The fifteenth of August—the Mid-Autumn Festival.
After the heat that belonged to summer had finally passed, the delayed touch of autumn had at last settled over the city of Hangzhou. When golden fallen leaves drifted down on the wind, they always brought with them a certain languid, unhurried feeling—and if one turned back the clock a few months, to when Ning Yi and Su Tan’er had first set out from Jiangning, this very atmosphere was, at least in part, exactly what they’d hoped to enjoy along the way. And yet, over these past several months, one tangled affair after another had ultimately pushed reality toward an outcome no one could ever have foreseen.
Ning Yi was making the most of this autumn now—if one wanted to put it in more literary, melancholic terms, there was certainly a touch of loneliness to it. But regardless, at least on the surface, he still managed to approach things with an attitude of enjoyment. Since complaining accomplished nothing, whatever feelings belonged to that side of things were best kept concealed beneath a veneer of contentment.
Fang La had ascended the throne two days earlier, and the festive atmosphere of the enthronement ceremony still lingered throughout the city. For Ning Yi, given his current position, there was neither much occasion for celebration nor, really, much cause for sorrow either. The one real effect on him was that the academy had let out for the past two days, and so, the day before, he’d taken Xiao Chan out for a stroll through the streets.
Since returning to Hangzhou, this marked the first time he’d gone out purely for leisure, which also signaled that the tension of the earlier period could, for the moment at least, be set aside. Xiao Chan’s mood, too, had visibly lightened.
Hangzhou, having only just caught its breath after the turmoil of war, had nevertheless seen the flow of goods largely restored by now, and Ning Yi and Xiao Chan wandered through several marketplaces that had come back to life for the new dynasty’s celebrations. Beyond the various flowers and banners crafted for the occasion, what caught the eye everywhere were the bamboo-and-wood scaffolding frameworks going up, with small clusters of workers here and there—altogether presenting, in this war-torn city, a scene of things slowly being rebuilt from the ground up.
Prices in Hangzhou were running rather high these days, but Ning Yi naturally had A’Chang and A’Ming accompanying him whenever he went out, and he picked up a few odds and ends of daily necessities, mostly on the stronghold’s tab. A new residence rarely feels like home right away, but with Xiao Chan around—these past few days she’d been running back and forth with various items like a diligent little ant—the place had taken on a rather endearing quality. She’d once been an all-around capable little housekeeper back at the Su family residence, and now, tidying up the rooms with all her usual particular fussing, she finally began to lend the place a genuine sense of warmth.
Xiao Chan still worked at the clinic just across the wall, picking up bits of medical theory and pharmacology from the elderly physician surnamed Liu while she was at it. The old doctor was decent-tempered enough, though he had little patience for Ning Yi—mainly because Ning Yi had, some time back, offered up various theories about suturing wounds and the like, which the old man found presumptuous, and he’d scold him for it every time, calling him ignorant and full of empty talk. Xiao Chan, though, was quite well-behaved, and over these past several days, the old man seemed to have come to regard her almost as a granddaughter. Ning Yi found himself wondering whether Xiao Chan might someday turn into a little miracle-worker of a physician herself.
Whenever the two of them were together in the afternoons or evenings, Ning Yi liked to ask Xiao Chan what she’d learned that day at the clinic—because if he didn’t ask, she generally wouldn’t bring it up on her own. The girl still kept firmly to her sense of place, and whenever she was with Ning Yi each day, her thoughts ran instead to cooking, washing dishes, boiling water, doing laundry, brewing tea, even helping carry chairs for him. Even when she chattered on, it was usually about small, amusing things around them, not about reviewing whatever lessons the old doctor had taught her that day—to her, that was, after all, a secondary concern.
The academy let out for Mid-Autumn Festival, but the clinic still had work to do, so Xiao Chan went over to help out that morning. With nothing much to do at home, Ning Yi took up paper and brush, intending to write down some of the things he’d been mulling over recently, but found the whole exercise rather tedious. He wasn’t a Confucian disciple with any burning desire to leave behind writings for posterity—but having genuinely come to understand something of the situation within Fang La’s army through his time with the Overlord Blade Camp, he occasionally found himself entertaining thoughts along the lines of “if it were me, how would I go about a rebellion?” If he could turn that into some kind of coherent set of principles, it would, in the end, prove a rather interesting exercise.
The reason writing felt so tedious was, in the end, that he hadn’t yet found the crucial point of entry.
As he sat mulling this over, someone knocked at the door outside. Ning Yi went to look—it was a Daoist priest carrying a banner, talking with A’Chang, come to sell talismans and images of the God of Wealth on account of the Mid-Autumn Festival. After the priest left, before long a Buddhist monk came by too, soliciting alms while also peddling wares of his own; occasionally, wandering martial artists carrying weapons could be seen passing through the streets.
