Xu Wuyou stepped across the towering vermillion threshold of the Three Judicial Departments just as the brutal midday sun began to lean westward.
That crooked official Qian Zhongwen, along with the eight thousand taels of incriminating silver, had been nailed onto the torture rack in the main prison.
He rubbed his sore and stiff neck, waved away the guards from the Waterways Hall, and did not even take the conspicuous black-canopied carriage of his own Marquisate. Instead, he slipped along the base of the wall and turned into the Western Market.
Listening Tide Pavilion was a teahouse hidden in a narrow alley, a place where all walks of life mingled—a true crossroads of the city.
They served no refined Dragon Well or Biluochun teas for cultured scholars and poets. Only coarse tea leaves, three coppers a pot.
He chose a dim corner seat by the window on the second floor.
For days on end, he had been locked in a mental chess match with those old foxes of the imperial court, and his mask as a carefree young aristocrat had worn thin, stretching his nerves to the breaking point.
Now that the dust had settled, he wanted nothing more than half an hour of peace in the clamor of the marketplace.
A waiter nimbly brought over a chipped earthenware teapot.
Xu Wuyou had just closed his eyes when the clamor from the next table drilled straight into his ears.
“I’ll say it plainly today: the Helian people will never dare ride south to raid our borders!”
The speaker was a fat scholar in a gray linen robe, his face flushed red with agitation.
“I bet a jar of the strongest Daughter’s Wine from the Southern District Brewery!”
Across from him sat a gaunt, bamboo-pole-thin failed examination candidate, hollow-cheeked and sharp-boned.
The thin scholar slammed his palm on the table without backing down.
“You pedantic fool—you’re like a frog at the bottom of a well!”
“Every autumn, the barbarians come to pillage for winter supplies. This year, the cold has come early beyond the passes. If they don’t steal grain, they’ll starve. This war is inevitable!”
The fat scholar snorted, picked up a softened salted peanut, and tossed it into his mouth.
“The Great Qian empire has a hundred thousand elite troops of the Northern Pacification Army stationed at the frontier. If the Helian Khan’s court dares to come, it’s like an egg smashing against a rock!”
Xu Wuyou let out a helpless sigh. The teacup he had just lifted was set back down.
“You blockhead sitting in your well—do you even know how the Helian ancestors rose to power?”
Determined to win that jar of wine, the thin scholar stood up straight and began showing off his bookish knowledge to the entire teahouse.
“A hundred years ago, in the final years of the Great Tang dynasty, the world was in chaos, and the Yellow Turban rebels trampled Chang’an.”
“Back then, the Helian ancestor Helian Lie was a Tang official guarding the northern frontier. The clan’s young men wore Chinese robes and studied the Spring and Autumn Annals.”
“A family that had enjoyed the bounty of the Central Plains court for generations—do you know what he did next?”
The thin scholar paused deliberately, scanning the crowd of tea drinkers now drawn to his story.
“That born rebel, seizing the chaos of the realm and the cutoff of army provisions, drew his blade in public on the day of the ancestral rites!”
“He brought his sword down and severed the head of his own clan elder!”
A deliberate hush of gasps ran through the teahouse crowd.
“That wasn’t all. He threw the Tang court’s bestowals—the official seal and the Four Books and Five Classics—all into a brazier.”
“In public, he cut off his topknot, draped wolfskin over his shoulders, and swore an oath facing the Yin Mountains: never again would he be the Central Plains’ hound or hawk.”
“This wild dog’s founding chieftain was a merciless, bloodthirsty savage who would slaughter his own kin without blinking.”
“That wolf pack has fattened itself in the desert for a hundred years, and you dare say they wouldn’t bite?”
The fat scholar was stunned speechless by this blood-drenched century-old history.
He opened his mouth, scrambling for a retort.
But at the next table, a Scarred Man gnawing on a chicken leg gave a cold laugh.
“You bookworm have a silver tongue, no doubt,” the Scarred Man said, spitting chewed bones crudely onto the floor and wiping his greasy hands on his coat.
“But the well water you’ve mixed into those unofficial histories is far too much.”
Xu Wuyou looked up sharply, his gaze appraising the man who had spoken.
The Scared Man was missing two fingers entirely on his left hand. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, exposing forearms crosshatched with faded red knife scars from years past.
Even sitting lazily, the frontier veteran’s rough military aura was unmistakable.
“Helian Lie was ruthless, sure enough, but he didn’t build his kingdom and seize the title of Khan solely by killing his own family to show off his power,” the Scarred Man said.
