Leaving that small village behind, the murmuring sound of the stream still seemed to linger faintly in the ear. Ning Yi, carrying a small lantern, walked with Yun Zhu along the post road they had come by, the carriage following behind.

Looking back, the scattered lights of that small village had already grown thin and faint, blending into the night sky until they could no longer be told apart. Holding her husband’s hand, Yun Zhu could still sense the heaviness weighing on him—brought on by the war reports from the north—but the words she had overheard from that room above did not seem to trouble him at all. Over these years of following her husband through so many twists and turns, Yun Zhu had listened, over the years, to the discussions among Ning Yi, Xigua, and the others regarding what they were working toward, and though she never took part herself, she had come to understand it well enough by now. It was only after they had walked quite a distance that Yun Zhu spoke quietly of the matter.

“That was… Master Zhong of Zhonghe City, wasn’t it? I’ve seen him at the schoolhouse before. I never heard him voice such ideas before, though…”

The lantern, glowing orange, led the way forward. Ahead on the road, two figures carrying baskets on their backs approached—farmers headed somewhere or other. As they drew near, they stepped aside somewhat awkwardly and stopped at the edge of the road to let Ning Yi and the carriage behind him pass. Ning Yi raised the lantern and gestured to them.

The two farmers passed by, and Ning Yi watched their retreating figures walk off into the distant starlight before speaking.

“If this Zhong Hecheng intends to get to know you through the schoolhouse, you should be a bit careful—though it’s not very likely. He has more important work to attend to; he wouldn’t want me to notice him.”

“Hm?” Yun Zhu’s fine brows furrowed slightly. “Is he… here to stir up trouble? I thought he’d simply been influenced by A-Gua.”

Ning Yi smiled. “It wouldn’t be wrong to say he’s been influenced by A-Gua.”

“But you’ve said before that A-Gua is too extreme.”

“The starting point of any way of thinking is always extreme.” Ning Yi smiled at his wife. “What’s wrong with everyone being equal? It’s the direction humanity, across all its thousands of years, ought to be heading toward. If there’s a way to make it happen, of course it would be better to achieve it today. I’m glad they’ve taken up this idea.”

“Liheng isn’t afraid of playing with fire.” Seeing Ning Yi’s composed attitude, Yun Zhu felt some of her worry ease, and she smiled as well, her steps growing lighter. The two of them walked on together in the night wind, Ning Yi tilting his head slightly.

“When you talk to people about equality, the biggest question is always whether the clever and the foolish can be equal, whether the capable and the incapable can be equal, whether the lazy and the diligent can be equal. Of course, in truth, they can’t—not because the principle forbids it, but because it simply can’t be achieved in practice. But where, exactly, does the difference between the capable and the incapable really lie? How does a lazy person come to be lazy, and a diligent one, diligent? Yun Zhu, you teach at the school—you don’t discriminate in your teaching, but a clever child won’t necessarily learn well, and a slow one might work harder still. If you come across someone who seems truly unteachable, would you feel it’s your own failure to teach him, or that no one in the whole world could have taught him?”

“Sometimes I feel like no one in the world could have taught him.” Yun Zhu smiled faintly, then added, “But of course, some teachers, if they put in enough thought, can always find some way to teach a child.”

“In this world, anyone can become better, anyone can become useful. Clever children need one kind of teaching, slow ones need another—everyone has the potential to become someone of worth. Even those towering heroes and sages people look up to started out as some ordinary, foolish child or another. Is there really any difference between Confucius and the farmer who just passed by us? In truth, there isn’t—they simply took different paths and became different people. Is there any difference between Confucius and you, Yun Zhu…”

“There is,” Yun Zhu said quickly.

But Ning Yi had already taken her hand and laughed. “There isn’t. That’s what it means for everyone to be equal.”

“…Every person has an equal possibility. Are the ones who rise above others always the clever ones? I don’t think so, necessarily. Some clever people are too restless in temperament, unable to focus and dig deep, and end up at a disadvantage because of it. A slower person, on the other hand, precisely because he knows his own limitations, often works through hardship toward mastery, and can end up achieving success sooner. So then, could that restless, unfocused clever person ever develop the temperament needed to dig deep and persevere? Of course there’s a way—if he encounters something, some painful lesson, and comes to understand the harm of his own inconstancy, he can make up for that flaw in himself.”

