Passing through the somewhat desolate marketplace, he bought breakfast on the way and made it back home just as classes were about to begin at Wenlie Academy.
Zhuo Xiaofeng had already parted ways with him partway back; by now, he was surely gathering a few trusted companions at the academy to discuss what to do about Chen Teng. To be fair, Ning Yi hadn’t put a great deal of effort into the group of children at the academy — at most, it had been a way to pass idle time. Still, wherever there was room for it, small factions tended to spring up on their own. The group of children who leaned toward Ning Yi’s side had named their own faction the “Yongle Youth League” — a distinctly modern-sounding name, naturally owing to Ning Yi’s own subtle guidance — while Zhuo Xiaofeng’s faction had formed the “Rectitude Society” to stand against them.
The formation of these two small groups was, in some respects, little different from the founding of a secret society — the Rectitude Society, for its part, observed all the usual trappings: burning incense, beheading a chicken, burning yellow paper, swearing blood oaths, missing none of the ritual. The Youth League, under Ning Yi’s off-hand suggestions, skipped all of that, but had, if anything, grown even closer-knit internally than their rivals, addressing one another as “senior brother,” “junior brother,” and “fellow disciples.”
Though the two sides remained locked in rivalry, actual friction between them stayed fairly limited. Most of these children came from families belonging to the mid-to-upper tiers of Fang La’s system, and their parents were, on the whole, rather pleased to see their children forming this kind of association. Championing the cause of justice and rooting out wrongdoing — even now, this was still a rallying cry heard within Fang La’s ranks. So far, both groups had only handled a handful of righteous causes, and when it came to investigating misdeeds and clearing the names of a few wronged parties, their parents had, in fact, often quietly lent a hand. Without that support, the children wouldn’t really have been able to accomplish very much on their own.
As for what had happened now, it could be called both entirely expected and something of a surprise. For a while, Ning Yi himself wasn’t sure whether to view it as good or bad. It was only midmorning when two more children came to see him. This time, though, it was two of the top students from the “Third Class,” the group he taught directly — one named Yang Zhiwu, fifteen years old and something of a leader among the children; the other, Chen Xituo, only eleven and still without a formal adult name, but remarkably clever for his age. The two of them had come to report that the “Rectitude Society” was likely in serious trouble.
The academy wasn’t exactly a strict, formal environment, and the “Youth League” and “Rectitude Society” had probably each planted informants within the other’s ranks — so word of what the other side had been investigating had naturally reached them as well. Given how serious this particular matter was, they’d come to ask Ning Yi’s advice. Ning Yi gave them some instructions and sent them off; it was nearly noon when someone knocked at the door outside, and when he opened it, Chen Fan was standing there.
The daylight was bright and calm, and the faint sound of students reading carried over from the academy nearby. By now, Xiao Chan had come back from the clinic to start preparing the fire for cooking, bustling busily back and forth. Chen Fan helped himself to a bowl of water with a wooden ladle in the kitchen, then came and sat down across from Ning Yi beneath the eaves. Ning Yi was pouring finely ground lime into a wooden bowl already holding a strange powder mixture. “How’s it going?”
“Still alive. His life should be safe, though what comes after is hard to say… How did you end up out there?”
“Zhuo Xiaofeng came to find me — he knew he couldn’t handle it on his own, but we still got there too late.”
“I should have stopped him earlier, I suppose.”
Hearing him say this, Ning Yi realized Chen Fan had, in fact, been following the whole affair closely from beginning to end. If anything, Chen Fan was probably the one who genuinely valued this group of children at the academy more than Ning Yi did. Though Ning Yi himself treated it mostly as a diversion, their underlying philosophies were quite different, and the ideas he was instilling in these children were of a different kind altogether. If all he’d been feeding them was stale Confucian moralizing or simple notions of righting wrongs, Chen Fan probably wouldn’t have paid the children much attention at all. Different foundations led, in the end, to different places a person might stop, different heights they might eventually reach. Serving one’s country and people, or simply the people around oneself — such things might sound simple enough to say, but if a person truly came to believe in them with their whole heart, the eventual outcome could prove to be anything but simple.
What Ning Yi was doing with these children now amounted, more or less, to exactly that. A simple matter of aligning knowledge with action — what was right, what doing this or that would mean for the nation and society — say a little, have them do a little, tell them this was something truly great, and then back it all up with an endless stream of classical citations and moral theory, using stories like that of Qian Xiwen to stir their emotions further. None of it, on its own, was particularly remarkable, and it followed a fairly methodical course — but when every element aligned just right, the brainwashing effect it produced on a person’s developing worldview was, in the end, genuinely frightening.
