The bustling New Year celebrations finally came to an end, and after the arrival of spring, affairs within the chancellor’s residence grew busy once more.

Spring—the start of a new year, the season when all things sprout and grow. For the people of the chancellor’s residence, what still needed attending to was the unfinished business of the previous year. The disaster relief work was not yet complete; even now, the lands stretching from south to north remained buried beneath a blanket of snow. What could be done had been done; what remained now depended on the individual initiative of local officials everywhere.

As the snow gradually melted, the data gathered in from various regions gave little cause for optimism or cheer. But for the others in the chancellor’s residence, in laying out plans and goals for the new year, there was still a considerable investment of enthusiasm. This was, after all, the attitude of those who get things done—the past was past, and one could hardly wallow forever in reflection without ever acting again.

Recently, for Ning Yi, this had been a period both relatively complicated and somewhat stagnant. On one hand, over the holiday season, spending time with family, exchanging visits with Yao Zunian, Ji Kun, Wenren Buer, and the various members of the Wang family, amid all the busyness there was, for the most part, laughter to go around. All the various planning and forecasting within the chancellor’s residence came easily to him as well—at least when it came to matters of numbers and order, there was no one else in the residence who could match him. On the other hand, in his idle moments, thinking over what came next, he found himself somewhat unable to make up his mind.

Zhang Jue’s death had been a heavy blow to everyone in the chancellor’s residence, but it was, to them, only that—a heavy blow. They could not truly share in what Ning Yi felt in his heart, and Ning Yi could hardly tell them that he believed the Wu dynasty was headed toward ruin, because the logical chain leading to that conclusion still wasn’t solid enough. To everyone else, since Zhang Jue was already dead, the investment in the northern territories going forward would only become more crucial—no matter what, the framework that remained still had to be propped up and maintained. That, naturally, was the correct way of seeing things. Even Qin Siyuan himself, after a brief period of dejection, had returned to his usual state of busy official duties, not letting his low spirits affect him for too long.

Ning Yi himself was uncertain about how this whole affair would turn out. There was still plenty he could do. But for him, the more troubling thing was not really this particular mood. Rather, it was that, as a modern man who had once stood in such a position himself, his tolerance for certain matters, for certain forms of folly, was limited. And yet that manic drive to seize every fleeting moment of advance rather than waste a single instant standing still—that too had, for him, grown distant.

Before him lay a fork in the road with different branching paths, and he still could not see clearly which way to go. Or perhaps he simply had not yet found the opportunity, or the impetus, to push him toward a decision.

Within the chancellor’s residence, aside from the day-to-day official business, what seemed to excite everyone most were those books Qin Siyuan had been annotating. This rough draft of Neo-Confucianism had sparked tremendous interest in Yao Zunian and the others; after Juemíng the monk returned, he too treated it as a treasure. To Ning Yi’s mind, he could indeed appreciate that it truly was a treasure—but his own feelings toward the book differed from everyone else’s.

Ning Yi, after all, understood in broad strokes the path that Neo-Confucianism, and indeed many schools of learning, would go on to take in the future. As for Qin Siyuan bringing forth this body of Neo-Confucian thought, Ning Yi felt genuine respect in his heart. If possible, Ning Yi hoped it could be preserved and passed down, continuing to develop through the clash of ideas among people. But Ning Yi had no wish to research it himself. Academic scholarship—he simply no longer had the temperament for it. As for the systems of rules and regulations that might be derived from it, Ning Yi himself had been too heavily shaped by modern management theory, and by a great deal of modern liberal thought as well. Ning Yi was willing to protect it, but as for studying it further or promoting it—that, he would leave to others.

In his heart, his own expectations for people and for society differed somewhat from those of Neo-Confucianism—though this difference from Neo-Confucianism’s own aspirations was perhaps not so great after all. Every philosophy in the world, in truth, shares certain things in common. Even in the later age, Ning Yi believed that the emergence of a new social philosophy ought to still be grounded in Confucian learning such as Neo-Confucianism and the School of Mind—change could happen, even great change—but to overthrow it entirely would be pure folly.