“…The Grand Historian once wrote: the Earl of the West, imprisoned, composed his work; Confucius, in dire straits, wrote his book; Qu Yuan, banished, composed his poetry… Generally speaking, those who accomplished great things in life rarely had smooth, easy paths. In truth, it was precisely these hardships that made them understand their own smallness and helplessness, and drove them to seek out the unchanging truths of this world. The more thoroughly they came to understand the world, the more easily they could master the things within it, and go on to achieve remarkable feats…”

“…Equality among all people is equality of possibility. Everyone, through learning, through self-discipline, through constant reflection and thought, can attain wisdom, and in the end reach equality, becoming an excellent person. But to do nothing at all, to be born wanting equality handed to you, to sit at home with your head in your hands expecting to be equal to those who fight and struggle with everything they have—that’s simply absurd. Of course… if that could actually be achieved, it would be a fine thing too, but it certainly can’t be.”

Ning Yi glanced back. “Those two farmers who just passed by—when we first arrived here, they would have knelt down by the roadside. In their hearts, there’s no notion of equality at all, and that’s not their fault either—for them, inequality is simply the natural order of things, because they’ve lived their entire lives within it. Even if someone among them wanted to become excellent, even if they themselves were clever enough, they have no money, no books, no teachers. That is an injustice done to them. But if someone strives, works hard, fights with everything they have, exhausting themselves entirely to become stronger, while someone else is lazy and gluttonous, shrinks from responsibility when it matters, and forgets what’s right for the sake of small gains—then calling these two kinds of people equal would be the greatest mockery of equality there could be.”

“Planting a sense of equality in the hearts of one generation—that’s one thing. Figuring out how to actually achieve equality is a matter for tens of thousands of years. Someone who is lazy and gluttonous—why did they become that way? What kind of environment did they grow up in, that shaped such a character? Was it because life was too easy for them? So then, for a child who’s had too easy a life, is there some way a teacher could instill in them a real, felt sense of urgency?”

“Someone capable of fighting with everything they have—why are they able to do that? Was it because their family was too poor in the past, or because they simply enjoy the feeling of accomplishment? In truth, when it comes to how to become an excellent person, if someone is willing to read and study, they’ll understand it all by the time they’re thirty—the only difference lies in how to actually put it into practice. Diligence, restraint, effort, seriousness… with the millions upon millions of children born into this world, is there some powerful system that, through education, could draw out the excellence in each of them? When everyone in the world begins to become excellent—that is when true equality among all people will exist.”

Perhaps because he had thought about these matters at great length in his ordinary life, Ning Yi spoke on quietly as they walked. Yun Zhu remained silent, but she could sense the sorrow behind his words. The sacrifice of Zhu Biao and the others—if they truly had been sacrificed—this, perhaps, was the value of that sacrifice, or perhaps, it was simply the thing her husband felt he “had no choice but to do.”

The dirt road curved around a bend, and in the distance, beneath the night sky, the fires of the Huaxia Army’s camp spread out, dotted here and there beneath the glow of the Milky Way above. The couple paused, holding the small lantern, standing beneath a tree by the roadside, watching.

“In this lifetime of ours, I doubt we’ll live to see true equality among all people,” Yun Zhu said with a faint smile, her voice soft.

“That’s a matter for thousands, tens of thousands of years.” Ning Yi looked off into the distance, answering quietly. “Once everyone can read and write, that’s still only the first step. It’s easy enough for principles to sit on people’s lips; getting those principles to truly sink into people’s hearts is far, far harder. A cultural system, a philosophical system, an educational system… it might take a thousand years of exploration before we can glimpse true equality among people.”

“So, even the most extreme forms of equality—as long as people genuinely study them, genuinely discuss them… that’s still a good thing.”

As Ning Yi said this, his voice had grown even softer. He smiled faintly in the darkness, and then Yun Zhu thought she heard him say, “I should thank Li Pin…”

The words sounded almost like the wind. Yun Zhu looked over at him. “…Hm?”

“What?” Ning Yi turned to her with a smile, and before she could speak, he suddenly added, “Oh, right—one day, men and women will become equal too.”

“What?”

“Once men and women are equal, once everyone does similar work and bears similar responsibilities, no one will ever be able to marry several wives the way I have… hmm, and by then, when people dig up the old records, I’ll probably be roundly condemned for it.”

As he said this, he lifted Yun Zhu’s hand to his lips. Yun Zhu laughed until her eyes crinkled shut. “Well, that sounds like it might be rather interesting, actually…”

“…But for this lifetime, at least, let me go on having the better end of the bargain.”

