In disaster relief efforts of the past, when the affected area was limited and the officials in charge were sufficiently resolute, the government could resort to fairly aggressive methods and measures. Generally speaking, this meant going directly to the great households to persuade or coerce them, and for any who refused to comply, executing a number of them — which would usually curb grain prices to some degree. Officials willing to adopt such measures, unafraid of retaliation afterward, tended to be regarded by others either as ruthless tyrants or as exemplary officials, depending on one’s perspective.
At the very outset of this relief effort, Qin Siyuan had also considered adopting such measures, hoping to save as many people as possible. But even then, he understood that given the sheer scale of this particular price surge, such methods would amount to little more than a drop in the bucket — they simply couldn’t accomplish enough. And if he pushed such measures too far, he risked being purged himself, as chancellor, before the relief effort was even completed. Weighing all this carefully, he ultimately decided to adopt Ning Yi’s approach instead.
But this didn’t mean the power of the Right Chancellor’s residence was entirely toothless.
The great households participating in this hoarding scheme — families like the Qi, Zuo, and Cai — were, for the most part, ones capable of contending with Qin Siyuan on equal footing, out in the open. On the surface, Qin Siyuan could never afford to openly break with any of them, since offending so many parties at once was something no one dared risk. But relief efforts and profiteering were matters that could be handled behind the scenes — and even if the great gentry clans themselves were untouchable, there were always smaller households the Chancellor’s residence had every right to move against.
Before the snow fell, Ning Yi and the others had deliberately restrained themselves from deploying this kind of force — aside from a handful of cases involving direct incitement to riot or direct attacks on officials, they largely limited themselves to persuasion and quiet lobbying, urging people to simply sit back and watch how things unfolded. Behind the scenes, though, they laid the groundwork: “We’re quite determined about this — you’ll see soon enough.”
Once the snow finally fell, everything sprang into motion at once. Officials had already gathered information on a number of small and mid-sized hoarding landowners. The moment the order was given, doors were broken down without warning, trials were held, guilty verdicts handed down — and for the more serious offenders, the Chancellor’s residence had already obtained the emperor’s approval to proceed straight to execution without waiting for the autumn assizes. This was meant as a warning, aimed squarely at the other small-scale hoarders watching from the sidelines.
In the capital, Qin Siyuan’s methods won the understanding of Zhou Zhe. As arrests, imprisonments, and executions proceeded, the grain that had been held in reserve all this time finally surged into the market, and the relief porridge distribution reached its most generous point precisely at the moment the snow began falling. And so the great households’ counterattack began in earnest.
Ambitious households rushed to absorb whatever grain flooded into the market, while those with connections used official channels or other means to intercept the incoming shipments. As for the government’s porridge distribution, they began attempting to sow chaos, and in several locations, granaries were even secretly set ablaze. Conflicts between hoarding households and outside merchants grew increasingly fierce by the day. Public order in the disaster zones deteriorated rapidly.
With the heavy snowfall and worsening security, some of the out-of-town merchants chose to leave. Some of those who had originally been stirred into hot-blooded fervor, upon confronting this harsh reality, no longer lingered in the region. Only a small number of young men remained — and, if anything, they grew even more tightly bound together in solidarity. The grain routes had become increasingly difficult to traverse, meaning that from this point forward, the total volume of grain reaching the disaster zones would essentially be fixed at whatever had already made it through. Still, the first wave of aggressive measures had broken the resolve of some smaller households, who began selling off their grain — and this trend continued to intensify.
All of this represented the conventional back-and-forth playing out within the disaster zones themselves. But the truly dangerous struggle, the one that would ultimately decide the outcome, was in fact unfolding at court.
The verbal attacks directed at the two Chancellors’ faction had grown increasingly fierce by this point. Nearly every single day, a flood of impeachment memorials arrived at court — not aimed directly at Li Gang and Qin Siyuan themselves, but at the officials working under them, especially those currently responsible for relief efforts across the various circuits, who bore the brunt of the criticism. Emperor Zhou Zhe found the constant barrage exhausting, but for the most part, he still supported the chancellors’ relief efforts. As emperor, he could, by and large, see through the political maneuvering at play, and only ordered thorough investigations and dismissals in cases where the evidence submitted against an official was genuinely conclusive.