Every society develops its own particular ecosystem. Ning Yi sat on the stone stool by the door, basking in the sun, mulling over the several things he needed to attend to in the near future.
The most important of these, the very center around which everything else revolved, was getting Xiao Chan sent away, back to Su Tan’er’s side. The ideal scenario, of course, would be to go along with her himself, but that looked exceedingly difficult. Xiao Chan effectively served as his hostage here, and while getting her sent away wasn’t impossible, the matter really came in two stages: first, getting her safely out of the city, and second, ensuring she made it safely through several hundred li of road all the way to Huzhou. The first stage was quite feasible—there were plenty of ways to manage it, no real problem there. But as for having Xiao Chan travel alone all the way to Huzhou, Ning Yi didn’t yet have a plan he could feel fully confident about.
Everything else was, in one way or another, a secondary problem branching off from this central one. If Xiao Chan’s escape failed, how would he ensure both her survival and his own? If it succeeded, how would he then secure his own safety? The answer to this, in the end, came down to increasing his own value, or the sincerity with which he could offer his help to the other side—these were the kinds of everyday considerations without any fixed formula. What he wanted to write, too, was part of this same underlying concern.
It wasn’t that he intended to write it purely to deceive people—he genuinely had thought these ideas through in earnest. Since he was going to be staying here for a while regardless, he needed to find something to occupy himself with; simply teaching a handful of students would grow tedious soon enough. And here, right in front of him, was a living, breathing example of a peasant rebellion in progress. Though it wasn’t yet the right moment to put pen to paper on it, Ning Yi did already have a basic framework of ideas in mind.
Ambition, desire, or what might be called an ideal—what later ages would term subjective agency—could, to a very significant degree, determine whether an individual, or a group of people, was capable of accomplishing something great. This principle certainly wasn’t a universal truth applicable everywhere, but at least in the case of this particular rebellion unfolding before him, it had become the single greatest constraint. A group of peasants lacking strong subjective agency—most of the soldiers simply looted and looted, and sooner or later there would come a point where they felt they’d “looted enough.” They weren’t scholars, driven by some vision of bringing lasting peace to all future generations; nor were they simple soldiers who could just follow orders and charge forward without question. When a rebel army’s ranks were made up too heavily of peasants, there would always come a point where they gradually ground to a halt.
Looking across the whole of history, the peasant rebellions that had actually succeeded shared, first and foremost, one crucial trait: to some degree, they truly represented the inevitable trend of the times—meaning that even the scholarly class itself was crying out that the old order deserved to fall. Second, the rebellion’s leaders had to be able to train peasants into genuine soldiers—that is, men who would follow orders, rather than asking “what are we here to loot?” The two factors varied in proportion, but the first was, by far, the more important—though there were exceptions, such as the later Ming dynasty’s Zhu Di raising his army, though that hadn’t been a peasant rebellion at all. In peasant uprisings specifically, the importance of that first factor was almost irreplaceable.
And throughout the long river of history, looking at the many peasant rebellions born of famine, plague, and unrest, someone would raise a single arm and tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands would rise up with them, surging forward like a swarm of locusts, only to fall silent again before long. Almost none of the leadership of these uprisings had ever truly given thought to how to draw out the full strength of every single individual within their ranks. And of the rebellions throughout history that had truly harnessed something like subjective agency, even something resembling genuine ideals, in their peasant soldiers—in the entire span of history known to Ning Yi, in every case he was aware of, there had been only a single instance.
That was the Communist Party’s uprising in a later age.
Whatever later ages might come to think of that revolution and its aftermath, at the very least, at the time, the force generated by that group of peasants had been the greatest of its kind, and it had also produced what was perhaps the most incorruptible revolutionary force in the entirety of human history.
Ning Yi himself had once gone through a phase of youthful indignation, during which he’d sought out material on the Japanese kamikaze pilots—those young men who, as the Second World War drew to its close, had shouted slogans of “a hundred million shattered jewels,” determined to keep the Americans at bay. Back then, Japanese pilots had strapped explosives onto lightweight bombers or fighter planes, sometimes carrying only enough fuel for a one-way trip, and flown straight into American aircraft or ships. This willingness to throw away their lives so completely had, at the time, even shaken the psychological composure of some of America’s own ace pilots—some, landing back on their own carriers, had been so unsettled that their planes had crashed on landing.