Since he was not the type to engage in this kind of academic research, and since his own worldview had already long since settled, in the end Ning Yi could only admire it, admiring too the wisdom of an old man capable of reflecting so deeply on society and probing its depths—but as for extending and developing the research further, that he would not take part in.

The turning point came in February of that year. When it arrived, Ning Yi could never, by any stretch, have imagined that such a piece of news would appear before his eyes.

…

The second day of the second lunar month—the day the Dragon Raises Its Head.

In the capital, the snow was gradually melting, and all things were beginning to send out tender shoots. Over this recent period, the data compiled from every disaster region on the large numbers of dead had left people feeling increasingly demoralized. The best-case estimate for deaths from starvation had originally been set at around fifty thousand; excluding those frozen to death elsewhere, that number had already been exceeded—though the statistics from every region were still rough at this point, this conclusion could nonetheless already be drawn. In particular, in Jinghu South Circuit, after Lin Quting’s death, that circuit alone accounted for more than eighteen thousand disaster victims who could be classified as having starved to death.

And yet, comparing this famine’s scale and severity against the data from past famine years, the entire relief effort could, in fact, be called unprecedented in its success. It was only that this success, too, left people feeling somewhat subdued.

Wenren Buer knew that Ning Yi’s mood recently had not been good; he seemed to be thinking about something beyond official business, and at times seemed distracted. At first Wenren Buer assumed this dejection stemmed from the disaster relief effort, but Ning Yi had seemed quite calm about the relief effort’s results falling short of the ideal:

“The most ideal outcome, of course, could only be achieved if everything had gone exactly as needed. After Magistrate Lin died, it was already clear this wouldn’t reach the expected outcome. And besides… this is the first time I’ve ever handled a famine relief effort myself—all my estimates, though based on data, were mostly guesswork. In any case, we did what we could.”

Ning Yi would say things like this while tossing some discouraging numbers into a drawer, and yet the indifference and coldness on his face made people feel he must be turning over some other thought in his mind. It was on the morning of this second day of the second month, as Wenren Buer passed by the study where Ning Yi worked, that he saw Ning Yi standing there, leaning back against his desk, apparently lost in thought about something. When he passed by again roughly an hour later, Ning Yi was still standing there in exactly the same way, his back to the door, both hands resting on the edge of the desk. Wenren Buer then walked in: “Liheng, what are you thinking about?”

Ning Yi turned to look at him, and in his eyes was a wariness as if looking at a stranger—as though gazing at something… not quite of this world. That gaze could hardly be called friendly. The Ning Yi that Wenren Buer knew was, without exception, composed, witty, and decisive—he had never once seen such an expression appear in Ning Yi’s eyes. Ning Yi tilted his head and looked at him for a while, then reached out and gave him a light tap, and only then, gradually, did a smile break across his face. He grabbed a sheet of paper from beside him and slapped it down on the desk: “Here, take a look at this.”

It was a piece of intelligence sent down from the north by the Secret Investigation Bureau. Wenren Buer picked it up and looked it over—it was a report concerning the news of the death of the former Liao general Yelu Dashi, which Wenren Buer had already seen before: “What about it?”

Ning Yi sat back down in his chair, saying nothing. Wenren Buer read it over again: “I know Yelu Dashi was quite a remarkable figure in his day, though after he left, the men he took with him were never that many in number… This Khiyan tribe has been rising on the steppe for some time now, hasn’t it… uh, Liheng, could you possibly be thinking of backing this… Borjigin Temüjin, to go compete against the Jin? That wouldn’t be a bad idea, actually…”

Ning Yi looked at him, and after a moment burst out laughing: “Raising a tiger only to court disaster… one tiger is more than enough to keep already… how could you possibly raise this one. Uh… I was thinking of something else, that’s all. It’s nothing—once I’ve thought it through, I’ll tell you about it. This… give it back to me for now.”

Wenren Buer handed the report back to him. “Really nothing?”

“Nothing.” Ning Yi answered without much conviction. Wenren Buer left the room, and after waiting a moment outside, heard what sounded like Ning Yi’s voice inside, muttering to himself: “Damn it… how could something like this happen… this has to be fake… damn it, you’ve got to be joking… this is way too much…”

Wenren Buer rolled his eyes, tilted his head in confusion, and walked off.

