“…then what?”

“Then, well, the islanders were defeated…”

“Er…”

Ning Yi smiled and swung his arm. “…After the islanders were defeated, don’t forget the West still had its share of villains of one kind or another. Their development in the science of things had already reached an extremely formidable height, while China… three thousand years of lingering Confucian residue, a hundred years of crippling weakness, meant we were still a huge distance behind them in the science of things. Just as I said before—fall behind, and you get beaten. They’d still be hanging around at your doorstep every day, threatening you, demanding you hand over this benefit, that benefit.”

“But by then, our side already had a will stronger than anything, a spiritual force capable of twisting the whole of China into a single rope. At that time, even if your own stomach was empty and the last steamed bun was in your hand, you’d think of giving it to your comrade-in-arms—imagine, that was the kind of army that emerged then. And the West’s science of things was a hundred years ahead of what we have now—iron-built aircraft flying through the sky, iron-built war machines rolling across the ground, and the bombs they dropped could level an entire street with a single blast…”

“China… and the strongest nation of the West went to war…”

Ning Yi gazed into the night and paused briefly. Xigua frowned. “Did they lose?”

“No, that was… the last time in human history that human beings used sheer spiritual force to forcibly fill in the gulf of material disparity. They drove back the West. It was only then, after a hundred and twenty years of being beaten, that China was finally taken seriously by the many Western nations, and won for itself a stable space to develop.”

They walked on, and Ning Yi waved a hand. Xigua laughed. “And then what—unify the world, rule for a thousand generations?”

“And then…” Ning Yi laughed too. “And then, they kept moving forward. They’d been through too much humiliation, beaten down for over a hundred years, and it was only at this point that they finally found a method: they saw that by educating and remolding every single person, making everyone noble, making everyone care about others, they could actually achieve such a great feat. Xigua, if it were you, what would you do?”

Xigua looked at him.

“They kept going deeper. Having used spiritual will to fill in the material foundation, they then wanted to complete the spiritual transformation of the entire society first, even while material conditions were still insufficient—to leap directly over the material obstacle and step straight into the final Great Unity society.”

“Spiritual transformation… transform how?”

“Through classroom education, and practical education.”

“…” Xigua couldn’t quite work this out for a moment. Ning Yi was gazing ahead, and then went on.

“…They finally arrived at one conclusion: with the material foundation still insufficient, humanity finds it hard to cross that spiritual gulf. To achieve true equality for all, with everyone’s spirit made supremely noble, a true Great Unity—they first had to go back and build up the material foundation, the educational foundation, the cultural foundation…”

Having said this, Ning Yi finally fell silent. Xigua thought for a moment. “What does spiritual nobility have to do with material conditions?”

“It’s like this—if I’ve eaten my fill, I’ll choose to do a good deed, want to be a good person. If I can’t even fill my own stomach, I probably won’t have the heart to be good.”

“So it’s the old saying—poverty breeds cunning, wealth grows a conscience. Is that kind of ‘good person’ really a good person at all?”

“What is a ‘real’ good person, Xigua? Where is there such a thing as a truly good person? A person is just a person—they have their own desires, their own weaknesses. It’s desire that produces need, and need that drove the creation of the world we have today. It’s just that since everyone lives in this world together, some desires end up harming others, and we call that wrong; some desires benefit most people, and we call that an ideal. If you’re lazy and greedy and just want to become an official for the sake of it, that’s desire. If you study hard, work hard, strive to better yourself, and want to become an official to do good, that’s an ideal.”

Ning Yi smiled. “Material conditions can’t truly turn someone into a good person, but they can solve part of the problem—and solving more of it is, of course, better than solving less. Education can also solve part of the problem, so education has to be raised up too. And then, they threw out three thousand-odd years of old culture and had to build their own new one—each of these things solves part of the problem. Once everything is finally in place, then perhaps someday in the future, they might earn the right to take up the challenge of that ultimate goal once more…”

“…Their previous attempt at the challenge.” Xigua seemed on the verge of saying something, then held back. “How did they arrive at this conclusion? What happened to their challenge?”

