Chapter 514: Manacles and Fetters

He did not fall completely. As the Wei army sounded the charge, Fan Chong forced his body upright, picked up his axe again, and fought on pure instinct, battling through blood and fire.

He does not remember how many Wei soldiers he killed — ten? twenty? — while the young guards and sworn brothers and sisters around him fell one after another, until even his axe slipped from his grasp and was lost to him. At last, Fan Chong was struck down again by a blunt weapon swung from horseback, and amid a hoarse cry beside him, he lost consciousness.

When he awoke again, everything before his eyes was pitch black. All the slaughter that had come before seemed a long, drawn-out dream; only the pain of the wounds on his body was real.

But they had all been properly treated. Fan Chong sniffed and caught the smell of alcohol all over his body. Groping about, he found clean cloth bandages wrapped around his back, his arms, and even his forehead, and over them a reddish-brown convict's garment — the clothing of a penal laborer. As his eyes adjusted, Fan Chong could now make out his surroundings.

And his feet and his hands were locked in ice-cold fetters and manacles. Apart from bedding to ward off the cold, the only other thing in the space was a bucket for waste.

Raising his head, he saw that the "dwelling" that held him was in fact a huge cage, built of the hardest timber, with bars set very close together. Fan Chong tested them; he could not break them, and he could not even fully extend his arm through the gaps. While he was straining at them, a clatter of footsteps sounded, the outer door of the cell was pushed open, and light streamed in.

Fan Chong raised one arm to shield his face, the iron manacles on his wrists clanking. The door closed again at once, and the candles around the cell were lit, letting Fan Chong see clearly the appearance of the visitor.

A young man of somewhat short stature, dressed in plain clothes, with several armored and sword-bearing Gentlemen-of-the-Palace guards treating him with the utmost deference, had a folding stool placed directly in front of the cage. The short man sat on it cross-legged and spoke, answering the question in Fan Chong's eyes.

"This is Boiled Jujube City."

"Fan the Giant, the Red Eyebrow Army has been utterly defeated. Some of your personal guards were trying to carry you out and break through when our troops stopped them."

This was obvious, pointless talk. Fan Chong was already a prisoner, and he only stared at the man before him with hostility. The Gentlemen guards, brimming with arrogance, barked: "Bandit Fan Chong, kneel before His Majesty the Emperor!"

"So you are Diwu Lun?" Fan Chong rubbed his eyes and sized up the enemy he had fought. Then he raised his little finger and said scornfully, "Everyone says an Emperor stands towering between heaven and earth, over ten feet tall. But the Emperors I have seen — the old one and this young one — are both short!"

Diwu Lun's height of seven feet three inches was similar to Wang Mang's; the old man had grown even shorter as he aged and stooped. Compared to Fan Chong, a Shandong giant of over eight feet, he indeed had no advantage.

The Gentlemen guards bristled with indignation, but Diwu Lun was not angered. He smiled and said, "Is sharp-tongued bickering all Fan the Giant is capable of? Victory and defeat are decided; there is no need to debate who stood taller on the battlefield. But do not forget: now, it is I who sit above, while you stand below on the floor."

"At least I am not kneeling!" Fan Chong cursed. "A Red Eyebrow warrior dies standing. Do not imagine I will surrender like Chengtou Zilu or Dong Xian."

Diwu Lun laughed in spite of himself. "Why would I want to recruit your surrender?"

Why? To make use of the Red Eyebrow Army, of course! Fan Chong believed that Diwu Lun and that "Old Man Tian" were the same — they knew the Red Eyebrows' strength and wanted to turn it to their own ends. Fan Chong was still seething with the fury of having been deceived and could not calm down at all.

Diwu Lun recruited Dong Xian's surrender to make the Red Eyebrows slaughter each other; he took in Chengtou Zilu, nominally to harness the Yellow River, but in truth to plunge them into endless toil. As for Fan Chong's own followers — they would likely become the sharp blade Diwu Lun would swing at Qing Province and Xu Province!

And to make the Red Eyebrow warriors obedient, naturally Fan Chong himself had to be subdued first.

Diwu Lun, however, shook his head. "Fan the Giant, you still think too highly of yourself — and of the Red Eyebrow Army."

"For the river works, Chengtou Zilu is already helping me pacify and recruit the Copper Horses and Red Eyebrow remnants in Ji Province and Qing Province. Using the people of the Yellow River flood zone to harness the river — there is at least some willingness in that, to save their homeland. But the Red Eyebrow Army under your command abandoned their homes long ago and wreaked havoc across eight thousand li. Would they ever labor for someone else's homeland?"

"Now Yu Province and Yan Province lie in ruins, white bones bleaching the wilds, not a soul for a thousand li. I do indeed intend to establish military farming colonies there, but the main Red Eyebrow force has not tilled the soil in years. Can they still settle their hearts to farm? Would it not be far better to pacify and bring back the local refugees to their villages?"

