The talk about Lüliang went on for a while before it moved on. After that, the conversation turned to what else Ning Yi planned to do in the capital this trip, and Ning Yi mentioned wanting to find a couple of courtyard houses, as well as scout locations for a cloth shop and a restaurant. Yao Zunian and Cheng Zhouhai were both well established in the capital, but their strengths lay in poetry and social circles rather than this sort of practical matter, so they said it would still be best to bring Ji Kun in on it. Just as they were discussing this, someone walked in through the courtyard gate, laughing: “For things like this, you’d do better coming to me than to Ji Kun.”
The man who entered was a monk in white robes, middle-aged but carrying himself with an easy, dashing air, handsome and refined, his gaze calm and clear, a smile on his face. He greeted Ning Yi first with his palms pressed together. “This must be Liheng — Jiangning’s foremost talent. I’ve long admired your name…” When Ning Yi rose to return the greeting, the monk introduced himself. “This humble monk’s dharma name is Jueming.”
Although this looked like idle chatter, in fact everything being discussed touched on the secrets of the Secret Service Bureau. That a monk could walk straight in like this showed he held considerable standing within the Chancellor’s household — he was already an old acquaintance of Yao Zunian and Cheng Zhouhai. He pulled up a chair and sat, asked in general terms about the kind of properties Ning Yi wanted, nodded, glanced over the materials the others had brought out, and then asked: “When this humble monk was chatting with Elder Yao and the others before, what came up most often was Liheng’s methods in Hangzhou. Now that Liheng is heading to Shandong, where does he plan to make his first move?”
“Probably start by looking at Dulong Ridge.”
“Ah… that could indeed be a good place to break in. Liheng is young, but his eye is sharp and seasoned…”
Mount Liang could not be taken by government troops directly, so of course the only option was to work around it and find allies. There was reason behind Ning Yi’s choice of Dulong Ridge, though it wasn’t especially surprising when you thought about it. Sowing discord between factions sounded simple enough to say, but the actual execution was extraordinarily complex, and depended on each person’s skill. The group under the grape trellis discussed Mount Liang a while longer. When Qin Siyuan came by, he steered the conversation toward the affairs of the Overlord Blade Camp in Hangzhou — that whole string of reforms that looked almost like child’s play. Even though everyone showed enthusiasm, Ning Yi himself had little desire to discuss it further. The Overlord Blade Camp affair was too complicated, touching as it did on changes to the very system, and putting something resembling the seeds of democracy in front of several men who had spent their whole lives studying Confucianism still made Ning Yi a little uneasy.
Of course, this was also because Ning Yi carried in his heart the knowledge of a thousand years later, and so he thought about it too much. In the minds of men like Qin Siyuan, there was no concept of the later ages’ democracy at all; even if something similar existed, it would still be understood as growing out of Confucianism, because for thousands of years, everything on this land had sprung from that same tradition. Ning Yi’s ideas, though they had shifted a great deal under close examination, were still first mapped by men like Qin Siyuan onto the old frameworks already in their minds.
That anyone could become a sage-king, that the people mattered more than the ruler — none of this strayed from orthodox teaching. Among the several perfect states imagined by Confucian thought, the virtuous rule of the ancient sage-kings was exactly like this: the ruler’s perfect moral instruction transformed all the people, so that every person understood right from wrong, and under such conditions the ruler’s authority was in effect pushed toward a purely symbolic status. Over a thousand years of Confucian development, the hope had been to spread moral instruction, and taken to its furthest extreme, everyone would understand propriety and value righteousness — this was one of the possibilities being pursued. In his essays, Ning Yi had quietly tried to instill in people the hope that each person could think independently and take initiative, and men like Qin Siyuan could see this, but even when they drew out the implications, they could only speculate in that general direction.
