“…In theory, restaurants that busy, where the staff can’t quite keep up with everything — it usually only takes three or four days to see results. We’re not exactly hiring anyone for this, but if you calculate it based on what we’d pay someone to do it properly, each restaurant probably costs us about two strings of cash at most. With four restaurants now, we can easily move sixty to eighty eggs a day. In terms of profit, each preserved egg should bring in about eight coins — over the course of half a month or so, we should recoup the initial investment…”
The clatter of an abacus rang out in the room as Ning Yi kept talking, casually running the numbers. “If the market expands too quickly, though, and we haven’t preserved enough in advance, I worry we might run into supply shortages. So for now, I don’t think we need to keep pushing to expand further — but either way, opening up a market for something new was never really going to be a problem.”
Kang Xian took a sip of tea nearby, raising an eyebrow. “I’ve seen it myself these past few days. Honestly, I assumed you had some clever trick up your sleeve, boy — turns out it’s just this business of hiring people to plant the idea. Simple enough, really.”
“Ha ha, in warfare there’s the orthodox approach and the unconventional one — you only resort to the unconventional when the orthodox fails to work. This was fundamentally a simple matter; as long as it solved the problem, why overthink it?” Ning Yi smiled.
“Fair enough.” Kang Xian nodded. “Still, would you call this method of yours orthodox, or unconventional?”
Old Qin laughed from where he sat. “Both, really. Taken purely as a method, I suppose you’d call it unconventional — but in this context, there’s nothing especially unusual about it at all, so really it counts as orthodox.” He thought for a moment. “Didn’t you mention before, Liheng, selling them at fifty coins apiece? How would that even work?”
“Ha, once you’re talking fifty coins and up, there’s really no ceiling anymore — at that point, you’re not really selling preserved eggs anymore.” Ning Yi smiled. “Treasure eggs, jade eggs — if I had my own restaurant, decked out in gold and splendor, and made a great show of the symbolic meaning behind these eggs — served a bowl at every banquet, said a few auspicious words about them, maybe wrote up some little story to go along with them — before long, people wouldn’t be eating eggs anymore, they’d be displaying a symbol of wealth and prosperity. Fifty coins, a hundred coins, even a full string or two — that’s just the opening price. And if someone of Old Kang’s standing served a few bowls at a banquet and said a few words about it, the value would only climb higher still. Wealthy people would flock to it without a second thought — nothing strange about that at all.”
“That day when you first mentioned fifty coins apiece, I assumed you had some astonishing scheme in mind. Turns out it’s this same unremarkable logic after all.” Kang Xian laughed and shook his head, then reconsidered. “Though, thinking about it, I suppose that’s exactly how it would work.”
Ning Yi smiled. “There’s really no such thing as an astonishing scheme in this world. In the end, it always comes down to setting a goal and then solving the problems in front of you. Take the battlefield, for instance — using the unorthodox alongside the orthodox to overcome strength with weakness. But in truth, there’s no such thing as genuinely overcoming strength with weakness. If you look closely, it’s always strength overcoming weakness in the end.”
“Now that’s a way of putting it I’ve never heard before.” Old Qin frowned slightly. “The military classics all say that using unconventional tactics is inferior to the orthodox approach, advocating for the proper path and cautioning against reckless deviation — and yet, whenever military strategy truly comes into play, it’s always in pursuit of overcoming a stronger enemy through weakness. After all, if I’m already stronger than my enemy, strategy hardly matters one way or another. I can’t quite agree with what you’re saying, Liheng.”
“Huh — so there really isn’t a saying like that?” Ning Yi blinked, mildly surprised.
“There truly isn’t.” Kang Xian laughed. “As you yourself said, Liheng — if all strategy exists to solve problems, then it’s precisely because the enemy is strong and we are weak that a problem exists in the first place. If we were stronger and the enemy weaker, what use would strategy be at all? That’s exactly why the military classics, aside from covering the basics of troop formations, are almost entirely devoted to discussing how to face a stronger opponent from a position of weakness.”