"Even if, in the future, I were to march on Qing Province and Xu Province to unify all under heaven, I could not trust the Red Eyebrow Army. You lot do not even qualify to be ditch-fillers!"

"What is more…"

Diwu Lun told Fan Chong the truth: "Fan the Giant indeed commands immense prestige among the Red Eyebrows. But right now, those who were going to surrender have already laid down their weapons. As for those who, like you, swore to die rather than yield…"

Diwu Lun made a gentle slicing gesture with his hand. "They should be mostly dealt with by now."

It turned out that in the bitter battle two days before, although the twenty to thirty thousand men of Fan Chong's core force had been thrown into chaos by the rumor that "Old Man Tian is Wang Mang," years of unruliness had driven many among them to fight to the very last moment.

Yet heavy as the casualties of battle were, they still could not compare to the methodical, one-sided slaughter that followed.

In the dry marsh, the Red Eyebrows who refused to surrender were herded together and butchered in droves as the Wei army's mechanical crossbows fired and their halberds and spears swung.

And those captured during the battle who still tried to escape while being escorted away were, on the orders of Colonels who had lost all patience, driven in batches into pits and buried under shoveled earth.

They were the flesh and blood of the Red Eyebrows.

As for the Elders and Attendants — so long as they had not groveled and surrendered, they were all executed, regardless of worth or folly, good or evil.

They were the sinew and bone of the Red Eyebrows.

In this decisive battle at the Ji River, how many were cut down in combat? A mere eight thousand. How many were executed en masse afterward? Ten thousand? Twenty thousand? In any case, more than Dong Xuan drowned at Dingtao.

The ones who did the killing were mainly the Yu Province and Yan Province troops under Ma Yuan. They were mostly common folk and refugees who had fled west to escape the Red Eyebrow calamity, hoping to drive out the Red Eyebrows and return to their native villages. They had been trapped for days in this great battle, and when their comrades and fellow townsmen were captured by the Red Eyebrows, Fan Chong had also ordered them slaughtered and impaled on wooden stakes as a taunt.

Did the Wei soldiers not have the right to avenge their comrades and countrymen?

This time, even Ma Yuan, who had always given the Red Eyebrows a way out ever since the Battle of Ao Granary, did not stop it. He only watched it all happen in silence.

Utterly unlike the revolutionary wars of later ages, in the civil wars of ancient times, do not speak of who was innocent or who was righteous. The killers were also the killed. Both sides had shed too much blood in this great war; the chain of hatred stretched on unbroken. A smile to wash away all enmity was absolutely impossible.

Fan Chong only listened in a daze. All those faces, the ones who had fought at his side through so many years, rose before his eyes one by one, and in the end they all became corpses on the open field, pecked at by crows!

Gravely wounded and still unhealed, Fan Chong suddenly lunged at the cage. His right hand stretched out madly, then his left. He wanted to seize Diwu Lun, to crush him, to tear him apart!

When he first rose in arms, when he lost his wife and children, the Emperor he hated most was of course Wang Mang. He had killed him three or four times over in his dreams. When he learned that after making a huge circle he had been used by that old Emperor all along, the deeper the love, the keener the hate — Fan Chong's teeth itched with it.

But now, the man Fan Chong hated most had become Diwu Lun! His hair stood on end in fury, and from his mouth came a beast-like roar!

Kill him — a thousand times would not be enough!

Yet Diwu Lun still sat cross-legged on his stool, utterly motionless, facing Fan Chong's berserk rage head-on.

Fan Chong was, after all, trapped inside the cage, wounded, and had not eaten for days. In the end his strength gave out. He could only grip the bars, straining to hold his body up, refusing to let himself collapse or kneel on the ground. He stared at Diwu Lun with bulging eyes and finally turned his bone-deep hatred into a bloody gob of phlegm — but it still did not reach Diwu Lun's feet.

"Diwu brat, why haven't you killed me yet? Let me meet my brothers and sisters again on the Yellow Springs Road!"

Fan Chong began to curse the Emperor of Wei, to curse Ma Yuan, to curse every female relative of their families, as if hoping to rouse Diwu Lun's anger and win himself a quick end.

Yet Diwu Lun only took a mild sip of wolfberry tea. The gaze he turned on Fan the Giant held none of a victor's arrogant mockery, like a cat toying with a mouse, but was instead full of sincerity — a sincerity he had never even shown when facing his own ministers.

Was it, then, that he meant to use Fan Chong — just as he had placed Chengtou Zilu under house arrest to draw in the Copper Horses and Red Eyebrows of Hebei to surrender — to bring in those Red Eyebrow troops who had already surrendered, or were about to?

Yet just as the poem "Fighting South of the City" says: the fierce horsemen fight and die, the hobbled horses linger and whinny. In the end, all that remained were the Red Eyebrow warriors whose "backbones had been broken," as Diwu Lun put it. From the Pu River to Boiled Jujube, nearly a hundred thousand of them wiped the marks from their foreheads, hung their heads, and resumed the look of the docile commoners they had once been.

