That night, the whole of Liangshan island sank gradually into a hell of fire and slaughter.
As the sun set, Fang Duxing, the commander of the Wurui Battalion, stood at the bow of his warship, hand resting on the hilt of his blade, watching from a distance as the banner reading “Acting on Heaven’s Behalf” fell from its pole on the island — amid clouds burning as red as fire, a sign of Liangshan’s meteoric rise and equally sudden fall. At that same moment, on the island itself, and in the hills beyond, one chieftain after another watched as the chaos emerged, spread, and finally became irreversible, crying out in anguish.
The entire campaign against Liangshan island, from start to finish, lasted only two days. On the twentieth of the sixth month, the government troops’ assault began — and it was an extremely cautious one, because back when Liangshan hadn’t even reached its current scale, the Wurui Battalion had already been beaten back from the marsh several times before. This time, even with the victory at Dulong Ridge behind them, Commander Fang Duxing still refused to let his guard down. He began by sealing off the waters, carefully working out Liangshan’s defenses around the smaller surrounding islands, and only at noon that day did he begin a probing attack.
The assault on the surrounding smaller islands actually met with a fair amount of resistance, but truthfully, it wasn’t nearly as fierce as it had been in past engagements — even under the government troops’ cautious defense, Liangshan’s harassment attempts came off rather clumsily. Sensing this, Fang Duxing gave the order for a full assault, knocked out several ships on the outer perimeter, and by nightfall on the twentieth, the offensive against the smaller islands was drawing to a close — and it was then that the strange turn of events began.
Whenever a battle nears its end, there are always those who surrender — and this time, the very first to surrender brought with them the heads of their own comrades. And then, as though some demon had been unleashed into people’s hearts by the falling of night, some of the Liangshan soldiers standing guard chose to flee, while others, in the darkness, began turning on each other.
Everything unfolded exactly as that man from the capital had said: heads traded for lives, heads traded for rewards. At first, some brought in the heads of comrades who had already died in battle; but later, when a smaller group of men found themselves unable to escape and had no more bodies left to take heads from, they turned their blades on the people beside them instead. And on Fang Duxing’s side, strict orders had already been given: bring a head, and live; bring none, and die.
On the twenty-first of the sixth month, the assault on the Liangshan main island began, with the fleets fighting a chaotic battle on the waters around it. And that very afternoon, once the Wurui Battalion’s main force began landing, having secured the first foothold and prepared for a full advance, what awaited them was no longer any great resistance from Liangshan — but the complete, self-inflicted collapse of the entire Liangshan bandit power.
Compared to their previous experiences in battle, this assault on Liangshan felt, this time, like a steel blade slicing through tofu. No one had expected the whole process to move this fast — and in fact, even the second half of that collapse couldn’t really be credited to that steel blade’s cutting at all.
For Fang Duxing, even he could only gradually piece together what had actually happened from the accounts of the prisoners taken.
In the days just before the government troops’ assault, the entire state of Liangshan had already sunk into an atmosphere of suspicion and fear. Things had developed so quickly that many hadn’t even had time to react before the brutal reality was already staring them in the face, whether they chose to believe it or not.
Friction, estrangement, quarrels, and small-scale clashes weren’t even the worst of it. What proved most troublesome and most sensitive of all was that once word spread of heads being traded for merit, it led to a number of disappearances. Sometimes a body would even turn up behind someone’s house, and even people within Liangshan itself had no way of telling whether that person had been killed by the enemy, or framed by a rival within their own ranks.
The senior chieftains tried to suppress the situation, but couldn’t avoid growing wary of each other and forming their own factions in the process; patrols were increased and enforcement tightened from above, but none of it did any good. The shrewdest among them had, from the very start, already been trying to organize small cliques of their own; then, for the sake of self-preservation, people from different factions in different parts of the island began reaching out to one another as well, watching over their own families and growing extremely sensitive to the slightest sign that someone might be watching them. Night after night, people kept dying — hidden clashes in the dark, open clashes out in plain sight. Though this was an island of tens of thousands, even a handful, or a dozen or so, deaths like this were terrifying enough.
Once accusations and open conflict became impossible to hide any longer, everyone had already sensed that collapse was coming — and by then, even the chieftains above could no longer hold it back. Close confidants began probing whether their own leaders above them were thinking of surrendering or fleeing, while those leaders in turn began probing the thoughts of their own confidants. In the middle of all this, once the government troops’ assault began, the whole of Liangshan was already like a patient with a great mass of fever seething inside his body, ready to burst at any moment — but without some outside force to trigger it, the process, left alone, might well have dragged on much longer still.
