Chapter 43: A River of Blood

The other set of memories never told him that in this era, rebel troops and bandits would trade human heads with the government soldiers sent to exterminate them.

When word reached Xingping Hamlet, it sent Liu Laoye into a thunderous rage.

"A year of disaster, a drought! Every household in my Xingping Hamlet set aside three days' rations each to give to the government troops, and this is the result we get? Never mind that there was no battle — they didn't even face off before the bandits were let go, and they took the heads of the murdered villagers from Old Temple Village back to the city to claim merit!"

At home, Liu Chengzong said not a single word.

It was not until his father took the lead, contacting the hamlet chief and convening the clan to propose helping collect the corpses of Old Temple Village's dead, that he was still digesting how deeply this incident had shaken him.

As he set out northward, leaving Xingping Hamlet, a vague thought suddenly came to Liu Chengzong — a term from the other memories that he had never been able to understand: weakness.

He still could not claim to understand that term now, but this jolt had given him a little more to think about, or rather, it had led him from that single term upward, toward an inductive summary of certain fragments from the other memories, combined with his own circumstances.

For instance, Battalion Commander Zhang leading three hundred guard troops to trade with the bandits, using the heads of Old Temple Village's folk in exchange for the bandits withdrawing on their own.

This matter was beyond his expectations, but to him, it was not as incomprehensible or rage-inducing as it was to his father.

He could understand it — he could understand a general, with two or three hundred subordinates who could not even eat their fill, facing an enemy they might not be able to defeat, making a compromise where each side took what it needed.

Even though it was utterly irresponsible, a betrayal of integrity, and supremely shameless — he could understand it.

He was merely astonished that he could actually feel such visceral resonance with a term that would not appear for another two or three hundred years.

Where did this resonance come from?

From his family's pillar, his father Liu Xiangyu; from his teacher Yang Dingrui; and even from himself — he saw the weakness of the literati.

The three of them shared only the barest common ground: they all read books, making them people of relatively high culture in this era.

The literati are a false class, with an abysmally low floor and an exceedingly high ceiling, an appendage dependent upon other identities.

To point at someone on the street and introduce them by saying, "This is a literatus," would mostly be an insult — it means the person does nothing proper and has no useful skill whatsoever.

His father was a literatus, but his more conspicuous identities were as a Provincial Graduate and an official; after being dismissed from office, his most important identity became that of clan leader.

Yang Dingrui was a literatus, but he was a Presented Scholar and also an official; even after resigning, he remained a gentryman with an examination rank to his name.

He, too, was a literatus — he had sat for the Licentiate exam, and had he not missed the examination hall, he might well have earned a rank himself. But once he became a soldier, he turned into a stout and valiant warrior.

They had different identities, different experiences, different stations — yet Liu Chengzong believed they all possessed weakness.

Because even when storming with fury, even when grinding their teeth in hatred, none of them entertained the slightest thought of taking revenge on Battalion Commander Zhang for defrauding them of their grain.

The more one possesses under the existing system, the weaker one's revolutionary nature.

What great deeds could they accomplish? They could accomplish no great deed at all. Even if they believed their surroundings were plagued by a thousand problems, the most they would ever consider in the end was mere reform.

No matter how bitterly they cursed, no matter how much they pondered, it could not compare to Cao Yao sitting silent on the doorstep, sneering as he sharpened his blade on the bluestone steps of their house.

That was a man who, under the existing system of the Great Ming Empire, possessed nothing save the warhorse between his legs, the armor on his body, and the saber at his waist.

As one of the first five cavalrymen to scout the way to Old Temple Village, Cao Yao told Liu Chengzong on the road that he had sharpened this blade in case something unexpected happened at Old Temple Village.

"But if we run into that dog's scrotum of a battalion commander again — he's eaten fifteen hundred meals of ours, so I'll gift him three mace of lead, and we'll call it even."

Three mace — that is the weight of a single lead ball for a bird gun.