Inside the room, Ning Yi sat upright in his chair, staring at the intelligence report, then propped it up directly on the desk in front of him. At first his expression carried a kind of unreal, bitter amusement—as if the whole world felt like some cruel joke someone was playing on him—but gradually, his gaze began to turn fierce and grim, his brows knitting together.

Borjigin Temüjin!

Genghis Khan…

This was a name a hundred times more terrifying than Wanyan Aguda’s. When Wenren Buer had spoken of backing him… in the history Ning Yi once knew, this single name had led the Mongols of the steppe on campaigns east and west, flattening the entire territory of the Han Chinese, with the empire’s borders extending as far as Europe—leaving Europeans so traumatized that even into the twentieth century they still called East Asians the “Yellow Peril.” And from the very start, this was nothing that any Chinese person could take pride in. For that era, the Mongol invasion of the Song dynasty had been an open, unmistakable, and utterly devastating act of conquest—more thorough, even, than the later Japanese invasion of China. The later claim that the Mongols had always, in some sense, been part of the Chinese nation was nothing more than a way for people, after being assimilated by Confucian culture, to gild their own faces after the fact… And now, backing him…

He stared at that name for a long while—he had no idea how long—until at last the expression on his face gradually grew quiet and indifferent. He pressed both hands down on his knees, and at a certain moment, his gaze once again flashed with something like the bloodlust and ferocity of a beast an instant before it tears into its prey. That expression flickered through his eyes and vanished in an instant. He reached out, opened the drawer, took out a stack of papers sitting on top, tore them up on the spot, and tossed them into the wooden wastebasket beside him.

Those had been his recent plans for adjusting Bamboo Records—but in the end, they had been far too shallow.

He rose to his feet, his fingers tapping slowly against the desk a few times, then drew a breath and put the report back into the drawer. When he walked out the door, it was already afternoon; sunlight filled the courtyard. Someone greeted him as he passed, and he smiled, patting the person on the shoulder, but did not stop walking: “I’m heading back for now.”

At the side courtyard of the chancellor’s residence, he climbed into his carriage. As the curtain was lowered, it hid his pensive face in shadow.

The carriage train left the residence and set off down the road. At some point, the train suddenly came to a halt. On the street, shouts of battle suddenly rang out; someone was yelling: “Get rid of the demon!”

“Kill this fiend—”

“Where is he—”

The wind stirred the curtain slightly open; the clash between assassins and guards had already begun. Ning Yi sat inside the carriage, mulling over this fact that was at once somewhat absurd and quite serious, his fingers tapping against the seat beside him. Then, at a certain moment, two grappling hooks suddenly latched onto the carriage opposite; with a crash, both the wall and roof of the carriage were torn open, and only then, sitting there, did he see the scene unfolding on the road ahead.

Someone shouted: “Watch out—”

Something came flying toward him from the front of his field of vision. Ning Yi watched that point of light without dodging; a crossbow bolt slammed into the carriage wall right beside his head. Ahead, a burly man came roaring toward him like a tiger.

Assassination attempts from the martial world, targeting Ning Yi within the capital, were nothing new by this point. This time the attackers were another group of fairly well-known experts from the martial underworld. The man charging straight at him now was known as Piaotianweng, “the Overlord of Lingnan,” throwing a punch forward with a roar like a tiger’s. The infamous reputation of the “Demon of the Heart” had spread throughout the martial underworld over this period, making him too wary to hold back or underestimate his opponent. And there, ahead of him, the cold-eyed scholar had already stepped forward to meet him, throwing a mighty punch straight at his face.

