When the night watchman’s clapper sounded, the sky was still dark; across Hangzhou, only a scattering of lights showed here and there.
In the small courtyard behind Wenlie Academy, a warm golden glow had already come alive within the room. Ning Yi hummed a tune in the kitchen, chopsticks in hand, working flour into a smooth batter; on the cutting board beside him, half of the leftovers he’d brought back from last night’s banquet for the hundred officials had already been chopped up as a meat filling, ready to be fried into pancakes.
Though Ning Yi had, over these recent weeks, managed to offend no small number of people, nothing particularly unusual had happened around him at last night’s banquet. Beyond running into Long Boyuan and Lou Shuwan again, he’d also crossed paths with a few other faces he recognized or had some prior impression of, and the rest of the evening had passed as a simple, lively banquet. He’d caught a glimpse of Fang La and the others appearing at one point, though it hadn’t held any particular significance for him. Afterward, he’d packed up a portion of the food to bring home — and that was that.
It was now nearing dawn of the following day. Ning Yi had risen early; the clinic just ahead had apparently received some patients not long ago and seemed already busy with activity, so he’d sent Xiao Chan over to help while he prepared breakfast himself in the kitchen. To do justice to the beef he’d brought home and chopped up the night before, he’d even cracked a couple of eggs into the flour batter specially.
Present-day Hangzhou was, on the whole, an environment of sharp class division — for those without status or connections, starving to death was no great surprise; those with the right backing, meanwhile, generally had every chance of becoming instant fortunes overnight. Ning Yi currently occupied one of the rare positions somewhere between the two — not likely to starve, and able to eat reasonably well most of the time. Even if he still couldn’t match others when it came to certain material comforts, Liu Dabiao’s side hadn’t exactly shortchanged him either. There seemed little need for corruption or abuse of position on his part, though he never had much surplus lying around day to day — living reasonably well, but taking each day as it came, with no real plan beyond that.
…
Passing by outside the courtyard gate, a girl in a wide-brimmed hat, moving like a quiet shadow, caught the strains of an odd little tune drifting from within: “Candlelight lights up the dinner table, but it can’t light up an answer, love was never meant to be a warm little dinner date…” — followed shortly by the smell of frying batter.
This was the small courtyard where Ning Liheng lived. She had passed by on the road outside a few times before, glancing over, but had never once actually come by. There had simply never been any need to. This stretch of street currently belonged to her, and while a superior could certainly show concern for her subordinates, there was no need to go out of her way to play the friendly neighbor — especially not for someone who went by a name as formidable-sounding as Liu Dabiao. In many respects, it was better to maintain a certain distance.
Those trained in martial arts tended to rise early. Last night’s banquet hadn’t demanded much of her time or energy, but this morning, as she was preparing to practice her breathing exercises and blade forms, she’d heard that Steward Chen’s youngest son back at the stronghold had suddenly fallen gravely ill and been rushed here to see the physician. With the sky still not fully light, she’d decided to wander over and take a look for herself.
The courtyards along this street had, of course, originally all been separated from one another, but after the earthquake, once the Overlord Blade Camp had claimed this area, many of the walls between them had simply been knocked through, and now the courtyards, large and small, had merged into one connected stretch, with three or five households sharing each space. Lively enough, certainly — though largely because the Overlord Blade Camp hadn’t bothered much with looting upon entering the city, leaving them rather short on housing as a result.
The girl carried no blade on her back this morning; dressed in a simple indigo robe with a gauze hat over her head, she moved along the street with an almost ghostly quiet, disturbing no one along the way. Of course, even if any of the manor’s more skilled fighters had happened to spot her, they wouldn’t have said a word about it regardless. She glanced quietly toward the back of the clinic — the scene inside looked rather tense, the family anxious, the child crying and screaming in pain. The elderly physician she was meant to call “grandfather” was busy at work, alternating between acupuncture needles and medicinal poultices; it seemed the maid who usually accompanied Ning Liheng was helping out as well — though she was well aware by now that this particular maid had already become Ning Liheng’s concubine. She was well liked around the clinic all the same.
The treatment inside was unlikely to conclude anytime soon; she had no wish to intrude or add to the chaos with an unnecessary visit, and so she turned to head back the way she’d come, passing by the gate leading to that small courtyard along the way. Firelight glowed from the kitchen, and Ning Liheng’s strange little tune drifted out toward her. Since Xiao Chan was over helping at the clinic, that clearly left him alone inside. The Overlord Blade Manor was hardly a household of scholars — among those who’d spent their lives roaming the jianghu, now turned to killing officials and rebelling against the throne, men who knew how to cook out in the wild were common enough. But a scholar, one with a woman of his own, still bothering to cook himself — that, she’d rarely seen.
