Night passed and day came again. On the first day, it rained outside, and the water ran down the walls, soaking the already foul cell in dampness. Near and far, cursing, talking, groaning—like sounds from the underworld itself.
The jailers pounded on the cells, shouting loudly. After a while, they dragged out whichever prisoner was making the most noise for a beating. At some point, new prisoners kept being brought in as well.
The wounded man sharing his cell groaned through the afternoon, writhing weakly on the straw, his moans edged with sobs. You Hongzhuo’s whole body ached with weakness; only after being disturbed by the noise for a long while did he raise his head to look at the man’s face, and saw it was covered in knife scars, his nose partially cut off—likely the result of being tortured however the jailers pleased in this prison. This was a member of the Hungry Ghosts, perhaps one who had once carried the Black Banner identity as well, but from what small signs of his age could be made out, You Hongzhuo guessed he was only in his twenties.
You Hongzhuo himself wasn’t even twenty, and looking at this man’s age didn’t stir much feeling in him. He simply sat silently in his corner, watching the man suffer—his wounds were too severe, he would die sooner or later, and no one else in the cell paid him any more mind. The Black Banner remnants here were bound, in a few days, to be executed alongside Wang Shitong regardless; it was only a matter of dying sooner or later.
You Hongzhuo still couldn’t understand how he’d come to be arrested as a Black Banner remnant, nor why that skilled man he’d seen in the street hadn’t saved him—though by now he’d also come to understand that in this world of rivers and lakes, great heroes didn’t necessarily act with righteousness or come to others’ aid in their hour of need.
He felt that he was probably going to die.
The youth hadn’t yet lived eighteen years in this world, yet these past six months alone had given him a taste of every bitterness and sweetness life had to offer. His whole family dead, fighting for his life, killing, being wounded, nearly starving to death, and now, on top of it all, imprisoned and tortured. Along this rough and broken road, if there had once been a sharp edge to him, now, locked in this cell, a thread of despair had gradually begun creeping into his heart.
Because he couldn’t for the moment think of any way to resist, the feelings of resistance within him had faded as well.
By night, the wounded man in his cell began muttering deliriously, most of it incomprehensible. Deep in the night, You Hongzhuo woke from a muddled dream to hear the crying: “It hurts so much… I hurt so much…”
“Father… Mother…” the wounded man wept. “I hurt so much…”
So even these Black Banner remnants could cry like this—even cry out for their parents.
You Hongzhuo thought to himself. The wounded man moaned on and on, his suffering piteous beyond words. From across the corridor, someone in another cell shouted: “Hey, you… give him a quick death! Give him a quick death…” It was the man in the cell across the way, calling to You Hongzhuo. You Hongzhuo lay in the darkness, stunned, unwilling to move, yet tears slid unbidden down his face. He found himself thinking, unbidden, that this man in his twenties was about to die, while he himself was only a teenager—why did he have to die here of all places?
He lay like that for a long while before finally rolling himself up and crawling over toward the wounded man, reaching out to grip his throat. But as his hand hovered in midair, he looked at the man’s face, at the wounds all over his body, and heard him weeping: “Father, Mother… Brother… I don’t want to die…” Thinking of himself, he found the tears wouldn’t stop falling. The man in the other cell, not understanding, called out: “Hey, killing him would be a mercy!” You Hongzhuo finally withdrew, hiding himself back in the darkness, and answered in a low, muffled voice: “I can’t do it.”
“You coward, look at him like this… if I could get out there I’d beat you to death—”
“Come and try it, then, kill me—”
You Hongzhuo shouted, half-hysterical.
…
The youth’s sudden outburst overwhelmed the anger from across the corridor. Everyone in the cells now was either about to die or, in a few days, faced execution as well—there was more than enough despair to go around. But since You Hongzhuo had made it plain he wasn’t afraid to die, and the other man had no way to actually cross over and fight him, there was no point in saying more.