He grabbed the coarse wine bowl on the table and took a gulp, his eyes sweeping over the city loafers with ears pricked.
“You chicks raised under the emperor’s shadow—what could you know about how deep the waters truly run in the barbarian Khanate?”
“Their Great Khan in Unified City presides over political rules that are a hundred times filthier than our Great Qian court.”
“The Xiongnu always venerated the east, where the sun rises, and their military system strongly favors the left.”
“Below the Great Khan are four imperial princes. Chief among them is the Left Prince. This Left Tuki Prince is the designated crown prince, governing the tribes on the eastern lands where the grass is richest.”
“But do you know who truly holds power over the armies, battles, and the realm’s trade routes?”
The Scarred Veteran deliberately dragged out his words in suspense, and after seeing everyone shake their heads, gave a scornful laugh.
“It’s the Right Tuki Prince—the one permanently stationed in the western stronghold—and the Left and Right Gul Kings defending the frontiers.”
“Specifically the Right Gul King, a Living Yama entrenched on the border.”
“Under the pretext of defending against the Great Qian dynasty, he monopolizes the black market between the two kingdoms, privately forging weapons and gunpowder, amassing wealth that rivals a kingdom.”
“That jackal, who dares not even heed the Great Khan, is the real ratchet-mover of war.”
“If the Great Khan wants to start a full-scale war, without those secretively scheming, power-grasping Gul Kings nodding—providing grain and troops—then even the Grand Shaman’s scorched bone divination is just a useless piece of firewood!”
The teahouse’s earlier chatter and laughter had faded completely into silence.
The Scarred Veteran wiped the wine stains from his beard, pulling the corner of his mouth into a bitterly mocking grimace.
“But the most farcical thing of all is that over the past century, the Helian regime has mutated into a twisted, grotesque monster.”
“When Helian Lie first took over, he set up the North and South Administrations to attract refugee craftsmen fleeing from the Central Plains.”
“But look at it now?”
“The old nobles of the North Administration, who stubbornly cling to nomadic ancestral traditions, now have their tents floored with Persian rugs smuggled from our Great Qian and drinking vessels from our imperial kilns.”
“They even hire poor failed scholars from Great Qian at heavy expense to meticulously calculate their usurious private accounts on the grasslands.”
Both the fat and the thin scholars sat dumbfounded, even their folding fans forgotten.
“Even that isn’t the most fatal part,” the Scarred Veteran slammed the table emphatically.
“It’s the demon officials and generals of the South Administration—men who wear Chinese robes and grow long hair to pass as Han—who are the truly rotten-to-the-bone living ghosts!”
“To prove their ferocity—to prove they still have wolf nature—to the North Administration nobles,”
“These bastards, wearing Han clothes by day with ‘Confucius-Mencius Doctrine’ on their lips, hearing cases on the bench with our Great Qian’s Imperial Code, will at night, deep in silence, capture our border citizens and war prisoners to sacrifice to that bogus Wolf God in the back courtyards of Unified City!”
“They even eat human flesh raw in public to flatter their rulers and beg for favor.”
The Scarred Veteran’s eyes were bloodshot as he forced out his words through grit teeth.
“And do you know what our Great Qian historians call them?”
“Thieves interact, one false to the other; Hu and Han pretend to be each other—all hypocrites to the bone!”
"Unified Walled City has long become a cauldron filled with supreme evil, supreme greed, and supreme hypocrisy!"
The tea drinkers in the hall felt a chill creeping up their spines. Those who had come merely for amusement now found their hands and feet growing cold.
Xu Wuyou, holding his tea cup, paused mid-air.
On the murky surface of the cheap tea, the reflection of his suddenly chilled brow appeared.
He finally understood completely.
His younger sister Xu Qinghuan, now in the northern border city, was not facing simple-minded barbarians who only knew how to draw bows and shoot eagles.
That rotting, century-old crucible at the end of its days had forged a group of faithless yet utterly cunning and brutal madmen.
That Han strategist Chen Changfeng, who had defected to the desert, had been tempered into a poison blade that recognized no kin within that fractured and twisted power structure.
No wonder his sister’s letter said that dead agents didn't need to be assassins—only a traitor could bait the Helian Royal Court to take the hook.
Because in that land, betrayal and hypocrisy were the very air they breathed to survive.
"You... you old army dog, stop scaremongering and boosting the enemy’s morale!"
