On the fourth day, Duan Yan arrived at the drill ground. After the previous three days, nearly thirty militiamen had left one after another, leaving roughly seventy behind.
In the end, more had stayed than gone. They had not been muddleheaded enough to be stirred into fleeing in a swarm. Most of those who remained appeared to be proper soldiers, while those who had hurried away were the rat droppings that had been buried in the ranks from the start, poisoning an otherwise decent militia with their foul influence.
“Now that the allotted time for choosing whether to stay or leave has passed, I am deeply gratified to see you all still standing here on the drill ground today. The army’s discipline was once in disarray, making us into a pestilence the common people wished to avoid. For a militia to earn such a reputation is truly unfortunate.
“For the sake of the future, we must purge the rot from our ranks and restore the army’s prestige!”
The soldiers on the field trembled slightly, fearful of Duan Yan’s methods. They still had no idea what further reforms awaited them.
As they listened to his address, none dared even breathe too loudly. With the troublemakers gone, no one dared put on airs or make a show of themselves any longer.
“Pain is unavoidable during this period of reform. But if you soldiers can remain true to yourselves and endure this cleansing, then you will be worthy soldiers of Chishan! The yamen will show not the slightest tolerance toward those who cannot obey military orders. Yet soldiers who follow the rules and stand guard for the people will likewise be treated well!”
With that, Duan Yan raised a hand. A clerk in charge of military pay hurried forward.
Unfolding the document in his hands, he announced loudly from the platform, “By order of the yamen, the soldiers’ monthly rations have been adjusted. Listen carefully!”
A stir immediately ran through the soldiers below. Though none dared openly voice their objections, their minds were already in turmoil.
So many new military regulations were bad enough—but now even their monthly rations were to be changed? They had originally received only ten jin of rice and twenty jin of millet each month, barely enough to feed one person. If those rations were reduced any further, they would have to depend on support from their families even while serving as soldiers.
Their households had already lost a pair of working hands when they joined the militia, leaving fewer people to farm the land and do other labor. It was distressing enough that they could not send anything home; if they had to ask their families for support instead, then there would truly be no way to live.
To put it bluntly, the presence of pests like Wang Renbiao in the army had something to do with the meagerness of the soldiers’ rations. Ordinary soldiers were honest and frugal. By scrimping on food, they could still spare a little for their families. But for the gluttonous soldiers led by Wang Renbiao, those scant rations were naturally nowhere near enough to satisfy their indulgences. If they wanted to live comfortably, would they not simply swagger off to extort the common folk?
Pei Shan had likely known of such matters before. But he had focused only on maintaining numbers, not quality; the local treasury could not provide sufficient pay for the troops, and so he could only turn a blind eye to soldiers squeezing the people below them. Otherwise, who would still be willing to serve?
Just as the soldiers were filled with anxious worry, the clerk barked for silence, then declared, “For soldiers, the monthly ration of ten jin of rice and twenty jin of millet shall be changed to twenty jin of rice, twenty jin of millet, half a jin of salt, and twenty jin of mixed grains!”
The drill ground erupted in an uproar!
For a moment, he could not stop himself from gaping. Looking around at the soldiers beside him, he said, “I didn’t hear that wrong, did I? Adding it all up, we can receive sixty jin of grain a month?! That’s half again as much as before!”
“You heard right. Not only do we get sixty jin of grain, but half a jin of salt as well!”
“Rice and millet are already clear enough, but what are those twenty jin of mixed grains? Beans?”
“Who cares what it is? As long as it’s edible, that’s good enough. Compared with our old monthly pay, this is practically the same as getting everything for free!”
The soldiers beamed with delight, their earlier panic completely swept away. Happiness was plain on every face, and they were all thanking their lucky stars.
“Good thing we didn’t listen to Niu Er and the others and let them talk us into leaving. Otherwise, how could we be enjoying such good terms now?
“Those troublemakers who kicked up a fuss and walked out were always the ones best at taking advantage of things. Now that they’ve lost out, they still tried to fan the flames and use us as their arrows. What rotten hearts they have! Thank heavens they didn’t trick us. We nearly lost our positions in the army because of them.”
Duan Yan watched as the soldiers grew more and more animated. For the time being, he did not interrupt them or order them to quiet down, allowing them to discuss the matter among themselves.
The pay here was somewhat different from that in Yan Town. Since it was a year of disaster, the grain produced had been adjusted from previous years, and military wages naturally had to be revised accordingly. For instance, the five jin of white flour originally issued in Yan Town had now been replaced with thirty jin of tubers.
The pay for Chishan had likewise been decided after discussion with the administrative office. Though it was not exactly the same as Yan Town’s, they had raised it as much as possible, and the total amount was still not far short of what the soldiers in Yan Town received.