In Old Temple Village, the wooden barricade that had blocked Liu Chengzong from entering the village half a month ago had been torn down and burned to carbonization. Headless corpses lay everywhere, along with the dried blood and bones left from slaughtered livestock.

Liu Chengzong, strolling with his horse in tow, pulled a broken spear shaft from the ground and held it in his hand. The three-foot shaft had been split, its fractured end bristling with splinters, while the three-inch leaf-bladed fine-steel spearhead remained mirror-bright and utterly unworn.

Such ridgeless leaf-blade spearheads were commonly seen among peasant rebel armies in history. Ordinary folk nowadays would not spend such a large sum to forge a spearhead like this, which made Liu Chengzong suspect that this spearhead might be an antique left over from some past war.

And he also felt a great pity for this fine shaft... Clearly, this war spear had belonged to one of Old Temple Village's tenants. Its owner, after carefully sharpening it, had missed his enemy in his very first clash with the bandit soldiers, only to have an opponent wielding a thick-backed cleaver or axe close in and split his spear shaft, dying a violent death.

It probably was not a clean death, because as his eyes searched the vicinity, aside from bloodstains long since soaked into the earth and merged with it, he found no corpse matching his conjecture.

The bandits must have left in a great hurry, or had looted so much that they were unwilling to take even weapons that could be put back into use with minor repairs.

Liu Chengzong was different — he had the genes of a scrap-collector in his bones and was not so wasteful. He lifted his hand and hung the broken spear on the side of his red banner.

His hanging gear did not have names like Victory Hook or Settled-Matter Ring. There were simply several homemade hanging devices on either side of his warhorse's saddle — rings with clips inside them, and leather fittings that could hold a saber or an axe.

Normal cavalrymen all had some hanging gear, but none had as much as he did.

Last year, returning from beyond the frontier, the scorched-earth operation had been a great success. He had shot dead a barbarian cavalry scout but had nowhere to hang his spoils of war. Many things could not be brought back, which left Liu Chengzong, who often crawled through cave dwellings, in utter despair, feeling that his life-and-death fight with the barbarian cavalry had been for nothing.

In a fit of frustration, he had made these items, thinking that this year, when he went beyond the frontier, he would earn the old Liu family a gable-roofed house with a shopfront on Qingliang Mountain in Yan'an Prefecture. Who could have guessed that the general would disband them?

Rounding the wooden barricade and the collapsed loess village wall, he stepped into a crushed courtyard wall. On the stone-lined well in the yard, maggots writhed. Around the bare tree stump, bark and wood chips covered the ground everywhere, and amid the bark and wood chips lay a girl.

Her blood had drained completely; her body was as white as blood.

He had just found a filthy blanket in the collapsed house when he heard wails of grief erupt from the village, so that he did not even have time to lift the girl's family from the well. He could only hastily drape the blanket over her to cover her body, then hurriedly follow the sound of weeping and run out of the courtyard.

Lu Bin stumbled and fell to his knees before a large black pillar, weeping inconsolably. He said this was the village's old Earth God Shrine.

Liu Chengzong could not see the slightest trace of an Earth God Shrine in this black pillar from which an old man hung. The shattered bricks and broken tiles all around made it impossible for him to even tell where the old courtyard walls had been. But if this were his village, he would weep even more bitterly than Lu Bin.

This was no longer a village, nor a home. They searched the entire village — corpses were everywhere. Not only those who resisted were killed; those who did not resist, or lacked the ability to resist, also died. It made no difference whether they were men or women, old or young.

The only distinction, perhaps, was that the corpses of the women mostly still retained their heads.

Compared to the suppressed grief of Liu Chengzong and Lu Bin, Cao Yao was faring much better.

The old bandit tossed a white cat out of a courtyard, cursing as he walked: "Damn it all, which heartless bastard left half a vat of wine in the courtyard? No water, so the cat got drunk — stretching its tail, all four legs going their own way. I thought it was a goose!"