The mountain wind blew steadily. On the mountain path at Hedeng, Ning Yi gave a small shrug.

“In this world, everyone wants to find the right path. Whatever people do, they always ask themselves whether it’s right or wrong. Right means it works; wrong means trouble follows. Right and wrong — for ordinary people, these are the most important concepts there are.” He paused for a moment. “But right and wrong, in themselves, aren’t really precise concepts at all…”

“…A farmer transplants his rice seedlings in spring and harvests in autumn; when there are pests, he kills them; to get from Hedeng to Jishan, he takes the mountain road or the waterway. Seen this way, right and wrong seem simple enough. But where does that sense of right and wrong actually come from? Through countless generations of observation and trial, people came to understand the underlying patterns, to know how to achieve the outcomes they needed. A farmer asks a learned man, ‘When should I plant my seedlings?’ and the learned man says, without hesitation, ‘In spring’ — and that’s simply correct, because the question itself is simple. But what happens when the question gets a little more complicated?”

“…Someone opens a small shop — figuring out how to run it correctly takes some effort, but the underlying patterns can still be worked out. But what about running a shop as large as the Bamboo Records? What counts as correct then? The Huaxia Army attacking Chengdu, seizing the Chengdu Plain — is that the right move? You want equality for everyone — what’s the right way to actually bring that about?”

Ning Yi smiled. “You gather a group of learned men together, have them discuss things according to their own views, and then you yourself have to weigh it all and make a decision. Is that decision right or wrong? Who gets to say? A thirty-year-old prodigy? A ninety-year-old scholar of vast learning? Looking back on it now, so-called right and wrong is something that exists beyond and above any individual person. A farmer asks a learned scholar when to plant seedlings, and the scholar says spring is correct — does that mean the farmer’s mind is now free of doubt? Was what the scholar said actually correct? People, based on experience and observed patterns, arrive at a relatively accurate judgment, that’s all. After making that judgment, they act on it — and then they must undergo yet another judgment, this one handed down by heaven, by the underlying laws of the world itself. Whether the outcome turns out well or not remains, even then, an open question.”

“When you hold power — whether over a single shop or an entire nation — so-called right and wrong is never easy to pin down. You gather a group of learned people to discuss things, but in the end, you’re the one who has to make the call. You don’t know whether that call will hold up under heaven’s own judgment, so you need a deeper sense of urgency, greater caution — you have to rack your brain over it day after day, turning it over countless times. Most important of all, you must arrive at a decision, and then submit yourself to heaven’s verdict on it… Only someone who can bear that kind of urgency can become a person capable of truly shouldering responsibility.”

“Many people place their hopes for the future in the hands of right and wrong. Farmers place their hopes in learned scholars. But anyone who truly bears responsibility can only place right and wrong in their own hands — make the decision, accept the judgment. Driven by that sense of urgency, you have to work a hundred times harder than everyone else, just to lower the risk of being judged wrong. You’ll take other people’s opinions and views into account, but everyone capable of truly bearing responsibility must, in the end, have their own way of weighing things… Take the Huaxia Army’s own path — I’ve turned it over in my head ten thousand times. When some unreliable scholar comes to argue with you and finds himself losing the argument, he’ll ask instead: ‘And how can you be so sure you’re right?’ Ah Gua, do you know how I deal with people like that?”

Walking beside him, Xigua smiled. “You throw them out.”

“I’d love nothing more than to box their ears and throw them out bodily,” Ning Yi said, laughing as well. “Asking a question like that proves the man’s mind is operating at an extremely low level. I’m happy to hear different opinions, to take them into consideration — but a view from someone like that is usually just wasting my time.”

He paused, kicking a stone by the roadside. “Common folk love stories about wise rulers who heed remonstrance, but anyone truly capable of getting things done must also carry a stubborn, self-assured streak of their own — because responsibility, in the end, is something you alone must bear. If something goes badly, the consequences are miserable to live with, and if you don’t want to live through that misery, you’d better have already turned the problem over ten thousand times beforehand, trying to account for every possible factor. And after you’ve already thought it through ten thousand times, if some fellow comes along and says, ‘And how can you be so sure you’re right?’ — thinking himself terribly clever for asking — well, he deserves nothing more than a slap for it.”

Xigua pressed her lips together. “So that’s why Maitreya can tell people what’s right.”

Ning Yi didn’t answer right away. After a moment, he said something strange: “The path of wisdom only ever grows narrower.”