Of course, if this era hadn’t held scholars in such high regard, and if these hadn’t been such simple, honest country children — carrying in their hearts the belief that “the learned gentleman from the city must be terribly impressive, and whatever he says must naturally be right” — none of this would have taken hold quite so quickly.
In another age, this wouldn’t really have counted as proper teaching in any strict sense — the key words for it would have been something closer to “political commissar” and “agitation.” The point of the lessons wasn’t to teach literacy or how to compose an essay. The sole target was always the mind itself — every theory, however profound or however simple, ultimately existed to instill devout belief. It required no particular threshold to enter; anyone with a modicum of comprehension could listen, could learn. Its ultimate purpose, then, was never to produce some towering scholar of unmatched erudition, but rather to forge a body of soldiers genuinely willing to sacrifice themselves.
To make people willing to sacrifice themselves, what needed to be given them was, in the end, nothing more than a sense of value and honor that they genuinely, wholeheartedly believed in. But getting someone to believe wholeheartedly was an extraordinarily difficult thing to achieve. These children were still only just starting out — under the combined influence of Confucian ideals and the chivalric code of the martial world, something like a rough outline had begun to take shape in them. What kind of result it would ultimately produce remained, in the end, genuinely hard to say.
Back in Jiangning, most of what he’d taught had been practical, technical subjects. Here, it was pure ideological indoctrination — something of a continuation of an idle thought experiment he’d once entertained: “how does one go about staging a rebellion.” Chen Fan, of course, had no way of grasping any of this, but he had recognized the useful part of it and had kept a close eye on it ever since. Ning Yi thought it over, then poured a bowl of water into the quicklime, watching it foam and churn. “That Ancient Paulownia Temple — what exactly is it, really?”
Chen Fan watched the reaction in the bowl, opened his mouth, then laughed. “Don’t tell me you couldn’t guess? Something ugly, obviously.”
“I could guess that much, I just hadn’t seen much of it firsthand. Besides, I’ve heard Celestial Master Bao does all manner of vile things — how would I know exactly what the Ancient Paulownia Temple was for?”
“These kids just happened to stumble on the right place.” Chen Fan lowered his voice slightly, his expression turning a little more serious. “What they were investigating was a string of missing women across the city… Bao Daoyi’s reputation for hoarding wealth and property is well earned enough, but as for being a Daoist — in truth, the man’s greedy for women too, and won’t touch the willing kind. He likes forcing himself on respectable women. I hear that when he was young, he was betrothed to the daughter of a wealthy family, but something happened to his own family, and she broke it off and married someone else. Once he’d finished his training, he went back and killed her whole family, and took the woman herself… well, in any case, he likes violating respectable women most of all — the more virtuous and chaste they are, the more he wants them, the harder they cry, the more it excites him… These past couple of years, it’s gotten to the point where if he spots someone he likes on the street, he’ll have her seized that very night. He’s the Protector-of-the-State Celestial Master — who’s going to do anything about it?”
“Ah… a rather harmless little vice, then…” Ning Yi had more or less guessed as much already; he nodded, expressionless, and after a moment said, “Two women a night, at most — how many can that really add up to? Everyone’s out here fighting and dying to build this new order, and if he indulges himself a little on the side, it’s probably not that big a deal. Every time a city falls, the death toll dwarfs numbers like this. The people at the top probably think the same way. Am I wrong?”
Chen Fan gave a faint smile, his eyes turning cold. “What else can be done about it? These are just his particular tastes — you can’t exactly call him out over it, can you, pick a fight with him over it? And once he’s got that kind of hobby, of course the men under him want a share of it too. If he sets his sights on someone’s wife and drags her off in broad daylight, you can be sure his men have three or four women of their own they’ve had their eye on too, and naturally they just help themselves along the way…”
Chen Fan trailed off here, seeming to want to say more, opening his mouth but apparently unable to get the words out. He was, at heart, a man who came across as careless but actually felt things quite deeply; he clenched his fists, trying to shake off the mood, and pointed at the bowl of lime. “Using this stuff is pretty low, honestly — not the way a real master fights. Aren’t you always going around telling people your outlaw name is the Bloody-Handed Butcher?”