“Xigua, a story is just a story.” Ning Yi reached out and stroked her head. “The real question is, across all these stages I saw, what was the true underlying law driving each and every transformation? From the Westernization Movement, to the Reform Movement, the old warlords, the new warlords, to the elite government and then to the people’s government—what, at the core, ran through all of it?” He paused. “The core of it all is called social consensus—or you could call it, the collective subconscious.”

“This social consensus isn’t some surface-level agreement—it’s what you get when you add together the views of everyone in that society: the scholars weighted a bit more, the officials weighted even more, the wretched peasants weighted a little less. Add up everyone’s view of the world, and you arrive at an average—and that average determines the shape a society takes.”

“Of course, at the beginning, ordinary people without an education made up a very small proportion of that weight, but the further along things went, the more their share could no longer be ignored. Take the Qing—three hundred years in, suddenly beaten down, and everyone begins to think, what do we do now? Someone proposes the Westernization Movement, and everyone thinks, that makes sense—and this change gets accepted by the majority.”

“Being beaten further shows the change wasn’t enough. Once everyone’s thinking, added together, accepts that it wasn’t enough, the Reform Movement follows. At that point, if you’d said, let’s not have an emperor at all… that could never have become social consensus yet.”

“Only once they kept getting beaten did ‘no more emperor’ become social consensus. Then old warlords became the consensus. Warlords needing to learn foreign ideas and technology gradually became the consensus too. Once it was clear our cultural system was fundamentally incompatible with the science of things, and after being beaten for so long, gradually smashing that cultural system also became the consensus. Once the elite government was established, made up of outstanding men who’d opened their eyes to the world and taken office, the social consensus of the time felt, well, this should be enough—so their constant grabbing for themselves also became a kind of consensus.”

“By the time the elite political system’s whole setup could no longer be sustained, and the people could no longer make a living, everyone arrived at a consensus: they needed to be even more outstanding, even more incorruptible, even stricter with themselves… That kind of social consensus deeply shapes a certain group of people—they come to genuinely believe these ideas in their hearts, and only then can they do the things they do, only then can they, even while starving themselves, give their one steamed bun to someone else. This is the social consensus that a hundred years of humiliation finally forged—something everyone, deep in their hearts, felt was simply right.”

“After a hundred and twenty years, the enemy was finally defeated, the outside threat was gone, and this consensus continued for a while by sheer inertia. But at that point, people still didn’t have much to eat. If your stomach is empty and there’s a steamed bun in front of you, do you give it to your comrade, or take it home to your own children?”

“When a question like that falls on the shoulders of tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people, you find that in the hardest of times, everyone feels that kind of ‘nobility’ is necessary. Once conditions improve a little, some people start to feel it’s no longer quite so necessary. If you still want to maintain that nobility, what do you do? Perhaps you can make up part of the difference through better material conditions, better education, better culture.”

“Xigua, forget about the peasants out there for today—just think about the scholars, the officials around you, my own students. Ask yourself, what is today’s social consensus? Equality for all? The vast majority of people in this society haven’t even formed a consensus around something as basic as ‘those who farm the land should be taught to read.’ Even the consensus of ‘no more emperor’—I’ve already leapt several steps ahead of that myself—let alone a consensus like the one Old Ox Head needs.”

“Without that kind of consensus, Chen Shanjun has no way to truly shape officials of that caliber. It’s the same as building up the court system within the Huaxia Army—we lay down the statutes, and through rigorous procedure, we make everyone act according to those statutes. When a problem arises in society, rich or poor, everyone faces the same statutes and the same procedures—that gets us as close to equal as we reasonably can. But where is the social consensus for it? The poor can’t make sense of statutes that feel so cold and impersonal; what they long for is a judgment handed down by some benevolent, all-wise magistrate. So even with repeated instruction and endless training sessions, the circuit-riding law enforcement teams sent out into the field still, more often than not, feel the urge to play the role of that benevolent magistrate themselves—setting the statutes aside, either coming down harder than the rules call for, or letting things slide.”

“There’s nothing wrong with judging by your own conscience.” Xigua muttered.

“It’s not exactly wrong, either—it just has to be worked out and refined slowly, over time.” Ning Yi smiled, then swept a hand across the whole night sky. “This world, with all its countless people—it may look like they have nothing to do with it, like the world has nothing to do with them, but in the end, the shape the whole world takes is still bound up with them. The shape a society’s political system takes can run one step ahead, or one step behind, but it’s very hard for it to make some enormous leap forward.”

