Chapter 315: All Beings

Gansu, Gaotai Guard Thousand-Household Station, Camel City.

The desert sun still set round as ever, but with the long river dried up, Camel City in the evening seemed even more desolate.

A great wind swept the yellow sands. This place had once been the Northern Liang capital and a key stronghold of the Hexi Corridor, but when the oasis receded into wasteland, the half-buried ruined city walls became a natural camel pen, a night-stop for merchants traveling east and west.

Crisp camel bells rang through the windblown sand. Travelers unloaded goods and pitched tents along the base of the wall. Bonfires rose one by one. Shadows cast upon the wall showed figures removing the headscarves that shielded them from the sand, revealing purple-gold caps bound over coiled hair.

Wang Ziyong ran his hand over the wind-eroded wall, tracing the scars of blades and arrows, lost in thought — until a youth ran over and said, "Master, the camels are all penned inside the city. There won't be any bandits here, right?"

Wang Ziyong burst out laughing at that, then straightened his face and said, "Little Master, in the northwest territories, the biggest bandit king is your Brother Lion. You're afraid of bandits?"

The youth removed his headscarf, revealing a face of only thirteen or fourteen. He scratched his close-cropped round head, flashed a silly grin, sat by the fire, broke off a piece of hard, dry flatbread, and ate it bit by bit, moistening it with water.

It was Shiliu.

Watching the child beside him, Wang Ziyong grinned too.

Compared to the majesty of Liu Chengzong's great army marching west, Wang Ziyong's departure from northern Shaanxi had not been so easy. The elite soldiers who had followed him on the Liaodong reinforcement campaign mostly stayed behind in Yan'an Prefecture, unwilling to head west with him to eat sand.

When he set out from Yan'an Prefecture, he still had over a hundred men with him. The journey was fraught with fear. By the time he gathered his forces at Lanzhou, only thirty-two had arrived as agreed.

It wasn't that they died — the road held no real danger, and in Pingliang they even ate well thanks to aid from Han Xiaowang and Gao Xian. It was just that many men no longer wished to follow him.

Wang Ziyong thought to himself: if he went to join Liu Chengzong with just these thirty-two men, what status could he possibly get? Forget comparing with Zhang Tianlin — he probably couldn't even match Luo Rucai, the greenest of the green juniors. So he decided to build a career in Lanzhou first, and only go to join up once he had some momentum.

After great difficulty, he stirred up over six hundred men, but word leaked and the government troops wiped them out. He had to lie low in Liangzhou Guard for a long, bitter stretch.

In the end, he decided he couldn't just keep stubbornly holding out. He needed to ask Liu Chengzong for support. But Wang Ziyong couldn't reach Liu Chengzong directly — he could only contact Liu Laoye.

Liu Laoye's reply was extraordinarily generous. He sent a letter saying Xining could support him with enough swords, spears, halberds, armor, firearms, and cannon to equip a thousand troops. Wang Ziyong was so alarmed he hurriedly wrote back telling Liu Laoye to stop — what would he even do with all that?

Times had changed. Wang Ziyong was no slouch himself — he had a natural touch for stirring peasants to revolt in northern Shaanxi — and during the period when their forces combined with the Lion Camp, he had witnessed firsthand Liu Chengzong's ability to win the people's hearts without relying on spirits and gods.

The experience of traveling a thousand li to reinforce Liaodong as a military officer, and everything he saw and heard along the way, had enormously increased his competence.

The defeat at Lanzhou in particular made Wang Ziyong realize the difference between Gansu and northern Shaanxi. To build a career in Gansu, the last thing he needed was military force. Instead, he had to solve the problem of people's hearts.

Once the problem of people's hearts was solved, wouldn't the government troops' arms, armor, firearms, cannon, and even battle-hardened veterans simply become his own reserve barracks?

So in his reply to Liu Laoye, he asked for a literate man who understood military regulations to teach him to read and write. Beyond that, all he wanted was ten or twenty hands, a hundred taels of silver or so, and a portrait of Liu Chengzong thrown in.

The hands should be mainly physicians, a funeral crew, cooks, and tattooists. Not many people, but the skill requirement was very high — because any more and Wang Ziyong couldn't afford to keep them.