After all, the soldiers in Yan Town had been trained from the very beginning as elite troops, so their treatment was naturally somewhat better. If both sides had been given exactly the same terms from the outset, the soldiers in Yan Town would inevitably have had some objections.
Besides, at present, Chishan’s military wages still required some supplies to be transferred over from Yan Town in order to keep everything running smoothly.
“All right, quiet down!” Duan Yan called. “The monthly pay has indeed been increased, but don’t celebrate too soon. Your training will be intensified accordingly. If you can’t endure the hardship and exhaustion, and fail the drill-ground assessment two months from now, the administrative office will dismiss you! In these times of war and natural disaster, the army’s generous pay is not meant to support idlers!”
“From now on, the administrative office will announce these terms publicly and hold new examinations to recruit more soldiers. You are all veterans. If, by then, you still perform worse than the new recruits, you’d better watch yourselves!”
It did not take long for word to spread that the army’s soldiers had suddenly received far better treatment. To make the news even more convincing, Duan Yan soon summoned the physicians in town, and Song Fengsui organized a day of free medical consultations for the soldiers’ families.
The news spread even faster after that. The former soldiers who had left the army and were now mingling among the farmers and ordinary townsfolk, stirring up trouble, were dumbfounded.
“We leave, and they immediately raise the monthly pay! What do they mean by offering such generous terms?! If they’d told us sooner, would we have left?”
“Bah! They’re doing this just to spite us!”
The soldiers who had walked out at the start went around cursing the yamen for having toyed with them. Still fuming, they returned home, only to be met with their mothers’ wails and their fathers’ scolding:
“You fools! What good does your pride do you? The family can barely keep food on the table. You should have stayed in the army and followed the chief instructor’s orders. Not only would you have received all that rice, you would have gotten half a catty of salt as well!”
Every household was both grieving and furious. They had thrown away such a good opportunity for nothing.
What was even more infuriating was the news that, starting the following month, the army would recruit soldiers from the general populace. The pay would be the same; anyone who signed up and passed the examination could enlist.
This delighted the households who had long watched other families’ sons join the army with envy. Now that the yamen had opened another path for them, they all praised the authorities’ wisdom and eagerly went around asking about the recruitment requirements.
As for the group who had stormed out of the army, they had no way to voice their grievances. When they left, the officers on the drill grounds had sternly declared that anyone who chose to go would not be held accountable. At first, every one of them had swaggered away, convinced that with so many people leaving, the drill grounds would not dare do anything to them. Who could have guessed that they had merely been waiting for them to make their move?
Now that everyone else had a chance to enlist, they had lost theirs for good—and had even become a laughingstock.
Unwilling to accept this, those fools began shouting from the sidelines again:
“The yamen issued reckless orders, forcing ordinary people to enter the mountains in the middle of a snowstorm, heedless of whether they lived or died! That much is undeniable!
“Everyone, don’t celebrate too soon. They say the pay is so generous, but whether any of it will actually reach your hands is another matter! It looks to me as though they deliberately dangled this promise of higher soldiers’ wages as a smokescreen to cover up what happened before!”
Who could have expected that the families involved in the accident would all step forward and say that the yamen officials had personally come to offer their condolences? They had shown them a level of concern they had never received in the past.
But the soldiers still refused to back down. They stood there with their necks stiff, cursing that these households had accepted the yamen’s favors. Their own family members had been injured or killed, yet they no longer cared; their consciences had been blinded by the few paltry benefits the yamen had given them. Now they were even helping the authorities harm the rest of the common people.
People like that had shamelessly thick skins, capable of shouting black into white.
Yet though the farmers were ignorant from lack of experience and easily led by the nose, they could still tell right from wrong when they saw the truth with their own eyes.
After the passes between the two towns were opened, few common households traveled between them at first. But after the trouble in Chishan, when Duan Yan had Yanzhen transport rice and grain over to Zhou Zhan, he took the opportunity to instruct them to encourage ordinary households to resume contact with Chishan.
With that order given, there was little to do while confined at home during the bitter winter months. Idle villagers and matchmakers from Yanzhen began coming to Chishan to visit relatives and arrange marriages. Seeing people from Yanzhen repeatedly arriving, the residents of Chishan learned that the passes had been opened and began traveling there as well to visit their own relatives.
The difference was that the people from Yanzhen came to see their kin, while those from Chishan went there hoping to borrow rice and grain.
Once the two sides began moving back and forth, they finally realized that although only a year or two had passed, their lives had undergone earth-shaking changes.