Even during Fang La’s rebellion, or in the worst famines, when nine households out of ten stood empty and corpses lay scattered across the roads, the suspicion and wariness among the starving and the desperate had never been pushed and provoked to quite this degree. Not only had no one on Liangshan ever gone through anything like this before — even Fang Duxing himself had never seen anything of the kind.
That evening, when the government troops pushed up onto the island, they did run into pockets of small-scale resistance here and there, and fighting was still ongoing on the waters around Liangshan, with several clashes breaking out between vessels trying to break free of the encirclement and the Wurui Battalion’s warships. But taken as a whole, the state of the island had, by this point, become something like a floating hell purpose-built to test the very limits of human nature. Comrades slaughtering one another, men killing each other for the sake of a head, and those looking to sow even greater chaos and profit from the confusion setting fires across the hillsides.
A head could save your life, and a head could also make your fortune. To keep his own men from suffering too heavily in the midst of this frenzy, Fang Duxing ordered part of his forces to simply encircle the island without attacking, letting the people on it destroy themselves, only counting and protecting those who came down bearing heads. He let the evil in human nature run wild across the whole island. And outside the island, scattered fighting continued amid the flames — men breaking through the encirclement, men in pursuit, men caught alone.
That night, watching the various survivors streaming down off the island, Fang Duxing said to He Rui with feeling, “We soldiers, most of us believe deep down that human nature tends toward evil — but only now do I truly see just how evil it can become.” By comparison, that scholar from the capital, in his eyes, now seemed like nothing less than a demon himself. He Rui, too, said, “Such methods — this is far too vicious. I fear it does harm to the very harmony of heaven and earth.”
A method that brought a chilling cold down on the enemy would, at the same time, bring a certain coldness upon oneself as well — what Ning Yi truly made of that, in his own heart, there was no telling.
Just as Fang Duxing and He Rui were exchanging these reflections, out on the waters near Liangshan, amid the fire and wreckage, a mid-sized warship was slowly making its way forward. Wang Shanyue stood at its bow, thinking back to a few days before Ning Yi had made his move — the way he had sat beneath the eaves at the Zhu Family Estate, turning that bracelet in his hand like a string of prayer beads. Meanwhile, information kept trickling in, converging aboard this ship.
“When I was small, studying the Three Character Classic, it said that man’s nature is fundamentally good at birth. After this, I don’t believe that anymore,” Su Wenyu murmured, gazing out at the same expanse of fire-lit water beside them. Ning Yi, beside him, frowned and glanced his way.
“Su Wenyu, remember this,” Ning Yi said after a moment. “Human nature is, by its very origin, neither good nor evil. Before, you thought human nature was fundamentally good — that wasn’t necessarily right, either. But if a single event like this is enough to convince you human nature is fundamentally evil, that only shows how narrow your view is. Human nature is a chaotic, undetermined thing — neither good nor evil at its core — but it isn’t fixed either; it’s easily swayed, and what it becomes depends entirely on outside forces. Reaching this point certainly wasn’t easy, but there are also ways to make people turn out for the better — it’s not as though there’s nothing to be done. If you insist that human nature is fundamentally good, or insist that it’s fundamentally evil, that’s the thinking of a coward unwilling to put in any effort at all — people with no real thoughts of their own, no self, who simply push everything back onto some fixed nature. If you actually want to get things done, you can’t afford to think that way.”
Watching this scene of Liangshan’s collapse unfold, Ning Yi’s own mood, in the eyes of those around him, didn’t seem particularly good either. He hadn’t placed his focus on the ordinary people of Liangshan caught up in all this — what he was waiting for now was some more critical intelligence. After thinking it over for a good while, Su Wenyu finally said, “I’ll remember that.” Ning Yi smiled, and sat down in a chair set up at the bow, gazing out at the distant island, burning and in chaos.
“Seeing this, what you ought to take away is the preciousness of order and the greatness of morality. A society’s spiritual civilization, its culture, its ethics — all of these things together are what protect everyone; law only comes after morality. The moment they collapse, it’s easy for things to turn into exactly what you see happening on Liangshan right now. However far we’re capable of manipulating human nature, when it comes to human nature itself, and to culture and morality, you and I ought to hold them in a certain reverence. If you don’t want to end up becoming something like this yourself, you need to remember that.”
