The old night watchman shrank his neck, pulling his sheepskin coat tighter, and glanced back at the long street.
At some point, the street had been covered in a layer of ghastly white.
The old man’s clouded eyes narrowed, thinking how thick the early autumn frost had fallen.
He bent his stooped back, scraped up a pinch of frost from the ground, and rubbed it between his fingers.
There was no cold wetness, only the sharp smell of oily, black ash.
It was a pile of cheap, rough-edged paper. Swept by the bitter north wind, they tumbled everywhere, plastering the blue-brick screen walls of the academies along the street and the carved pillars of the tea houses.
Even the solemn red lacquered door nails of the Imperial Academy were glued with a layer by the night dew.
The long street was cold, silent, and dead in this darkest hour before dawn, permeated with a strange, murderous aura.
Just as dawn broke, the slush still wet.
On the long street outside the Imperial Academy, the failed scholar Lin Jiusi was wandering like a walking corpse. He was wrapped in a tattered padded jacket that had long lost all its cotton lining, his feet dragging mud-caked, broken shoes.
He had started studying at fourteen, and now crow’s feet had appeared at the corners of his eyes. He had taken the Imperial Academy’s entrance exam countless times, yet had never even set foot across its threshold.
The cold wind poured into his torn collar, making his teeth chatter.
Lin Jiusi lowered his head, picked up a piece of torn paper stained with half a footprint of black mud from a puddle, and was about to crumple it into his sleeve to use as kindling to warm his hands later at the broken temple.
But just as he was about to crush the paper ball, the corner of his eye was caught by half a line of wild cursive script on the paper.
"... The sun rises in the east and sets in the west; water flows downward to humble places; metal melts when it meets fire; a boat floats when placed on water—these are all instances of the Heavenly Principle manifesting in all things. It does not exist because Yao was a sage, nor does it perish because Jie was a tyrant."
Lin Jiusi’s hand trembled.
Fifteen years! Day and night, he sat facing the wall, reciting the classics in solitude.
But the principles spoken of by those high officials in temples and the great scholars of the Imperial College were always lofty and intangible, completely out of reach! He had no idea what this "Principle" actually was, and could only chant along like a wooden puppet.
Now, this crumpled, mud-stained paper told him plainly—the Heavenly Principle was that water flows to low places, that metal melts when fire meets it, that it was the most solid, tangible aspects of objects and measurements in Heaven and Earth!
Lin Jiusi pressed the dirty paper to his chest, holding it against his skin through the torn jacket.
His throat quivered several times. Then, he let out a shrill, piercing howl of joyous laughter.
He laughed until tears streamed down his face.
Ignoring the dumbfounded stares of the breakfast vendor on the corner, he waved his arms and roared at the lofty gates of the Imperial Academy above him: "The Heavenly Principle is not in the temples! Not in those lofty moral and ethical scriptures! It lies in the sun and moon, in these grains and wheat, in this mud no one looks at!"
...
Completely opposite to this humble scholar's wild, sudden enlightenment was the panic in the Imperial College, akin to the grief of mourning one's own parents.
In the rear chamber of the Minglun Hall, Cui Mingyun, a member of the Chen Commandery Cui clan's collateral branch and a student of the Imperial College, sat on a a much-grained rosewood armchair. He was meticulously polishing a freshly acquired Duan inkstone from Zhaoqing with a piece of fine deerskin.
His demeanor was steeped in that innate air of aristocratic aloofness nurtured since childhood among the gentry families.
"Young Master! Young Master! There's a riot outside!" A servant boy stumbled through the door, thrusting a crumpled flyer into Cui Mingyun’s hands.
Cui Mingyun frowned slightly, muttering, "You impertinent little brat," and glanced casually at the paper. He assumed it was just another disgruntled failed scholar’s sour rant. But the moment his eyes scanned the first three lines—
A crisp crack.
The priceless Duan inkstone in Cui Mingyun's hand slipped uncontrollably, striking the corner of the deep red sandalwood table.
The hard stone chipped a corner.
But he didn't care at all anymore.
"To regard the ordering of human relationships and moral principles as the Heavenly Principle is to abandon the sun and moon and talk about a candle..." Cui Mingyun gritted his molars, reading the words out one by one, his back instantly drenched in a cold sweat.
As a disciple of the Cui clan, he could hardly be foolish.
He realized immediately:
Is this just about scholarship?
Was it not cutting off the lifeblood of the great gentry families, who for generations had monopolized the annotation and interpretation of the Confucian classics?
Once the scholars of the Empire believed in this heresy that "Principle lies in physical things," on what grounds could the great families monopolize the education system? On what claim could they call themselves disciples of the sages and hold sway at court?
This essay was digging up the graves of their ancestors!
"Seditious heresy! Poison intended to bewilder the people's hearts!" Cui Mingyun felt both fear and rage. He tore the flyer in half with both hands and flung the pieces into the air.
Not satisfied, he strode to the main hall, pulled down the ceremonial sword displayed under the central scroll, and—clang—drew it from its scabbard, the point aimed directly at the door.