Having said this, he looked off toward the distant camp, and the two of them fell silent for a while, before sitting down together on the grassy slope by the roadside.

The warm, golden light seemed like a cluster of gathered fireflies. Yun Zhu sat there, turning her head to look at Ning Yi beside her—more than ten years had passed since they had first met and fallen in love.

Aside from those first few peaceful years, the more than ten years since had felt, to both of them, like riding a small boat through raging, stormy seas. Even having come from an official family herself, Yun Zhu had never imagined that her life would go on to change in such dramatic ways. Back then, she had lived in a small tower by the river, watching that young scholar run past her doorway every day; they would occasionally exchange a few quiet greetings, and she had imagined she might spend the rest of her life quietly, as his concubine or a woman kept outside his household.

Jiangning had, in the end, become the past, and everything after had turned into an experience beyond even her wildest imaginings back then. That once calm and composed young scholar had gone on to turn the whole world upside down, gradually entering middle age, no longer as consistently composed as he once had been. That small boat had sailed out onto the open sea, into the wind and waves, and he had come to resemble someone locking himself in a life-or-death struggle against those towering swells, meticulous and unyielding even as, deep down, this figure feared by all the world still gritted his teeth and kept his nerves taut, without pause.

Over these years, Yun Zhu had taught at the school, and would occasionally hear Ning Yi and Xigua discuss their ideas about equality; she could understand what they meant, and it would sometimes stir a warmth in her heart. But in this moment, looking at the man sitting beside her, all she could think of was Jiangning, back then. She thought: whatever happens to me, I only hope he can be well—that would be enough.

She reached out, wanting to smooth away the slight furrow in his brow. Ning Yi glanced at her, not hearing the thought in her heart, but simply reached out and pulled her close on instinct. The two of them leaned against each other, sitting for a while in the warm golden light beneath the tree. Down the grassy slope, the sound of the stream flowed on, murmuring just as it had, so many years ago, in Jiangning, when they had sat beneath a tree talking, the Qinhuai River flowing past before their eyes…

Before long, Ning Yi returned to the courtyard and gathered his people to continue the meeting; there was not a moment’s rest. That night, rain began to fall outside.

Time did not pause, not for a moment.

On both banks of the Yellow River, the rain poured down in torrents. Countless things were happening, each one like a single raindrop within that downpour, falling heedlessly, without pause, through the space between heaven and earth, gathering toward the streams, the rivers, and finally the sea.

When they gather together, we can see where they are headed, and the immense destructive power they carry. But in the moment each one falls, no one can attend to the fate of any single drop.

In the Central Plains, the storm of worldly affairs had already been raging for a year.

This was one utterly ordinary drop of rain among them…

Night.

A thunderous roar bellowed on and on; floodwaters swept through a village, tearing down houses. Amid the pouring rain, people cried out, people ran, people scrambled wildly through the pitch-black hills.

Lightning split the night sky, its white light illuminating the scene ahead. Below the hillside, a vast expanse of floodwater surged and roared, swallowing up the places where people had once lived their everyday lives, countless pieces of debris tumbling in the current—roof beams, trees, corpses. Wang Xing stood in the rain, his whole body trembling.

On the hillside, a small number of people who had managed to escape were still crying out in the rain, some shouting the names of family members at the top of their lungs. People climbed upward toward the hilltop while muddy water rushed down below; some fell into the water and were swept away, tumbling downward, their hysterical screams rising up out of the darkness.

The rain continued falling. By daybreak, those who had climbed to the top of the hill could finally see clearly what lay around them. The great river had breached its banks in the night, surging down from upstream, and though word had gotten out in time, only two or three out of every ten who fled the village had survived. Wang Xing dragged out a small sack of dried fish—all that remained of his entire household’s possessions.

The rain didn’t stop. He took shelter beneath a tree, rigging up a small lean-to with branches, his whole body shaking, while more people wailed in the distance or nearby.

Many had lost family members to the floodwaters, and the survivors now faced not only this grief but the far more terrible fact that everything they owned, even their food, had been swept away by the water. Wang Xing shivered inside his little shelter for a long while.

By full daylight, the rain had eased somewhat, and the surviving villagers gathered together. Then something strange happened.

They saw Wang Xing approaching, carrying that sack of dried fish, and in his other hand, half a cooking pot from who knew where. “This is all that’s left at my place. It’ll spoil if it sits out in the rain much longer—let’s all cook it up and eat it together.”