And the lyrics, odd as they were, had a certain charm to them. Just then he sang the line, “Sunlight flows across my skin, waiting for all my sins to be forgiven…” — and, somehow, she found she could follow the meaning easily enough.
She’d listened along for a few more lines when the singing inside suddenly stopped, and the scholar’s figure appeared beneath the eaves, gnawing on something golden-brown in his hand, looking her way. She’d meant to leave, but since she’d already been spotted, there seemed little point in going now.
The scholar, seeing her, looked mildly startled for a moment, then broke into an easy, faintly teasing smile. “Good morning, my liege.”
Over these past several days together, whenever Ning Yi used the word “liege,” there seemed to be a certain private amusement he took in saying it — not malicious, exactly, but not entirely respectful either. Still, she didn’t much mind his little private jokes. She lifted her chin slightly and nodded, her manner mild. “Good morning to you too.”
“Have you eaten?” Ning Yi held up the wrap in his hand. “Fine morning, lovely scenery — why not come sample your humble servant’s cooking?”
A moment later, the two of them sat beneath the eaves eating the wraps together — golden-fried flatbread wrapped around beef, fresh cucumber, and other fillings, not entirely unlike the wrapped meat rolls one might find at a certain fast-food chain in another life. Liu Xigua lifted the edge of her veil slightly and took a bite, glancing at Ning Yi. “I’ve heard it said that a gentleman keeps his distance from the kitchen.”
“That’s a saying attributed to Confucius, yes.” Ning Yi nodded, then glanced toward the clinic. “My liege… could it be you’ve come to check on that sick child?”
Liu Xigua kept eating, giving nothing away. “Watching that child in so much pain — sounds like it might be an intestinal abscess. If luck isn’t on his side, I’m afraid he might not pull through.”
“My liege’s compassion is truly admirable. But an intestinal abscess, that would be… appendicitis, wouldn’t it? You’d just need to cut out a section of the intestine and he’d be fine.”
Liu Xigua studied him from behind her veil for a long moment, then answered in a tone that sounded almost perfunctory: “How would one go about cutting it out?”
“Make an incision, locate the affected appendix — it’s roughly located along this stretch of intestine — cut it out, then stitch everything back up… er, something along those lines. I don’t know the specifics myself, but to properly research something like this, one could consider dissecting the corpses of otherwise healthy people, comparing their intestines against those who died of the condition.”
“What Liheng says is truly thought-provoking.” The girl turned her head and focused on her food.
“Not a bad method of research, all things considered — cut it open, compare, sew it back up. Sterilization would need to be done properly, of course, and then… well, I’m no physician myself, that’s a matter for the actual doctors to work out.”
No stars, no moon, the sky not yet properly light. The two of them, sitting beneath the eaves talking, were clearly not putting much real thought into the conversation. On an ordinary day, whatever Ning Yi said, the girl would usually mull it over for a while — but this morning she seemed distinctly indifferent to it all. Ning Yi, for his part, likely didn’t much care whether she believed any of it — probably precisely because he was confident she wouldn’t — and having rambled on irresponsibly for a while in this vein, he laughed. “So how did they end up reporting on me, exactly?”
“They said you believe in some crooked, unorthodox nonsense — that you stitched up your own wound and very nearly died of it.” Recalling this, Liu Xigua seemed to find it amusing as well, though the feeling passed as quickly as it came.
Ning Yi shrugged, offering his defense. “Scientific research, you know — bound to make mistakes along the way. Failure is the mother of success.”
The sky still wasn’t light; this wasn’t the time for discussing real business. Liu Xigua had, by this point, more or less settled on the conclusion that Ning Liheng was, at heart, a rather dull man — and most everything else about him could be understood from that same starting point. That business about gentlemen keeping clear of the kitchen — he clearly didn’t care one way or another. As for his more unconventional ideas and habits, those, too, likely stemmed simply from a broader indifference toward most things in general. And for her part, all she really wanted from him now was his ability to plan and organize — she wasn’t especially concerned with the rest either. Between the two of them, a workable rhythm had more or less taken shape on this basis: they could talk nonsense freely, so long as both stayed clear-headed enough not to let actual matters fall into disorder.
In some sense, in Liu Xigua’s understanding, ruling over others was, at its core, a matter of doing whatever it took, without much concern for principle. And yet, even so, she still found herself drawn to admire those who held to genuine principles and convictions. When she’d first set out to win Ning Liheng over, she’d approached it, in her own mind, as a grand challenge — she’d made all sorts of predictions about how he might respond, and had prepared accordingly even while marching with Fang Qifo’s forces toward Jiaxing — sending people to Huzhou to inquire after Su Tan’er, laying careful groundwork for every contingency, whether he ended up as a teacher, a friend, or an enemy, she’d expected any of those outcomes to prove worthwhile in its own way. Who could have guessed he would simply comply so readily in the end?
