It is a summer night in Jiangzhou.
After several bouts of heavy rain, the rainy season fades away to herald the long-awaited arrival of midsummer. The flood has driven both Great Chen’s ruler and its subjects to utter exhaustion — too many people will need to be fed. Once it starts getting hot, the ground outside the city is littered with bodies of pigs, horses, cows, and dogs … even that of people, and there are dead fishes washed up by the flooded river, run aground on the shore, and those that haven’t been cleaned up in time begin to stink as soon as it grows hot.
That being the case, pestilence is probably going to start spreading again. Everyone in the city is busy cleaning up after the bodies of the dead who drowned during the flood, with the Black Armours rushing all over the city day in and day out. Petitions for help come from all over from each of the disaster zones, constantly arriving in Jiangzhou, going through sorting and annotation by the Office of the Secretariat before they’re delivered to the palace, where they’re presented to Li Yanqiu to await the emperor’s official reply.
The bodyguards serving by Li Yanqiu’s side have also been changed to four shifts of Black Armours taking turns to protect the emperor. Every hour there are reports from soldiers entering the palace. Late at night, a eunuch announces that Xie You is here to see him.
Li Yanqiu gives the order to let him in, and Xie You comes in dressed in casual clothing to stand inside the imperial study. Xie You doesn’t make a sound, and Li Yanqiu isn’t speaking either; a ruler and his subject thus remain silent on his own, the only sound in the room being the turning of memorial pages.
A long time passes before Li Yanqiu sets the work in his hands down on the desk, and he looks up from the pile of memorials.
“What is the crown prince doing?” Li Yanqiu asks.
“Evaluating memorials. Lately, for some reason, he has been rather diligent when it comes to dealing with military affairs.”
A Black Armours bodyguard carries in a stack of annotated memorials from the Eastern Palace. Over the past several days, Cai Yan has taken on the day-to-day governmental paperwork by his own volition, while Li Yanqiu has taken charge of commenting on those memorials related to the flooding. The Office of the Secretariat has already screened them, but Li Yanqiu will still occasionally do a spot check of the memorials that Cai Yan has already gone over.
Li Yanqiu flips open one of them, his gaze falling on the very last line of comment.
“I recall that when the crown prince first returned to court, he had written several letters,” Li Yanqiu says. “One of them was a eulogy for the late emperor that he presented to the Imperial Ancestral Temple. Xie You, bring it to me so I can take a look at it.”
Xie You’s brows are locked in a deep frown, but he doesn’t ask any extraneous questions before ordering one of his underlings to retrieve it. Soon, a guard hands a roll of yellow silk to Xie You, and Xie You presents it to Li Yanqiu with both hands.
Li Yanqiu spreads the yellow silk open, holding down one edge with the jade arc that’s been sitting on the desk, his eyes scanning each line one by one until they finally rest on the character “Li” of “Li family’s empire”.
The Eastern Palace is lit as bright as day. Sleepy and nodding off, Cai Yan, with his forehead resting in his hand, nearly falls right over onto a memorial.
“Your Majesty?” Feng Duo says.
“What time is it?”
“It’s already midnight. Your Majesty, why don’t you get some sleep? It won’t be long before you’ll have to get ready for the morning assembly.”2
“I won’t be able to sleep for long. Wuluohou Mu.”
From his seat nearby, Lang Junxia acknowledges Cai Yan with a sound at the mention of his name.
“Go bring me my jade arc. There’s going to be an assembly soon.”
Lang Junxia gets up and leaves. The room is quiet for a little while. Feng Duo takes a hot towel and wipes Cai Yan’s hands down with it.
“How are things?” Cai Yan whispers.
“Three units have already been sent.” Feng Duo whispers back just as quietly, “forty-eight men altogether, with Baili, Linghu, and Nangong leading them. By my estimation, they’ll arrive in Ye in a month, and they’ll be keeping themselves hidden beneath Ochre Mountain.”
The Shadow Guard was established by the founding emperor, and every iteration of it has been made up of exactly one hundred people. These one hundred people would each take a name from the book of Hundred Family Names to use as a code name. No matter what their real name used to be before joining the Shadow Guard, once they join the Guard that identity disappears, and as a rule, they would take on a surname instead.
