Chapter Forty-Three: Flow of Blood

Another memory he possessed had never revealed to him that, in this era, rebels and bandits would trade in human heads with the government troops sent to suppress them.

When the news was brought back to Xingpingli, it drove Master Liu into a furious rage.

“In these years of disaster, with drought upon us! Every household in Xingpingli scraped together three days’ worth of rations per person to feed the soldiers, and this is what we get in return? Not only was there no battle—there was not even a skirmish! The bandits were let go, and now they return to town with the heads of villagers from Lao Miao Village to claim their reward!”

At home, Liu Chengzong did not utter a single word.

It was not until his father took the lead in contacting the headman to gather the clan and propose helping the bereaved families of Lao Miao Village collect the bodies that Liu Chengzong was still processing the impact of the recent events.

As he set out northwards, leaving Xingpingli behind, Liu Chengzong suddenly recalled an elusive term from another life—a word he had never truly grasped: weakness.

Even now, he could not claim to fully understand it. This incident, however, had stirred him deeply, prompting him to reflect—perhaps to elevate that term into a broader synthesis, combining fragments of that other memory with the world around him.

Take, for example, Commander Zhang, who led three hundred garrison troops to bargain with the bandits, bartering the heads of Lao Miao’s villagers in exchange for the enemy’s peaceful withdrawal.

The event was unexpected, yet for him, it was not as incomprehensible nor as infuriating as it was for his father.

He understood. He could empathize with a commander, tasked with leading two or three hundred half-starved men, facing an adversary he was unlikely to defeat, making a mutually convenient compromise.

Shameless, devoid of responsibility, a disgrace—yet he understood.

What surprised him most was his own ability to relate to a word that would not come into use until two or three centuries later.

And where did this empathy come from?

From his father, Liu Xiangyu, the pillar of their family; from his teacher, Yang Dingrui; and even from himself—he saw, in all of them, the weakness of the scholar.

The three of them shared only a few traits: they were all educated, men of letters in their time.

But “scholar” was a false class, with a low floor and a high ceiling, always dependent on other identities for support.

If you pointed to someone in the street and introduced him as a scholar, it was more likely an insult, meaning the man was useless for any practical purpose.

His father was a scholar, but more prominently a licentiate, an official; after his dismissal, his most important role was that of clan leader.

Yang Dingrui was a scholar, but also a presented scholar, an official, and even after resigning, he remained a gentryman with official rank.

Liu Chengzong himself was a scholar, having passed the children’s exam, and might have earned official recognition had he not taken up arms and become a soldier.

They each had different roles, backgrounds, and status, but Liu Chengzong believed they all shared a certain weakness.

For all their fury, their clenched teeth, none harbored any real thought of revenge against Commander Zhang for his deception over the grain.

The more one had vested in the existing order, the weaker the spark of revolution.

What great deeds could they accomplish? None at all. No matter how many flaws they saw in the world around them, their thoughts turned only to reform.

No matter how sharp their words or how deep their ruminations, none could compare to Cao Yao, who sat silently on the threshold, sharpening his blade on the stone steps.

He was a man who, within the empire’s system, possessed nothing but his horse, his armor, and the saber at his waist.

As one of the first five cavalrymen sent to scout Lao Miao Village, Cao Yao told Liu Chengzong on the way that he was sharpening his knife in case of trouble.

"But if I run into that damned commander again, after eating our food for fifteen hundred meals, I won’t mind sending him three coins’ worth of lead."

Three coins—the weight of a single musket ball.

In Lao Miao Village, the wooden palisade that had barred Liu Chengzong a fortnight before was smashed down, charred to carbon, and everywhere lay headless corpses and the dried blood and bones of slaughtered livestock.

Leading his horse at a slow walk, Liu Chengzong pulled a broken spear from the ground. The shaft, three feet long, was split and frayed at the break, but the three-inch steel blade was polished, unmarred.

Such flat, un-ridged spearheads were common among the peasant armies of history. Nowadays, villagers would not spend the money on such a weapon; perhaps this was a relic of some former war.

He regretted the loss of such a fine weapon. Clearly, it had belonged to one of Lao Miao’s villagers—painstakingly sharpened, yet during his first clash with the bandits, it failed to strike true, and he was cut down by someone wielding a heavy-backed saber or an axe.

Perhaps death had not come quickly. Liu Chengzong searched nearby, but apart from blood long since seeped into the earth, he found no matching corpse.

The bandits must have left in haste, or perhaps taken so much loot they could not be bothered to carry off a weapon so easily repaired.

Liu Chengzong was different. He had a scavenger’s soul and could not afford such extravagance; with a casual motion, he hung the broken spear at Red Flag’s side.

His gear had no grand names like "victor’s hook" or "completion ring." He had simply fashioned a few handmade holders on each side of his saddle, with rings to grip, and leather sheaths for knives and axes.

Most cavalrymen had some sort of gear, but not as much as he did.

Last year, after returning from the frontier where their scorched-earth campaign had succeeded and he had shot down enemy scouts, he had nowhere to hang his trophies—so many things were left behind, making the cave-dwelling Liu Chengzong despair, feeling all his struggles had been in vain.

In a fit of frustration, he made all these attachments, hoping to earn, this year, enough to buy the Liu clan a house with a shop and a hard-tiled roof on Qingliang Mountain in Yan’an. Who could have foreseen the general would break up the unit?

Rounding the palisade and the collapsed earthen wall, he entered a ruined courtyard. Maggots crawled over the stone well; bare tree stumps stood amid scattered bark and wood chips. Amid the shavings lay a young woman.

Her blood had all drained away; her body was as pale as blood itself.

He had just found a dirty blanket in a collapsed hut when the sound of wailing reached him from within the village. He barely had time to pull her family from the well; hastily covering her with the blanket, he rushed out, following the cries.

Lu Bin was staggering, kneeling before a great black pillar and weeping bitterly, saying it was the village’s old earth god temple.

Liu Chengzong could see nothing of a temple in that blackened post, from which hung an old man’s corpse. The surrounding rubble gave no hint where the courtyard walls had once stood—but had this been his own village, he would have wept harder than Lu Bin.

This was no longer a village, nor a home. They searched the ruins, finding corpses everywhere. Those who resisted were killed, but so too were those who did not, or who could not—regardless of age or gender.

The only difference seemed to be that most of the women’s corpses still had their heads.

Compared to the heavy gloom that weighed on Liu Chengzong and Lu Bin, Cao Yao was in far better spirits.

The old bandit tossed a white cat out of the yard, cursing as he went: “Damn it, which bastard left half a vat of wine in this yard? With no water, the cat got drunk—tail out, legs all askew, I thought it was a goose!”