Li Gang and Qin Siyuan’s faction, for their part, launched counter-impeachments of their own against officials working to obstruct the relief effort. Minor officials who hindered relief work bore the brunt of these attacks, with someone being toppled from office almost daily — a fair exchange, in kind. Even as the emperor maintained his tilted support toward this arrangement, he also grumbled to Li Gang and the others: “Don’t push this too hard, or one day it’ll come back to bite you. Lately I’ve had about all I can take from every direction, and not just from what’s happening at court.”
Yet by the twelfth month, the greatest loss suffered by the Chancellor’s faction came in the form of Lin Quting, the Vice Commissioner of Transport for Jinghu South Circuit — one of Qin Siyuan’s most capable lieutenants. In managing Jinghu South Circuit, maintaining the trade routes and directing relief investment, he had originally been among the most effective officials in the entire operation. The one problem was that the most powerful clan in Jinghu South Circuit bore the surname Han — and this clan happened to be the family of the Empress Dowager herself.
In administering Jinghu South Circuit, Lin Quting had done everything in his power to avoid direct conflict with the Han family, yet friction of various kinds had proven unavoidable regardless. By the eleventh month, members of the Han family had already gone to the capital to lodge a formal complaint with the Empress Dowager, fabricating a whole litany of charges against Lin Quting — accusations of high-handed tyranny, corruption, and dereliction of duty in Jinghu South Circuit — complete with prepared witnesses and evidence, tirelessly working the matter from every angle. As the impeachment memorials against him grew increasingly heated, the Empress Dowager was eventually swayed as well, feeling that her own family had been grievously wronged out there. Zhou Zhe, for his part, began scrutinizing the accusations too, and finally flew into a rage, determined to have Lin Quting dealt with.
Once the court had settled on this course of action, Lin Zhongtai, Vice Minister of Personnel and a close associate of Lin Quting’s, tearfully pleaded with Zhou Zhe to rescind the order, going so far as to declare: “If Lin Quting is removed from his post now, the countless disaster victims of Jinghu South Circuit will have no path to survival left at all!”
He was, in fact, an official aligned with the Li Gang and Qin Siyuan faction — but at this moment, he had clearly lost his head entirely. His words sent Zhou Zhe into a towering fury, and he slammed his hand on the table, roaring, “Nonsense! Do you think Lin Quting is the only decent official left in this entire realm! Do you think you people are the only ones with a clean conscience, and that everyone else under my command couldn’t possibly care about saving the common people from ruin!? I am removing Lin Quting from office! And you! Go home and reflect on your conduct—”
With two of his key officials lost in a single stroke, even Qin Siyuan found himself powerless to reverse the outcome. Though heavy snow was falling at the time, the mountain passes and roads weren’t so thoroughly sealed as to be entirely impassable, and the imperial edict quickly made its way south to Jinghu South. Lin Quting, stripped of his post and ordered to return to the capital to await further investigation, was consumed with anxious frustration, cursing bitterly the entire way. On the journey to the capital, he fell gravely ill, and in the end, only word of his death eventually reached the court.
Lin Quting had been only forty-nine years old that year — a prominent official at the height of his career, still vigorous and capable. Though being stripped of his position had dealt him a devastating blow, and the timing coincided with the depths of a bitter winter, there were nonetheless many suspicious elements surrounding his sudden death from illness. Whether the matter was exactly as it appeared, or whether it was in fact the covert work of the Han family of Jinghu South Circuit exercising their considerable influence behind the scenes, would never be conclusively determined.
Amid the relief effort at this point, a number of smaller operational components had already begun encountering problems. The Chancellor’s residence had managed to scrape together enough replacement personnel each time to keep things running, but the loss of a major official like Lin Quting directly resulted in the near-total failure of an entire circuit’s relief effort — and similar setbacks were occurring virtually every single day.
