In this world, one will encounter a tiger.
Chapter 308: Iron Sword, Rivers and Mountains — Reunion at the World’s End (I)
Spring, the tenth year of the Jinghan era of the Wu Dynasty. Zhenjiang.
As the sun began to set, it was as if the wind were carrying flower petals drifting leisurely across the horizon. The weather had not yet fully warmed, but the chill of winter could no longer be felt. The willows were budding, the poplar catkins danced, and the peach trees had already turned pink. This spring was gradually entering its finest season.
This was a city nestled against mountains and rivers, and night had nearly fallen. Near the docks, most of the boats setting out had already gathered together, bustling with activity. Cormorants stood on the wooden rafts watching it all — the calls of fishermen, the clamor of the boatmen with their poles, the sailors coming and going. Sometimes a hull would catch on a net, sparking a burst of confusion and cursing. When the bell of Jinshan Temple sounded from far away, lanterns were already beginning to flicker on, scattered across the ancient city behind.
The setting sun stained the distant hills with a trace of lingering red.
“When we left it was summer. By the time we came back, it was already spring of the following year.”
Standing at the gate of a house where lanterns had just been lit, looking out at the spring scenery outside, Ning Yi sighed like this to Lu Hongti.
The heroine in her plain hemp clothes clapped her hands, and not long after, quite without dignity, sat down on the threshold, tilting her head to watch the scattered pedestrians making their way home.
Ning Yi smiled and sat for a while too, at the edge of the threshold, until Xiao Chan called from inside that the young mistress was looking for him, and he got up and went in.
They had arrived in Zhenjiang on the twenty-seventh of February.
Compared to the leisurely pace of their journey south at the start, now that they were truly hurrying back, the road hadn’t taken much time at all. When the city had fallen, Su Tan’er had already been more than eight months pregnant. Although she had been looked after by Wenren Buer’s people, anything could happen in a city that had just been breached, so under the protection of men sent by Wenren Buer, Su Tan’er, Xiao Chan, and the others had gone north to Zhenjiang first, to wait for the dust to settle. And only once the matter of the Overlord Blade Camp had finally been dealt with did Ning Yi set out with Lu Hongti to join them here.
Since last July, the crises of the Hangzhou expedition had come one after another, almost without pause. In the most difficult times, even Ning Yi himself had grown uncertain whether he would make it back. But now, the whole affair had finally come to a close — especially after settling the fate of the Overlord Blade Camp, a great weight had finally lifted from his chest, and he could let out a long breath. To feel the peaceful atmosphere of Zhenjiang’s streets truly felt like something from another lifetime.
For Lu Hongti, it was perhaps a different feeling altogether.
The Lüliang Mountains where she had originally lived had, even before its fall, been no better than occupied Hangzhou — Liao to the north, Tian Hu to the south. After arriving in Hangzhou, all she had really seen was a group of kindred spirits rising up in rebellion. In no sense did Zhenjiang feel like another lifetime to her — it was, like Jiangning, another world entirely, one she could hardly hope to reach.
To Ning Yi, whether it was Zhenjiang, Jiangning, or Hangzhou before, their prosperity fell within a range he could merely tolerate. As for those remote, impoverished villages where people ate husks and thin gruel and couldn’t even clothe themselves properly, he could understand and imagine such things, but to say he truly felt them himself — that, naturally, was impossible.
The state of the Lüliang Mountains was, by and large, just as miserable. Farming families tilled the land, but whether they could even be assured of a year’s harvest was uncertain. The Liao often raided the border, and sometimes an entire village, unable to flee in time, would be reduced to ashes. After the Liao left, officials from who-knew-where would appear to collect taxes and rents. Those who could pick up a blade and fight would enjoy a brief moment of glory before dying by the blade themselves; those who took to banditry would gather in groups, kill their enemies, skin them, and hang the skins on flagpoles. After Tian Hu’s uprising began, yet another power joined the scramble for plunder, but people didn’t seem to feel any more miserable for it — they had simply grown used to it.
Coming here, seeing these people living settled lives, truly felt like arriving in another world. Even occupied Hangzhou, from its houses and buildings, still showed traces of a prosperity not long past, and all she could think to say was, “What a pity…”
The Lüliang Mountains were somewhat better now, at least within the stockade, but there was still no comparison to this place. She sat at the gate for a while, and when Juan’er came to call her for dinner, she rose and went inside.
During her days in Hangzhou, she had disguised herself every day. Though she had her own methods, it had still been troublesome, and apart from necessary outings, she had simply stayed within the compound. During that time, she had grown somewhat quiet. Ning Yi would occasionally talk with her about matters concerning the Lüliang Mountains, and would give her simple thoughts on strategy, but he never made any definitive decisions. She, too, had spent those days watching everything Ning Yi did, trying to remember it, trying to understand it.
This time, traveling with them, she was no longer disguised as the woman in her thirties she had once appeared to be, but had let her true, delicate features show, which had left Xiao Chan and Juan’er rather astonished. Su Tan’er, now heavily pregnant, seemed the more ordinary one of the group by comparison, but she couldn’t help glancing curiously between Ning Yi and Lu Hongti.
These people — surely they didn’t think there was something between her and Ning Yi?
The thought made her smile faintly. On their journey south last year, she had thought over certain matters with some complexity of feeling — including the possibility of persuading Ning Yi to come to Lüliang, or even… of something happening between them. She was, after all, no longer young, and there were things she needed to force herself to seriously consider.
She had long grown used to the ways of the north. The customs of the south she had seen along the way felt overly soft, and those with any hint of toughness tended toward a coldness she disliked. Only this man named Ning Liheng was strange — he possessed both a scholar’s refined ease and the grand bearing of one who could plan strategies from a thousand miles away, and yet in close combat with others, the ruthlessness he showed toward others and himself alike would probably frighten even many of the most notoriously savage outlaws near Lüliang. If there were such a hypothesis — that she might end up with a man like this — she thought she wouldn’t mind it.