When Liu Laoye read the letter, though he had no idea what Wang Ziyong was thinking, the matter was very easy to handle. Only the "literate man" requirement was a bit tall... During the Marshal Manor's rapid expansion, the shortage of literate men was extreme. Virtually every xiucai who could be sent out had already gone to Kangning Prefecture.

But Wang Ziyong was, after all, a former leader from when their forces combined. Sending a mere tongsheng would seem insufficiently respectful.

In the end, Liu Laoye decided to send Shiliu.

After all, what Wang Ziyong wanted was literacy. In peacetime, even an ordinary landlord couldn't afford a teacher like Liu Xiangyu. Shiliu had studied under Liu Xiangyu for three years and could even teach basic literacy to the Lion soldiers at the Juerwan academy.

Moreover, Shiliu understood military regulations. Apart from his young age making the assignment of a teacher seem a bit frivolous, every other qualification perfectly matched Wang Ziyong's request.

Most importantly, everyone knew that Shiliu had first been Liu Chengzong's little attendant, and later Liu Xiangyu's page. Sending a child like this over showed Liu Xiangyu's regard far more than sending some other tongsheng would.

It was just that, for Wang Ziyong, this regard was a little too weighty. If this boy died on his watch, how could he ever face Liu Chengzong again?

When Shiliu, leading four guards and a full wedding-and-funeral crew, a party of over twenty in all, entered Gansu via Sunan —

Wang Ziyong nearly swore brotherhood with him on the spot. In the end, after some discussion, Shiliu took Wang Ziyong as his master, and Wang Ziyong called Shiliu, who taught him to read, "Little Master."

Shiliu had been brimming with excitement the whole journey to Gansu. Back at Zuantianmao in northern Shaanxi and Juerwan in Xining, he had heard plenty of stories about Wang Ziyong.

People spoke of Wang Ziyong as if he had supernatural powers, able to pull together a peasant army of over a thousand at a moment's notice whenever needed.

Shiliu wanted that kind of ability too, but arriving at Wang Ziyong's place left him deeply disappointed... There was no magic to summon soldiers from scattered beans, nor any military camp like the one Shiliu knew. The men didn't even live together normally — they only gathered when there was business to do.

This was terribly unsettling for little Shiliu. When people lived apart, he lost his sense of security, as if he were back in northern Shaanxi before meeting Liu Chengzong, drifting and fleeing famine.

After meeting Liu Chengzong, no matter what he did, he was always with the army. The army was his home.

What Wang Ziyong had established in Gansu was a secret society, called the Three Tribulations Society.

Their emblem was a three-leafed lotus. The initiation rite was held in a dark room, burning incense and pricking blood, performing three kneelings and nine kowtows before the Marshal's portrait. Afterwards, regardless of gender, all addressed each other as brothers and swore an oath to entrust life and death to one another, to share fortune and rescue each other from misfortune.

Those with talent among them would have a three-leafed green lotus tattooed on their palm and the Northern Dipper on their back, and be granted titles such as Village Head, Land, Judge, and Vanguard.

All rules and regulations were dictated by Wang Ziyong, written down by Shiliu, and mixed with military law... But in Shiliu's eyes, this secret society of theirs had nothing whatsoever to do with warfare or rebellion.

Their usual activity was moving through the remote outskirts of Ganzhou, aiding the downtrodden among the porters, the widowed and orphaned military dependents in the villages, going deep into the homes of marginalized people no one else bothered with to help the distressed and assist the needy. Hearing that someone was desperately seeking medicine, or that someone had died with no one to bury them, they were as happy as if it were New Year's.

So up to now, the Three Tribulations Society didn't have many members in Gansu. Quite a few people had smeared a three-leafed lotus in white lime outside their mud-brick houses, but there were only a handful of local chapter heads at the Village Head and Land level.

This time, their reason for passing through Camel City was to head west to Black Spring Post. According to the Three Tribulations Society's Village Head at Zhenxi Fort, an unemployed post-station hand at Black Spring Post had an old mother who was ill with no money for medicine. Hearing that the Society's chief could help with burial and perform rites for the dead, he had sought them out.

They were far apart, and messages traveled slowly. Wang Ziyong didn't know if he could make it in time to save her, so besides bringing a physician, he could only prepare for funeral arrangements as the other party had requested.

Shiliu set out with the group. After some simple calculations, he finally confirmed that Wang Ziyong did, indeed, still want to rebel.