Afterward everyone dined together at the Chancellor’s residence, and by the time it grew somewhat late, the talk still circled around various ideas in Confucian scholarship. Yao Zunian, Jueming, Qin Siyuan, and even Cheng Zhouhai could all hold forth on the subject, and when Ning Yi was occasionally asked his views, he held to his principle of saying nothing rather than risk saying something wrong, deliberately keeping his own thoughts hidden. To the others watching, this looked like continued reluctance on his part. Of course, a knot as large as the one he carried in his heart could hardly be laid bare to people he had only just met, and by now the group had more or less come to see Ning Yi as a fellow traveler worth sitting down and discussing the great questions with, so they could understand his temporary reticence — ideas of that weight, naturally, could only be spoken once people had grown truly familiar with one another.
In the course of the conversation, talk also ranged widely — over the recent surrender of the Grievance Army, and Ning Yi’s views on the various rebellions currently being stirred up across the Wu Dynasty by men like Tian Hu and Wang Qing. Ning Yi’s idea of promoting the Zhuji venture, using storytellers to shape public opinion, had not yet been fully settled in his mind, so he only brought up, half as a joke, the idea of compiling a ranking of the hundred greatest martial artists in the land. Everyone laughed heartily at first, but soon enough sensed the deeper implications behind it. Qin Siyuan laughed and said, “If Liheng truly means to take this on, this old man will certainly support it.”
Monk Jueming pressed his palms together with interest as well. “This humble monk could help too — after all, I once met that Iron-Armed Zhou Tong myself, back in the day, ha ha…”
Once a ranking of the martial world’s greatest were released and actually took hold, promoting it would require a sizable propaganda apparatus — laying that groundwork now would make it that much smoother, later, for Ning Yi to bring the Zhuji venture to fruition.
As for the detailed strategy, plans, and purpose, Ning Yi felt it was better not to lay everything bare just yet. Run as a private venture, it could be treated as an ordinary business, and once it reached a certain scale, it could then cooperate with the Secret Service Bureau. But if he revealed everything from the start, given the Bureau’s current suppressed position, it wasn’t even certain he’d get support — and even if he did, a system of that scale could never remain in his own hands. Ning Yi did harbor that much private ambition. After all, in the Wu Dynasty as it now stood, no one understood better than he did how to use and develop the machinery of public opinion.
Chirping and chattering, the grape trellis in the Bianliang night was steeped red in lamplight; the city’s ink-dark shadows deepened, pedestrians came and went, carriages clattered along, and boat lanterns drifted faint along the river. It was on just such a night, at Qingmu Stockade on Mount Lüliang — the very place Ning Yi and the others had mentioned not long before — that a sudden upheaval was taking place.
Blood spread through the dark; the sounds of slaughter pierced the night and the firelight. Amid the stockade built of white poplar wood, waves of fighting were underway, stray arrows occasionally flying past, someone’s scream carrying through the night sky.
By now, though, the fighting inside the stockade had already reached its final stage. The side with fewer men — the nearly hundred who were still alive — had already been surrounded. And deep within the camp, among the houses, a decisive battle was unfolding in the firelight, one that had become entirely one-sided.
Qingmu Stockade had expanded quickly of late, and its buildings had gone up somewhat hastily. Now, at a small crossing point in the firelit alleys, four figures were locked in combat — three men and one woman. Three of the men appeared to be on the same side, all wearing armor; one of them, powerfully built, wielded a heavy spear and looked to be the leader, while the other two each carried a broadsword. Amid their howling attacks, the tall, striking woman fought bare-handed. After a few exchanges — dodging, seizing, redirecting — she flicked one man’s broadsword spinning up into the air, and then, as the heavy spear came whistling in, her unhurried, walking stride suddenly surged forward, and in an instant, like a phantom, she had closed the distance to stand right before the man wielding the spear. That burly man, caught off guard, swung the spear crosswise; an enormous force came crashing at him like a collapsing mountain, his footing gave way, and he staggered back eight or nine steps before he could steady himself.
He hadn’t even seen clearly what happened — it was as though the woman had simply given his spear-shaft a push. It was also because the other man beside him, the one with the broadsword, swung in at that moment that the woman named Lu Hongti sidestepped along the reverse direction of the force to avoid the blade. And yet this kind of overwhelming power, surging like a current of water, clearly hadn’t arrived at its peak all at once — it wasn’t brute strength; it was, as he had heard described, internal power cultivated to its very pinnacle.
