Chapter 3: The Executioner's Meal

Liu Chengzong's barracks was a cave dwelling.

The outside of the cave dwelling resembled a courtyard house, only larger, and it was sunken.

Fort Yuhe was a rare stretch of flat terrain in this area, yet it lacked grain, so from the start they had chosen to build sunken cave dwellings.

First they dug a large square pit, then carved arched cave dwellings into several of the walls; the number of cave dwellings per wall varied, depending on the size of the earthen pit.

For instance, this retainer courtyard of theirs had cave dwellings on two walls, ten dwellings per wall, housing forty men in total.

Of the remaining two walls, one had a sloped ramp leading up to ground level, with a cellar dug out to serve as a storehouse; the other wall held the stables. Inside the courtyard they had dug a well, set up a millstone, planted two shade trees, and filled the rest of the yard with stone locks and weapon racks.

The sunken pit cave dwellings for ordinary border troops followed a similar layout, except the infantry caves replaced the stables with livestock pens — back when they had plenty of grain, they could even raise some livestock.

The rooftops of these sunken cave dwellings could still grow grain, and in some places there were even streets connecting the underground courtyard houses.

By now, whether the livestock pens inside the caves or the fields on the rooftops, none of it served any purpose. The pens were even cleaner than the cave dwellings themselves, and the rooftops had no use left beyond the loess paths.

The golden millet porridge went down, but for Liu Chengzong it counted as half-full at best.

He swayed his way back to the barracks, first tossed the red banner into the stable and locked it, picked up a short branch from outside the door and lit it at the courtyard's ever-burning stove, then carried it inside and touched it to the table — the oil lamp, nearly empty, flickered to life.

Little Zuanfeng, who had followed him inside, wrinkled her nose first, stared at the oil lamp with displeasure, and lifted her front paws trying to climb onto the table to snuff out the stinking thing. One stretch of Liu Chengzong's leg sent her fleeing with her tail tucked, whimpering, to lie down in the dog bed in the corner.

The lamp burned linseed oil. Because linseeds look remarkably like lice, it was also called tick sesame, and it had a faint stench. People didn't use it for cooking; quite a bit was grown in the Shaanxi-Gansu region, and as lamp oil it was passable.

In his memories, this stuff that people hated and dogs ignored had, a few hundred years later, become something fine for cooking — as if it no longer stank. He had no idea why.

There were plenty of things from that other set of memories he couldn't figure out. Liu Chengzong didn't bother delving deep — thirty years could make the world change its face, let alone spanning the four-hundred-year river of history. No change would be strange.

Rather than fretting over why linseed oil four hundred years from now was edible, he'd much rather puzzle out how to live a life of three meals a day, three dishes a meal.

The martial skills Liu Chengzong possessed — skills nearly ruined by starvation — had not come easily.

Three dishes a meal — he'd only eaten that way in autumn, back when he was learning martial arts in the Mizhi County jail.

Autumn in the jail was a fine season — you could scrounge the executioner's meal.

The good days had begun in the second year of the Tianqi reign. Their father, Liu Xiangyu, a Provincial Graduate, had left his post as Confucian Instructor of Yan'an Prefecture and transferred to become the Prison Warden of Mizhi County.

Though the Prison Warden held no official rank, he was still a court-appointed official, selected by the Ministry of Personnel and approved by the Emperor himself.

He was specifically in charge of arrests and jail prisoners. His office was on the west side of the county yamen, and he was commonly called the Fourth Master of the West Office.

That very year, in the first year of Tianqi, Du Wenhuan, the Regional Commander of Yansui, had launched a nest-destroying raid against the Mongols to dodge the Emperor's edict ordering him to reinforce Liaodong. This provoked a retaliatory raid southward by the Taotie bandits, who besieged Yan'an Prefecture and proclaimed they would surely capture Du Wenhuan. Du Wenhuan dared not meet their blade, and the Mongols plundered for ten days before leaving.

Commander Du avoided battle and stayed behind his walls, but Liu Chengzong's paternal uncle was killed by the plundering bandits.

Because of this, Provincial Graduate Liu got the idea of finding martial arts teachers for his two sons, who had resolved to pass the Presented Scholar exam.

He directly elevated his sons' goal from ordinary civil Presented Scholars to the heights of a dual-degree Presented Scholar like Xiong Tingbi, accomplished in both civil and martial arts.

This was just like the parents in his memories from four hundred years later, who, longing for their children to succeed, would start worrying about Beijing's high cost of living after their child got into Tsinghua University — even while the kid was still in preschool.

During the six years Provincial Graduate Liu served as Prison Warden, the Liu brothers learned a motley assortment of skills and apprenticed under countless martial arts masters. None of them were famous, but every single one was a true specialist.

