Night. The third watch had just sounded.
The small bronze ring on the side gate of Shunzhen Gate in the Forbidden City was knocked twice, and the heavy red-painted wooden door cracked open. Hai Shou, the head eunuch of Noble Consort Wan's palace, had changed into a short gray lambskin jacket, clutching a wax-sealed bamboo tube tightly to his chest. He swung himself onto the purebred dark horse waiting outside.
A single whip struck the horse's rump hard.
The horse's hooves were wrapped in cloth, their muffled beat forming a steady line as they raced straight for the southern gate of the Great Qian capital.
The gate officer had just stepped out with a lantern, about to raise his spear and demand identification.
Hai Shou didn't waste a word. He tore off his waist token and hurled it into the officer's face, sending blood gushing from his nose.
"Imperial decree by eight-hundred-li express! Open the gate! Block the way, and your family will be wiped out three generations over!"
The waist token bore the glaring mark of the Inner Palace Directorate of Ceremonial, exuding a bloodthirsty menace.
The gate officer scrambled in terror, swinging his whip at his subordinates, driving them to crank the iron chains with all their might.
Hai Shou clamped his legs against the horse's flanks, slipping through the gap beneath the still-rising portcullis.
Man and horse vanished into the impenetrable night, speeding toward Jinling.
This was the deadly game at the top of Great Qian. The Grand Secretariat had only just finished its calculations in the Cangshu Pavilion when a secret order from the deep palace was already galloping on horseback.
They were racing against time. Racing to catch that rising wind of outrage among the empire's scholars—the gale that would tear the Xu family to pieces.
...
At the third quarter of the hour of the Ox, at the westernmost end of Liulichang in the capital.
The battered sign of the Wash Ink Studio hung askew beneath the eaves, its red lacquer long since peeled away.
The cold wind poured through the gaps in the tiles, cutting into flesh like knives.
A layer of white frost had formed on the high-quality paper pasted over the broken window lattice, shattering the moonlight that filtered through.
The broken clay brazier in the room no longer gave off smoke, only half a basin of dead, cold ash.
Lu Changying, a thirty-year-old failed scholar from a humble family, was rubbing his hands under his armpits—his fingers swollen with purple chilblains, like rotten radishes.
At the age of four, he had begun his studies. For fifteen years, he had toiled in bitter solitude, his mouth filled with the holy words of Confucius and Mencius, seeking the righteous path of restraint and ritual.
Now, at the threshold of his thirties, he hadn't even passed the provincial exam, let alone found a way to earn a living. His meager family savings had long been drained dry.
From the wooden bed in the inner room came the sound of his mother's breathless coughing, each racking gasp piercing his heart.
She had been coughing blood for days.
A simple decoction of Bupleurum at the medical clinic cost thirty coppers—the cheapest they had.
Even if Lu Changying were to break all his bones and sell them by weight, he couldn't scrape together half that sum.
Yet, in this wretched state, he still wore his threadbare, patched gown with proper dignity. The hollow moral precepts in his belly were the last tattered cloth he used to cover his shame.
Suddenly, the faint sound of wooden wheels crushing thin ice on the bluestone came to a stop just outside the wall.
Lu Changying shivered and pulled the stiff, iron-hard quilt over his knees.
No one knocked.
Slowly, something slipped under the gap of the drafty wooden door.
By the pale snow light, he saw it: a long, well-kept hand, free of calluses, its knuckles smooth.
Between two fingers was wedged a gleaming gold leaf, along with a roll of thick mulberry paper, pushed gently inside.
At the same time, the rich scent of aloeswood drifted into the sour-smelling room. Half a gram of this fine incense could feed an ordinary family for half a year.
The voice from outside was barely a whisper, slipping through the crack in the door.
"Before dawn, find the crudest movable type blocks and print one thousand copies of this manuscript."
"Leave no name. Distribute them to all the major teahouses and academies south of the city."
"Complete the job, and this pure gold is yours."
The wagon wheels started up again, the horse's hooves fading slowly into the distance. Not a shadow remained.
Lu Changying sat frozen on the edge the brick bed.
Producing handbills for an unknown patron was a capital crime under Great Qian law.