“That’s certainly true, when you put it that way.” Ning Yi nodded with a smile. “I suppose I was just speaking from theory without much practical grounding — merely a scholar’s idle talk, ha ha, forgive me.”
“It’s all idle talk in the end — I myself am no great expert in military strategy either…” Old Qin took a sip of tea, seeming to recall something from the past, his expression growing faintly complicated behind his smile. “Since we have nothing else pressing to do, why not tell us in more detail where this idea of yours actually comes from, Liheng.”
Ning Yi thought it over, then after a moment pulled the chessboard nearby toward himself. “It really is just a different way of looking at the same thing. What the military classics call ‘overcoming strength through weakness’ — as I see it — is really about how to reverse the relative strength between the two sides.”
He took ten white stones from the jar across from him, then five black stones from his own side, and began dividing up the white stones one by one. “To put it simply: say the enemy has ten units, and we only have five — a direct confrontation, we’d lose. So instead, through strategy, we split their forces into four groups, say one, two, three, and four, and use our five against their four, crushing that group. With our advantage there, we lose one unit of our own, leaving four — then we use four against their remaining three, then three against two, then two against one… by the time the battle is decided, though it looks like weakness has overcome strength, if you break it down carefully, every single engagement along the way was actually strength overcoming weakness.”
Old Qin laughed. “What you’re describing, Liheng, is rather too idealized—” He stopped mid-sentence, suddenly pausing, staring at the chess pieces, brow furrowing in thought. Old Kang, who had also been about to point out how unrealistic this all sounded, seeing Old Qin’s expression, fell into thought as well.
Ning Yi smiled. “Too idealized — that’s certainly true.” He reached out and gathered the white stones back together. “Real battlefields are far too complicated for such a perfectly ideal state to ever actually occur. This is just a way of looking at things, not something that can be calculated with such precision from the very start. But if you work backward from the outcome, every instance of overcoming strength through weakness, or strength defeating weakness, breaks down into exactly this same pattern. There’s no such thing as a genuinely weaker force defeating a genuinely stronger one, because strength and weakness are themselves defined entirely by whether one side can actually defeat and destroy the other. Success determines who gets called strong here — when facing a stronger enemy from a position of weakness, the goal becomes finding ways to divide, isolate, and manipulate the opponent, ensuring that in each localized engagement, strength faces weakness rather than the reverse — down to the level of individual soldiers, even, though of course no commander, however brilliant, could ever manage the overall battle with that level of precision. Still, whether any one unit wins or loses against its immediate opposing unit is, in the end, usually fairly straightforward to judge.”
“Business, warfare, dealing with people, getting things done — I don’t believe there’s any such thing as a genuine victory of weakness over strength. Of course, there are plenty of invisible factors that also count as part of relative strength — intelligence, public sentiment, personal likes and dislikes, even luck. The goal sits ahead of you; the path to it may be invisible, or there may be many paths at once. But working backward from that final goal, breaking it down step by step, you might find that each individual step is actually quite simple — just solving one problem at a time. That’s why I don’t believe in any such thing as brilliant, miraculous strategy.” He thought for a moment, pushed the chessboard back, and laughed at himself. “Of course, this is all just theory from a man who’s never actually commanded troops. The generals who actually lead armies into battle would surely be formidable whether they thought this way or not — it’s really just a matter of perspective, and doesn’t solve any real, practical problem on its own.”
“And yet, in every detail, it truly is strength overcoming weakness — there has never been any principle of weakness overcoming strength.” Old Qin let out a sigh. “What you’ve said, Liheng, is simple on its surface, yet it aligns remarkably well with a deeper truth. Military strategy… is truly about turning weakness into strength, not about weakness overcoming strength directly. If one could clearly distinguish between those two ideas, that alone would be…”
Here was a matter laid bare before them, and how one chose to view the underlying pattern within it might mean little to an ordinary person — but for men like Qin Siyuan and Kang Xian, its significance was entirely different. As Old Qin sank into deep thought, Kang Xian shook his head slightly.