Once she’d more or less understood the pattern of how he operated, everything had lost much of its savor. She admired his competence, but found it hard to genuinely appreciate the man himself. I won’t kill you, you work for me, I’ll treat you well in return — and from there, more or less, a mechanical sort of arrangement between them. Perhaps that was precisely why she felt no particular reluctance about sitting here in his courtyard now, eating a pancake, chatting idly — because both of them understood the arrangement for what it was, and neither would take any of it too much to heart.
Amid their scattered conversation, the faint sound of shouting and fighting on a small scale seemed to drift over from somewhere in the night air. Liu Xigua paused, listening carefully; Ning Yi listened for a moment too. “That street to the east — another fight. Seems to be happening rather often lately.” As he spoke, Liu Xigua had already risen to her feet; after a moment’s thought, she held out a hand. “Give me one more.”
Ning Yi handed her another wrap. She started toward the gate leading out to the street, then turned back to ask, “Care to come watch?”
Ning Yi blinked, taken aback for a moment. “Sure, why not — I do love watching people fight.”
The eastern sky had begun to show the first faint pale glow of dawn, roosters starting to crow. In the hazy early light, the two of them made their way toward the street where the brawl was still underway, eating their beef wraps as they went. Hangzhou wasn’t a particularly peaceful place these days; by the time they reached the mouth of the street, they could already see torches flickering in the distance and figures moving amid pools of blood, some shouting “Kill him!” as they charged into a side alley.
The streets on the eastern edge of the Overlord Blade Camp’s territory ran close to the outskirts of the city, relatively run-down; after the city’s fall, a great many poor residents had gathered in this area. The Overlord Blade Camp hadn’t pushed its claim over the surrounding territory too aggressively — likely because Liu Xigua, seeing how crowded and dilapidated the area already was, had simply let its residents be. It was said that, during the chaos of the city’s fall, Liu Xigua herself had even come out to hand out steamed buns nearby, more or less for the fun of it. Since then, the area had become something of a mixed bag, and all sorts of unpleasant incidents were common — people dying of illness, of starvation — though by now such things had simply become routine on the outskirts of Hangzhou. Ning Yi had occasionally mentioned this to Xiao Chan, only ever telling her to stay away from the area a bit; over this stretch of time, he’d personally witnessed several outbreaks of violence there, apparently among local toughs and gangs originally from Hangzhou itself, now sensing the rebel army’s general indifference to the area and beginning to jostle for territory and rebuild their own little power bases.
Ning Yi had no particular objection to watching a bit of gossip-worthy commotion himself, though he was somewhat surprised to find Liu Dabiao just as interested in it. As the sky gradually brightened, the street ahead filled with groans of pain; the girl, having finished her wrap, murmured quietly, “I should have someone send over some medicine later.”
“How considerate of you…” Ning Yi said this rather perfunctorily. The girl’s fits of charity tended to arrive at rather odd moments — handing out steamed buns when the city fell, sending medicine now — likely both born of some passing whim more than anything else. This time, though, what she said next caught him rather more off guard.
“I’m the one who got them fighting.”
The morning breeze stirred the edge of her veil; beneath it, her finely shaped lips seemed to curve slightly upward, as though she were describing some accomplishment she took a certain quiet pride in.
“Hm?”
“I got them fighting,” Liu Dabiao said again, smiling with evident satisfaction. “When the city fell, they all came flooding this way. I came out and handed out steamed buns — not very many, mind you — but some of them started fighting over it, and I didn’t intervene.”
“So I heard. Some child had his bun snatched away right in front of you, and you didn’t step in either.”
“Mm, I’d already done my good deed, hadn’t I? That made me a good person. Either way, someone was going to eat my buns — does it really matter who? It’s the sincerity of the gesture that counts.” She went on, “They didn’t know who I was, of course — they assumed I was just some wealthy young lady with a bit of backing. One time I came by, and they even snatched my whole bundle right off me. So after that I started coming by carriage instead, handing things out from inside.”
Ning Yi had already heard several accounts of this sort of thing from people within the Overlord Blade Camp. The streets around here were crowded with people; there was simply no way the girl’s handouts of buns or whatever else could ever reach everyone, and she never brought much to begin with — just a single bundle, handed out and then she’d leave with an easy conscience. And so, generally, people had assumed she did it purely to satisfy her own sense of virtue, nothing more.
