seriousness—casual in his teaching, careless in demeanor, showing not the slightest air of a proper teacher during lessons, and constantly telling little stories from the streets and marketplaces that often had the whole class roaring with laughter, more like a storyteller in a teahouse than a scholar. Nothing at all like the solemn Consort Kang; she couldn’t imagine how the two of them had ever become friends.

Honestly, though, she did admire that barbarian’s learning in the end—every so often he’d say something thought-provoking, and sometimes even his offhand remarks left people astonished. Not long ago, prompted by something on her own mind, she’d blurted out a question in class: “Why must people get married at all?” In Zhou Pei’s heart, the matter of marrying and continuing the family line had always been an unquestionable given—if one were to really discuss it, anyone could cite the classics and hold forth on the great principles of human relations at length. She herself wasn’t even sure why she’d suddenly asked it.

The class Ning Yi currently taught was made up mostly of younger children—since the Su family ran it as a private school, there were several young girls among them, with Zhou Pei being the oldest. But for a girl to ask such a question left the classroom instantly silent, and a group of children turned red in the face. Only little Junwu nodded along. “Yeah, yeah, why is that? Girls are the worst—always crying…” Junwu was mild-mannered by nature and generally well liked among their relatives, so no one expected this to be his actual view. The remark immediately darkened the faces of several of the Su family girls in the room.

“I hate you too!”

“I’m not playing with you anymore.”

Junwu hastily tried to explain himself, and the room fell into chaos. Zhou Pei, in truth, had already regretted asking the question the moment it left her mouth, expecting her tutor’s answer, if any, to be a simple one. She never imagined that Ning Yi would think for a moment and then say something that left everyone utterly dumbstruck.

“There’s one way of looking at it that’s rather interesting…” Ning Yi began, smiling, and the classroom fell silent, everyone craning their necks to listen intently. He pointed at Junwu. “Take Junwu, for instance. Right now you’re the only son in your family—you have a sister, but no other brothers or sisters.”

Junwu nodded vigorously.

“For that to be the case, you needed a father, and your father needed a son. Your grandfather and grandmother had to produce a son—that’s your father. Your great-grandfather and great-grandmother also had to produce a son—that’s your grandfather. And so on, and so on, generation after generation… going back thousands of years. Do you all realize just how lucky that is?”

The children’s grasp of the concept was admittedly still rather limited, so Ning Yi paused for a moment.

“Thinking about it this way might seem a little strange, but imagine you were one of your own ancestors thousands of years ago, needing to pass this bloodline down generation after generation—what would that take? Junwu, you’d need to marry, and you’d absolutely need to produce a son.”

Junwu flushed red, and the children all laughed.

“Your son would also need to marry, and he’d need to produce a son too. Your grandson would need to marry and also produce a son. Your grandson’s grandson… all the way back to your own father, he too had to marry and produce a son, before you could exist at all. That’s how all of us came to be—a single bloodline, stretching back thousands, tens of thousands of years, hundreds and thousands of generations, and in every single one of those generations, they had to have a son, and it had to be a son, every single time…”

“Take a look at Old Man Huang who sells noodles at the street corner—his whole family has no sons and no daughters at all. Or think about the recent tragedy in the Qi family—their only child went out on a business trip, ran into bandits, and died. Xiao Qi, your father went to pay his respects, didn’t he? Last year in the floods, so many families lost their children. This happens all the time, over and over. In all the thousands, tens of thousands of years a person’s life has taken to reach this point, all sorts of things could have happened along the way. If even once, some generation had happened to have only a daughter, none of you would exist right now. Or, ever since the age of the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors, this world has mostly been an age of chaos and turmoil—if even one of your ancestors, in any single generation, had run into war or natural disaster and died before leaving behind a child, that too was entirely possible…”

“And yet, throughout this whole dangerous, unbroken chain, across hundreds, thousands of couples—our ancestors—not a single one of them died before producing an heir, and what’s more… every single one of them had a son. Thousands upon thousands of couples, every single one having a boy, and each of their children in turn also having to have a boy. And the same goes for your mother’s bloodline as well—your maternal grandparents needed to have a daughter, and going further back, your grandmother’s parents also needed to have a daughter… every single generation needing a daughter, and that daughter needing to give birth to another daughter, all the way down, every single one a daughter—and the odds of that happening are even smaller. Who even wants a daughter, right? All your families favor sons over daughters…”

Ning Yi smiled. “Every one of you probably feels like your existence here is simply a given, something obvious and unremarkable. But think about it—how many generations did your ancestors have to survive, how many dangerous possibilities did they have to avoid, for this bloodline to never once break, passed down and down and down and down… until finally it reached you. How lucky you all are. Maybe this can help you feel, just a little, the connection between the blood running through your own body and your father, your grandfather, and all the generations of ancestors before them—who went through countless hardships just to carry this bloodline down to the present, so that you could exist. Thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of millions of years of effort—surely none of you would want to be the one to let it end here…”

Almost every child in the classroom sat there stunned—some understanding, some not, some grasping only a fragment of it. But Zhou Pei understood completely. She had heard many things from her grandfather Consort Kang since childhood, and had read many poems and paintings; she had thought she already understood what grandeur meant—things like the nation, the Great Wall, the Silk Road, or her favorite pieces like the “Preface to the Pavilion of Prince Teng” and “A Dream of Heavenly Tianmu Mountain, Ascended in Song.” But no matter how grand or magnificent those works were, none of it compared to what she’d just heard.

She could almost feel two threads of bloodline, stretching back thousands of years—no, even further, back to the very dawn of humankind itself—reaching across the ages to flow within her own body, unbroken across all those endless years.

To be able to speak of such a thing so casually, so lightly… her teacher truly was, without question, an extraordinary man.

And yet, in telling this story, he hadn’t used a single flowery phrase—which made her almost resent him for it. How could he do that!