“This kind of thinking is almost too clear-eyed. Liheng, your regard for the investigation of things sets you apart from others, and reaching an insight like this is certainly thought-provoking. But have you ever considered — amid all this calculation, where does the human element fit in? Even the workings of the human heart, the ways of the world, all these countless factors…”
Qin Siyuan was a practical man, but he understood the ways of human affairs clearly enough as well — perhaps troubled by some memory of his own, he seemed genuinely moved upon hearing Ning Yi’s reasoning. Kang Xian, meanwhile, placed even greater weight on human affairs than Qin Siyuan did, and this was the very first thing he’d noticed. Once he’d said his piece, Ning Yi glanced at the chessboard, smiled, and shook his head without offering an answer.
In his former life, Ning Yi had approached the world through a thoroughly modern analytical framework — everything in existence, mere data, mere pieces on a board, luck and misfortune reduced to simple probability. Beyond a certain point, so-called brilliant strategy simply didn’t exist; there was only the difference between greater ambition, still greater ambition, and ambition taken to excess. But things were different now. Heaven’s motion is ever vigorous; thus does the noble man ceaselessly strive to strengthen himself. Confucian scholarship was, at its core, an extremely moderate, conservative, and rigorous field of study — and yet somewhere within it lay a strand of extraordinarily uplifting hope, one that demanded the greatest possible affirmation of a person’s own cultivation and effort, that affirmed the significance of the individual, that affirmed the courage to examine oneself and, finding oneself in the right, to advance even against ten thousand opposing men. The reasoning behind this was complex, but in a certain sense, this might well be the very reason Confucian thought had held itself back from the investigation of physical phenomena, drifting ever further from that cold, rigorous Western logic of cause and effect.
The conversation couldn’t go much deeper than this, and soon enough they moved on to smaller talk. Ning Yi casually asked after Song Xian, the garrison commander of the Wulie Army, and when Old Qin and Old Kang showed some curiosity, he admitted candidly that it was because of the events of the Lantern Festival. Kang Xian laughed at this. “Ha ha, ‘searching for her among the crowd, a hundred, a thousand times’ — I’d thought you’d simply used that line to express some lofty sentiment of your own, Liheng, never expecting there to be an actual case of searching for someone among a crowd a hundred, a thousand times over. If word of this ever got out, imagine how people would laugh… though I must say, it’s rather unbecoming for you to take such interest in the ways of martial men and wandering swordsmen. However skilled such a person might be, they could only ever match ten men, or at most a hundred. Better to follow that line of reasoning you laid out earlier — though it has its flaws, developed further, it could make you a fine scholar-general one day, someone who could truly match ten thousand men… oh, right — A’Gui, come here.”
Despite saying this, he still called over the attendant named A’Gui. Though the man’s name sounded rather common, his standing was likely not low at all — he simply remained respectful in Kang Xian’s presence. Ning Yi knew his full name was Lu A’Gui. Kang Xian then asked him about the assassination attempt on Song Xian, and the man thought for a moment.
“I don’t know a great deal about this Song Xian myself, but if young master Ning has an interest in martial arts, I can say that he’s reportedly a man of formidable skill — ordinary men, even a dozen or more at once, couldn’t easily get close to him. Within the Wulie Army, he’s held in considerable regard, currently commanding their most elite bodyguard unit. That said… his character doesn’t have the best reputation. Word is he’s arrogant and domineering, never forgets a slight, and came up from the outlaw world in his early years — killed no small number of his former comrades in pursuit of official rank and recognition. Since young master Ning has an interest in martial arts, but isn’t well acquainted with the man, I’d suggest keeping some distance from him — such matters, in the world of martial arts, are always sensitive.”
“Then… does Brother Lu happen to know how common such highly skilled martial artists actually are, out in the world?”