“Well, once you’ve put up the archway, you might as well play the part properly — no point putting up an archway and refusing to act the part.” Ning Yi waved a hand with a laugh. “Besides, I’ve still got unfinished business with Li Tianyou, and now that Li Tianrun’s back, I need to be careful. Keeping a couple of lime packets on me seems only sensible… Say, you’re the real expert here — if I were to throw one at you, how should I go about it for the best effect?”
“Uh… heh… hahahaha…” Chen Fan stared at him for a moment, then burst out laughing, shaking his head for a while. “Throwing it straight at someone probably won’t work — I’d dodge it easily enough. What you did this morning wasn’t bad, though. Dark night, someone who doesn’t recognize you, you shout ‘watch the blade,’ and most ordinary people are going to fall for it. If the lime gets in someone’s eyes and you’re right there next to them, they’re finished. But under normal circumstances, there are a few tricks to throwing a concealed weapon properly — I’ve never trained in it myself, but I’ve heard my master mention it. First off… if you’re free this afternoon, I’ll come practice with you…”
Chen Fan himself wasn’t one to stand on ceremony either, and the two of them spent a while discussing the finer points of throwing lime powder at people. Afterward, the courtyard fell quiet; Chen Fan sat there watching the yellowed leaves fall. In truth, what had happened at the Ancient Paulownia Temple left a certain coldness settled in the chest, however one looked at it — but with Bao Daoyi involved, even Chen Fan had no idea what could actually be done about it.
Ning Yi, too, was no naive innocent. What had happened at the Ancient Paulownia Temple wasn’t, in truth, the worst thing that had occurred in Hangzhou these past few months — there was far worse still, he simply hadn’t witnessed it firsthand, and not witnessing something didn’t mean it hadn’t happened. In the period when the city fell, countless people had starved, burned, or died from every kind of abuse and humiliation imaginable — once the restraints of order fell away, there was no limit to how far human cruelty could reach. And even before the city’s fall, such things had, in truth, already been happening constantly, in countless dark corners no one spoke of. For now, all he could do was quietly, coldly, keep sorting his quicklime.
“People around here have been guessing lately who helped you kill Tang Kou at Four Seasons Studio,” Chen Fan said, thinking of a new topic, tilting his head with a grin. “The other day I joked, why not just say you struck the blow yourself — played weak in front of everyone, then jumped out of the shadows and cut him down in one stroke. It was just a joke at the time, but this morning it suddenly occurred to me… could it actually be true?”
Ning Yi blinked, startled for a moment, then laughed and nodded, clapping him on the shoulder. “Ha, I’m touched — every time I say that, no one ever believes me…”
“…Having thought it over, I still don’t think it’s very likely.”
“Get out of here.”
Chen Fan laughed heartily, and after a moment, said, “So with all this happening now, what’s going to happen to those kids?”
“What can happen? Even the strongest can only do so much. Either they take a hard knock and never recover, or they learn something from it — that there’s a proper sense of proportion to everything you do.”
Chen Fan studied him for a long moment. “They say you calculate ten steps ahead in everything. Wang Yin and my own master both nearly got burned by you before. You really have no thoughts on this at all?”
“Liu Xigua said something about you the other day,” Ning Yi said, gathering up the things on the small table. “She said you’re not stupid — just cleverer than you let on. Being cleverer than you let on still makes you clever. What am I supposed to do about it? I’ve got thoughts, sure — but as for telling you any of them, I’ve got exactly none to share.”
“A sharp-tongued woman will never find a husband her whole life…”
Chen Fan muttered this under his breath. In truth, he was a man of considerable judgment and discernment; his earlier question had been asked more out of idle curiosity than anything else. That afternoon, Chen Fan spent the rest of the day practicing the fine art of throwing lime powder at people with Ning Yi, and for the time being, the matter of the Ancient Paulownia Temple was set aside. Chen Fan was, in all likelihood, holding himself back with tremendous restraint — Ning Yi, bracing for confrontation with Li Tianyou, needed outside pressure to work in his favor, but even so, he couldn’t very well set every corner of the city ablaze at once. The ideas he’d begun instilling in that group of children had only just started to take root, and the one real concern now was how to guide them through whatever small setback might be coming their way.
Both Chen Fan and Ning Yi thought much the same on that score.
But the world rarely unfolds as one expects.
Retaliation arrived the very next day.