Another day passed, and the wounded man was at his last breath, only occasionally muttering delirious words. You Hongzhuo, moved by pity, dragged his own injured body over to fetch water, wetting the man’s lips with a few sips. Each time he did this, the man seemed to improve somewhat, and his words grew clearer; piecing them together, You Hongzhuo learned the man had once had an older brother and parents, though whether they were still alive he had no way of knowing.
Toward evening, the same two jailers from the day before came and hauled You Hongzhuo out again for another beating. During the torture, the lead constable said: “No harm in telling you—that Master Kuang paid good silver to have the two of us give you a proper working over. Heh, if you’ve got someone outside willing to grease palms, the officer could make things easier on you.”
You Hongzhuo was utterly alone in the world, with no kin left anywhere to turn to. There was still some silver Mr. Zhao had left him back at the Liang’an Inn, but though he’d cried bitterly the night before, faced with these wicked men the youth still kept his stubborn nature and said nothing.
The two constables beat him until his skin split and he was covered in blood before finally throwing him back into the cell. Their beatings had their limits—though it was agonizing, he never suffered any serious internal injury—this was to keep You Hongzhuo as clear-headed as possible so he could endure more suffering. They knew perfectly well, of course, that You Hongzhuo had been framed and thrown in here, and that since he wasn’t actually Black Banner, he might well have some money or valuables somewhere. Tormenting him, even though they’d already been paid for it, offered a chance at a little extra on the side too—no harm in that.
Thrown back into the cell, You Hongzhuo had no strength left at all. He lay on the straw for a long while, and at some point suddenly realized that his badly wounded cellmate had stopped groaning.
He struggled to sit up. The man beside him lay with his eyes open, as though looking at him—except those eyes showed mostly white, little black, his expression distant and lost. After a long while he stirred faintly, murmuring in a low voice: “Why… why…”
“The Jurchens… bad people… corrupt officials… bandits… tyrants… the army… Tian Hu…” the wounded man mumbled on, as though determined, in his final moments, to curse every villain in his memory one by one. After a while he said again: “Father… Mother… don’t eat, don’t eat the clay… we won’t give away our grain to others anymore, we…”
“Wait until Elder Brother defeats the Jurchens… defeats the Jurchens…”
“Why do our own people fight each other… fight the Jurchens instead…”
The murmuring rose and fell, sometimes shot through with sobbing. You Hongzhuo, in unbearable pain himself, simply listened numbly. The man across the corridor reached his hand out: “Give him a quick death, give him a quick death, I beg you, I’ll owe you a favor for it…”
You Hongzhuo stared blankly, not moving. The man asked several more times, his voice rising: “I’m begging you! Do you know? Do you know? This man’s older brother went to fight the Jurchens and died in the war. His family was once wealthy landowners in their district; during a famine they opened their storehouses and gave grain to the people, and afterward, bandits struck them so badly that even his own family had nothing left to eat. His parents died eating clay to fill their stomachs! Raise your hand, I beg you, give him a quick death—”
You Hongzhuo tried to reach out, but for some reason his hand simply wouldn’t rise. After a moment, he opened his mouth and forced out a hoarse, ugly sound: “Ha, so you’re suffering. Who hasn’t seen someone suffer worse? You’re suffering—but how about the people you all killed? Plenty of them never provoked you or did you any wrong either, cough, cough, cough—the people of Zezhou—”
The words choked in his throat. The man across the way froze, then flew into a rage: “What did you say? Have you ever seen a person starve to death right in front of you!”
“I nearly starved to death myself, cough—”
“Have you ever seen what it looks like when thousands, tens of thousands of people have nothing to eat!? All they wanted was to go south—”
“Wanting to go south didn’t stop you from killing people either—”
“Then… then what else could we do, people were starving to death right there—”
The two of them shouted a few more exchanges, and You Hongzhuo, purely to keep arguing, said: “…If Zezhou falls into chaos, who will the people of Zezhou blame?”
“…If we were outside, I’d kill you dead!”
“Ha, come and try it, then!”
