The seventeenth of the second month, before dawn, near the Dabie Mountains.
For some, Fang Qifo’s death had, in truth, been somewhat foreseeable. But at the actual moment it happened, most hearts still felt shock—mixed, to varying degrees, with anger, grief, loss, and bewilderment.
For Tie Tianying, Zong Feixiao, and the others, Fang Qifo’s death was the one outcome that should never have slipped through the cracks of this whole operation. Yet in the end, Fang Qifo had been rescued under the most improbable circumstances; throughout the chase, he had clung stubbornly to the fleeing bandits, and in his heart there had still been a flicker of hope that things might turn around. Now, in this instant, everything had become irreversible. Ning Liheng’s sudden strike caught everyone in the Ministry of Justice’s ranks completely unprepared.
For them, the first reaction was anger. For Fang Baihua and the others, anger was, in fact, secondary—more a reflexive response driven by grief. But the feelings on the side of Lin Echan and Sikong Nan were far more complicated, and this included Wang Yin, who was at that moment hiding at a distance, quietly watching how things unfolded. In some sense, they too felt a faint sting of failure at the very last step.
After being rescued, Fang Qifo had said a few words to Chen Fan, one of which was an admission that he himself had known nothing about the three constables who secretly held ties to the Mani Sect. If he hadn’t known, it was quite possible Wang Yin hadn’t known either—outside of Fang La’s own system, the only other person with Mani Sect connections would have been Sikong Nan.
Of course, the affairs of the Mani Sect ran deep and wide, since the reach of a religious organization tends to extend very far. A sect of this size was something even Fang Qifo and the others could never fully account for in every detail, and it remained entirely possible that the meticulous Wang Yin had simply managed to root it out himself. Such speculation, even many years later, was never confirmed. But Fang Qifo’s rescue brought, for everyone involved, no good outcome at all—and this may well have already been clear to someone the very instant Fang Qifo stepped free of his cage.
He was, truly, a liability. His presence would cost Fang Baihua and the others their chance to scatter and flee; it would force Fang Baihua, Chen Fan, and the rest to throw everything they had left into a desperate, hopeless fight; and it would let the Ministry of Justice’s full strength come down without restraint, hunting them relentlessly, leaving no one any margin of luck. And on the other side—perhaps, for some, the truest revenge lay in making sure that everyone this man cared about died right in front of his eyes.
Fang Qifo’s head was suddenly severed. Looking up at the young man in scholar’s dress standing on the slope above, Lin Echan and Sikong Nan both, in some measure, found their minds gone blank. And among everyone present, the one caught in the most complicated, most stunned state of mind was not any of these outsiders, but Zhu Biao, standing close by Ning Yi’s side.
He truly had not seen this coming at all.
Ever since crossing swords with Chen Fan, he had followed Ning Yi south the whole way, and was the only one among the whole party who knew some of what lay behind it all. That Ning Yi wanted to save Chen Fan, wanted to save the woman named Xigua, even wanted to speak with Fang Qifo himself in hopes of finally putting an end to Chen Fan’s obsession—all of this, he had roughly understood.
But the situation had proven far too dire, and the Secret Investigation Bureau’s move south had come too late; Ning Yi had too few people at his disposal here. Various fragments of information kept trickling in, but two days simply hadn’t been enough time to piece together a clear picture. More than once, Zhu Biao had seen Ning Yi sitting in his room, eyes closed in deep thought, fingers tapping restlessly—the last time he’d seen Ning Yi like that had been back at Zhu Family Manor, and after that time, the number of people who had died, directly or indirectly, at Ning Yi’s hands at Liangshan had run into the tens of thousands.
Zhu Biao was no fool. Careless as he often seemed, to have honed his martial skill to this level required a genuinely sharp mind. Given a situation this dire—so many forces involved, so little information—had it been up to him alone, he would have had no idea what to do at all. And even watching Ning Yi, Zhu Biao could see the frustration building in him as time slipped away. Meeting with Fang Qifo, of course, hadn’t worked out, and as for getting Chen Fan and Liu Xigua out alive, it had come down to nothing but luck.
But in the end, luck never arrived. Over these two-plus days, Ning Yi had been running back and forth, working through calculations as the situation grew clearer, even carefully studying and inquiring about the terrain leading toward the Dabie Mountains—but time constraints meant he’d never managed an on-site survey. He had also sent several notices out to the surrounding prefectures and counties, laying what looked like casual groundwork, but in the end none of it had come to anything.
Zhu Biao had seen all of this unfold. When things finally reached their climax that night, he and Ning Yi’s group were still rushing to get ahead of the pursuing column. Along the way, Ning Yi had speculated on several possible ambush points—two calculations had proven wrong, since terrain described secondhand was always hard to grasp with real clarity; a third had simply come too late in timing. Only this final mountain pass had they managed to reach in time, and even then only just barely.
