“Old fellow, you’re a senior of the martial world, esteemed and venerable—be careful he calls Sect Master Lin over to smash your platform…”
“If the fat man really dares come, even if neither you nor I lift a hand, he still has no chance of walking out of the southwest alive. Old Qin and Chen Fan, either one alone, would be enough to deal with him.”
The night was gentle, the carriage rolling slowly through the streets of Chengdu. Ning Yi and Xigua watched the night and chatted quietly.
“Liheng, tell me—after that defeat in Jin territory, what has the fat bastard actually been up to?”
“Zhan Wu wrote back saying that Lin Echan took on a disciple. These past two years he hasn’t managed sect affairs at all, let the congregation go, and has focused entirely on raising the child. Come to think of it, this fat man spent his whole life talking big about ambition and desire, shameless in front of others—now it seems he’s finally seen through some of it, admitting he only ever had skill in martial arts, and that he’s getting old, so he’s pinned his hopes on the next generation.” Ning Yi smiled faintly. “Actually, according to Zhan Wu, Lou Shuwan considered inviting him to join Jin territory’s delegation, to come to the southwest this time and give us a show of force right out of the gate.”
“…Good idea.” Xigua thought it over, knocking a fist into his palm. “Why didn’t it happen?”
“From a political standpoint, if it had worked, it would certainly have been interesting. Back then the fat man tried to take advantage of Lou Shuwan, colluding to cook up that whole ‘Descended Mysterious Maiden’ business, and ended up thoroughly played and buried by her instead. The two of them are tangled in a real grudge because of it—the fat man never risked killing her, but that doesn’t mean he has no wish to. If they could use this occasion to make him step down off his high horse, and even get him to help fight for Jin territory in the ring, then Lou Shuwan could rightly call herself the biggest winner…”
Xigua laughed. “If Lin Echan and that Shi Jin came to the southwest together, this ring match would actually be worth watching. The people at Bamboo Records would be thrilled.”
Ning Yi laughed too. “It would be interesting, no doubt. The only problem is—Old Qin’s blood debt, my father-in-law’s blood debt, Fang Qifo and the others’ blood debt… you, me, Shaoqian, Chen Fan… the moment he passes Sword Gate Pass, he’s dead. Even if he genuinely wanted to come to Chengdu, there’s no banner he could fight under that would work.”
As he said this, a flash of coldness passed through his eyes. The long-standing feud with Lin Echan was neither small nor terribly large. For Ning Yi personally, the deepest of it was simply that Lin Echan had killed Old Qin—but on a broader level, Lin Echan had merely been a blade in someone else’s hand.
After the regicide, the grievances at the level of the martial underworld had gradually diminished. Toward Lin Echan, Ning Yi wouldn’t hesitate to kill him if the chance arose, but he held no great urge to actively hunt him down either. Truly killing a grandmaster of such deep skill would cost much and yield little, and if the man found a sliver of a chance to escape, it could turn into an endless blood feud—which wouldn’t necessarily be safe for Ning Yi’s side either.
Over more than a decade, the two sides had maintained exactly this kind of tacit understanding. However much he craved a name for himself, Lin Echan would never set foot within the Huaxia Army’s territory; and although Ning Yi had once met him face to face in Jin territory, he hadn’t insisted on killing him there either. But the moment Lin Echan wanted to enter the southwest, that unspoken understanding would break. The fat man had offended the entire upper leadership of the Huaxia Army—setting aside the old grudges, if a man like that were let into Chengdu, Xigua, Ning Yi, and the others certainly weren’t afraid of him, but if he went berserk, who could guarantee the safety of everyone’s family?
Ning Yi followed the rules when it came to the bigger picture, but where the safety of his family was concerned, there were no rules to speak of at all. Back at Qingmu Stronghold, Lin Echan and Hongti had fought what was, all things considered, a fair duel—yet the moment he suspected Hongti had been injured, he’d been ready to mobilize everyone to gang up and beat the fat man down. If Hongti hadn’t turned out fine and defused the situation, once he’d made his move he might well have killed every witness present in one go—and in that chaos, Lou Shuwan herself had originally been one of the onlookers.