On any other day, with his stubborn scholar's pride, he would have thrown the copper-stained item and the paper roll into the muddy gutter, cursing the degradation of all learning.
But now...
His mother's painful coughing came from the inner room, and his heart could not bear it.
In the corner, the chipped clay rice jar had been raided by rats just two nights ago. Now it held only half a handful of moldy husks.
His pride, his cherished integrity—it meant less than a fart against this bitter cold that could freeze a man to death.
Lu Changying bent down.
His hands trembled uncontrollably.
He picked up the frost-covered gold leaf and bit its edge hard.
The true gold pressed against his teeth with a solid ache.
He tucked the leaf into his undershirt, close to his skin, afraid this lifeline might sprout legs and run.
He hurried to the typesetting table, took out the fire striker, and lit the shallow sesame-oil lamp.
Printing was hard, manual labor.
In the past, he had disdained such grimy work, even wrapping his fingers in cloth when holding a carving knife.
But tonight, he moved with astonishing speed.
He picked out the worn, chipped, and broken pinewood type blocks, grabbing them by the handful.
He unrolled the thick mulberry paper. The characters were a blend of ink hook and silver strokes, exuding a fierce, bone-deep intensity. The top was blank—no name, no signature.
With one hand holding the paper and the other stuffing wooden types into the composing frame, he began.
His eyes landed on the first line, and his hands froze mid-motion.
"In recent times, scholars have regarded quiet sitting and inner contemplation as the investigation of things, and memorization and recitation as the extension of knowledge. For a century, methods have grown denser and denser, while practical learning has grown thinner and thinner."
Lu Changying clicked his dry, peeling lips. Another arrogant fool, starting by digging up the ancestors of all scholars under heaven!
He snorted in discontent, then pressed a type block bearing the character for "heaven" into the form. His eyes followed the lamplight downward, scanning further.
"Now, heaven has constant principles; earth has constant laws. This is called the pattern of nature. The sun's rising in the east and setting in the west; water flowing downhill to the low places; metal melting when it meets fire; boats floating when they encounter water—these are manifestations of the pattern of nature in all things. They do not disappear because Yao ruled, nor emerge because Jie was overthrown."
At this point, his typesetting hands stopped.
"Scholars ignore these and speak only of the ethical bonds of ruler and subject, father and son, husband and wife as the pattern of nature. This is to discard the sun and moon and talk of candlelight; to abandon rivers and oceans and sip from a hoof print!"
Thud.
A half-inch cube of pinewood type slipped from his fingers, falling straight into the bamboo basket of scrap paper.
"How insolent!" Lu Changying's throat tightened, and a guttural roar escaped through gritted teeth. "This is treason!"
The heavenly and earthly ethical bonds were the very pillars holding the Great Qian empire upright!
And this man had dismissed them as the meager wick of a dying lamp, leaving the true radiance of sun and moon behind?
This was nothing less than overturning the table, tearing off the faces of all the empire's scholars and grinding them into the ground!
But before his curses faded, the lamp wick spat out a spark, burning brighter.
The flame dragged his eyes back to the page.
The words turned into barbs of rusted iron, burrowing into his skull.
"To investigate the pattern of water, one should use a clepsydra to measure its speed; to investigate the pattern of fire, one should examine wetness and dryness to discern its warmth and coolness."
"To understand the principle of grain, one must distinguish between fertile and barren fields with their yields, and examine droughts and floods accumulated over the years. This is what is called 'realizing truth through tangible objects, and verifying proof through numbers.'"
Lu Changying's breathing completely lost its rhythm.
The line in the essay—"Truth lies in tangible objects, in that which cannot be falsified by measurement"—was like a series of heavy, crushing slaps across his cheeks, reaching through the thin paper.
At the age of fourteen, the capital region was struck by a severe drought.
The county magistrate led all the scholars who had passed the imperial examinations in the city, kneeling in dense rows on the stone steps of the Dragon King Temple.
They prayed for rain, appealed to heaven, performed sacrifices, and expounded on the mysteries of Confucianism—nonstop for three entire days and nights.
And what was the result? The crops outside the city still withered into dry clumps of grass! He had personally witnessed the horrors of people exchanging their children for food!
