A gentle breeze blew past; the once-blazing sunlight in the sky was beginning to shift toward orange. Up on the rooftop, the young man smiled as he spoke. Down on the street below, nearly half the onlookers turned their gazes up toward this rooftop, including the man with the bow — and then, subtly, the whole atmosphere seemed to stiffen.

The young man turned his head back. “It’s not only them who want you dead. Zhang Daoyuan is working with Li Tianyou. There’s also Xu Bai, Yuan Xing… I think there’s a Zhuo Wanli in there too, though I don’t recognize most of them. But don’t worry — this is Overlord Blade Camp territory… oh, look, there’s Li Tianyou. Seems like he’s leaving.”

At this point, the atmosphere around the street had turned distinctly strange; figures were scattered here and there in twos and threes, the sunlight beginning to take on a warmer glow, tree shadows falling across the ground like golden elm seeds, bright yet gentle. Aside from that lone archer at the end of the street, the long avenue gave hardly any sense of imminent violence at first glance.

The two men sat on the rooftop; over on the street, in one of the uneven old buildings, someone pushed open a window — some glanced at each other, some looked down at the street below, and some looked toward this rooftop. After the young man smiled and waved, a middle-aged man in the window of a two-story building on the street quietly stepped back two paces and disappeared from Ning Yi’s line of sight.

Seeing this, the young man smiled faintly, and after a while, as if suddenly remembering something, he asked abruptly: “But… why aren’t you worried?”

Ning Yi had already been studying this young man for some time. He furrowed his brow and thought it over. “I am worried. But… since I’ve managed to survive this long, I suppose today probably won’t kill me either. Something like that.”

“Hard to say, really…” The young man sat there gazing down at the scene below, murmuring to himself. After a moment he added, “I hate clever people…”

This marked the first real contact Ning Yi had had with anyone from Fang La’s side in more than ten days. He’d made a few guesses in his own mind beforehand, but he hadn’t expected things to unfold quite like this. The young man before him carried a certain wild, unrestrained air about him, quite unlike most people of this era — the sort of man who, if not simply mad, was usually possessed of remarkable skill.

He was reminded, oddly, of Qin Siyuan’s second son, Qin Shaoqian — a man who once made a thousand-mile raid to take the head of an enemy despite being badly outnumbered. But Qin Shaoqian’s wildness had always been of a relatively orthodox kind — the Qin family had deep scholarly roots, and he himself was a wealthy young noble born to privilege. This young man in front of him, by contrast, carried more of an unconventional, extreme edge — Ning Yi’s first impression was of something closer to an angry young man risen from the grassroots. Of course, that was only a first impression, and hardly an objective one.

Ning Yi watched the scene unfold with a certain fascination as the young man murmured on. Down in the street, the shifting figures kept rearranging themselves, the mood constantly changing, and on the rooftops of nearby courtyards, one figure after another gradually appeared, forming, in the sunlight, the outline of one enormous standoff. The young man paid none of this any mind; he simply sat there, tapping at a patch of moss on the roof tile with the toe of his foot. When he finally looked up again, he held Ning Yi’s assessing gaze for a long moment before his brow finally furrowed, his expression turning grave.

“I hear that when your side retreated from Huzhou, you were deliberately left behind as bait to draw off the enemy — that’s how you were captured. The court treated you unjustly, though that’s nothing new for people like that, no surprise there. Our side has something more concrete to offer. Would you be willing to stay and do some work for us?”

“Do I have a choice?”

Ning Yi said this as a kind of rhetorical question. The young man laughed. “And if you did?”

Ning Yi thought it over. “I wouldn’t want to.”

“Why not?”

“You people have no future.”

Ning Yi answered plainly, then let out a sigh and stood up on the rooftop. The young man watched him, then rose as well, about to speak — when suddenly, from the window across the street where Li Tianyou had just vanished, a loud boom sounded.

A staggering pressure swept over everything in an instant. In that same moment, the young man in front of Ning Yi flung out his left hand — a little over a meter to Ning Yi’s side, a roof tile burst apart in a spray of shards, an arrow deflecting off into the air. Across the street, the window frame shattered into a swirl of wood splinters dancing in midair. Ning Yi shifted position slightly on the rooftop, coming to a stop with his right hand closed around an arrow, still trembling faintly in his grip. The young man was still facing Ning Yi; a moment ago he’d only extended his left arm, and yet somehow his left hand had steadily caught not one but two arrows — Ning Yi couldn’t quite tell how he’d managed it. And in that same split second, Ning Yi had clearly seen the man’s sleeve snap like a long whip, sending another arrow flying high overhead, spinning as it now began to fall.