“…Since both sides mean to do business, there’s no need to throw in such a huge variable over a moment’s pride. Lou Shuwan probably just wanted to give Zhan Wu a scare—not going through with it shows she’s grown more mature… Purely as a spectacle, of course I’d love to see you, Hongti, Chen Fan, Lin Echan, and Shi Jin all thrown together in a brawl, but matters like that… let’s wait until the world is at peace, and see how Ning Ji and that generation perform. Lin Echan’s disciple is supposed to be quite good—watching how resolute Little Ji’s been these past two years, I suspect he’s set his heart on the path of martial cultivation too…”
He paused. “Good to have someone at home who could inherit both our legacies, don’t you think…”
Xigua nodded. “Mostly it’ll depend on me. You and Tanzi together would only just about match me.”
“Hm? What kind of logic is that?”
“You and I together would only just about match Tanzi.”
“…Xigua, that’s a rather vicious thing to say.”
The carriage clattered along through the dim light and shadow of the nighttime city, the husband and wife trading easy banter. Ning Yi looked at Xigua’s smiling profile beside the carriage window and seemed on the verge of saying something, then held back.
Xigua must have felt his gaze, for she turned her head. “What is it?”
Ning Yi looked at her. “There’s word from Old Ox Head’s side. Not good.” He drew a letter from inside his robe and handed it over. Xigua took it, sighing. “It’s not as if this is the first day it’s been like this…” Only then did she start reading, brow furrowing.
The carriage fell quiet inside. Ning Yi’s gaze on his wife was warm. That he’d come along to join Lu Liutong’s gathering out of curiosity about the martial underworld was, in the end, only secondary.
Nearly two years ago now, the Old Ox Head incident had seen Chen Shanjun and Li Ximing break away from here with over a thousand Huaxia Army soldiers, occupying the northwest corner of the Chengdu Plain to develop independently. Chen Shanjun, his heart set on the common people, aimed at a Great Unity world of equalized means of production. With the backing of his thousand-plus troops, he annexed several nearby counties and towns and began seizing land from local tyrants to redistribute it, collectivizing land and other major means of production for unified reallocation.
The whole process of reclaiming land was anything but gentle. Among the great landlords and rich peasants who held land at the time, some could certainly be shown to have committed clear wrongs, but it was impossible that all of them were bad people. Chen Shanjun started with the landlords whose misdeeds could be proven, punishing them severely and stripping their property, then spent three months persistently persuading and laying groundwork, finally completing the whole process with the support of his elite troops.
Bloody incidents inevitably occurred along the way, but Chen Shanjun firmly believed this was a necessary process. For their part, the Huaxia Army soldiers who’d followed him there had mostly come to deeply understand the importance of equal means of production, and under Chen Shanjun’s daily lead-by-example speeches, resistance across the entire territory was eventually suppressed. Naturally, some landlords and rich peasants, unpersuaded but willing to leave, packed up their households and moved into Huaxia Army territory instead—Chen Shanjun had no intention of hunting down to the last man those who wouldn’t be convinced but were willing to go.
So starting last spring, Chen Shanjun and the others created the world’s first “People’s Commune” at Old Ox Head. Built on a force of nearly two thousand armed men governing a population of roughly forty thousand, with all means of production placed under government control, land was equalized, and draft oxen along with iron farming tools that Chen Shanjun had purchased through his Huaxia Army connections were collectively distributed. Of course, the seeds of trouble were present from the very start.
Farm tools varied in quality, and land came in different grades. Chen Shanjun had subdued the region by relying on his army, and that same army became, from the outset, an invisible privileged class—not that Chen Shanjun was blind to these problems; Ning Yi himself had warned him about them from early on.
Given the small scale of the territory, Chen Shanjun led by personal example, opening study sessions every day to preach to everyone about the meaning of equality and the vision of Great Unity. Among the more zealous activists around him, he selected an elite group to form an internal inspection corps, hoping they’d become more morally conscious guardians of egalitarian thinking. Though this ended up creating yet another, higher tier of privilege, in those early days of building the organization, Chen Shanjun had no choice but to rely on these “more conscious” people to get things done.