Blood sprayed across the sky, mixed with the sound of shattering bone, as internal force cultivated to the extreme sixth stage let out a thunderclap-like roar. Piaotianweng’s entire body was sent flying backward, tumbling more than a zhang before finally rolling to a stop. Amid the melee, the demon lord, calm and composed, his expression cold, had already stepped down from the carriage and was moving toward Piaotianweng. Not far off, someone came sprinting in—a female knight-errant of the martial underworld, over forty years old, who used the technique of Eight Steps to Catch the Cicada to close the distance with astonishing speed, breaking through the guards’ encirclement in an instant. In the next moment, the demon lord’s left hand rose slightly toward the side. With a booming blast, accompanied by fire, a spray of iron pellets tore straight into her lower abdomen, stopping her mid-air and sending her crashing down, blood and flesh scattering.

The demon lord fired his weapon without breaking stride for even an instant; in his right hand he drew a strangely shaped military saber. Piaotianweng struggled up from the ground, retreating, and swung a steel blade he had snatched up off the ground, thrusting twice toward his opponent—but the other man barely paused even a step, his hegemon’s blade technique smashing aside the incoming blade, and with the second stroke severed his wrist, the third stroke stepping in and slicing across his shoulder, the fourth cleaving into his forehead. With a series of wet, cracking sounds, blood sprayed from his chest, abdomen, and thighs as he stumbled backward, finally collapsing to the ground. Through blood-flooded eyes, he saw that cold gaze looking down at him from above; the short firearm in the man’s left hand had already been swapped for another, its muzzle now aimed at him, a great round black hole.

“The famine relief is almost done, and you people still won’t leave well enough alone…”

Another boom sounded, and something burst apart like a watermelon.

Zhu Biao came over with his spear tucked at his side, looking somewhat surprised: “I knew… you had some skill… but how did you suddenly get so much stronger?”

“Thought of some things, and now I’ve got nothing left to hold back for—of course I’d get stronger…”

“Is that so?” Zhu Biao blinked. “You never seemed to hold back much before, either.”

“Anyway, I’m about to become invincible under Heaven—just so you know, don’t go spreading it around…” Ning Yi laughed, then grew somewhat weary. “I want to get back… home quickly, and take a look.”

…

By the time the carriage made its way back home and entered the courtyard, the smell of blood still clung to him. Ning Yi stood in the back courtyard and looked around—at the tables and chairs, the house, the trees, the surrounding wall—and after a moment’s thought, stepped inside. In the side courtyard, Xiao Chan and Ning Xi came bounding over. Seeing the blood on him, they grew worried and were about to check him over, but he pulled both of them into an embrace before they could. For a moment Xiao Chan thought Ning Yi had been wounded: “Husband, what happened, what happened… let me look at you…” His son, however, unaccustomed to the smell of blood on his father, turned his head away: “Daddy—smelly, smelly…” Ning Yi laughed and pressed his face against the boy’s.

“It’s nothing.” He pulled Xiao Chan closer, letting her head rest against his shoulder, and after a good while, said: “Xiao Chan, do you remember our very first meeting… when I’d been hit with that brick, and had just woken up… what was I like back then?”

“I don’t really remember.” Xiao Chan answered, then added, “Actually… you were a bit fierce back then. My husband… you were injured, but you still wanted to go out, and then you snapped at me. I was a little scared.”

“Ha.” Ning Yi patted her. “Don’t worry, I’m fine. I just… thought of some things.”

Letting go of a puzzled Xiao Chan and their son, who was pulling a long face, Ning Yi walked further inside. In the bedroom, Tan’er was sitting at the table writing something; seeing Ning Yi come in still covered in blood, she rushed over: “Husband…” Before she could finish, she too was scooped up and carried further inside, eventually pressed down onto the bed. Ning Yi leaned over her, startling her badly: “Husband, what’s wrong with you? What’s wrong…” She thought he’d been injured on his back and reached around, trying to check. Ning Yi cupped her face in both hands, staring at her while smiling: “It’s nothing. Don’t move.”

“But… you’re… you’re hurt…”

Their eyes met; Tan’er was still a little flustered, but her expression gradually shifted to confusion. Ning Yi looked at her for a while, then reached out and touched her eyes, her nose, her lips, before finally burying his face in her neck to breathe her in for a moment.

“Husband, what’s the matter…” Tan’er asked softly.