Forty-eight people, all lying in ambush as well and able to send back information at any time. Cai Yan feels a lot more at ease as soon as he hears this, and so he perks up too and works hard at tackling the rest of these memorials. Soon, Lang Junxia returns with the jade arc, and the two stop their conversation without having to signal that this must be so.
Lang Junxia takes one look at Cai Yan, and does not say anything.
The highway in summer is well-shaded and as green as jade. It’s already been almost a month since Duan Ling left Jiangzhou, and the farther north they go the more pleasant the climate becomes. Gradually, he has learned the faces of those who are following him north, along with the names that go with them.
In front of everyone, Wu Du would always maintain the appearance of a loyal guardian, acting even more severe than the way he used to in the chancellor’s estate, never stepping a toe out of line in his interactions with Duan Ling. Sometimes, in order to keep an eye on the caravan, he would often travel by horse and only go inside the carriage to attend to Duan Ling while he’s taking his afternoon nap.
Since Wu Du is taking the position of Commandant of Hejian, they all call him “general”, while Duan Ling as the Governor of Hebei is being called Lord Wang. They don’t converse often in front of everyone, and even when they do have the occasional conversation, it’s no more than Wu Du reporting on the security along the journey to Duan Ling.
Whenever they stop to rest, children from nearby farmsteads would occasionally discover their caravan as well, and gather around; the Lord Governor would then get off the carriage to teach the children how to hit the green plums growing by the roadside with a slingshot in order to get them down, never missing a shot, and he would split the plums among the children. Wu Du, meanwhile, would sit crosslegged on a rock and tell tales of war and glory about the late emperor. Sometimes, the stories are beautifully vivid — he would describe how the late emperor shot and killed a tiger in the night only to find that the tiger was only a rock once dawn comes, and sometimes he’d talk about how the late emperor was marching his army in the desert and told his soldiers that there was a plum forest ahead so that they wouldn’t be so thirsty anymore.
Listening to all this Duan Ling just finds it ridiculous; all the way to Ye, he’s managed to hear many things that clearly had nothing to do with his father, and yet somehow have everything to do with his father now. He never knew that idioms like “quench one’s thirst by thinking of plums” and “The Flying General’s tiger hunt” could be told anew with fresh protagonists.3
Sitting on another rock, Duan Ling is drinking some plum tea to deal with the heat, wearing the clothes of a literati. Though he’s only sixteen and seems a bit young, there’s already a faint hint of greatness in his bearing and mannerisms.
Whenever this is happening, he would always stare at Wu Du with the road between them. After Wu Du finishes telling stories, he would get up and send the children away, then walk over to him, tall and handsome beneath dappled sunlight, and hold out a hand to gesture him aboard the carriage. Once Duan Ling is inside the carriage, Wu Du would press a single kiss to his lips before turning around, getting on Benxiao so he can go on patrol and protect their caravan.
Occasionally, when they get to spend the night in a village or a city along the way and Duan Ling has a room of his own to stay in, Wu Du would come to see Duan Ling in the middle of the night like a gust of wind; he would bar the door behind him and wrap his arms around Duan Ling without a word. He would hold him down on the bed, and they would kiss each other, whispering words of love and longing, and yet they’re both so greedy for the little time they have together that they’re unwilling to spend any more of it on words. He would rather kiss and hold Duan Ling and make passionate love to him before letting Duan Ling fall asleep while holding onto him.
When it rains, and they don’t have to travel, Wu Du would also remain inside the room, seriously studying the recipe book Zheng Yan has given him, keeping Duan Ling company.
And so in fits and starts, the caravan travels for a month. By then the scenery along the way is already filled with desolation; it is the cusp of autumn, summer’s end when they finally reach the border of Hebei.
Once past the boundary stone, they will be in Hebei. A rainstorm has started to pour down on them today, and they’re in the middle of nowhere without a village or an inn where they can stopover. One of the carriage’s wheels is stuck in the mud, and Duan Ling climbs down from the carriage in the rain to help them push it.