Over more than a decade, the Huaxia Army’s internal exploration of “equality” had never been anywhere near complete, and the doubts and frictions within Old Ox Head never ceased from the very beginning. During this period the Huaxia Army had first been preparing for war, then formally entered combat with the Jurchen Western Route Army, and had paid little attention to the situation at Old Ox Head—but Qian Luoning and others already stationed there had been continuously observing how things developed.
Struggles over interests inevitably surfaced in political form. After Chen Shanjun formed the internal inspection corps from the activists, the soldiers left out of it raised objections, and friction broke out. People began bringing up the bloody incidents from the land redistribution, arguing that Chen Shanjun’s methods had been wrong. At the same time, another strand of doubt emerged: with the Jurchen Western Route Army’s southern invasion imminent, the split they themselves had caused now looked, in hindsight, extremely foolish.
Under this pressure, Chen Shanjun had at one point sent a formal request to the Huaxia Army offering to send troops to help in the fighting—which Ning Yi, naturally, had declined.
The joy of land redistribution had come in the first half of last year, but by the second half, all sorts of problems had begun surfacing like an undercurrent rising to the top. Corruption started appearing among a number of army members, and similar signs emerged within the inspection corps as well—”signs,” because establishing guilt had grown increasingly vague and difficult, cliques of mutual protection gradually formed, and last September, one investigation even resulted in an entire farming family being murdered to silence them. Arguments and mutual accusations began breaking out at the highest-level meetings.
Chen Shanjun and Li Ximing worked together to launch two internal purges, though it was hard to say how effective either really was. They could enforce land equalization with a heavy hand, but a genuine cleansing of the army’s own ranks proved far harder to achieve. Across the two purges, a handful of higher-ups were charged and expelled, but the underlying hazards were never eliminated.
Though a bright path had been set from the very start, Old Ox Head’s progress had been an uphill struggle from day one, and by early this year the meeting table was seeing arguments almost daily. The leadership’s grip on the spring planting had already begun to slip, and once the Huaxia Army won its great victory in the southwest campaign, more and more voices within Old Ox Head began invoking Ning Yi’s name, saying they shouldn’t have ignored Master Ning’s warnings—that equalizing the means of production here had simply come before its proper time.
On the surface, everyone at Old Ox Head still spoke in bright, hopeful terms, but what that was actually covering up was an imbalance that had already erupted in private. With internal oversight and purges not strict enough, corruption and the appropriation of interests had grown quite severe, and the specific justifications for it all had naturally grown more and more tangled. To meet this crisis, Chen Shanjun might well launch an even harsher and more thorough purge, and everyone else, naturally, had picked up their own weapons in response, beginning to lay the blame on Chen Shanjun.
In this atmosphere of drawn swords and mounting chaos, Li Ximing—acting as the “inside man”—seemed to have sensed something amiss, and so had written to Ning Yi to warn him about the state of affairs at Old Ox Head.
In truth, Ning Yi had from the very start only ever regarded Old Ox Head as an experimental field—this kind of grand ideal was bound to face a difficult birth, entirely as expected. But to Xigua, the matter carried a different weight altogether.
He looked toward the woman’s figure by the carriage window, bent over the letter.
Time flowed like water, and it had made his wife’s profile beside him more mature, yet the way her brow furrowed still carried that same innocence and stubbornness from years ago. Over the years, Ning Yi knew that what she carried closest to her heart was that idea of “equality.” The experiment at Old Ox Head had, in fact, come about through her own persistence and guidance—but she herself had never gone there in person, and over this past year and more, learning of all the stumbles and setbacks from afar, all sorts of anxieties had naturally taken root in her heart.
“Maybe it would be better this way…”
“Maybe that wouldn’t have happened…”
On the rare occasions she brought up Old Ox Head with Ning Yi, such remarks were about as far as Xigua ever went. During the earlier fighting against the Jurchens, the two of them had rarely been together, and in their brief meetings she had always held herself back on the subject, never saying too much.