For just one sentence from someone else, they brought medicines, a physician, a funeral crew, and the apprentices for all these roles — dozens of people setting out from Ganzhou, crossing barren fields and a hundred-li stretch of desert, nearly reaching Jiuquan.

Wang Ziyong's funeral crew was very famous in Ganzhou. The physician was expert in all manner of difficult and complicated illnesses, the cook could skillfully prepare meals for over a hundred people, and the funeral musicians were especially professional and deeply experienced — to say nothing of Heavenly Master Wang himself, who could personally officiate both Buddhist and Daoist funeral rites.

In Ganzhou Guard, a Thousand-Household had invited them to officiate his mother's funeral. Without them even providing the coffin, one funeral service cost forty taels of silver.

Yet here, for poor families, as long as someone asked — whether funeral, wedding, or medical treatment — they gave everything freely and answered every plea.

The carpenter society member at Zhenxi Fort had even made a coffin for them. The enormous cost of all this — no one but someone who wanted to rebel would do such a thing.

This westward journey, besides handling the funeral, had another mission: to let Shiliu meet their Village Head at Zhenxi Fort.

He was an old widower in his sixties, living out in the sands beyond Zhenxi Fort. He had three broken-down mud-brick rooms, sparsely furnished, his household in extreme poverty. The only thing on the cooking stove was a little clay figurine.

But the house was exceptionally lively. The society members of Zhenxi Fort, hearing that the Gansu General Chief, Heavenly Master Wang, had arrived, all flocked to the old Village Head's home to pay their respects.

This old Village Head was a man of bitter fate. For generations his family had lived off forty mu of land, but by his father's time, the desert had encroached, and by the time it passed to him only twenty mu remained — and now even those twenty mu had been swallowed by the sand.

He had fathered two sons and a daughter. The eldest son was sold away, the daughter did not survive, and only a youngest son remained, serving as a soldier at Zhenxi Fort.

His wife had died just during last year's autumn defense. The youngest son came back. The old widower was himself a marginal man, with no distant kin or close neighbors able to lend a hand. Wang Ziyong had brought his people to bury her. From then on, the old man joined the Three Tribulations Society as a brother. He bore no Northern Dipper on his back and had not pricked blood for the oath — he simply led the Zhenxi Fort members in bowing to the Marshal.

Who was the Marshal? He didn't know, and it didn't matter.

Zhenxi Fort now had over fifty society members, mostly old men, old women, and military dependents left behind, mixed with some bankrupt peasants — all of whom had joined after Wang Ziyong helped the old Village Head arrange the funeral.

No one cared who they were bowing to. Ming King, Maitreya, sworn brothers — Eternal Venerable Mother, embrace us in your arms. What they sought was simply to bow to the Marshal, so that when trouble came to their own house, someone would help.

Wang Ziyong brought the physician to examine and treat the society members who had come to pay respects, then had Shiliu lead the tattooist in conducting the initiation rites for new members. They visited every household, smeared white lime to paint a three-leafed lotus on each door, picked up a few jobless and landless men to hoist the coffin, and drove the camel train onward.

The unemployed post-station runner at Black Spring Post was called Suo Kang. His ancestors were Yellow-Turban Uighurs. In his forties, he had spent half his life at the post station working for the court for those few maces of silver. He endured until the Chongzhen Emperor ascended the throne, and finally no longer had to sell his life for a few maces of silver — he was laid off.

In the Ming dynasty, Gansu was one huge military camp. If northern Shaanxi was a semi-military society, then Gansu was a military society of very high purity.

A military society inherently exerts strong control over the common people, because every household provides soldiers and the people are naturally organized. But once the soldiers can no longer make a living, this military control over the populace collapses in the blink of an eye.

When Han society entered a semi-collapse phase, people could at least still rely on their clans; the common folk of other ethnic groups could also still rely on aid from their own communities to get by.

Only naturalized outsiders like Suo Kang — whose family had taken a Han name three generations ago, lived in Han settlements, and done the hereditary work planned by the court — were different.

After losing their jobs, they could hardly return to the nomadic life of their original tribe, nor were they accepted by the local Han clans. With no one to rely on, they became a truly vulnerable group.

After losing his job, Suo Kang's life was hard. His family had no land. He thought of making a living by his martial skills, but the great households of Gansu had no need at all to hire martial artists as household guards.

The great households of Gansu all already possessed, to a greater or lesser degree, their own private armed forces. In these days of deserters roaming everywhere, his résumé simply was not competitive.