The firing of several elm-wood cannons had thrown the whole standoff into chaos, and in that instant Ning Yi’s bearing and presence had genuinely overwhelmed everyone present. But Zhu Biao understood well enough that behind this forced show of strength, Ning Yi actually had very few real cards left to play. Eight elm-wood cannons and some twenty-odd men could not decide the outcome of the whole affair on their own—and this move of Ning Yi’s had already carried enormous risk.
In the chase that followed, that ferocious bearing had been enough to intimidate a great many people around them, but a limit was still a limit. Ning Yi’s breaking of Liangshan had, in hindsight, been a masterstroke of planning, the kind that left people in awe every time they thought back on it—but having been part of the whole affair himself, Zhu Biao also understood that so-called brilliant schemes were never castles built on wishful fantasy. Every step Ning Yi took was simply about stretching whatever resources he had to their absolute maximum, then letting the chain reaction unfold. How this group carrying Fang Qifo could possibly escape had, by this point, become an impossible situation—a dead end. Only this particular act of Ning Yi’s had gone almost entirely beyond anything Zhu Biao could have anticipated.
Even if Fang Qifo was certain to die that night, whether he died at the hands of an enemy or at the hands of his own trusted friend, in front of his companions and the woman who loved him—these were two entirely different things. When Ning Yi rushed forward and brought the blade down, in the midst of his own shock, Zhu Biao felt a flash of understanding pass through him.
Only… how had this man managed to actually do it…
The mountain wind howled. From the rope bridge behind them came a woman’s voice, crying out as if in mourning. Ning Yi stood on the shifting torchlight of the hilltop, blade in one hand, the severed head held up in the other, his gaze sweeping coldly over the two groups below—Mani Sect and Ministry of Justice alike—before he turned and descended the mountain from the side path. “Kill them! Find a chance to cut down the rope bridge!”
Fang Baihua and the others surged forward in a fierce assault; Zhu Biao raised his spear to hold them off while crossbow bolts fired from behind him. Because of Ning Yi’s order to “find a chance to cut the bridge,” Fang Baihua gritted her teeth and, after trading a couple of blows with Zhu Biao, finally withdrew, leading the few remaining beside her toward the near end of the rope bridge. Knowing full well time was running out, and that anyone still on the bridge would soon have no chance left at all, she shouted toward the other side: “Go!” On the bridge, Luo Bingren and the others took hold of Xigua’s arms and rushed across.
Zhu Biao understood well enough that Ning Yi’s aim, in the end, was not to take Fang Baihua’s life. Seeing the enemy fall back to defend the bridge, he called over a nearby Secret Investigation Bureau crossbowman and headed toward Ning Yi. The constables below surged forward; in the flickering torchlight, Fang Baihua and the four still beside her held off the flood of attackers—and in the blink of an eye, there were only three. Some constables tried hurling torches onto the bridge; Fang Baihua managed to knock several away, but the near end of the bridge still caught fire in the end.
Over there, Xigua, still being dragged backward, kept her eyes fixed on Ning Yi’s descending figure. After a long moment, she finally shouted: “Demon of the Heart! Ning Yi! No matter how vicious, how formidable you are! I will find you! You’d better wait for me—”
The words carried a note of pure menace. From far off, Ning Yi raised his blade, his voice cutting cold and clear through the night air in reply: “I’ll be waiting!”
With that, the exchange between the two sides came to an end.
Threats and taunts like this were commonplace enough in the martial world; no one paid the two lines any particular mind. Ning Yi walked down the slope, Zhu Biao and the others hurrying back to join him, just as Zong Feixiao, Tie Tianying, and Fan Zhong arrived in pursuit.
“Ning Yi, how dare you kill Fang Qifo—”
Ning Yi looked up, his gaze cold and indifferent. “So what?”
“Do you know he was a wanted criminal designated by the imperial court itself? The Ministry of Justice had strict orders that he be brought to the capital alive—”
“You want the head?” Ning Yi lifted Fang Qifo’s severed head and held it out toward Zong Feixiao. Zong Feixiao said in a low voice, “I’m going to have you dealt with—” Beside him, Tie Tianying reached out to take it, but before his hand could even touch it, Ning Yi tossed the head backward, into Zhu Biao’s hands instead.
“Pack this head in lime… Zong Feixiao! Tie Tianying! Fan Zhong! Escorting Fang Qifo to the capital was your assigned task! You took it upon yourselves to set a trap, and it fell apart completely—and now you want me to clean up your mess for you! Zong Feixiao, you dare speak to me like this!?”