By now the southwestern campaign had been settled. Though the city of Chengdu remained in an uproar, Ning Yi had already laid out his plans for everything. He could afford, for once, to step outside all that and turn his attention to his wife’s ideals.
“It’s getting messier and messier…” By the light of lamp and moon, Xigua read the letter for a long while, brow furrowed, before finally finishing it. After a moment she let out a long sigh. “…Liheng, tell me—can they actually pull through this time?”
“If we weren’t standing right beside them, they wouldn’t have made it past the very first crisis.” Ning Yi shook his head. “Nominally they broke away, but in practice they’re still a minor power within the bounds of the southwest, and plenty of the people there still hold you and me in some regard. So since they’ve made it through the first two crises, it’s hard to say about this one either… Maybe Chen Shanjun will turn ruthless enough to find some more mature way to solve the problem.”
Xigua thought for a moment. “…Would it have been better, in the end, if we’d driven them out completely from the start?”
“An immature system, put through even crueler internal struggle, will only collapse that much sooner. Things at this early stage are always like that…”
“—You’ve never actually seen it for yourself!”
Xigua’s brow knotted, and she raised her voice at Ning Yi, then drew a few deep breaths. “You always say that, always say that… you’ve never actually seen it for yourself…”
This time, perhaps because the war in the southwest had finally ended, she allowed herself to be angry about it, finally letting it break out in front of Ning Yi. Ning Yi wasn’t offended by it. He glanced out of the carriage. “You’re right… there aren’t many people around here—shall we get out and walk a bit?”
“…Mm.”
Xigua nodded, and the two of them had the carriage stopped. When they got out, it was in a quiet, little-traveled lane within the city. Along the road were a few lit shops and homes, but most of the pedestrians were local residents, and children ran about laughing and playing in the alleys. They walked on for a while, and Ning Yi said, “Doesn’t this feel a bit like that night in Hangzhou?”
“That night in Hangzhou there was a curfew—there was no one around!” Xigua said.
Ning Yi drew closer and took her hand. Two children playing nearby caught sight of the hand-holding couple and drew back with startled, faintly bashful sounds. Xigua, in a blue floral-print dress, watched the children and smiled—she was a girl from the mountains of Miao territory, bold in love and hate, generous by nature, and after more than ten years of marriage she carried about her an easy, composed grace all her own.
“I think about it sometimes.” Ning Yi walked on hand in hand with her. “Back in Hangzhou, how old were you then—so set on wanting to be a shepherdess, wanting everyone under heaven to be able to grab that steamed bun. If things had gone differently, would those convictions of yours still be this firm today?”
“Hm?” Xigua turned to look at him.
“Back then on the streets of Hangzhou, it was me who told you about Great Unity under heaven, about everyone being equal. Classmate Xigua—is there some chance that it’s precisely because I told you all that, that you’ve held onto it this firmly for all these years? Thinking about it this way, it feels like this ideal has been ours together all along, doesn’t it…”
His words were warm, and hearing them, the resistance that had been in Xigua’s expression softened, her gaze narrowing gradually with a smile. “But didn’t you say you were lying to me back then…”
“Still the same answer—there was some lying involved at the time, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t believe it myself.” Ning Yi laughed. “Thinking back on it, I once asked Tanzi what she wanted, so I could get it for her, tie it up in a bow and hand it over. She said she wanted peace under heaven… Peace under heaven, I can deliver. Only your wish—we won’t get there in this lifetime…”
“It’s Chen Shanjun who won’t get there.” Xigua looked at him, a touch of resentment in her eyes. “Sometimes I think, if you were the one doing it, would things turn out differently—but you’ve never once tried it yourself, and you just keep saying, it’s bound to turn out that way… I know, of course, that defeating the Jurchens first is the priority for the Huaxia Army, that you couldn’t afford to go do what Chen Shanjun did, that you had to play it safe, but… you really have never seen it, have you…”
“What if…” Ning Yi let out a soft sigh. “What if… I had?”