This force wasn’t like a great wave crashing down all at once. In that brief contact, it felt as though one stood at the center of an enormous whirlpool, something almost impossible to resist. And this woman named Lu Hongti looked to be barely in her twenties; from what he had heard of her beforehand, her reputation was even one of being rather too soft-hearted, too easily taken advantage of. Even those who spoke of her as skilled in martial arts had never said she was skilled to this degree — could she possibly be some kind of monster?
The shock of this night had not struck him only now — one could almost say he had felt it from the very first moment the attack began.
This burly man’s name was Cao Hong, one of the generals under Tian Hu stationed at Jinwu Ridge. Tian Hu had risen in rebellion, and the smugglers of Lüliang had long had dealings with his side; the bandits of Lüliang, unless truly desperate, would generally show Tian Hu’s side some deference. Qingmu Stockade had already been doing reasonably well before, out on Mount Lüliang, and one of Tian Hu’s commanders had once sent an envoy to propose marriage to Lu Hongti, hoping to tie the two sides together. Lu Hongti had refused, but at the time no one had taken the matter too seriously, and afterward relations between the two sides had simply continued as before.
Then, over the past year, Qingmu Stockade seemed to have received guidance from some skilled hand and had grown rapidly, even absorbing a number of the surrounding villages and stockades. The spoils to be had began to look considerable. Tian Hu’s side still hadn’t been particularly tempted, but some of Qingmu Stockade’s own people, wanting to stir up internal strife, had reached out to Jinwu Ridge, saying they wanted to overthrow the current stockade master, Lu Hongti, and asking for support.
Though Qingmu Stockade had been doing well lately, Lu Hongti herself was a woman, and had been away for a long stretch the year before. The stockade ran according to its rules and had prospered under them, but a number of the men inside had grown hungry for power, feeling that authority shouldn’t be held by a woman like this. Cao Hong had made inquiries into the situation: Qingmu Stockade, having absorbed the surrounding villages, wasn’t yet fully stable at its foundations. If he struck suddenly, killing Lu Hongti and her closest followers, seizing power afterward would be a simple matter.
So this time Cao Hong led more than twenty soldiers into the mountains under the pretense of escorting goods, posing as though headed to trade with the Liao border. Since he was one of Tian Hu’s men, and was moving a large shipment of goods, Qingmu Stockade’s takings from him were not small, and Lu Hongti had treated him rather warmly. They were both leaders, after all, scraping by not far from one another, and he had met her once before — he had thought that although she carried herself with a heroic bearing, she was still quite different from the usual female bandits scattered through this region. Women like her rarely lasted long; after knocking about the area for a while, if they didn’t end up violated and left for dead in some mass grave, they became the private property of some greater chieftain’s bedchamber — and in truth, most such women ended up choosing the latter of their own accord.
In truth, on his way there, this thought had crossed his mind as well.
The people at Qingmu Stockade who wanted to seize power didn’t actually know how skilled Lu Hongti’s martial arts truly were — only that she was said to be quite formidable, able to fight her way in and out of brutal battles, having taken both light and heavy wounds. But that kind of skill, an old soldier could manage as well, more or less. Cao Hong had at first dismissed it, but to be safe, the people at Qingmu Stockade had secretly stolen Lu Hongti’s sword beforehand, and on his own side, Cao Hong had arranged a full eight personal guards to move against her together with him.
Few martial artists could withstand nine men attacking together while empty-handed, and he had also hoped to capture this beautiful woman and take her into his household — but almost from the very start, he already regretted it.
Two of his guards ended up throwing themselves onto their own comrades; in that instant, blades clashed, and the crackling sound rang out like sudden hail, yet it turned entirely into his own men striking each other. Cao Hong and his eight guards were seasoned in battle, their formation and coordination drilled countless times, but inside that hut where the attack began, nearly every strike of theirs was dodged by the narrowest of margins. By the time Cao Hong realized something was badly wrong, the look in her eyes had already turned to ice; before his very eyes, she swung both hands and tore open one guard’s throat, then swung the corpse up as a shield and forced her way straight through the window that everyone had been so tightly guarding.
That truly was like something out of a nightmare —