Wang Xing had ordinarily been known throughout the village as the stingiest, most slippery good-for-nothing there was—thin-faced and rat-eyed, lazy and cowardly, always ducking for cover when anything serious happened, and shameless in grabbing whatever small advantage came his way. He lived alone, with no family, and even at thirty he had never managed to take a wife. But at this moment, his expression was entirely different—he was actually handing out the last of his food to others, which startled everyone considerably.

Of course, in the midst of such a sudden calamity, whatever confusion people felt over this was set aside for the moment, and everyone got a fire going, split up the dried fish, and ate it to fill their stomachs. While the fish was being divided up, however, the survivors in the village noticed that Wang Xing himself had gone missing. Not long after, a child, coming around a large boulder behind the hill, witnessed something strange as well.

Wang Xing was crouched behind the rock, digging at something with a shard of stone. He then pulled out a long object wrapped in oilcloth, unwrapped it, and inside was a blade.

Rain was still falling from the sky at that moment; Wang Xing, having been soaked through all night in the storm, his hair plastered to his face, looked like some soul-shattered, half-drowned dog. Combined with his already unattractive features, the whole scene was enough to send a chill down anyone’s spine.

The child, badly frightened, told the adults in the village about it not long after. The adults were startled too—some said maybe, having lost everything, this man was preparing to kill someone and rob them; others said Wang Xing was far too timid to ever pick up a blade, and the child must have seen wrong. After a search turned up nothing, this ne’er-do-well of the village was never seen again.

Even as they searched all around for him, Wang Xing was already walking down a mountain path, far from that place.

In truth, the storms of the Central Plains had been falling for more than ten years now.

From the first Jurchen invasion south, through the establishment of the puppet Qi regime, and up to the present day, life had never once been good. The Yellow River had, since ancient times, been called the Mother River, but the people living along its banks both loved and feared it. Even in the most prosperous years of Wu rule, the annual cost of flood control had always been astronomical, and by the time Liu Yu came to rule the Central Plains, plundering wealth without restraint, the yearly work of managing the river had already come to a halt.

Over these ten years, the Yellow River’s flooding had grown steadily worse, and beyond the floods themselves, yearly plagues, refugees, conscription, and crushing taxes had already pushed people to the very edge of survival. As for this spring, in the tenth year of Jianshuo, what drew everyone’s attention was the resistance in the land of Jin and the fierce fighting at Daming Prefecture, but long before any of that, the floodwaters looming over everyone’s heads had already come surging in.

Since the Jurchen campaign began in the latter half of the previous year, conscription and crushing levies across the Central Plains had already reached the point of squeezing people to the bone. After Wanyan Chang took over Li Xizhi’s territory, in order to support the eastern route army’s southern campaign, he raised the taxes and levies across the Central Plains several times over, ordering Han officials to handle the matter, with the order that any who failed to collect the required grain would be killed without mercy.

In the first few months, nearly half the administrative officials who had served under Li Xizhi’s old territory were replaced; as for those who had been “replaced,” their heads were already hanging on the city walls for all to see. The grain stores in Han households across the Central Plains had already been completely drained. Officials, as long as they were ruthless enough, generally still had a way to survive.

As for the other path to survival—joining the army for food. When Li Xizhi died, nearly two hundred thousand troops had been scattered; after Wanyan Chang took over military affairs, he wasted no time mobilizing the remaining forces while also launching a fresh round of conscription. During the siege of Daming Prefecture, the Han soldiers on the front line ate like beggars—some died in the fighting, some were scattered—and by the time the city fell, the Han troops in the surrounding area, together with the various garrison “forces” stationed elsewhere, had swelled to as many as four hundred thousand men.

The combat effectiveness of these “forces” might have been low, but all that was really needed of them was the ability to seize grain and money from the common people—part of which they kept for themselves, and part of which was sent south. By the third month, when the walls of Daming Prefecture fell, the region north of the Yellow River had already gone far beyond what the phrase “the people cannot survive” could describe. In many places, cannibalism had already begun to appear.

Wang Xing was a coward.

A few people had once known that he’d been forcibly conscripted, sent to fight at the Battle of Xiaocang River—he’d been afraid, and had fled. After the affair at Xiaocang River had settled down, he’d quietly slipped back home. He had still been young when he was taken for a soldier, and over the years, with the times so chaotic and the village’s people either dead or scattered, fewer and fewer people remained who could confirm any of this. He had come back here and lived out his days, cowardly and unremarkable.