“It’s the same with holding office—everyone will say out loud that they despise corrupt officials, but if your own uncle became an official, would you think he should be absolutely incorruptible, or would you think it only natural that he help out the family a bit? Whatever’s in the mass of people’s heads is what decides the shape of the world. Suppose today equality for all took a huge leap forward—if you’re an ordinary commoner and something happens to you, is your first instinct to look for connections to help you out, or to think of letting the judicial authorities handle it strictly by the book? The shape of society hovers around the average of all these instincts.”

“I can hold hundreds of meetings a year within the Huaxia government, exhausting myself telling everyone to stay incorruptible—but those meetings can never truly defeat or reverse the consensus already sitting in people’s hearts. The consensus buried in the collective subconscious of a whole society is something culture decides.”

They turned the corner past a long street and came out into a secluded square, beside which ran a small river, with flower-boats gliding along its surface, casting back shimmering ripples of light. The two of them walked on quietly for a while before Xigua spoke. “No wonder you have Bamboo Records… writing all those things…”

“The only thing that can reach down into the subconscious is culture.” Ning Yi’s smile was complicated, tired. “If you want equality for all, you have to fill people’s lives with stories about equality. If we want to tell people how evil it is for the realm to belong to one family, we have to get them talking about how foolish and incompetent the emperor was. Of course, taken as a whole, it’s not really that simple, but that’s the gist of it… We can drag this society forward one step at a time, but with every step forward, everyone’s hearts need the foundation laid first—only once one step is fully walked can we move to the next, otherwise if you leap too far ahead, they’ll drag you back.”

“Chen Shanjun’s Old Ox Head can bring a great deal of experience about equality… For instance, the reason he was able to redistribute land so roughly at the start was because our troops were there backing him up. What if the Huaxia Army, this towering presence, hadn’t been there as a precondition? Would it have taken much longer, needed much better groundwork in public opinion first? He’s been running Old Ox Head for two years now—starting out talking about equality, and as he runs into one problem after another, he keeps adding to his own theories and justifications. Whether or not he makes it through, all of this will become a cornerstone for the road forward…”

“But if it were up to me, Xigua, you think too highly of me—I couldn’t make it through either, because I’m afraid of the subconscious buried in every single person’s heart. The moment you move too fast, they’ll hold you back—and without even realizing it themselves, they might just end up killing you…”

“You and your endless… what on earth do you spend all day thinking about.”

Xigua reached out and smoothed his brow. Ning Yi laughed. “So you see—I have seen it, it’s not that I haven’t.”

“In this story of yours, achieving Great Unity is probably still a few hundred years off, isn’t it?”

“Probably…”

“Will they face another challenge after that? What would that be like?”

“I can’t see that far ahead…”

“Can’t even make up a story properly all the way through…”

“That’s exactly why it’s real—I really saw it, I’m not just making it up on a whim as I please. Don’t believe it if you don’t want to…”

“You made it sound so convincing, of course I believe it.”

Ning Yi looked at her, and Xigua blinked her big, moist eyes at him.

“Never mind that—by the way, you said earlier the Westernization Movement was disgusting. What was that about?”

“It just is disgusting!”

The two of them bantered on, walking further, until up ahead at a stretch of crossroads the lamps grew bright again and there were passersby on the road. Xigua suddenly caught sight of someone, pulling Ning Yi quietly forward. The couple then ducked behind an alley corner, poking their heads out to peek ahead.

“Who is it?” Ning Yi asked, frowning, leaning on his wife’s shoulder.

“A bad man from the city—look, that old man, his name’s Guan Shanhai, he’s got a woman with him… Big Demoness Y… he’s the one who’s been badmouthing us in the newspapers lately.”

Ning Yi pursed his lips. “That’s enough out of you—have you no shame? There are thousands upon thousands of bad men in Chengdu right now. I’ve opened the gates and let them all in—do you think I pay any of them any mind? If he catches you spying on him like this, he’ll boast about it for the rest of his life. Let’s go, let’s go—I feel embarrassed just looking at him another second.”

