Chapter 14: The Storm Gathers
Li Shun repeated the characters to himself several times in his mind, his brow lifting slightly. "Just these few words and they're worth five leaves?"
Zhou Xunzhen leaned back into his chair, his expression unreadable, and let out a quiet, long sigh. "You see only the weightless characters written on this counter. What you have not seen is the centuries of blood and slaughter, the mountains of bones, that those characters represent."
Li Shun fell into thought, a faint chill drifting through his heart.
"It seems Zhou Xunzhen, too, is a man who carries a deep and heavy story."
At that moment, a thread of early morning sunlight slipped through the gap in the door and fell at an angle across Zhou Xunzhen's profile, catching the boundary between light and shadow. For the first time, Li Shun noticed with sudden sharpness: whether it was his imagination or not, in the few days since he had last seen him, the fine and previously flawless skin at the corner of Zhou Xunzhen's eyes had quietly acquired a faint webbing of lines, and his entire bearing carried an unmistakable air of something fading toward its dusk.
"You seem to always be here in this bookshop, I've never seen step outside." The observation came out of Li Shun almost before he'd decided to say it.
Zhou Xunzhen's expression became strangely distant. He laughed at himself quietly. "Living within a bookstore, my eyes see only this square-inch of quiet heaven and earth. The heart concerns itself with nothing more than the trade of a few worn volumes and a handful of paltry gains. The days may be dull and monotonous but the spirit is free.
"And yet, if one were to step outside this bookshop..."
He tilted his head up, watching the motes of dust turning in that slant of light, his voice dropping lower and lower. "The world outside is all noise and motion, all rolling dust. Desire, it disorders the mind and it destroys lives."
Li Shun gave a nod that suggested he half-understood.
"Very well. That is all I have to say. You may go." As if sensing he had said more than was his habit, a look of tiredness came over Zhou Xunzhen's face and he issued what was, for him, an unprecedented dismissal.
Li Shun took no offense. He gave a polite bow and turned to push the door open and leave.
...
When he returned to the small courtyard, the front gate was still shut exactly as he had left it, the lock undamaged too, no sign that anything had gone wrong.
Li Shun had just produced the key to open it when a sudden rapid, thunderous hammering of hooves erupted from the far end of the street.
His heart gave a jolt. He looked instinctively toward the sound. A unit of Black Armor cavalry, their killing aura enough to make the air vibrate, was tearing at full gallop down the long street in the direction of the Magistrate office.
"Is that... the unit that escorted Old Feng home, returning already?" Li Shun's pupils narrowed. "No, that can't be right. By any reckoning of distance and time, it's impossible for them to be back this fast.
"What's gone wrong now?"
Li Shun muttered quietly to himself in the doorway until the shapes of the Black Armor soldiers disappeared entirely from view, then slipped inside and locked the gate firmly behind him.
As night fell and the day drew to a close, the treasonous poetry he had written on the walls to test for surveillance had produced exactly nothing, swallowed without a trace, without consequence.
He finally let himself relax entirely.
"Three times a day, I reflect upon myself."
In the soaring sweep of those words, time reversed once more.
The second examination.
In the early morning, Li Shun rose early again and visited the Jixia Bookshop.
This time he did not ask about the Twelve Perpetual Lives, he simply continued purchasing pages of the Emperor’s Records.
[In the second year of the New Calendar, the Grand Architect Gongshu Ji presented a memorial to the Emperor, saying: "Your servant observes that the terrain of the realm is a tangle of mountains and rivers, riddled with obstacles and barriers, such that the imperial civilization cannot reach all corners and decrees cannot penetrate all distances. Your servant petitions permission to conscript laborers to cut roads through mountains where there are mountains, and build bridges over rivers where there are rivers. To weave official roads across all nine provinces and channel the earth's qi into those roads. That fine horses and swift carriages traveling upon them should move as though riding the wind and riding the clouds, departing at dawn and arriving by dusk. In this way, the Emperor's authority may reach all in an instant, and the four direction shall lie within his palm." The Qian Emperor, upon hearing this, was greatly pleased, and declared it a contribution for ten thousand generations. He thereupon issued a decree conscripting one million able-bodied men to carve through mountains, fill valleys, and draw qi into formations. From this, all under heaven was seized by massive construction, and laborers were scattered and displaced. The qi of mountains and rivers was fundamentally changed.]