“Hm?” Xigua’s brow furrowed.

Ning Yi looked at the trees ahead on the path, his thoughts drifting back. “Ah Gua, more than a decade ago, that night in Hangzhou when I carried you on my back — there weren’t many people on the road. I told you that all people could be equal, and you were so happy, so full of fire and conviction. You felt you’d found the right path. Back then, the road was wide — at the very start, every road looks wide. Cowardice is wrong, and so you handed people steamed buns and pushed them to pick up knives instead. Inequality is wrong; equality is right…”

“But the further you walk down it, the narrower the path built on wisdom becomes. You’ll come to realize that handing out steamed buns was only ever the first step, and it doesn’t actually solve the problem — but forcing people to pick up knives at least solves one small part of it… And going further still, you’ll discover that perhaps, from the very beginning, pushing people to take up arms wasn’t necessarily the right path either — the people who picked up those knives didn’t necessarily end up with good outcomes… To arrive at the right result, you need step after step, all of them correct, and eventually you reach a point where you no longer even know which of the next steps will turn out to be right. At every single step, a person must think things through exhaustively, take that step, and then submit to judgment…”

The mountain wind blew past, moaning faintly. Ning Yi fell silent for a moment. “Clever people aren’t necessarily happy people. For someone truly intelligent, the more clearly they see the world, the more thoroughly they grasp its underlying patterns, the narrower the correct path becomes — until, in the end, there’s only a single path left, and even that one path starts to blur and grow indistinct. Ah Gua, it’s just like what you’re seeing right now.”

“Equality for all, everyone in control of their own destiny,” Ning Yi said. “This may well be an endpoint that human society won’t reach even ten thousand years from now. It isn’t a system we can simply conjure into existence just because we’ve thought of it — it has too many preconditions. First, there must be material development, and on the foundation of that material development, a system must be built where everyone can receive an education. That educational system must, through constant trial and refinement, embed certain necessary, foundational concepts into every single person’s mind — the basic structure of society, for instance, which as it stands today is almost entirely wrong…”

He pointed down toward the town below. “Right now, everyone looks at the world around them and imagines it as something fixed, unchanging, external to themselves. ‘It has nothing to do with me,’ ‘as long as I don’t do anything bad, I’ve fulfilled my responsibility’ — in everyone’s mind, bad things are done by bad people, and stopping bad people is the responsibility of good people, not the responsibility of ordinary folk. But in reality, in a group of a hundred million people, everyone’s individual desires are, at every moment, quietly dragging that whole group downward and letting it sink. Even without a single truly bad person among them, based purely on everyone’s own individual desires, the social hierarchy will keep sinking and widening, until eventually it collapses entirely… The true structure of any society is exactly this kind of continuously sliding system — even just to keep the system as it is, without collapsing, requires everyone to expend real effort. The moment that effort slackens, the whole thing starts sliding again.”

“This kind of awareness creates a sense of urgency, and once you have that urgency, you still have to work out how to actually walk the right path. For an ordinary person to genuinely participate in a society, they need to know what’s happening within it — which means there has to be a system of news and information built for ordinary people. And to make sure people receive accurate information, someone has to oversee that system as well. On top of that, the people within that system need to have dignity and self-respect. Beyond even that, you need a sufficiently well-functioning system that lets ordinary people exercise their own strength appropriately within it. Throughout the whole process of a society’s development, mistakes will keep arising, and people must keep correcting them continuously just to maintain the current state… Get even one step wrong, and the whole thing can collapse entirely. Correctness was never simply the other half of a coin balanced against wrongness — correctness is a single path out of ten thousand possible ones, and every other path is wrong.”

“Equality, democracy.” Ning Yi sighed. “Telling people, ‘You’re all equal’ doesn’t actually solve anything. Letting ordinary people vote by a show of hands on every single matter is a dead end. Ah Gua, plenty of the scholars we’ve come across are fools, but does that mean people who never read books are somehow more right than they are? Not really. At the very start, no one had read books, no one much cared to think things through. Once people start reading and thinking, at first, they’re wrong just as often — plenty of scholars stay stuck on that wrong path forever. But without reading, without thinking at all, you can’t even come close to brushing up against being right. Only once you’ve walked all the way to the end, and finally brushed up against what’s actually right, do you realize just how difficult that road really was.”

“Ah Gua, you’ve made it this far.” Ning Yi reached out and touched her head.