The volley of arrows that had burst through the window seemed to trip some kind of switch. Ning Yi, now fully alert, found his hearing and eyesight both sharpened beyond their usual state; before the wood splinters and arrows even hit the ground, his ears were already filled with the ringing sound of blades and swords being drawn all around — some fast, some slow, overlapping in waves. The broken window across the street swung and creaked on its hinges, splinters falling to the ground, the loosed arrows skittering off the roof tiles, followed by a scattering of clanging, clashing sounds — clearly the sound of newly arrived men drawing weapons against each other in sudden tension. Somewhere, blades met; a shout of “Stop!” rang out somewhere among the alleys and buildings, indistinct.

The tension that followed felt almost solid enough to touch. Many of the people gathered here were likely waiting on the young man’s decision; the various factions over there probably had no wish to actually come to blows either, and were waiting for a clear order. The young man simply stood there, brow furrowed, staring at Ning Yi. After a long while, he finally spoke.

“My teacher once told me that some people, in order to make others take them seriously, love to speak in alarming terms — saying things others don’t want to hear first, to stir up their resentment. Then they turn around and, with clever, flattering words, offer up some plausible-sounding but ultimately worthless argument to deceive people. The strategists of old loved to use exactly this kind of trick, but beyond a moment’s boldness, there was nothing to it. The imperial court has lost the Mandate of Heaven now, and the whole realm rises against it together — you say we have no future. Why? If you’re just talking nonsense… I’ll kill you.”

“Er…” Ning Yi was somewhat taken aback by such a strong reaction. In truth, there were many ways to demonstrate one’s value, many different lines one could take, and Ning Yi had naturally considered a number of possibilities beforehand. He was simply a little surprised the man would react so intensely to that particular remark — it suggested this man’s own thinking, at this point, was quite different from that of the vast majority within Fang La’s rebel army. He tried to gauge the man’s identity, but without a fuller understanding of Fang La’s military hierarchy, he had no way to place him precisely. After a moment, he said instead: “You people have no ambition.”

…

“He who does not aspire to bring peace to one age cannot bring peace to ten thousand.“

Night was nearly upon them. In his cluttered room, Chen Fan looked down at this line written in his little notebook, the handwriting crooked and hard on the eyes. He studied it for a moment, licked the tip of his writing brush, added another line beneath it — “no ambition” — then tossed the notebook aside and lay down on his bed.

In the end, nothing had come to blows that afternoon; the man called Ning Liheng hadn’t made a move either. All told, it wasn’t a major incident. This scholar named Ning Liheng did seem to have some genuine ability — he’d already assumed as much beforehand, but he hadn’t expected the impression to be this favorable. Not an unlikeable fellow, though still someone to be wary of. He’d known the man would probably say something interesting, but he certainly hadn’t expected that particular line.

He’d once heard his master say something along these lines: a scholar’s opinions are hard to judge right or wrong; there’s no absolute truth in this world, it all depends on the circumstances and how you choose to interpret them. If the man had said something else, he might have pressed him to explain himself a bit further — the fellow wasn’t unlikeable, after all, and it wouldn’t have hurt to hear him out. But he hadn’t expected the line “you have no ambition” to bring back to mind… what his master had once said to him.

He who does not aspire to bring peace to one age cannot bring peace to ten thousand.

It sounded like a rather dull line on its own. His master had said it to him once, and he hadn’t taken it much to heart at the time. The reason it had stuck with him now, though, was really because of these past half-month or so. After the Saintly Duke’s army had taken Hangzhou, his master had marched out again with the troops, leaving him to more or less maintain order in the city. He wasn’t a fool — he’d understood from the start roughly what needed doing, and though he’d grumbled about it out loud, in practice he hadn’t found it particularly difficult.

Over this past half-month, though he might have looked, to outsiders, like a man wielding his martial skills and his status as Fang Qifo’s disciple to run roughshod over the city, brawling and killing without much order or method — in truth, if he hadn’t leaned on exactly that kind of brute force, he’d never have had any real way to steer the situation. Trying to reason with those unit commanders who’d grown used to looting, talking to them about rules and discipline, simply wouldn’t have worked — they wouldn’t have listened to a word of it. Even if they’d humored him out of politeness, some toothless little punishment would never have been enough to actually frighten anyone.

There was no room for real law and order here, not truly. He’d been in the army for years now, and he’d long since stopped bothering with such things. Burning, killing, looting, extortion — none of that mattered to him, so long as it was done quietly enough not to disrupt the bigger picture. Whenever someone actually threatened something that mattered on a larger scale, he didn’t bother arguing — he simply went and beat them to death. Like that business with Chen Damu a few days back — the man worked under Bao Daoyi, and there was nothing wrong with collecting protection money in itself, but once it started interfering with the water transport routes, within a matter of days Chen Fan had gone and beaten or crippled every one of the men connected to it. After that, no one dared try that particular game again.