The passage recorded events from the founding of the Great Qian, the construction of the empire-wide official road network.
Since crossing into this world, Li Shun had not ventured a single step beyond Lengshan County's city walls, and had therefore never seen the Great Qian official roads with his own eyes.
But the memories of his original body retained fragments of awe and reverence regarding those roads.
"An ordinary laborer traveling on the official road, without horse or carriage, can cover two hundred li in a single day without feeling the fatigue.
"The Great Qian's official roads extend to every corner of the realm, every reach of the land. Even a place as thoroughly remote as Lengshan County is connected...
"Reaching all in an instant, the four direction within one's palm. It truly deserves to be called a contribution for ten thousand generations, one that anchors the whole realm."
Li Shun understood deeply how vital efficient transportation and information flow were to a vast empire and gave a quiet, genuine nod of acknowledgment.
When he finished with the pages and left the bookshop, stepping out to the mouth of the street, history repeated itself. He came face to face with that same unit of Black Armor cavalry, riding back in urgent haste.
This time, in the brief flash of their passing, Li Shun caught it with clarity, the expressions on their faces. The gravity there was extreme.
After thinking it through, and trusting in the fact that he still had one more reversal remaining, he decided to quietly investigate.
What he did not expect was,
He hadn't gathered a single useful piece of inside information before misfortune found him instead.
Toward evening, a deafening crash shook the air as Li Shun's front gate was kicked in with brutal force.
A team of constables filed through in rapid succession, radiating menace.
At their head, Head Constable Wu Kuang narrowed his eyes, looked Li Shun up and down, and waved a cold, dismissive hand.
His men lunged like wolves, seizing Li Shun's arms and wrenching them behind his back with savage efficiency.
"Officers, I have done nothing wrong!" Li Shun cried out in his best performance of panic and bewilderment.
Wu Kuang let out a cold snort, his eyes full of brutish ferocity. "Done nothing wrong? A worthless lowly laborer, skulking through the streets and alleyways today, prying into military secrets. What were you after?!
"I've had my eye on you, you old fox. Last time, that useless Sun Wu couldn't get anything out of you but now that you've fallen into my hands, I'll make sure you can neither live nor die in peace!"
Wu Kuang didn't even bother listening to any attempt at explanation. He tore a scrap of cloth and stuffed it into Li Shun's mouth, then had him dragged bodily through the streets to the deepest cell in Lengshan Prison.
What followed was another session of torture so savage it defied description, flesh and blood reduced to a state even more gruesome than the last time.
Yet Li Shun's true consciousness sat calmly within the Fangcun space, entirely unharmed.
"Military secrets?" Simply making a few inquiries was enough to cross a line."
Watching the wreckage being made of his physical body from a cold and clinical distance, a thoughtful glint moved through Li Shun's eyes.
The third reflection.
The new day arrived, and Li Shun returned safely to his own residence once again, as though nothing had happened.
He reviewed carefully everything he had witnessed "yesterday," and caught faint but unmistakable scent of something dark and heavy bearing down, clouds massing at the mountain's edge, rain about to break.
"It seems Lengshan County is about to see another major upheaval. Preparations must be made early."
Li Shun's gaze deepened. Without another moment of hesitation, he released the puppet [Li Shun] directly and ordered it to begin digging a new tunnel at once, in a suitably concealed location.
"This time, go deeper."
Perhaps because he had been releasing and recalling the puppet repeatedly in such quick succession recently, Li Shun found that his soul had adapted considerably. That sensation of his spirit being torn apart felt nowhere near as unbearable as it had been the very first time.
For reasons he couldn't quite explain, watching the tireless, unsleeping substitute puppet at work, Li Shun felt a vague but unmistakable premonition stir in the depths of his mind.
Perhaps the moment of breaking open a new region within the Fangcun space, that area still shrouded in white mist, was not so far away after all.
...
Late updates, got a lil busy 😮💨😮💨