“By highly skilled, young master Ning means those with truly profound internal cultivation — the sort who could topple a tree or shatter stone with their bare hands? Such people are exceedingly rare indeed. Among the various military units these days, you might find one or two here and there, and among the rebel bands and bandit forces, there may well be a few formidable individuals as well. As for the assassin who struck at Song Xian that day — I never saw the person myself, but I heard what happened. The first strike missed its mark, and the assassin then went on a rampage at the Feiyan Pavilion, wounding over a dozen people including Song Xian himself before finally withdrawing, still without any serious injury. Song Xian himself is quite formidable, so whoever struck him must rank among the very top tier of martial artists in this world — and yet even so, exactly who this person was remains a mystery to me.”
He paused. In truth, having crossed paths with Ning Yi many times and occasionally exchanged a few words, he’d developed something of a genuine regard for him, and now he cupped his hands together. “Actually… forgive my bluntness, young master Ning, but truly profound internal cultivation almost always requires training from a very young age to be of any real use. Setting aside whether you could even find such a teacher, even if you could, it would likely prove useless at this point. And… even where it is useful, the truly remarkable part of martial arts was never really the internal cultivation itself. Even the most formidable fighting style, practiced and refined for decades, with astonishing natural talent behind it, would still prove useless in the end. Such skills can only be honed through repeated combat and real bloodshed — when an opponent strikes, you must respond without conscious thought, and only then does the training have any value. What matters most, beyond that, is speed, ruthlessness, precision, and a certain killing intent, a fighting spirit — internal cultivation is merely a means of generating force. Someone who has only trained in that alone would still lose to a battle-hardened veteran who has actually fought and killed in real combat. Young master Ning is a man of extraordinary talent — whether as an official or a general in the future, you would command ten thousand men either way. Why abandon the greater path for something so far beneath your true worth?”
However romantically the martial-arts novels might portray such things, in reality, who would truly wish to live a life where one couldn’t be certain of surviving to see tomorrow? The vast majority of people still held to the old ideal of mastering both scholarship and the martial arts in service of the throne. This Lu A’Gui, having served at Kang Xian’s side for a long time, likely also considered Ning Yi to be an exceptional man, and felt it would be a genuine waste for him to spend his time on martial arts training. His meaning was simple enough: you’re a scholar — you’ll never even find yourself in actual combat, and without an environment in which to truly integrate the training, learning martial arts would amount to learning nothing at all. Ning Yi understood that these words came from a place of genuine sincerity, and thanked him warmly for the advice.
They chatted a while longer, and once Ning Yi took his leave and stepped outside, the afternoon sun was pleasantly warm, the banks of the Qinhuai River bathed in springtime beauty. He walked along the riverbank for a while, still turning over the matter of martial arts in his mind. As he approached the small building where Nie Yunzhu lived, still some distance off along the river bend, he spotted a column of black smoke rising into the air — as though the place were on fire.
He hurried over, and by the time he reached the front of the small building, he found the kitchen filled with billowing smoke, a figure swallowed up within it, flailing about with something in hand, fanning the air, coughing, appearing and vanishing amid the haze, before finally emerging from the room entirely.
It was, of course, a thoroughly disheveled Nie Yunzhu, her face now streaked with soot in dark lines. Even in the cool spring weather, she was drenched in sweat. Clutching a large palm-leaf fan, she hurried out onto the walkway, turning back with obvious frustration to survey the smoke-filled kitchen, apparently still trying to decide how to charge back in, when she turned her head and spotted Ning Yi on the path ahead, freezing for a moment in surprise.
Ning Yi couldn’t help but burst out laughing, and a moment later Nie Yunzhu laughed too, wiping her cheek with the back of her hand in embarrassment, which only smeared the soot into an even more pronounced streak across her sweaty face.
There was something sheepish, something bashful in that smile — yet somehow, paired with those streaks of soot across her cheeks, it only made her seem all the more pure and lovely.