"Prepare! Summon all the guards and retainers from the estate! Go out onto the street! Burn any scrap of this devilish writing you see! Anyone caught hiding or reciting it, beat them within an inch of their lives!"
...
While Cui Mingyun's sword pointed at the long street, a far more brutal, silent collapse was unfolding in a cramped little room on the second floor of the Tongfu Inn.
Sun Mao, a fifty-year-old perpetual examinee, had mottled, thinning, graying hair.
He sat motionless by the window overlooking the street, holding that same “On Investigating Things and Rectifying the Mind” discourse that had apparently been slipped under his door. In his left hand, under the pressure of his right palm, lay an annotated volume, its corners curled from years of use.
This densely annotated volume, filled with tiny marginal notes, was a lifetime’s treasure, an object of worship for the thirty years he had burned the midnight oil.
Sun Mao stared at the line of text on the flyer. Unable to stop himself, he thought: If you only chatter about the inner nature of the mind and the moral principles all day long, you can't harvest an extra bushel of grain in a year; if you sit in meditation on righteousness, you can't forge a single pound of iron in a day...
He stared at this line for the better part of half an hour.
Then, suddenly, out of Sun Mao’s throat came a forced, gurgling hybrid sound—half a laugh, half a sob.
It was so jarring that the few young scholars eating their morning porridge at the neighboring table had goosebumps and nearly dropped their chopsticks.
"Heh... can't harvest an extra bushel of grain... can't forge a single pound of iron..."
Sun Mao’s hands began to shake violently.
He stood up slowly, his movements as stiff as a frozen corpse. He grabbed the pile of old books—the decades of annotated interpretations of famous commentators, neatly stacked on the table—and staggering to the charcoal brazier blazing hotly in the corner of the room...
"Sir! What are you doing!" exclaimed a scholar at a nearby table in shock.
Sun Mao ignored him. With a shove from both hands—
Crash.
Thirty years of toil, thirty lifetimes spun from jet-black hair to white, poured into the crimson cinders of the brazier.
Flames shot up, licking the yellowed pages in an instant, sending up a dazzling flash.
The firelight cast a glow over Sun Mao’s pale, manic old face. He turned around, and facing the astonished fellow scholars in the room, he bared his few remaining teeth in a miserable grin.
"Waste paper! For thirty years, I worshipped this pile of garbage! Half my life, never trusting the practical world, never understanding numbers and measures, never knowing how everything under Heaven actually turns! I lived as a colossal joke!"
The old man’s laughter echoed through the inn. Each laugh seemed to tear his own heart, liver, spleen, and lungs right out of his body.
This was a more cruel destruction than drawing a sword and killing someone.
It was a man who had spent his whole life reading, finally realizing, just as he was about to die, that the altar he had worshipped for a lifetime was nothing but an empty mold of mud.
The raging fire of thought scorched the sky red from the deepest mire, yet from the lofty halls of power, this blaze cast a shadow of a different, more venomous kind.
Inside a private dining room on the second floor of the Bright Moon Pavilion, overlooking the street, two officials in plain clothes gazed coldly downward.
On the long street below, several groups of household servants from noble clans, bearing family insignias on their uniforms, were already shoving and scuffling with poor scholars trying to snatch back the pamphlets.
Censor Liu Huaifang of the Metropolitan Procuratorate was leisurely stroking the goatee on his chin.
There was no enlightenment for the lowly scholars in his eyes, nor any sorrow for the collapse of an old Confucian's moral path. Deep within his pupils was only a meticulously honed, poisoned glint.
"Minister Liu, it looks like a huge riot is about to break out in the city," said another surveillance official at the same table, lowering his voice with a hint of probing.
Liu Huaifang's lips curled into a cold smirk as he reached out and flicked a copy of "On Investigating Things and Rectifying the Mind" lying on the table.
"This essay has a most insidious skeleton," Liu Huaifang said, his words carrying a calculating chill that seeped into the bones. "Whether the author is truly mad or merely playing the fool, releasing this new discourse at this critical moment is clearly a ploy to factionalize all the scholars of the empire!"
He leaned closer to his colleague, his eyes sharp. "Just think about it: once this doctrine enters the Autumn Provincial Examinations, those impoverished and scorned scholars will pounce on it like rabid dogs. By then, whoever seizes this pen first can wield it as a ready-made weapon for forging cliques and pursuing private interests. In this court, whoever controls the direction of the pure-minded literati can poke a sky-sized hole in the system."
Liu Huaifang straightened up and turned his head, issuing a cold order to the trusted attendant standing behind him.
"Go. Follow the trail of ink and the paper stock. Investigate this to the death. Before dark, I want to know which workshop it came from. This blade must not fall into another's hands!"
The sun was high in the sky, but there was still no warmth in the air. Beneath the towering white marble archway outside the Imperial Academy, the situation had spiraled completely out of control.
Cui Mingyun led dozens of household thugs from the Chen Commandery Cui Clan. On the street, they set up an iron cauldron, lit torches, and frantically tossed the pamphlets they had seized along the way into the blaze.
Flames roared toward the sky, thick smoke billowed, obscuring the heavens above the statue of Confucius.