Xigua’s temperament was outwardly tough but inwardly soft; ordinarily she disliked it when Ning Yi treated her like a child this way, but this time she didn’t resist. After a moment, she let out a breath. “…Maitreya really does have it easier.”

“That’s true — religion always gives people half the answer, and never makes them accountable for the rest,” Ning Yi said, tilting his head. “Believe, and you’re right; don’t believe, and you’re wrong. Half and half — what a happy world that must be.”

“But it doesn’t actually solve anything,” Xigua said with a smile.

Ning Yi shook his head, though. “On the ultimate question, religion actually does solve the problem, in its own way. If a person believes blindly from childhood, then even if they spend their entire life as a slave, they can still remain at peace with themselves, start to finish. Living at peace, dying at peace — that, too, can be counted as a kind of fulfillment, a compromise system that human wisdom itself has built… But people inevitably awaken, in the end. Beyond religion, more and more people will still go on seeking a better world, at least on the surface — hoping children can suffer a little less from hunger and cold, hoping fewer people will die for no reason, even though, in even the best possible society, differences in class and accumulated wealth will still arise. All we can hope is that effort and wisdom might, as much as possible, make up for that gap… Ah Gua, even if we spend our entire lives at this, we can only manage to take a step or two forward, laying down the material foundation, letting everyone at least know that the idea of equality for all exists — and even that alone is no small feat.”

They walked on a while further, and Ning Yi said quietly, “Actually, all that stuff back in Hangzhou — I made it up on the spot just to save my own skin…”

Xigua kicked out at him at once, though Ning Yi easily dodged it. The woman planted her hands on her hips, tilted her head back, and declared, “You’re barely in your thirties yourself — I’ll go further than you anyway, just you wait!”

“Sure, sure, sure.” Ning Yi nodded repeatedly. “You can’t beat me — don’t go bringing shame on yourself by trying.”

“We’ll see who brings shame on themselves… ah—!” Before Xigua could finish, she let out a small yelp. Skilled as she was in martial arts, as a wife, she still found herself unable to fully let loose in front of Ning Yi; after a few futile dodges against whatever indescribable move he’d used, she cursed, “You shameless—,” turned, and ran off. Ning Yi stood there with his hands on his hips, laughing heartily, watching Xigua run off into the distance before turning back to call out, “Off to the meeting! Du Sha, you go with him!” and walked on. Only then did he let the exaggerated grin fade from his face.

Du Sha approached slowly, and seeing his young lady’s bright smile, he too wore a faint smile of his own. “The master’s gone to some trouble again, I see.”

“Little Ke went around today telling people I got beaten up by Liu Xiaogua. If I don’t set the record straight, I’ll never hold my head up as head of this household again,” Ning Yi said with a faint smile. “Well, there she goes, running off — old Du, you’re the witness. When it’s time for you to speak up, don’t you dare dodge it.”

“This humble one saw nothing at all…”

The two walked on together. Ning Yi wasn’t surprised by his answer, and sighed. “Ah, the moral decline of the age…”

Quietly lamenting this to himself, Xigua, having run some distance away, finally stopped, thought back over what had just happened, and burst out laughing — before letting out a complicated sigh of her own.

The path of wisdom only ever grows narrower…

But beyond it, in the end, there is no other path at all.

Thinking this, she found the afternoon sky pleasant, the mountain wind and drifting clouds carrying a pleasant autumn crispness. Continuing on, she soon arrived near the conference room of the general political department, exchanged greetings with her deputy, and picked up her files and documents. By the time the meeting began, her husband had already arrived, his expression grave and composed as he greeted the assembled attendees. This session concerned the handling of several major disciplinary violations from the campaign outside the mountains, and many from the military, the military police, the political department, and the general staff had all come. Once the meeting began, Xigua stole a glance at Ning Yi from the side — he sat there calmly, listening to the speakers, his expression carrying its own natural gravity. Utterly different from the easy, playful man she’d just been walking with on the mountain.

Once everyone had finished voicing their views, Ning Yi sat silently in his seat for a long while before finally sweeping his gaze across the room and beginning to lay into them.

Mm — the way he tore into people, Xigua thought, really was remarkably handsome, remarkably impressive… That was exactly what crossed her mind in that moment.

Beginning in Hangzhou, this marked the fifteenth year since they had first met. The wind of passing years swept by, just outside the window, over the mountains.