Qin Siyuan, his hair now entirely white, faced this relentless stream of crises with sheer force of will, frequently consulting with Ning Yi and the others to make his decisions. Ning Yi had his own effective methods when it came to the marketplace and human psychology, but he wasn’t nearly as familiar with the actual workings of the Wu Dynasty’s官场 (bureaucracy) at this level, and the strategies he proposed were often deemed by Qin Siyuan to be excessively aggressive. Amid this tangled, interlocking struggle, grain prices continued their steady, determined decline — yet no one knew what the final outcome would truly be, or how many of those they hoped to save would end up dying regardless. Because in the disaster zones at this very moment, day after day, a great many deaths were already occurring — some from starvation, others from freezing to death. Places under government or great-household relief efforts fared somewhat better, but there were always those living in remote mountain regions who, once their stored provisions ran out, died alone, or sometimes entire families together, in isolated, remote villages, without a sound.
Far away in Hedong Circuit, Shishi had already spent a full month there. In the early days, she had traveled tirelessly from place to place, throwing herself into relief work — distributing porridge, releasing grain, selling grain — and had genuinely felt that surge of passionate, righteous fervor in her heart. But by now, an overwhelming exhaustion and psychological weight had settled over her. Some days she still went out beyond the city walls in her cloak and headscarf to distribute porridge, but more often now, she would simply stand at a distance, watching the disaster victims, quietly weeping to herself.
Her tears had come readily enough in the early days, then eventually stopped — but these past several days, they had begun again. In those first few days, she had wept for the disaster victims themselves; lately, part of her weeping had come to be, in some measure, for herself as well.
Over the years, it wasn’t as though she had never witnessed tragedy, never witnessed death. And yet, now that she had truly thrown herself into this effort, wanting genuinely to accomplish something — with so many others around her equally passionate, equally determined to do something meaningful — the sense of defeat that had ultimately settled over her was overwhelming beyond anything she had expected. The words Ning Yi had spoken to her back in the capital had, upon arriving here, gradually crystallized into something painfully real and tangible.
“We’re not trying to make the great households lose money.”
“We’re only trying to make them profit a little less.”
“If we can strip away even a fraction of their greed, that alone means many more people can survive…”
And yet… every single day, so many people were still dying…
Sometimes she desperately wanted to rush straight back to the capital, find Ning Yi, and ask him directly: “Have we succeeded? How many have died? Fewer than fifty thousand?” But she knew that regardless of the answer, her heart would find no peace either way. The government’s grain reserves were steadily dwindling, and the porridge being distributed was growing thinner and thinner by the day. Some regions were likely faring even worse than where she currently was.
Sometimes she found herself thinking: so many people had died, and all it had accomplished was making these great households profit just a little less. So many people had died, and yet every single one of those households was still turning a profit regardless. So many people, working so earnestly, so wholeheartedly — and who, exactly, had they truly defeated in the end?
In the capital, even Ning Yi himself couldn’t say for certain whether they would ultimately achieve what they’d set out to accomplish. In truth, ever since the heavy snow had begun falling, the flow of information from the various regions had already begun to slow to a crawl. Everything now depended on the plans already set in motion, on the officials already stationed and prepared in each locality — while here in the capital, all they could do was try their best to hold the greater situation together.
And with Lin Quting’s death, even that greater situation was no longer holding together quite so cleanly.
Time was drawing near the latter part of the twelfth month now, with only ten days left until New Year’s Eve. Throughout the capital, every household hung lanterns and decorations in festive celebration, and places like the Ning residence and the Chancellor’s residence were no exception — however hard the men of each household were working to see the great relief effort through, the New Year still had to be properly observed in every home. Ji Kun had by now returned to the Chancellor’s residence; Yao Zunian had gone back to his own home; the monk Juemingwas still traveling about on various errands. Ning Yi came to the Chancellor’s residence each day, working with the others to tally figures and handle the countless other matters requiring attention. This particular evening, after dinner, the group hadn’t yet returned home, still discussing matters related to the relief effort — specifically, whether a certain reserve of grain in Huainan could be reallocated elsewhere, and consulting with the assembled aides about the proper procedural justification for doing so.
The night hadn’t yet grown too late. Candles burned in the study as Qin Siyuan, hands clasped behind his back, recounted various political precedents to Ning Yi, Ji Kun, Wenren Bu’er, and the others, discussing which precedents might prove useful going forward. His hair and beard were entirely white by now, but his gaze remained sharp and clear, his spirit strong, and his words, even now, carried a fair amount of wit and humor. During this time, the elder Madam Qin came in once to check on him, bringing a set of tea and refreshments for everyone. After she left, Qin Siyuan continued his story, when a subordinate came hurrying in, holding a piece of intelligence. “My lord.”