Opposite them, Lin Jiusi and Lu Changying, his eyes bloodshot, led hundreds of shabbily clad poor scholars. Arm in arm, they formed a human wall.
They pressed the pamphlets they had gathered tightly against their chests, between their robes, refusing to retreat a single step.
At first, the two sides merely glared at each other across the fire.
"Confucius said: 'When the Way prevails in the world, show yourself; when it does not, go into hiding!' How dare you blindly follow heretical doctrines and spout nonsense about the principles of Heaven! Are you trying to plunge the Great Qian into a land without the Way?" Cui Mingyun stood, one hand on his sword, rebuking them harshly before the flames.
"Spit!" Lin Jiusi's eyes bulged as he pointed at Cui Mingyun's nose and cursed. "The Great Learning says: To extend knowledge lies in investigating things! You people are four limbs unmoved, five grains unknown—you only chew the stale chaff left behind by the sages! The principle is within things! You dare not look, because you're afraid of peeling off that hypocritical skin of yours!"
The fiery passion of scholarship amidst the cursing finally ignited the century-old grudge between the classes.
It started with a half-broken brick thrown from among the nobles' servants, or a heavy Spring and Autumn scroll hurled from the plebeian students' ranks.
The objects cracked open the forehead of an opposing scholar.
Crimson blood streamed down along his brow, dripping onto the stone slabs of the streets outside the Imperial University.
"They're striking us! Protect the new theory! We must not let these parasites destroy the principles of Heaven!"
The war of words instantly transformed into a brutal physical brawl.
Hundreds of scholars who had seemed as weak as bound chickens turned into bloodthirsty beasts, tearing off their masks of civility.
Washed-out scholar's gowns were ripped to shreds; square caps symbolizing noble status were trampled into the mud.
Dozens of students wrestled viciously with the ferocious household guards.
Some were kicked in the stomach and doubled over, vomiting bile; others clung to a thug's leg and sank their teeth in.
Spattered blood, a shocking sight, splashed onto the base of the century-old stone statue of Confucius, the symbol of orthodox authority.
Amidst the chaos and trampling, Lu Changying was violently shoved to the ground by several panicked people running frantically.
His already frozen body crashed onto sharp gravel, and the front of his robe tore open.
The stack of pamphlets—still bearing the lingering warmth of his body, each one he had peeled from the greasy printing mold with his own hands the previous night—scattered like a fall of snow into the mud and blood-streaked filth.
Rushing straw sandals and black boots trampled mercilessly over the pages.
"Don't step on them... that's the principle... that's our only way out!"
Lu Changying's eyes were blood-red. Ignoring the clubs and boots raining down on his head, he sank to his knees and crawled forward across the ground.
He carefully lifted a page stained with muddy footprints and someone else's blood from the mud pit.
The purple tooth mark on the back of his hand, which he had bitten through last night, was still oozing blood.
Lu Changying pressed this filthy, crumpled sheet to his chest.
Watching his fellow students bleeding and fighting all around, watching the arrogant noble youths wailing in the mud.
This impoverished, struggling scholar, who had nearly been frozen to death by the rigid old doctrines, suddenly threw back his head and laughed hysterically in the grimy mire.
It was the searing exhilaration of a soul veering out of a corpse's burial shroud!
Yet, on the fringes of this disgraceful, bloody chaos.
In the shadow of a cave, less than ten steps from the tilted white marble archway of the Imperial Academy, stood a middle-aged Confucian scholar dressed in extremely simple clothes.
He wore a set of green robes washed until the original color was unrecognizable.
In this vortex of madness, where everyone was either snatching paper or burning it, he neither joined the shouting to protect the books, nor spoke out to stop the nobles' brutality.
He merely watched as an impassive observer of the Great Qian Dynasty's inevitable, painful awakening through bloodshed.
After a long time, the middle-aged Confucian scholar finally moved.
He stepped forward slowly, sidestepping two bodies writhing and gnashing at each other.
At the tip of his dusty cloth shoe lay a single page from "On Investigating Things and Rectifying the Mind," fallen from Lu Changying's robe, soaked with mud and a few drops of blood.
The Confucian scholar bent down, picked it up steadily, and shook it a few times.
With the pad of his thumb, he pressed it against the paper, painstakingly smoothing out every deep crease left by trampling, inch by inch.
Then, with a gesture both solemn and ritualistic, he folded the ragged paper in half, then in half again, and finally tucked it into the inner layer of his robe.
Amidst the violent book-burning and pillaging that gripped the city, his simple act of retrieving it carried a calm and weight that seemed to silence the clamor of the entire street.
The middle-aged Confucian scholar lifted his eyes, glanced once at the Imperial Academy's archway—now tilting slightly under the siege of noble servants—and once at the struggling, shouting masses in the mud pit.
He turned and walked towards the shadowed entrance of an alley branch off the Eastern Gate. The dark shadows within the alley gradually swallowed up his gaunt figure in green robes.
Only a nearly inaudible sigh slipped from between his lips, drifting faintly through the north wind carrying the scent of blood:
"The storm of thunder has already risen. The hibernating dragon should awaken."