The bowmanship and horsemanship of a Yinchuan post-station runner, the executioner's beheading blade of Mizhi, the county bailiffs' arrest cudgel and meteor hammer, the survival skills and combat experience dictated by horse-bandit death-row inmates in the county jail — they even picked up a set of Shaolin flower spear from a monk who'd broken his vows and was staying briefly in the cell.

A shoulder-high staff with a spearhead — half staff technique, half spear technique. The opposite of the Ma-family spear and Yang-family spear, which were spear-bone with staff-skin, this style used fewer thrusts and more sweeps and smashes. It was a spear method suited for wandering the jianghu and fighting alone, for showing off courage and ferocity amid leaps and bounds.

But on the battlefield, this skill was useless. Spears thrust in clusters, spears thrust out in clusters. In mounted combat you still needed the great spear, fifteen or sixteen feet long. Wielding a seven-foot short spear, no matter how much you leaped, you couldn't fend off three spearheads stabbing at you at once.

Back in the day, any prisoner thrown into the Mizhi County jail first had to be questioned by the Liu brothers about what skills they possessed. But when it came to the executioner's meal, his elder brother was more fastidious than him. It was just that he was still young and clueless back then — whenever he caught wind of an executioner's meal, he'd go scrounge it.

No one could stop him. If they tried, he'd cry, saying he was too hungry to bear it. And he also felt the executioner's meal was wasted — most of those death-row inmates facing beheading couldn't eat much anyway. At best, they'd down a jug of rice wine the next day.

He, on the other hand, wasn't the least bit afraid. Eventually, Provincial Graduate Liu just let him be.

As it turned out, retribution came very quickly.

In the seventh year of Tianqi, Provincial Graduate Liu's term as Prison Warden came up for review. He was promoted back to Yan'an Prefecture, appointed as the Tax Bureau Commissioner, an unranked post of the ninth grade. And that was the end of the good days for the Liu family.

Those two years, northern Shaanxi suffered drought every other season. The spring seedlings withered as soon as they sprouted, and come autumn another drought struck. The common people were driven to burn down their own houses and flee into the mountains to evade taxes. Fields lay barren everywhere, impossible to sell.

There were wealthy households and great landlords buying up land, but they had a trick: "the yield goes, the tax stays." They'd pay a premium for your land, but the tax on that land was still yours to pay. With the land gone, what the hell could a farmer pay?

When the taxes truly could not be collected, Provincial Graduate Liu, cautious and timid all his life, stiffened his spine just once out of sheer cowardice. He had seen with his own eyes what the natural disasters had driven the common people to, and he dared not go collect taxes no matter what.

He could only enter the prefect's yamen and suggest petitioning the court for tax relief and disaster aid. It was just that his wording was a bit too fierce.

He said, if you don't grant tax relief and disaster aid, before my six-year term is up, we'll all die together.

The Prefect didn't die, but he truly didn't let him finish his six-year term.

They charged him with cursing a superior, and coupled with poor job performance, they threw Provincial Graduate Liu straight into prison, freeing up the position for someone else.

Being an official is just getting things done. If this man can't get it done, swap him for one who can.

It was then that the two brothers went to take the Military Examination. Because they were the sons of a disgraced official, they couldn't bluff their way through. Halfway through the exam, they were driven out with clubs and sticks. He Renlong, serving as the deputy examiner, recruited them under his command.

Provincial Graduate Liu had been right after all. Three months after his successor took office, there was a village ward in the mountains — one hundred and ten households — whose taxes simply could not be collected. He personally led the bailiffs to force the tax payment.

Who knew that in that ward, only a single household remained — the rest had all fled.

The Great Ming's taxes were collected as fixed quotas by region. At the grassroots level, that meant ten households owed a set amount of tax. If three fled, the remaining seven still had to pay that same amount.

Out of one hundred and ten households, one hundred and nine had fled. The last household was the ward chief, the grain chief — he had to pay the taxes for all one hundred and ten households.

If not for a crippled and blind old mother, that last household would have fled too. They truly could not flee. Leaving on his own meant forcing his mother to hang herself; being taken by the bailiffs meant forcing his mother to starve to death. There was no other way to pay the tax.

In the end, he tricked the tax officer and two bailiffs into the firewood shed, locked it from the outside, and set it ablaze.

Before the bailiffs sent to arrest him even arrived, his old mother starved to death, and he hanged himself too.

Later, Provincial Graduate Liu was locked in prison for half a year. He was only released when the Chongzhen Emperor ascended the throne and granted a general amnesty. Returning home to farm, Provincial Graduate Liu was stripped of his scholarly rank.

The family had no mountains of gold or silver, yet they still had to suffer for the burden of empty reputation.

The world was about to descend into chaos.

Liu Chengzong knew very well: the classical and historical learning he'd studied since childhood, along with the memories from four hundred years later, would determine how far he could go — but martial skill was the foundation upon which he stood.

That would determine whether he could walk that path alive.