Of course, such a feeling had only just begun to sprout before being swept away by many other things. It wasn’t that the idea had been rejected outright, but rather… it was no longer something worth considering.
Everything Ning Yi had done during the events at the Overlord Blade Camp, seen and unseen, she had witnessed all of it — how others lost themselves in his open schemes, how they were deceived, how they were stirred and moved by him, even including how that girl named Liu Xigua had come to fall for him. It made her feel that the things this man accomplished were beyond her own reach — she could barely even guess at what was going on in his mind.
Back during their earlier meeting and parting in Jiangning, when Ning Yi had wanted to learn martial arts from her, there hadn’t been much scheming involved — he had shown a sincere side of himself then. Occasionally telling stories, tinkering with all sorts of messy “experiments” in his little “laboratory.” Sometimes she had been amazed, but back then she had been able to appreciate him on the basis of a kind of self-recognition — that “we’re roughly on the same level.”
Now it was different. She wasn’t repulsed by what Ning Yi did, but the longer she watched, the more it became pure astonishment, even a sense of looking up at an unreachable peak. Especially that whole plan he had made for Liu Xigua, that vision of making everyone’s lives better — she didn’t know how much of it was deception and how much was genuine, careful thought, but once it had fully unfolded before her, the breadth and depth of what this man was thinking about exceeded anything she could hope to reach. Beyond that, there were things she preferred not to think about.
Only… she suddenly felt a kind of loss.
She had once heard a similar story from Grandfather Liang.
It was like a wandering swordsman meeting a truly great Confucian scholar, the kind of sage-like figure who lived for the nation and the people, being won over by his ideas, even moved to want to do something himself — but in the end, the swordsman could only return to the wilderness, while the two of them remained worlds apart.
She didn’t think Ning Yi was a sage, but the feeling was similar.
That evening after dinner, she sat in the courtyard for a while, and feeling bored, climbed up to the rooftop and sat there watching the ten thousand lit windows of the city. Her inner strength was refined, and without particularly meaning to, she overheard the conversation between Ning Yi and his wife Su Tan’er drifting over from nearby. Su Tan’er still had more than a month before giving birth, and since Zhenjiang wasn’t very far from Jiangning, she wanted to return there as soon as possible — her own household had more familiar doctors and midwives, and a better environment besides.
Su Tan’er had always been active, running back and forth, and her health was good. Since becoming pregnant, despite all she had been through, aside from the baby occasionally kicking energetically inside her, she hadn’t found things too taxing lately — a journey of just over a day was well within what she could bear. Ning Yi seemed to have nodded in agreement.
Eavesdropping on private matters wasn’t proper, and Lu Hongti, having already heard a few sentences, thought about leaving — but then the two of them began talking about her. Su Tan’er said, “That Miss Lu is really rather different from the other martial artists we met in Hangzhou.”
She paused on the rooftop, and heard Ning Yi say, “She’s not really what you’d call a martial artist.”
This made Lu Hongti curious, and she sat back down.
“Oh? Isn’t her skill very high?”
“The martial world we saw in Hangzhou has something to do with skill level, but not that much, really. Their world of the martial arts is just like being a merchant — it’s all about getting by. Depending on who you meet, you say certain things, observe certain courtesies, follow certain rules — these are all things they can see and touch, part of daily life. If you learn martial arts, more often than not it’s so you can live your life according to those rules. But for someone like Miss Lu, martial skill is survival itself — used for chopping wood, cutting vegetables. Learning martial arts, for her, was about having a life to live at all. How to live it comes after.”
“The way you put it, my husband… makes it sound…”
“Hm?”
“Makes it sound like Miss Lu is somewhat pitiable…”
Lu Hongti frowned up on the roof, but then heard Ning Yi below say, “It’s not pity — I think it should be… cute, actually.” He thought about it for a moment before quietly settling on this word. Lu Hongti blinked up above, and Su Tan’er, too, seemed a little taken aback. “Husband, you…”
But Ning Yi’s tone carried a certain gravity: “In an environment that harsh, to fight her way out of a mountain of corpses and a sea of blood by her own strength, to survive so tenaciously all the way through — someone like that, I think… is really something. In some ways, I think she’s not so different from people like Qian Xiwen.”
Su Tan’er evidently hadn’t expected such an evaluation from Ning Yi, and Lu Hongti herself was momentarily stunned. She was similar to Qian Xiwen? She had heard the old man’s story from Ning Yi back in Hangzhou, and had heard his evaluation of him, but had never imagined there was anything similar between herself and him. Su Tan’er thought it over and said, “So then, husband, you mean you admire Miss Lu?”
“No.” This time Ning Yi’s answer was quite decisive.
“Hm?”
“She’s a woman.” Ning Yi said.
Su Tan’er hesitated. “So what?”
“She’s a woman,” Ning Yi emphasized, and after a moment, probably seeing that his wife didn’t understand, added, “She’s a woman, so how could I possibly admire a woman? A woman is, of course, something to find cute, isn’t she…”
Su Tan’er apparently laughed despite herself, and Ning Yi’s voice dropped a little lower. “Aren’t you the same? A woman, wanting to do a man’s job, managing the household and running business, this and that — in the beginning, right after we married, you kept trying to accommodate me, and it wore me out just watching. What was the point? I don’t plan to admire you, so it’s enough just to find you cute.”
“And now with the baby about to come, if I’d known earlier…”
Thinking she was the subject and finding instead that they were simply flirting with each other, Lu Hongti thought to herself, then sighed and left the rooftop as the conversation between husband and wife continued in the room below, her face growing unconsciously warm.