Hah — isn't it just swapping one Emperor for another and going on being slaves!

And so, Diwu Lun no longer had any need for Fan Chong.

What awaited the Red Eyebrow surrenderers was not amnesty and a blessed land, but brutal enslavement. Those who years ago had wished to be slaves and could not, in the end became slaves of the Wei dynasty. They would spend their lives on river works, military farms, and a whole series of projects to restore the Central Plains, until they collapsed!

Diwu Lun rose to his feet and walked up to the cage. By the firelight, Fan Chong saw the eyes of this young Emperor. The emotion in them was… pity and regret?

"I did not come to shatter the manacles of hundreds of thousands of Red Eyebrows."

Diwu Lun spoke the truth softly, even dropping the lofty "I, the sovereign": "You cut off your own manacles eight years ago. I can only say: well done. That is what I most admire about Fan the Giant."

"But this eastern campaign of mine — I came to deliver the millions, the tens of millions of common people of Yu Province, Yan Province, Ji Province, and Qing Province, whom the Red Eyebrows have coerced, kidnapped, and ravaged!"

A privileged stratum can be called 'local magnates' — and it can just as well be called 'the Red Eyebrows.'

A blessed land for hundreds of thousands was a nightmare for tens of millions. Slow oppression versus the whirlwind chaos of plunder — which is truly worse? Diwu Lun was not qualified to judge, but the people living through these chaotic times would surely make their own choice.

And so the Red Eyebrows, the dragon-slayers of old, had now become the evil dragon laying waste to the Central Plains. They had to be destroyed!

Even if Diwu Lun and Fan Chong, when they first set out on the road against the Xin dynasty, shared a sliver of similar original intent, in practice they walked two utterly different paths. By today, that has become a fundamental contradiction and a blood feud of deep hatred — a divergence that makes working together or sharing any common feeling absolutely impossible.

An era cannot forever look backward in a retro manner, still less can it fall into the kind of disordered chaos of the Red Eyebrows, destroying all the civilization so painstakingly accumulated in the past.

It must move forward step by step, tentatively probing the way, under a form of centralized authority, with someone to lead it! And as for the Red Eyebrow Army — their historical role will be to become the myriad bleached bones paving the road ahead!

As Diwu Lun witnessed the slaughter, he said to himself in his heart: "Though they be thousands upon thousands, I shall go forth."

Those thousands upon thousands are not necessarily enemies blocking your path, but also the "innocent" crushed into bloody mud. Can this foot keep pressing down upon them? Can it still take that step?

Diwu Lun had long since shed the naivety of those early years. He had already concluded: a transmigrator cannot bring absolute fairness to this world, still less justice for every collective, every individual.

What he brought should be correctness!

No one knew whether Fan Chong had taken it in, or whether he could even understand. He still glared at Diwu Lun with bitter hatred, repeating those words from his mouth, even tinged with a plea that he himself did not realize.

"Kill me."

"Kill me!"

Diwu Lun shook his head. "You will certainly die."

"But the time has not yet come."

"I have said it before, Fan the Giant: to me, you are not important."

"But to some people, the absence of Fan Chong is very important to them."

Diwu Lun laid it bare for Fan Chong: "Ever since you were captured, the memorials submitted requesting that you be executed by dismemberment with chariots or the Five Punishments have been truly countless."

Fan Chong gave a contemptuous laugh. He did not fear death, did not fear pain. But Wang Mang had deceived him, led him toward the "Promised Land," and only at the end did he learn it was all emptiness — at once he was filled with remorse. And Diwu Lun had destroyed his cause, slaughtered his brothers and sisters, strangled the Red Eyebrow Army! Yet he was powerless to kill the villain — these were the greatest tortures of all!

Diwu Lun, however, said: "So long as Fan Chong lives a single day, a thorn remains lodged in the hearts of certain people! That is a great good!"

The existence of the Red Eyebrow Army was what caused the powerful families scattered across the various regions of the State of Wei to unite around Diwu Lun. But now, with the main Red Eyebrow force destroyed, the honeymoon-period cooperation between the center and the localities would likely come to an end as well. The local snakes in every corner would inevitably begin to stir.

With these words, Diwu Lun began to step backward, once more putting on the mask of the Emperor. Only before leaving the cell did he turn his head to look at Fan Chong, who still struggled to stand, still refusing to bow his head, and said: "With Fan the Giant's temperament, you surely would not be so weak as to starve yourself, slit your wrists, or dash yourself against the cage to commit suicide, would you?"

"For now, just go on living. At the very least, live until he comes to share this lodging."

Who! Who is coming? Fan Chong suddenly raised his head.

"The other Emperor, of course."

Diwu Lun smiled. "Do you not wish, together with me, to see Wang Mang once more — a living Wang Mang!?"

PS: The second chapter will be in the middle of the night.