“F— your mother! You won’t die well—”
Amid You Hongzhuo’s dry, bitter laughter, curses rose up from the surrounding cells too. After a moment, the jailers came to put a stop to it. You Hongzhuo, in the darkness, wiped the tears from his face—those tears, falling into his wounds, hurt terribly, and those words weren’t even ones he’d truly meant to say; it was only that, in such a hopeless place, the malice in his heart simply couldn’t be held down. Once he’d finished speaking, he thought to himself that he really had become a wicked person.
His memory grew hazy after that. His body couldn’t sustain the agitation, and after the outburst faded, drowsiness swept over him like a tide. His nightmares held everything—he glimpsed fragments of his parents: his mother gone mad after being violated, his father killed in humiliation. He saw hazily the family of three when he was small; sometimes the memory fractured and he saw his parents dying from eating clay in their hunger, his mother feeding him porridge, saying as she fed him, “Eat quickly, eat quickly, Mother isn’t hungry, I’ve eaten plenty…” His mother’s belly swelled slightly, yet in the dream a terrible clarity told him that what filled that belly was only dirt. His heart wanted to scream but couldn’t make a sound; the small boy You Hongzhuo happily drank down the porridge.
What kind of world produced dreams like this? In fragments of the dream, he also saw those who had been kind to him—several sworn brothers and sisters slaughtering one another in the dream, blood everywhere. The figures of Mr. and Mrs. Zhao flashed past only briefly; amid the confusion, a warm feeling rose within him, and he opened his eyes, unsure whether he was still in the dream or in reality. It was still that same hazy, dim light, and his body didn’t hurt as much—faintly, he felt the sensation of bandages wrapped around him.
Don’t let them all die before the execution…
Words seemed to drift toward him. You Hongzhuo turned his head slightly, feeling as though he were still caught in some nightmare.
—At the far end of the cell, a figure sat on the ground, not looking at all like someone who belonged in a prison—it looked, somehow, like Mr. Zhao. He wore a long scholar’s robe, with a small case beside him, sitting there quietly, holding the hand of the gravely wounded young man.
The young man, in his final moments, spoke softly in the dimness. You Hongzhuo instinctively tried to listen but couldn’t make out the words. Then Mr. Zhao seemed to say something too. You Hongzhuo’s awareness came and went, sometimes clear, sometimes distant; at some point the voices stopped, and Mr. Zhao pressed a hand to the wounded man’s body, then rose and left. The man too fell forever silent, at last free from his unspeakable suffering…
The prison stirred with noise for a while, then quieted again. You Hongzhuo couldn’t fully wake, and eventually sank back into deep sleep. Some words he seemed to hear, and seemed not to have heard, rose and sank in the darkness, and by the time he woke, they had nearly all sunk down into the depths of his mind, impossible to remember clearly.
—You are, like your elder brother, someone worthy of admiration—a great person…
—It was my honor to have existed in this world alongside people like you.
…
At the gate of Zezhou Prison, Ning Yi held out his arms and, like the other physicians, submitted once again to a search by the jailers. Some of the jailers passing by looked on in puzzlement, unable to understand why their superiors had suddenly taken it into their heads to organize physicians to treat the gravely wounded prisoners.
Walking out onto the street, it was the deepest hour of the night. The tail end of June—no moon in the sky. After a moment, a figure came quietly and fell into step beside him. “Doesn’t this remind you of Hangzhou?”
“You think any chaotic place looks like Hangzhou to you.” Ning Yi laughed. Beside him, the woman named Liu Xigua turned slightly; her smile was clear, her eyes just as clear, still pure and steady even after everything she’d been through.
They walked together along the dark street. Night watchmen and soldiers on patrol passed by without noticing them. Even on a night like this, in a city where the lamplight had already grown faint, all sorts of forces and ambitions still stirred restlessly. In this seemingly peaceful, eerie stillness, the moment that would push everything toward collision was drawing near.
The faint light of dawn was coming; the blazing white light of day would soon replace the darkness once more…