“What are you doing?” Wu Du has just scouted on ahead, and now he’s hurried back in the rain. He yells, “Get back in the carriage!”
“The wheel is stuck!” Duan Ling answers him loudly.
It’s raining buckets. Wu Du urges Duan Ling back inside the carriage lest he may catch a cold from getting caught in the rain, then with one hand holding up the carriage’s shaft, he pulls it towards him with a shout. The entire carriage, weighing near a thousand pounds, is dragged out of the mud.
“Don’t do that!” Duan Ling says, displeased, “You’ll hurt your tendons!”
Wu Du puts his left hand on his right shoulder and rolls his arm. “It’s fine! Don’t get off the carriage!”
A flash of lightning cuts across the dark skies above; it looks like their caravan will have to stay overnight in the mountains. But with the rain coming down this hard, they can’t just sleep without shelter. As Wu Du inspects the caravan, he’s soaked through by the rain.
“Let’s keep going!” Lin Yunqi says, “We’ll find a mountain stream! Something like a cave is fine too!”
“No, we can’t!” Yan Di says, “It’s too dangerous — you can’t march an army in the mountains! We have to get off of the mountain path!”
Yan Di had been drinking quite a bit, but once sobered up in the rain he insist that they mustn’t keep going. Wu Du does as he advises then and asks everyone to move towards a nearby forest.
Soon after they get off the mountain, the yellow mud sitting on a hill farther off collapses. The mud water mixed with rocks rushes down in a landslide, burying the road beneath it.
That was close, Duan Ling thinks. If they’d insisted on moving forward, they may have lost a lot of their things.
I do not monetise my hobby translations, but if you’d like to support my work generally or support my light novel habit, you can either buy me a coffee or commission me. This is also to note that if you see this message anywhere else than on tumblr, do come to my tumblr. It’s ad-free. ↩︎
Palace dramas generally use daylight for court assembly, but officials used to start lining up by 3am to enter the palace during the Ming dynasty. ↩︎
See Li Guang and the rock tiger, as well as quench one’s thirst by thinking of plums. ↩︎
It is a summer night in Jiangzhou.
After several bouts of heavy rain, the rainy season fades away to herald the long-awaited arrival of midsummer. The flood has driven both Great Chen’s ruler and its subjects to utter exhaustion — too many people will need to be fed. Once it starts getting hot, the ground outside the city is littered with bodies of pigs, horses, cows, and dogs … even that of people, and there are dead fishes washed up by the flooded river, run aground on the shore, and those that haven’t been cleaned up in time begin to stink as soon as it grows hot.
That being the case, pestilence is probably going to start spreading again. Everyone in the city is busy cleaning up after the bodies of the dead who drowned during the flood, with the Black Armours rushing all over the city day in and day out. Petitions for help come from all over from each of the disaster zones, constantly arriving in Jiangzhou, going through sorting and annotation by the Office of the Secretariat before they’re delivered to the palace, where they’re presented to Li Yanqiu to await the emperor’s official reply.
The bodyguards serving by Li Yanqiu’s side have also been changed to four shifts of Black Armours taking turns to protect the emperor. Every hour there are reports from soldiers entering the palace. Late at night, a eunuch announces that Xie You is here to see him.
Li Yanqiu gives the order to let him in, and Xie You comes in dressed in casual clothing to stand inside the imperial study. Xie You doesn’t make a sound, and Li Yanqiu isn’t speaking either; a ruler and his subject thus remain silent on his own, the only sound in the room being the turning of memorial pages.
A long time passes before Li Yanqiu sets the work in his hands down on the desk, and he looks up from the pile of memorials.
“What is the crown prince doing?” Li Yanqiu asks.
“Evaluating memorials. Lately, for some reason, he has been rather diligent when it comes to dealing with military affairs.”
A Black Armours bodyguard carries in a stack of annotated memorials from the Eastern Palace. Over the past several days, Cai Yan has taken on the day-to-day governmental paperwork by his own volition, while Li Yanqiu has taken charge of commenting on those memorials related to the flooding. The Office of the Secretariat has already screened them, but Li Yanqiu will still occasionally do a spot check of the memorials that Cai Yan has already gone over.