“I never bring much, so I just give it to a few people at a time — that way, each of them ends up with quite a lot. Some of them suddenly find themselves holding ten steamed buns at once, more than they could possibly eat, and want to hide the extra away — only to have someone else spot it and come to take it from them. Later I started bringing preserved meat too, whatever tasted good, really. There’s a Boss Jin around here, a Boss Tian, and a few others — several different gang leaders, each with their own followers. They can’t take on us, so they end up bullying the ordinary people on the street instead. Every time, whatever I handed out just kept getting snatched back and forth between them — until eventually, no one dared accept anything from me at all.” Liu Dabiao pressed the back of her hand to her lips and laughed. “But I’m not a bad person, you know — even if they don’t dare take it, I still hand things out regardless. Some of these people are starving badly enough that they’ll take desperate risks eventually. I heard about one boy who tried to snatch some food to bring back to his mother, and ended up beaten so badly he was crippled for life. Heh heh…”
The sunlight was slowly rising now. Dressed in her indigo floral dress, wrapped in her cloak, without the imposing great sword she usually carried on her back, the girl looked soft and unspoiled — and yet, at this moment, there was something distinctly unsettling woven into that laugh of hers. Ning Yi’s brow furrowed as a certain possibility suddenly occurred to him. “You’re not planning to…”
The girl lowered her hand; the laughter stopped. Behind the veil, she seemed to grow quietly still for a long moment before finally speaking. “Every time, I bring a little more than I really should, but it’s never enough regardless. And I never give it to the ones who look strong and capable — I always look for whoever seems to need it most, and give it to them. Ten steamed buns, twenty steamed buns, a pound of preserved meat… these people, having lived so long within the city, have grown afraid to do anything at all. Give them a single bun, and they eat it right away; give them ten and they can’t finish them; give them a pound of preserved meat and they can’t bear to eat it all at once. Every single time, it just gets snatched away, and the ones who get bullied simply keep getting bullied — some starve to death, some die of illness, some get beaten half to death and simply linger on in pain until they finally die. It’s pitiful, really. Then, a few days ago, there was a fifteen-year-old boy — his steamed buns got snatched, and he got beaten on top of it. So he grabbed a knife and stabbed all three of the men who’d come to rob him, killing them. He was arrested afterward, and I had someone step in to have him released — brought him into my own personal guard within the Overlord Blade Camp instead… And these past few days, a great many of them have started fighting back.”
In the distance, it seemed a squad from the Black Feather Guard was approaching to enforce order. The girl laughed again. “‘The law applies equally, without distinction of rank.’ But in a world like this, if someone’s too afraid to even raise their own hands, then whatever I give them was never really theirs to keep in the first place. So all I can do is teach them to take things with their own two hands instead. What’s the use of giving people something if they can’t even hold onto it — am I supposed to stand there and watch over them while they eat it too? I’m not their mother. Why should that be my job? This stretch of land, we took it with our own blood — and if they can’t hold onto it, that’s exactly why they lost it in the first place. If they still don’t understand that much, then there’s nothing left for them but to die.”
She lifted her chin slightly. “I hope, someday, there can be a place where whatever someone manages to get with their own hands truly, properly becomes their own. But before that can happen, all the people who’ve taken more than what should rightfully be theirs need to be brought down first. There are far too many people in this world holding onto things that were never truly theirs to begin with…”
“That’s what I intend to do, going forward. I really am quite capable, you know.” She turned to look at him directly, her expression earnest. “So, Liheng — could you please stop calling me ‘my liege’ from now on? It sounds no different from calling me ‘princess.’ You can call me Liu Dabiao, or just Dabiao. We’re all working together here, more or less like brothers-in-arms… Of course, if you truly don’t want to, that’s fine too — you can keep calling me ‘my liege,’ or you can call me Liu Qianqian, I do have a childhood name too, Liu Xigua — if you really want to use that, I wouldn’t mind either. Just so long as you never become my enemy, I can tolerate anything, because you’re a man of genuine ability.”
Having said this, she turned and walked off, waving a hand. “I’ll head back first.”
Ning Yi stood there stunned for a long moment. “Ha, alright then. Dabiao.”
A few steps away, Liu Dabiao turned back, pointing a finger at him. “Don’t go shouting it out on the street too loudly or too casually — I am your superior, after all, need to keep up appearances a little…” As she turned away again, her skirts flared out; her voice, clear and bright, carried something of the air of a tomboy about it. Then, apparently spotting a door about to open nearby, she leapt suddenly, vaulting up onto a wall, glanced back at Ning Yi once more, and dropped down out of sight on the other side.
Ning Yi found himself rather charmed by the sight. This Liu Dabiao — odd at times, domineering at others, occasionally scatterbrained, occasionally quiet, and yet, every so often, genuinely open and unclouded — if this really was how she carried herself among the upper ranks of the Overlord Blade Camp, then she truly was a woman of considerable, magnetic leadership after all…
As he was still turning this over in his mind, at the end of the street where his small courtyard stood, a carriage came to a stop outside the gate. Someone stepped down and knocked at the courtyard door. Looking closer, he saw — it was Lou Shuwan.