The ship moved slowly onward, passing the wreckage of a large vessel; flames still burned unquenched on the water’s surface, and corpse after corpse drifted past along the ship’s side. Ning Yi shook his head, looking at the scattered points of fire ahead, his brow furrowed, his voice low and unhurried.
“I’ve met… a great many people before who thought themselves quite formidable, shouting about having ‘character,’ about being ruthlessly decisive, about not caring what morality even was. That kind of person is, in truth, the lowest sort in this world — with neither strength nor wisdom, possessing nothing but arrogance and stupidity.”
Ning Yi sighed, and pointed toward the flames on Liangshan. “They see only some small, immediate gain in front of them, and never notice their own fragility. In truth, what morality really constrains isn’t the common people at the bottom — it’s the people with real ability, real strength, real intelligence who are bound by it most of all. Morality is a strange thing, and once it’s loosened, ordinary people picking up some small crumb of advantage and feeling pleased with themselves don’t realize that every inch those chains are loosened for the powerful above, it’s a thousand ordinary people’s interests and lives that pay the price. Human nature is a curious thing, and a cruel one too — good and bad are always mixed together. If you want the good in it, you have to work for it — if you always tell yourself none of it has anything to do with you, then one day, perhaps, once morality falls below some threshold, there’ll be nothing left at all.”
Light shifted and flickered, bright and dim by turns; Ning Yi’s sigh sank into the night, and the men around him fell quiet. A small boat cut across the water, coming from the other direction — Qi Xinhan, bringing news, climbed aboard.
“Not long ago, the one who broke through the encirclement on the island was Song Jiang. A few of the Wurui Battalion’s ships tried to intercept him and were caught off guard. I’ve already questioned some of the prisoners taken… it really was just as you said — cutting off the arm.”
The news everyone had been waiting for had finally arrived. Ning Yi stood up. “How many?”
“The final tally they managed to pull together comes to fewer than four thousand,” Qi Xinhan said. “These past several days, Song Jiang and the others kept up a show of doing nothing on the surface, but in truth, they really were waiting for the tensions to come to a head. They quietly selected out the men on the island least likely ever to surrender — men with blood feuds against the government, or whose crimes were too great to be forgiven, or the ones closest to them by direct ties. Once the tensions had fully boiled over, they could see things more clearly, made contact privately, and only then gathered them all together. As for the rest, everyone else on the island, they simply abandoned.”
Ning Yi pressed his palms together and nodded. “Cutting off the arm… they really were decisive about it, in the end.”
Qi Xinhan, beside him, said, “There must still be some among them with two minds, wouldn’t there be?”
Ning Yi shook his head. “There are still spies among them, but they can hardly affect the fighting strength now. For one thing, the men themselves are die-hards to begin with; for another, anyone who wanted to trade heads for reward had no reason to follow along with them — staying on the island to kill people was enough to get that done. This way, whatever influence I planted in their hearts has effectively been filtered right out of the group. Four thousand men — and I’d guess a fair portion of those are family members, not fighters. But what happens after they leave Liangshan is still going to be a real problem. Never mind Liangshan itself for now — this group has to be wiped out entirely… We should get ready to give chase. Also, send word to the two thousand men at Dulong Ridge to come join us, and notify the various prefectures and counties to cooperate.”
He turned and pointed to Su Wenyu. “Wenyu, take a few men over to Commander Fang’s side, have him split his forces — you handle liaison between the two sides. Tonight, you stay over there and watch this whole thing play out to the end. And another thing — up on the mountain, whether or not they have family there, anyone who brings down more than three heads on average should be detained by Commander Fang’s men. After this battle, they’ll either join the army, or come along with me for the time being — this batch can’t be allowed to blend back into ordinary society just yet — well, no need to spell that part out for now, we’ll settle it once I’m back. Also, once the fighting up on the mountain dies down some, have Commander Fang send troops in to clear it out. Even those without any heads to their name, as long as they don’t resist, can all be let go — if anything, they’re the cleanest ones left by now. There’s no real point left in killing them…”
“Understood.” With Ning Yi’s arrangements complete, Su Wenyu nodded and led a few men off toward the island by small boat. Orders given here, the warship raised sail and cut through the waves, following the scattered lights of the imperial fleet out across the distant waters under the moonlight, further still, toward the dark silhouettes of mountains and water beyond.
To one side, the great island still burned and fought in the darkness, and there was no telling when it would finally come to a stop…
On the twenty-second of the sixth month, Liangshan fell. Only the more than three thousand men under Song Jiang’s leadership managed to escape — and hunting them down now became the new problem facing every prefecture, county, and government garrison in the region.