Of course, no one knew that he had once been captured by the Huaxia Army and taken to the southwest.

He had been far too afraid of dying. Taken to the southwest, after some time of indoctrination, he found that even the Huaxia Army’s life was far from easy—strict military discipline, and in that early period, they too had gone hungry. Wang Xing couldn’t bear it, and eventually lied his way out, claiming he had an elderly mother at home to care for, and was released.

This long back-and-forth journey, spanning thousands of li, had only further worn away whatever courage Wang Xing might once have had. This world was simply too terrifying; he didn’t want to die—didn’t want to be the one charging out in front, suddenly dead for nothing.

Over these years, life had been extraordinarily difficult. This year, soldiers collecting grain had burst into his house and beaten him half to death; he had genuinely thought he was going to die, but had slowly pulled through even that. The land of Jin was still fighting, Daming Prefecture was still fighting—those brave, courageous men, heroes at heart, were still resisting.

He couldn’t become a man like that; neither could most people—that was simply human nature. This was what Wang Xing told himself, and as long as there were people like that, like the Huaxia Army, still fighting on without end, this world, in the end, would never truly perish.

During his time with the Huaxia Army, there was at least one thing he had come to remember: sooner or later, people would drive the Jurchens out.

When that day came, good days would finally arrive.

But I’m no hero… I’m just afraid to die, don’t want to die out in front.

This was what he kept telling himself.

Then came that day in the fourth month—the river had flooded, and by luck he’d managed to catch some fish, which he took into the city to trade for a few things. There, he suddenly heard the Jurchens’ proclamation.

Daming Prefecture had fallen. The Black Banner Army had been defeated.

Something inside him suddenly collapsed.

He waited two days in the city and watched the convoy escorting the captured soldiers of the Black Banner Army and the Light and Might Army enter the city—some of the prisoners missing limbs, some gravely wounded and near death—yet Wang Xing could recognize them clearly for what they were: Huaxia Army soldiers.

Not long after, they were all executed on the killing ground, heads rolling one after another.

In the Jurchen proclamations, the Light and Might Army and the Huaxia Army had been utterly wiped out.

No matter how hard life became, there would always be some people who kept living.

Some wanted to live with real conviction, some wanted to live like proper human beings, some just wanted to bend without ever kneeling entirely… in the end, there would always be someone willing to charge out in front.

It doesn’t matter about me, I’m just afraid to die, even if I kneel, it doesn’t matter—I’m not like them, after all, they weren’t as afraid to die as I am… being this afraid, well, there’s nothing I can do about that either. This was what went through Wang Xing’s mind.

The Wu dynasty had been defeated; the various righteous armies that had risen up before had, one by one, faded away into silence. Then there had been the Light and Might Army, the Prince of Jin—and even after the Light and Might Army and the land of Jin had fallen, at least there had still been the Black Banner. But now even that was gone… and still, we haven’t yet defeated the Jurchens.

The lid was coming down over the Central Plains. No one would rise up to resist anymore. Back in the village, something inside Wang Xing gradually died as well. A couple of days later, the floodwaters came in the night, and Wang Xing, his whole body ice-cold, shook uncontrollably without pause. In truth, from the very moment he’d witnessed that beheading in the city, he had already understood in his heart: there was no way out left.

He kept a small portion of the dried fish for himself and gave the rest away to the villagers, then dug up the rusted blade he had buried. Two days later, a Jurchen soldier out seizing grain was killed on a mountain road several dozen li from the village.

Carrying the small amount of grain he had taken from the man he’d killed, Wang Xing found a small raft, and on a day when the sky had cleared somewhat, set out to cross the river against the wind and waves. He had heard that the Huaxia Army was still fighting on at Xuzhou.

Having grown up on the banks of the Yellow River, he had known since childhood that crossing the river under such conditions meant a fifty-fifty chance of death. But it didn’t matter—those who had resisted were already dead.

Even the most cowardly of men now had no way out left.

The rain over the Central Plains was still falling.

Countless things were slowly fermenting within that downpour…

At the same time, under Wanyan Chang’s command, an army of over two hundred thousand men began advancing toward Liangshan Marsh to lay siege to it. After the destruction of the Light and Might Army and the Huaxia Army, several tens of thousands of family members still remained there, living on the islands within the marsh. Guarding them now were barely more than two thousand troops…