But the more he handled these messy, chaotic affairs, the better he came to understand what his master had meant by that line. To speak of bringing peace to ten thousand generations might be too lofty a goal — but to say these men lacked ambition seemed closer to the truth. To an ordinary observer, these men had already risen up, killed officials, rebelled against the throne, and even taken Hangzhou — surely the very height of ambition. And yet, at this point, that ambition simply wasn’t enough anymore.

Why does no man take up the sword, to reclaim fifty passes and mountains? From where Chen Fan stood, there were plenty of men with real ambition, men who longed to seek noble titles a thousand miles from home — but tallying them up carefully, they turned out to be confined to that small handful at the very top: men like his master, Bao Daoyi, Zu Shiyuan, Lü Shinang — men who naturally held ambitions of pacifying the whole realm. But go just slightly further down the ranks, and that ambition was already gone. Even among men like Zhang Daoyuan, Xu Bai, and Yuan Xing, once Hangzhou had fallen, a great many of them had simply stopped wanting anything more. And further down still, among the common soldiers and displaced refugees, they didn’t even know what ambition was to begin with.

When they’d had nothing, they’d dreamed of looting money, grain, and women. But the moment they reached Hangzhou, these men seemed to suddenly discover that everything they wanted was already right here — they no longer needed to go far to seize anything; it was all right there around them in abundance. Among the troops that had profited most from the taking of Hangzhou, a large portion had no wish to go on and attack Jiaxing at all. The higher-ranking generals and commanders wouldn’t say so openly, of course, but among the lower ranks, this sentiment was plain to see — even those who hadn’t personally profited from Hangzhou, so long as they had the right connections, mostly had no wish to march on to fight at Jiaxing either, because as long as one had connections, there was already plenty to be had right here in Hangzhou.

But Chen Fan knew that Hangzhou’s resources couldn’t possibly sustain this many people forever. They simply saw what was close at hand and easy to take. In a short span of time, the dangerous work of burning, killing, and looting had given way to the comparatively safer business of infighting among themselves; once these men found a safer path to grain and treasure, they no longer had any desire to push on toward Jiaxing. In earlier times, the righteous army might well have simply razed Hangzhou to the ground, each man taking his share of the spoils before moving on to ravage the next place — that alone would have generated more refugees, built an even larger army in the process. But Chen Fan also knew that the Saintly Duke intended to become emperor, and that this uprising had already spread far and wide by now; what came next needed to be consolidation, not further chaos.

The real problem, in the end, came down to this: these men’s ambition simply wasn’t enough anymore. And over these past few days, Chen Fan had also come to realize that the ones with real ambition now might well be those very scholars — men who’d spent their lives buried in the Four Books and Five Classics, unable to lift so much as a chicken. Because the moment the Saintly Duke began recruiting men of talent, the scholars who came to seek his patronage — regardless of whether they actually had any real talent, which, in truth, most of them didn’t — nearly all of them were already dreaming of noble titles and ministerial rank. While the common soldiers busied themselves carving up the spoils of Hangzhou, it was these men, one after another, who were quietly imagining themselves as founding ministers of a new dynasty, should the Saintly Duke’s army ever go on to seize the entire realm.

No ambition… what a headache…

He mulled this over, letting out a faint sigh. As for that Ning Liheng who’d spoken the line, he didn’t think too much of it — the man showed some insight, which only confirmed that Liu Xigua’s judgment of people wasn’t off. But he doubted he was the only one capable of seeing things this clearly; Chen Fan wasn’t so naive as to be astonished, thinking the man some great statesman in the making. Still, what he’d said had left him with a certain wistful feeling all the same.

As for a solution — with this many people in the army unable to find one, with even his own master unable to find one at present, there was little chance some scholar could solve it either, however cleverly he might talk. Scholars did love to ramble on, though — if he ever went and asked the man directly, he’d probably get an earful of grand talk in return. Still, if he ever had the leisure someday, it might be worth going to hear him ramble a bit. Most of it would likely be nonsense, but who knew — it might spark some useful thought or other…

As he was thinking this over, someone outside reported that the Lou family’s eldest son, Lou Shuwang, had come calling again. The man had already come by persistently several times now, and Chen Fan felt his patience wearing thin just thinking about it. He waved a hand dismissively, as usual: “Tell him I’m busy. Tell him to go to hell.” Then he got up, preparing to head out and find someone to fight, and maybe get a free meal out of it while he was at it…