This faint sound was unmistakably a dry skull being snapped under a careless footstep—a crack that pierced straight into the depths of his brain.
His gaze locked onto the final lines of the manuscript, unable to move away even half an inch.
Empty talk of human nature yields not an extra bushel of rice per year; idle meditation on benevolence and righteousness cannot forge a single pound of iron in a day.
In his heart, it was as if a bolt of lightning had flashed—Lu Changying's heart was shattered.
Lu Changying's whole body shook violently twice. His knees lost all strength, and half his body collapsed onto the typesetting platform, covered in black ink stains.
These thirty-six characters had taken the official essays of two centuries since the founding of the Great Qian dynasty and cut them down into something less than rag-wiping cloth—a mess of rotten cotton wool.
Salty, bitter tears surged without warning, mingling with thick yellow mucus, falling straight into the wooden movable-type tray soaked in ink.
He thought of...
The harsh winter when he was twelve, even more deadly than the current weather.
His little sister, who had just passed her fifth birthday, was so starved that her cheeks had caved into two dark pits. She clung to his leg, crying that she was hungry.
At that moment, he had been sitting upright, holding a costly hand-copied copy of the Orthodox Classic of Sages and Worthies, reciting from memory: "Knowing contentment brings stability."
When his little sister breathed her last, she wasn't even given a tattered mat to wrap her body—just two handfuls of hard, frozen earth as her cover.
Fifteen years of study! Fifteen years of reciting the classics, histories, and philosophical works!
What had Lu Changying reaped from it all, except a decayed, frail body unfit for carrying loads on his shoulders or lifting with his hands?
His mother lay critically ill, and he couldn't afford a dose of medicinal herbs; now, he himself was so hungry he had to swallow chaff to fill his stomach.
At last, he understood!
Those so-called "saintly teachings" were nothing but a tattered loincloth, riddled with holes—unable to hold back the bottom of an empty rice jar, unable to block the bone-penetrating autumn chill.
Lu Changying trembled as he pulled out his frozen hand. His knees gave way, and he knelt halfway to the ground, clutching the golden leaf and the manuscript into his palm.
He held on until his palm ached, as if this alone could crush his fifteen years of pride and dignity into his very bones and blood.
The Confucian doctrines he had mouthed so often, the old scholarly rules that had broken his spine—
These had once been his only glory, the halo he clung to for appearances.
But at this moment, they had become a shroud full of maggots, shrunk to a suffocating fit.
They dug into his flesh, choking him, making him retch until even a single breath was impossible!
Every stroke of the essay's characters had turned into a thick, rusted, blunt blade, slowly sawing the false illusions with which he had deceived himself for years into a pulp of rotten meat.
"Truth lies in tangible things... truth lies in tangible things!"
Lu Changying let out a desperate scream.
He had gone utterly mad.
No longer caring about his blood-cracked palm, he grabbed the composing brush and thrust it deep into the thick ink, then beat it against the typeset plate in frantic strokes.
Ink splattered everywhere, covering his entire body and face.
Each time he pressed the cheapest rough paper over the wooden block, each time he scraped the brush across the paper's back, the room, dark and empty, erupted with grating, grinding sounds.
This was not printing.
At this moment, Lu Changying was nothing more than a devil about to freeze to death in a snow pit, clutching desperately at a basin of burning coals.
He didn't care if the coals burned through his skin and flesh to the bone!
Print!
Before dawn, he would print a thousand copies!
He would take this fire, which tore the veil off every pedantic scholar under heaven, and carry it into the southern part of the city!
Burn it into the teahouses and pavilions of those self-important old masters! Burn it into every pair of eyes still shut in beautiful dreams!
Lu Changying tore open the collar of his long gown, ripped off his tattered cotton jacket, and hurled it into the muddy ground.
Pale, coarse sheets of paper, stained with heavy, pungent black ink, were pulled from the mold one after another, stacking into a tall pile on the earthen bed.
A thousand cheap leaflets, enough to shatter the old world, were now brewing a wild fire from this stinking dead-end alley—a fire that would burn through the sky of the Great Qian dynasty.
Full of logic that devours people!
Let it change... let it change.