Suo Kang could only try to work as a porter or laborer, yet he could not even produce the gift to offer the trade boss. Instead, he faced discrimination for his looks. Apart from a few other laid-off post-station runners like himself, he had no friends at all.

Finally, left with no choice, when one laid-off post-station runner became a tenant farmer, Suo Kang naturally became the day laborer hired by that tenant.

In truth, back when he worked as a post-station runner, Suo Kang had always thought he had quite a few friends. It was only when he needed to seek medical help for his elderly mother that he discovered his friends were actually very few.

Two friends brought two hundred and ten cash and two bowls of rice. The fellow villagers living in the same hamlet were each so poor they could barely feed themselves and had no way to offer any help beyond their concern.

Clutching the two bowls of rice, Suo Kang ran all over Black Spring Post but could not find a single physician to help him. By the time he returned home with his two sons, who had been filling their bellies with wild grass, his elderly mother had already breathed her last.

The old woman had not died of illness. She could not bear to watch her son, just to keep her alive, bow and kowtow to everyone, then pour every last meager possession the family had into it.

So the old woman, while no one was home, tied a rope to the window frame, tied the other end around her neck, rolled off the bed — and she was gone.

No matter how Suo Kang wept and wailed to heaven and earth, the funeral arrangements had to be put on the agenda. But the current situation was that all the villagers feared he would borrow money, and feared they themselves had none to give, so they dared not even set foot in his door.

Just as he began racking his brains for funeral money again, Wang Ziyong arrived with a camel caravan.

The funeral team coming from afar struck every household in Black Spring Post as strange. But Wang Ziyong had a kindly face. He first expressed his regret at arriving so late, then presented Suo Kang with his own Buddhist and Daoist ordination certificates, asking what kind of rites he wanted. After that, he chanted scriptures for seven days straight.

At the same time, the physician he had brought set up a stall outside Suo Kang's door, diagnosing the common folk's ailments and writing out prescriptions.

People were overwhelmed with gratitude. Suo Kang even burned incense and drew blood, performing three kneelings and nine kowtows before the portrait of the Marshal in a darkened room. He swore a blood oath with villagers who hoped to receive help should they face the same plight in the future. Together they burned incense, kowtowed, and became the Marshal's own sons and grandsons, making Suo Kang the local head of the Three Calamities Society at Black Spring Post.

Once the matter was settled, Wang Ziyong led his people away, choosing a different route to return toward Ganzhou.

On the road, Sixteen asked, "Master, we always do this. Is it useful for the uprising?"

"The court, the army, even a society — all need to use people. Just like the Marshal's mansion, it's always short of hands. The government is different; the government has too many people and too few it needs to use. So there are many posts that seem useless on the surface but are really just there to keep people busy... like the dismissed post-station runners, for example."

Wang Ziyong explained, "Once these people are cut, they become useless people. The things useless people are least able to resolve are life, death, and face."

"Unless a society can create a source of wealth, mutual aid within the society cannot solve this problem either. Everything you see me do has nothing to do with rebellion, but in the end it will surely lead to rebellion, because a society needs a source of wealth to solve the problems of life, death, and face."

"Physicians need money; weddings and funerals also need money. I treat people's illnesses and become their lifesaver. When others join the Three Calamities Society, they gain brothers who will share their hardships. Having accepted this benefit, when something happens in the future, a single call and they must come."

Sixteen's face was full of doubt. "Why would they come at a single call? Aren't they afraid of death?"

"They are afraid, but fear is useless. They are all useless people. Without the society, who would preside over the funerals when their elderly fathers and mothers die? Who would treat their children when they fall gravely ill? The entire village are society members — how would others look at them? They are already useless people; would they dare throw away even this last lifesaving straw?"

Wang Ziyong raised a hand and rubbed Sixteen's head, looking at this disciple called 'Little Master' with a smile. "Little Master, I have seen those who worship Maitreya, and those who worship the Eternal Venerable Mother. This time, switching to the Marshal's portrait, is to prove one thing."

Sixteen asked, "What thing?"

"These useless wretches who are the first to be cast aside — so long as all living beings still stand with them, they do not care whether they worship the Wisdom King, Maitreya, the Eternal Mother, or the Marshal."

As he spoke, Wang Ziyong smiled easily. "Because the great calamity is at hand."