The thin, tall scholar, unwilling to let his hard-earned moment of attention be stolen, lowered his voice and took a mysterious step forward.
"I have a distant cousin who deals in furs. He fled back to the capital from the north just last night."
"He told me with his own mouth that outside the Zhenbei Pass, something monstrous has happened!"
The scholar’s eyes bulged, his voice trembling with barely restrained shivers.
"Listen well! Among the Great Qian border troops, a Living Yana has appeared!"
The entire floor’s focus instantly shifted from the old soldier to the thin scholar’s face.
"That Yama is missing his right arm. He wields an iron mace in his left hand."
"On that wasteland, relying purely on brute strength, he smashed twenty of the Helian Royal Court’s Iron Floats into bloody pulp on the ground!"
"Even the vanguard battalion’s centurion had his entire arm crippled. The barbarian army panicked and broke camp that very night."
"This is the peerless courage of Xiang Yu reborn! Even the dead would crawl out of their graves in fear!"
Xu Wuyou nearly snorted the big mouthful of coarse tea he had just swallowed straight out through his nose.
He turned toward the cobblestone street outside the window and coughed violently twice, tears gathering at the corners of his eyes.
That one-armed, mace-wielding god of slaughter.
Who else could it be but his second younger brother, Xu Zhan—silent and sullen since childhood but with a ruthlessness that defied belief?
Little brother, little brother, even your fearsome reputation has reached the tea houses of the capital.
The entire second floor erupted into a clamor.
Someone slapped their thigh fiercely, shouting with fanatical fervor about a divine general descending from heaven—that the ancestors of Great Qian were blessing the realm.
A timid merchant paled and chanted "Boundless Heaven," insisting that this must be a demonic asura possessing the soldiers.
Only the fat scholar remained stubbornly defiant, curling his thick lips in a sneer.
"Ridiculous! The height of absurdity!"
"A cripple missing one arm, unable to even keep his balance—how could he swing a heavy iron weapon?"
"This kind of tall tale wouldn't fool a three-year-old child by the roadside!"
The thin scholar, publicly humiliated, jumped in frustration, rolling up his sleeves and swearing oaths, desperate to make the other tea drinkers join him.
Xu Wuyou sat by the window, his broad shoulders shaking with suppressed laughter.
The gloom and exhaustion that had hung over him for days seemed to dissipate entirely amidst this absurd yet genuine market noise.
He no longer wished to listen to these bookish scholars, who knew nothing of war, squabble over his brother’s exploits.
From his sleeve, Xu Wuyou pulled out a small, solid piece of silver.
The coin silently rested on the edge of the table, stained with deep brown tea marks.
Just as he adjusted his collar and prepared to rise and leave—
The Scarred Veteran, who had been sitting in his seat watching coldly all along, suddenly let out a heavy sigh.
That sigh, laden with profound sorrow and grief, fell like a boulder into a lake, crushing the hall’s noise into silence.
"Do you Southerners really think that producing a single One-Armed Divine General can safely hold off the Helian Royal Court's hundred thousand greedy wolves?"
The Scarred Veteran rose slowly, leaning on the table’s edge. His single eye gazed toward the north-facing window, swirling with an indescribable sadness.
"A hundred years ago, when Great Qian was first founded, the founding Emperor led a personal expedition to reclaim the lost northern lands."
"At the Battle of White Wolf River, Great Qian’s finest infantry square formations and repeating crossbows collided head-on with the Helian dynasty’s newly-formed Gold Wolf Guard heavy cavalry."
The veteran’s voice grew low and deep, as if reciting a eulogy written in blood.
"That was the bloodiest defeat Great Qian had suffered in a century."
"A hundred thousand men lay floating in rivers of blood, dyeing the entire frozen White Wolf River red."
"If the generals of that time hadn’t formed a desperate shield wall to protect the Emperor, he would have been wiped out on that vast snowy plain."
"In the end, they had no choice but to swallow their pride and recognize the legitimacy of this Northern dynasty."
The veteran bent down, picked up his patched and worn bundle from the floor, and pushed aside the long bench blocking his way.
"Here, under the splendid feet of the Son of Heaven, you drink tea and amuse yourselves with idle talk of war."
"How could you possibly know that every brick on that northern wall was filled with the bones and lives of Great Qian’s border troops?"
"This century-old blood debt has demanded a century of bloodshed."
The veteran, hunched and limping, made his way toward the stairway.
"This world will not be at peace for long."