“Ran into some trouble.” Ning Yi still lay against her. “There was an assassination attempt on the way back, but that’s not really the main thing…”

“Those people, it must be about the famine relief…” I heard about it…”

“That’s not it either.” Ning Yi fell silent for a moment. “Tan’er, if… this very month, I brought Yun Zhu into the household… and Jin’er too, would you…”

He hesitated slightly. Tan’er, however, gave a soft laugh. “You’ve finally made up your mind. Everyone’s been waiting, I’d imagine…” This was her deliberately putting on an air of unconcern, but the truth was, she had already spent a long time preparing herself for this, and so it did not sting too much.

“Also, once things here are settled, I need to take some time to go to Lüliang Mountain.”

Only then did Tan’er’s brow furrow. After a moment, her expression grew complicated, and she gave him a light, awkward smack with her hand: “And you’re not even worried… about wearing your body out…”

“Ha ha ha ha… it’s not that kind of thing.” Ning Yi laughed for a moment, then said, “Juan’er, have someone bring me some hot water—I need to wash up… there’s blood on me.”

Outside the door came the timid reply of Juan’er, who had been listening in: “Oh.” Then she scurried off.

Ning Yi sat up; freed from his hold, Tan’er was finally able to straighten her clothes, looking at him with a puzzled expression. She understood Ning Yi’s temperament well enough to know that something beyond mere romantic matters must have happened, for him to be acting so out of character.

Ning Yi thought for a moment. “In the past… I always had some resistance to committing to anything long-term…”

“…Huh?” Tan’er didn’t understand.

“That was because I always thought that once things got to a certain point, I could just pull back and walk away.” He sighed. “But now it seems, some matters leave no room for retreat. After all… something this absurd…”

“I… I don’t understand.”

Ning Yi didn’t answer further. He took her hand and patted it, then patted it again, and smiled at her—a smile that had, by now, turned warm and gentle: “Anyway, you’ll have to walk this road together with me.”

Tan’er looked at him: “We’re… already husband and wife.”

Amid a gaze both puzzled and yet somehow already half in understanding, certain things were, in that moment, settled. At this time, sunlight slanted in through the open door, and the air carried the particular chill unique to a spring day…

…

The second day of the second lunar month.

Qingming.

Li Pin walked up the slopes outside the city of Taiyuan, gazing at the countless graves scattered across the wilderness, and the smoke rising from the offerings people burned in mourning for their relatives.

At the edge of another stretch of forest, a man named Cheng Zhouhai, dressed in a green robe, knelt on the grass, bowing three times toward the direction he had chosen, toward all those who had died in this famine. Beside him, there was only the chill of spring—no one else there to witness it.

By the docks, Shishi boarded a large ship heading back south, setting out on her journey. Gazing at the distant city, the mudflats, the docks, tears fell from her eyes. This winter, she had felt an emotion she had never known before—the dead, those people… those she had fought with everything she had to keep from dying, who had died all the same, remained behind on this land.

What lay ahead was the spring famine—a smaller-scale disaster that would continue until the new year’s harvest finally came in. During that time, people would go on dying, one after another, but now that the snow had melted and the ice had thawed, there was no longer any obstruction on the roads for the court’s continued relief efforts and porridge distribution. Grain prices held steady at eight taels per picul—no longer rising, though still three times the ordinary price.

She had no choice but to go back.

To stay would only mean more helplessness, nothing more.

She wished so much she could go back and tell someone of all she had seen.

The wind stirred her hair as she stood on the ship.

Every year, that wind rises in spring, and blows on through summer, into autumn, into winter, circling round and round without ever ceasing. It blows the years away; it ages one’s youth; it blows the young toward maturity, and the grown toward old age; and then it blows the old, who must at last leave behind the seeds of their wisdom, hoping to pass them on to the children of the next generation. So do people live, work, rest, and carry on across this earth.

This was, once again, a new year. In the spring wind, people felt the songs and dances of peace and prosperity in this new year; at court, crowds of men, filled with high spirits, laid out their grand and distant plans. To the north, war continued, unceasing, and amid that smoke of battle, the blazing sun of prosperity alternated with the ominous glow of dusk.

This was the twelfth spring of the Jinghan era of the Wu dynasty.

Peace reigned beneath Heaven.