Beyond these kamikaze pilots, along Japan’s coastline, they had also fitted torpedoes with steering controls, training sailors to pilot them directly into American ships. Of course, this particular tactic had been prepared as a defense against a large-scale American invasion; since the Americans never ended up landing, these manned torpedoes had never actually been put to use.
Learning about all this material at the time, Ning Yi had genuinely felt a sense of horror at it—and, naturally, he’d also wondered whether such a spirit could ever be replicated in some way, or whether there might be lessons in it applicable to enterprise management. It wasn’t until later, when he came across accounts of the Battle of Chosin Reservoir during the Korean War, that his thinking shifted.
The volunteer soldiers who’d entered Korea at that time had encountered a brutally harsh winter, their winter gear severely inadequate. To carry out a blocking action against American forces, troops had been sent ahead to lie in ambush at their positions—and in temperatures of forty below zero, amid heavy snow and ice, entire companies had frozen to death right there on the line, still holding their firing positions even as they died, never once releasing their weapons. They had simply never lived to see their enemy arrive.
If the Japanese spirit could be said to spring from a kind of fervent fanaticism, it was hard to say exactly what spirit had driven these volunteer soldiers—but throughout the entire War of Resistance and the civil war period that followed, this same spirit among the Communists could be seen again and again; no one could deny the sincerity of that generation of Communists in wanting to save their country. In that era, with advances in various technologies, the role of sheer manpower on the battlefield had already been significantly diminished. If a force like that could somehow be replicated in an ancient era so heavily dependent on raw manpower—even partially replicating that spirit—then even an army as fanatically driven as that of Genghis Khan, which had carried its wars of conquest all the way to Europe, would likely pale in comparison before such a force.
No need for advanced technology, no need for gunpowder, tanks, or rifles—even armed with nothing but simple blades, a force like that could sweep clean through the Wu Dynasty, could sweep clean through the Liao state as well. Of course, the emergence of that particular spirit in later ages had involved a great many contributing factors and constraints, and replicating it fully would prove extraordinarily difficult—but perhaps some part of it, at least, could still be imitated and learned from.
Fang La himself had once proclaimed, within his army, that “the law treats all equally, with no high or low”—but in essence, this was something even he himself barely believed, and in the end it had become nothing more than a slogan. To get people to truly believe in something, one first had to actually live it oneself, to hold to a genuine, carefully considered set of principles, and present it to people in a way convincing enough that they would sincerely believe they were striving for some great and noble cause—just as those old scholars genuinely believed they were “bringing lasting peace to all future generations.” Only with that as a foundation could any of this truly begin.
Simply copying Das Kapital wholesale would prove far too troublesome, but drawing on it for reference was always worthwhile. Piecing together various fragments of sociological thought from later ages he’d encountered, and weaving them into a set of principles founded on “fairness,” wasn’t entirely out of the question. Ning Yi himself didn’t believe in any of it, and within Fang La’s army, it was probably already too late to genuinely implement something like this in earnest—but if presented properly to people, it might well be able to win them over regardless. What mattered was that some people had already begun to notice the lack of faith and ambition affecting them—and if he himself pursued this thoroughly enough, there would surely be those who took interest.
Aim high in intent, but keep the foundation accessible, popular, easy for ordinary people to grasp. On this Mid-Autumn morning, sitting on that sunlit stone stool, he narrowed his eyes and turned all this over in his mind.
Might as well call it a pyramid scheme.
Then it occurred to him—all this, just to keep himself and Xiao Chan alive, and now he was planning to go start some kind of religious movement? That seemed like rather a lot of commotion for the purpose. Of course, for now this was all just idle musing in his head; everything would still have to be improvised as circumstances demanded. But if he was going to be staying here for a good while regardless, he’d need to find something to occupy himself with one way or another.
Having mulled this over for a while, he was just about to head back and check on Xiao Chan at the clinic when, rising to his feet, he noticed a man standing across the road who seemed to have been watching him for some time now, and who was now walking this way.
The man wore black from head to toe, with the bearing of someone from the martial world, though he carried no weapon. He was tall and lean, his expression somewhat stern, brow furrowed as he studied Ning Yi. Ning Yi frowned slightly in return, and glancing at A’Chang’s expression nearby, gathered readily enough that this man had indeed come looking for him. He’d spent several days now going over information about the Overlord Blade Camp, and had picked up some sense of the appearances of certain figures within Fang La’s ranks. Running through the names in his mind, he saw the man cup his hands in greeting.
“Might you be Ning Yi—Ning Liheng?” The words carried a notably polite air.
“That’s right. And you are…”
“This one is An Xifu.”
Ning Yi let out a sigh. Here to make trouble.
And so he smiled and said, “Have you eaten yet?”