Li Yanqiu flips open one of them, his gaze falling on the very last line of comment.
“I recall that when the crown prince first returned to court, he had written several letters,” Li Yanqiu says. “One of them was a eulogy for the late emperor that he presented to the Imperial Ancestral Temple. Xie You, bring it to me so I can take a look at it.”
Xie You’s brows are locked in a deep frown, but he doesn’t ask any extraneous questions before ordering one of his underlings to retrieve it. Soon, a guard hands a roll of yellow silk to Xie You, and Xie You presents it to Li Yanqiu with both hands.
Li Yanqiu spreads the yellow silk open, holding down one edge with the jade arc that’s been sitting on the desk, his eyes scanning each line one by one until they finally rest on the character “Li” of “Li family’s empire”.
The Eastern Palace is lit as bright as day. Sleepy and nodding off, Cai Yan, with his forehead resting in his hand, nearly falls right over onto a memorial.
“Your Majesty?” Feng Duo says.
“What time is it?”
“It’s already midnight. Your Majesty, why don’t you get some sleep? It won’t be long before you’ll have to get ready for the morning assembly.”2
“I won’t be able to sleep for long. Wuluohou Mu.”
From his seat nearby, Lang Junxia acknowledges Cai Yan with a sound at the mention of his name.
“Go bring me my jade arc. There’s going to be an assembly soon.”
Lang Junxia gets up and leaves. The room is quiet for a little while. Feng Duo takes a hot towel and wipes Cai Yan’s hands down with it.
“How are things?” Cai Yan whispers.
“Three units have already been sent.” Feng Duo whispers back just as quietly, “forty-eight men altogether, with Baili, Linghu, and Nangong leading them. By my estimation, they’ll arrive in Ye in a month, and they’ll be keeping themselves hidden beneath Ochre Mountain.”
The Shadow Guard was established by the founding emperor, and every iteration of it has been made up of exactly one hundred people. These one hundred people would each take a name from the book of Hundred Family Names to use as a code name. No matter what their real name used to be before joining the Shadow Guard, once they join the Guard that identity disappears, and as a rule, they would take on a surname instead.
Forty-eight people, all lying in ambush as well and able to send back information at any time. Cai Yan feels a lot more at ease as soon as he hears this, and so he perks up too and works hard at tackling the rest of these memorials. Soon, Lang Junxia returns with the jade arc, and the two stop their conversation without having to signal that this must be so.
Lang Junxia takes one look at Cai Yan, and does not say anything.
The highway in summer is well-shaded and as green as jade. It’s already been almost a month since Duan Ling left Jiangzhou, and the farther north they go the more pleasant the climate becomes. Gradually, he has learned the faces of those who are following him north, along with the names that go with them.
In front of everyone, Wu Du would always maintain the appearance of a loyal guardian, acting even more severe than the way he used to in the chancellor’s estate, never stepping a toe out of line in his interactions with Duan Ling. Sometimes, in order to keep an eye on the caravan, he would often travel by horse and only go inside the carriage to attend to Duan Ling while he’s taking his afternoon nap.
Since Wu Du is taking the position of Commandant of Hejian, they all call him “general”, while Duan Ling as the Governor of Hebei is being called Lord Wang. They don’t converse often in front of everyone, and even when they do have the occasional conversation, it’s no more than Wu Du reporting on the security along the journey to Duan Ling.
Whenever they stop to rest, children from nearby farmsteads would occasionally discover their caravan as well, and gather around; the Lord Governor would then get off the carriage to teach the children how to hit the green plums growing by the roadside with a slingshot in order to get them down, never missing a shot, and he would split the plums among the children. Wu Du, meanwhile, would sit crosslegged on a rock and tell tales of war and glory about the late emperor. Sometimes, the stories are beautifully vivid — he would describe how the late emperor shot and killed a tiger in the night only to find that the tiger was only a rock once dawn comes, and sometimes he’d talk about how the late emperor was marching his army in the desert and told his soldiers that there was a plum forest ahead so that they wouldn’t be so thirsty anymore.