“That’s not it.” Xigua waved a hand at him. “This afternoon, Little Ji had Hou Yuanyong look into that old scoundrel—someone mentioned him for some reason, I don’t even know why—and wouldn’t you know it, here he is right in front of us… the old wretch offended my son…”

“Hm?” Ning Yi frowned, leaning behind Xigua to take another look. “Come on, what’s this ‘offended’ business—with that old man’s build, if he’d actually offended our second boy, Little Ji would’ve already chopped him into eight pieces… no, wait, do you really think Little Ji would do something like that?”

“I don’t know.” Xigua said. “Little Ji’s such a good boy.”

“Ugh, forget it—an old man going to a brothel, what’s there to watch? Let’s have someone look into it properly later. Come on, let’s go.”

“We can’t investigate openly. I trained Little Ji myself, he’s sharp as anything—he went and quietly asked Little Hou for help, and if you go making a big fuss about it, he’ll know he’s been found out. He’ll say we’re watching his every move all day.”

“That does make some sense, actually—him going to quietly seek help like that means he’s trying to dodge our watchful eyes, which clearly means there’s something on his conscience… should we really assign someone to follow him?” Even as he said this, he couldn’t help glancing over that way another couple of times, before catching himself and feeling it beneath his dignity. “Let’s go. You won’t see anything worth seeing anyway.”

“I’ll come kill him in the middle of the night. One look and you can tell he’s no good.”

“You can’t do that… let’s go.”

“Don’t pull me, I…”

Riiip—

Over there, under the moonlight, Guan Shanhai led the woman into a large mansion, while on this side, the couple stood in the secluded alley glaring at each other with irritation.

“Who does something like you, tearing your own woman’s clothes off out in public—if someone saw you, would you be proud of yourself…”

“I said let’s go, let’s go—your godlike husband has spoken and you’re treating it like wind past your ear… that old wretch, I’ll have someone catch him later and pour chili water down his throat…”

Xigua reached out with both hands to hit him, and Ning Yi swung back in return; the two of them windmilled their arms at each other, trading blows down the dark alley, all the way back home.

That night, the stars scattered like woven threads across the sky. The low mood Xigua had carried over Old Ox Head had eased somewhat after Ning Yi’s rambling deflections, and once back home, the two of them each looked over some documents. Someone delivered a secret report to Xigua—Qian Luoning’s warning about the situation at Old Ox Head had arrived as well.

Having stumbled its way to this point, no one could say whether Old Ox Head would manage to hold on. But for Ning Yi, everything happening in Chengdu right now was, without question, of great importance—just as he’d said out on the street, thousands upon thousands of enemies were pouring into the city, and though the Huaxia Army seemed to be responding almost mechanically on the surface, countless efforts were quietly underway beneath it.

Xigua turned over everything her husband had told her earlier—however far-fetched it sounded, she knew Ning Yi never spoke of such things without purpose—and she fetched paper and brush, and after hesitating a moment, began writing the words “OO Movement” on the page.

She really didn’t want to write out those first two characters. Ning Yi was too much—even on such a serious matter, he had to make a joke of it.

After “OO Movement” came “Reform Movement,” “old warlords,” “new warlords”… and so on. Relying on memory, she finished writing it all out, then turned over again and again in her mind everything Ning Yi had said about “that world.”

Was this truly the sequence of steps he had seen? Was this road really so long, so difficult? Was it because he never dared lightly consider the possibility of success that he’d let Old Ox Head’s break stand, treated the whole undertaking as merely an experiment?

A hundred-odd years of humiliation and searching, endlessly seeking a way forward, endlessly failing, endlessly summing up experience and revising course—absolute correctness never truly appearing at any single moment. If she herself were placed within such a world, what would that feel like? Inspired, or despairing?

She could still remember the excitement she’d felt, hearing Ning Yi speak those words about equality on the streets of Hangzhou all those years ago; when Ning Yi killed the emperor and rose in rebellion, she’d thought in her heart that the day was no longer far off. Over more than a decade, she had come to feel, with ever-growing clarity, that her husband measured the success of this undertaking on a scale of centuries, of millennia.

How very short a human life is…