“Speak to you like this? Today I’ll beat you to death if that’s what it takes—”
Zong Feixiao’s face was already flushed with fury; his finger jabbed toward Ning Yi, and the constables behind him instantly tensed, weapons half-drawn. On this side, the Secret Investigation Bureau members raised their crossbows in the same instant. Ning Yi’s gaze remained cold as he faced down the three of them, and in terms of sheer presence, he did not yield an inch.
“Chief Constable Zong. If you’re certain you can bear the consequences of pushing me too far, I’m happy to oblige.”
The words weren’t spoken loudly, but each syllable landed with deliberate weight, chilling to the bone. In ordinary times, Ning Yi might never have voiced so blunt a threat aloud—but it was hard to say, at this moment, exactly what state his own feelings were in. After several seconds of this standoff, Ning Yi’s gaze slowly swept across the three men, and he pointed downward.
“Go back and think this through properly! Were you three arrogant and overconfident, and your plan failed as a result? Did you lose Fang Qifo on your own watch? Wasn’t it me who helped clean up this mess for you? A single threat from Fang Qifo, and you actually hesitated—where exactly do you think the court’s dignity was supposed to go in that moment? Think it over carefully! I’ll give you back the head! And another thing—Fang Qifo is dead, but the bandit leaders are still out there. Fang Baihua, Sikong Nan, Lin Echan, Wang Nantuo—these Mani Sect demons—how long exactly are you planning to wait—”
By the second half of this, his tone had grown steadily more forceful. Lin Echan and the others on the far slope could probably hear every word of it; there was no telling what they might be feeling.
But whatever Lin Echan and Sikong Nan might be feeling, and whatever decisions Zong Feixiao, Tie Tianying, and the others might ultimately make—at the near end of the rope bridge, the men still standing beside Fang Baihua kept dwindling. When the last of her companions fell, the woman’s whole body was already soaked in blood, wounds covering her from head to toe—even her face bore a ghastly gash from a blade—yet she still swung her crimson spear, holding the line before her, trying to drive back the constables surging toward the bridge.
At last, a grappling hook sank into her shoulder blade. Several constables hauled together and pulled her to the ground; Fang Baihua let out a cry, swinging her spear at the men around her while tangling it in the chain, and more constables closed in. Both sides strained against each other, and a swirl of blue fabric flew up into the air. In that instant, no one knew exactly how much force she’d summoned, but she wrenched the chain apart, drove back the men attacking her, though not without taking several more wounds, blood spraying as she rolled backward. When she finally stood, she’d wrapped a faded blue banner belonging to the old Yongle dynasty around her spear.
Blood was already threatening to blur her vision, but in her final moment she looked once more at Fang Qifo’s headless body—the constables nearby had already begun dragging it away—and then turned and charged forward!
On this side, Ning Yi turned his head; on that side, Lin Echan and Sikong Nan turned theirs as well—just in time to see that figure leap from the edge of the bridge, out into open air, the blood-stained blue banner unfurling for one instant as the figure fell, and faintly, carried on the air, came Fang Baihua’s final words:
“The law treats all as equal… there is no high or low… strike down evil, uproot the mighty… peace and prosperity for the people, forever…”
That had been the rallying cry of Fang La’s uprising in its day. That cry and that blue banner lingered in the air for only a single instant, and there, the last glow of the Fang La uprising of Jiangnan finally faded away.
Flames burned through the rope bridge, sending the long, aged span swinging down against the far cliff face. The surviving dozen or so fighters rushed into the distant mountain forest, with Lin Echan and the others still giving chase from below…
…
In the final years of the Wu dynasty, as land annexation intensified, as the court’s taxes and levies multiplied, and as tyrannical policies like the Flower and Rock Convoy took their toll, the Mani Sect uprising led by Fang La shook half of Jiangnan. Even after being suppressed, the Mani Sect continued to survive and grow among the common people at the grassroots level, and in the years that followed, further Mani Sect uprisings broke out one after another, each in turn crushed.
Given the internal and external crises facing the Wu dynasty at the time, the prevailing philosophy of treating a grave illness with fierce medicine meant that, in handling the aftermath of these rebellions, the court largely resorted to wholesale slaughter on a massive scale. By the time the Wu dynasty itself finally fell, the number of people who had died by the sword over the course of the various Mani Sect affairs exceeded two million.
And given the inherent limitations of peasant uprisings of this era, while a small handful of rebel leaders genuinely carried relatively good and noble intentions, cases in which peasants, once they gained power amid the chaos of rebellion, became even more brutal and inhuman than the very court and officialdom they had once opposed, were common beyond counting.
The oppressed rose against their oppressors, only, in the end, to seize for themselves the power to oppress others in turn. It seemed that this one law alone held true, unwavering, through every chaos and upheaval.
No one was spared.