Qin Siyuan took it and read it over.
The report was no larger than half a sheet of paper. Qin Siyuan read it once, then frowned and read it again. He stood there, his gaze drifting toward one side of the study, blinking, a look of confusion in his eyes. After a moment, he extended the slip of paper outward. Ji Kun and the others were about to reach out to take it when Qin Siyuan, still holding out his hand, suddenly sank backward into the chair behind him, one hand gripping the back of the chair, veins bulging along it. He opened his mouth, as if trying to say something, but in the end managed only two words: “Zhang Jue…”
Wenren Bu’er burst out the door. “Someone! Fetch Physician Xu! Quickly!”
Ji Kun rushed forward, one hand gripping Qin Siyuan’s pulse, the other trying to press against his philtrum. Ning Yi hurried over. “Relax, relax, Chancellor, relax, everything’s in our hands… relax, no matter what’s happened, we will see it through. Deep breath, come, follow me, breathe in… out…”
Even as he spoke, he took the piece of paper from Qin Siyuan’s hand and read it. Once he had it in his grip, his fingers suddenly tightened around it, his lips moving without producing any sound, until finally he forced out, through gritted teeth: “Breathe… in… out…”
Physician Xu of the Chancellor’s residence came rushing in almost at a sprint, glanced once at Qin Siyuan, and said, “Everyone, out.” He drew out his silver needles and began treatment at once. Ji Kun stepped back two paces, and Ning Yi pulled him out of the room, handing him the slip of paper. Ji Kun looked it over, and Wenren Bu’er leaned in as well.
No one spoke, for fear of disturbing the man inside the room.
From October into November, beyond Yanmen Pass, Zhang Jue and Wanyan Shemu had fought three engagements. The first two had ended in defeat, but the third had turned the tide, driving back Wanyan Shemu’s forces entirely. After this, the Jurchen replaced their commander with Aguda’s second son, Wanyan Zongwang, who then dealt Zhang Jue a crushing defeat outside Nanjing. Wanyan Zongwang was, at this time, one of the strongest generals in the entire Jurchen army. Knowing he could not match him, Zhang Jue withdrew his forces south into Yanjing. Yanjing was, at that time, defended jointly by Guo Yaoshi of the Ever-Victorious Army and the Pacification Commissioner Wang Anzhong. As Wanyan Zongwang led his forces southward, laying siege to a city in winter was no easy task, and Guo Yaoshi strongly advocated holding the city through defensive resistance — unaware that Wang Anzhong had already received a secret directive from the capital.
Wang Anzhong had Zhang Jue hidden away, and when Wanyan Zongwang demanded his surrender, simply claimed no such man existed. As Wanyan Zongwang’s demands grew ever more insistent, threatening war against the Wu Dynasty if Zhang Jue was not handed over, Wang Anzhong finally located a man who resembled Zhang Jue in appearance, had him killed, and sent his head out as proof. But among the Jurchen were men who had personally known Zhang Jue, and they recognized at once that the head was not truly his. Under mounting pressure, Wang Anzhong finally brought the real Zhang Jue out, enumerated his crimes before him, accusing him of having recklessly provoked conflict between the Wu Dynasty and the Jurchen. Zhang Jue cursed the Wu Dynasty bitterly for its inability to tolerate him, after which Wang Anzhong had him executed, sending his head to Wanyan Zongwang.
The Jurchen, at last, withdrew their forces and departed.
The lanterns hung high in preparation for the coming New Year, and the city of Bianliang remained as prosperous and bustling as ever — only the cold winter night wind moaned on, growing steadily colder. In the courtyard, those present stepped aside, falling into a heavy, wordless silence. Before long, Ning Yi walked out into the courtyard and drove his fist into a large tree. With a resounding thud, the tree’s trunk shook violently, its bark splitting open.
In this winter of the eleventh year of Jinghan in the Wu Dynasty, countless people had struggled and strived, hoping to accomplish something meaningful — and in the end, countless others had struggled just as hard to deliver, to this entire nation, a perfect and devastating betrayal from within…