Listening to all this Duan Ling just finds it ridiculous; all the way to Ye, he’s managed to hear many things that clearly had nothing to do with his father, and yet somehow have everything to do with his father now. He never knew that idioms like “quench one’s thirst by thinking of plums” and “The Flying General’s tiger hunt” could be told anew with fresh protagonists.3
Sitting on another rock, Duan Ling is drinking some plum tea to deal with the heat, wearing the clothes of a literati. Though he’s only sixteen and seems a bit young, there’s already a faint hint of greatness in his bearing and mannerisms.
Whenever this is happening, he would always stare at Wu Du with the road between them. After Wu Du finishes telling stories, he would get up and send the children away, then walk over to him, tall and handsome beneath dappled sunlight, and hold out a hand to gesture him aboard the carriage. Once Duan Ling is inside the carriage, Wu Du would press a single kiss to his lips before turning around, getting on Benxiao so he can go on patrol and protect their caravan.
Occasionally, when they get to spend the night in a village or a city along the way and Duan Ling has a room of his own to stay in, Wu Du would come to see Duan Ling in the middle of the night like a gust of wind; he would bar the door behind him and wrap his arms around Duan Ling without a word. He would hold him down on the bed, and they would kiss each other, whispering words of love and longing, and yet they’re both so greedy for the little time they have together that they’re unwilling to spend any more of it on words. He would rather kiss and hold Duan Ling and make passionate love to him before letting Duan Ling fall asleep while holding onto him.
When it rains, and they don’t have to travel, Wu Du would also remain inside the room, seriously studying the recipe book Zheng Yan has given him, keeping Duan Ling company.
And so in fits and starts, the caravan travels for a month. By then the scenery along the way is already filled with desolation; it is the cusp of autumn, summer’s end when they finally reach the border of Hebei.
Once past the boundary stone, they will be in Hebei. A rainstorm has started to pour down on them today, and they’re in the middle of nowhere without a village or an inn where they can stopover. One of the carriage’s wheels is stuck in the mud, and Duan Ling climbs down from the carriage in the rain to help them push it.
“What are you doing?” Wu Du has just scouted on ahead, and now he’s hurried back in the rain. He yells, “Get back in the carriage!”
“The wheel is stuck!” Duan Ling answers him loudly.
It’s raining buckets. Wu Du urges Duan Ling back inside the carriage lest he may catch a cold from getting caught in the rain, then with one hand holding up the carriage’s shaft, he pulls it towards him with a shout. The entire carriage, weighing near a thousand pounds, is dragged out of the mud.
“Don’t do that!” Duan Ling says, displeased, “You’ll hurt your tendons!”
Wu Du puts his left hand on his right shoulder and rolls his arm. “It’s fine! Don’t get off the carriage!”
A flash of lightning cuts across the dark skies above; it looks like their caravan will have to stay overnight in the mountains. But with the rain coming down this hard, they can’t just sleep without shelter. As Wu Du inspects the caravan, he’s soaked through by the rain.
“Let’s keep going!” Lin Yunqi says, “We’ll find a mountain stream! Something like a cave is fine too!”
“No, we can’t!” Yan Di says, “It’s too dangerous — you can’t march an army in the mountains! We have to get off of the mountain path!”
Yan Di had been drinking quite a bit, but once sobered up in the rain he insist that they mustn’t keep going. Wu Du does as he advises then and asks everyone to move towards a nearby forest.
Soon after they get off the mountain, the yellow mud sitting on a hill farther off collapses. The mud water mixed with rocks rushes down in a landslide, burying the road beneath it.
That was close, Duan Ling thinks. If they’d insisted on moving forward, they may have lost a lot of their things.
I do not monetise my hobby translations, but if you’d like to support my work generally or support my light novel habit, you can either buy me a coffee or commission me. This is also to note that if you see this message anywhere else than on tumblr, do come to my tumblr. It’s ad-free. ↩︎
Palace dramas generally use daylight for court assembly, but officials used to start lining up by 3am to enter the palace during the Ming dynasty. ↩︎
See Li Guang and the rock tiger, as well as quench one’s thirst by thinking of plums. ↩︎