Long ago, whenever anyone mentioned Yan Town, they would shake their head and click their tongue, muttering about how poor and remote it was. Yet during this bitter winter, every household had more than enough firewood stockpiled, and the earthen farmhouses were so warm inside they felt like spring. The charcoal beneath their stoves had never once gone out.
Every family was eating the same round, lumpy root vegetable. One household would wash it, smoke-cure it over the stove with some pork, and cook it as a dish for guests. Another would steam the root vegetables, mash them into a paste, and mix in crumbled hard-boiled eggs until the result looked almost like a pastry.
Oh, the households had all come up with countless ways to prepare those root vegetables. No matter how they cooked them, they turned out fragrant and sticky-soft—and, more importantly, incredibly filling. Two small bowls were enough to keep a person from feeling hungry all day, whether they walked there in the morning or walked home in the evening.
Those who had once looked down on Yan Town now kept their mouths shut. They could only stare, first at this and then at that, eyes narrowed in bewilderment. “In times this chaotic, with harvests so harsh they might as well eat people, how have they somehow managed to make their lives better and better?”
Whenever the people of Yan Town saw relatives from Chishan arrive, they could hardly contain their pride at how those relatives had changed their attitude. “It’s all thanks to the capable officials at our yamen. They’ve thought of everything for us, so we don’t have to worry about a thing. We just follow the officials’ instructions—plow the fields, plant these root vegetables, clear the irrigation channels—and look how well we’re living now!”
“And don’t be in such a hurry to complain. Didn’t they say the two towns are going to merge? Our officials will be going over there to take charge. Just don’t argue with them. Do whatever they tell you, and your lives are sure to improve.”
Once the villagers from the two places began visiting one another, the differences in their lives became apparent. Some people saw for themselves; others heard how well things were going in Yan Town. Then, when they saw the discharged soldiers ranting that the yamen officials had ulterior motives, they began thinking for themselves and stopped believing what the soldiers said.
Several farmers borrowed grain from relatives in Yan Town. They all hoped that their lives could truly improve as their relatives had promised if they followed the yamen officials’ arrangements. They had no patience for deserters who did nothing but stir up trouble without offering anyone the slightest benefit, so they secretly reported them to the authorities.
Song Xuemu had been fretting over how to catch them. With the villagers’ help, he was able to round up in one sweep all those hiding among the people and inciting unrest.
Now that they had caught such prime examples, there was naturally no avoiding a public punishment. It would serve as a warning to anyone else who was thinking of causing trouble.
After several rounds of purging and reform, those who deserved punishment were punished, those who deserved rewards were rewarded, and the regulations were thoroughly revised. At last, Chishan had become peaceful again.
“When your opponent attacks, use their momentum against them. Move in a circular arc, then thrust! The key is to be fast, precise, and ruthless. Strike once and disable your opponent so completely that they have no chance to attack a second time.”
Snow fell in a steady hush across the courtyard. Beneath the covered walkway, Duan Yan supported Song Fengsui by the waist with one hand while gripping his wrist with the other, guiding him through the dagger’s attack pattern twice. At the end, he led him into one fierce lunge, which whipped up a sharp gust of wind.
Song Fengsui was dressed in a neat, practical outfit: a dark-blue short jacket embroidered with gold patterns, its cuffs tightly fastened, and a moon-white sash cinched around his waist. His ink-black hair was tied high in a ponytail. His already-excellent bearing, dressed up this way, gave him the dashing air of a wandering swordsman—completely unlike the cool, aloof elegance of the laurel moon he had always resembled.
After Duan Yan had personally guided him through the dagger techniques three times, Song Fengsui had already committed them to memory.
But he had been raised in wealth and luxury, with hands that had never so much as touched spring water. He had never been interested in martial arts before. Though he had memorized the entire set of dagger techniques quickly and could perform it from start to finish, his movements lacked finesse and force. He looked just like a dan-role actor performing onstage—beautiful to watch, but with little killing power.
Song Fengsui was not satisfied with that. Anyone he might have to deal with using a dagger would certainly be someone he detested deeply. If he moved like this when the time came to fight, wouldn’t those despicable people only find it more amusing?
Thus, he practiced his strikes again and again without the slightest impatience. Whenever he set his mind to learning something, he was always willing to put in the effort.
After guiding him through the set once more, Duan Yan let him practice on his own. He stood off to one side, putting on the air of a stern instructor. He figured that once Song Fengsui had practiced a couple of times and grown tired, he would plead for a rest—and Duan Yan could not afford to look too easygoing.
Who would have thought that Song Fengsui would remain silent, practicing seriously dozens of times in succession? His hands had begun to tremble, yet he still showed no intention of stopping.
In the end, the stern Commander Duan was the first to give in.
“Not bad. Rest for a while before you continue.”
Song Fengsui seemed not to hear him. He merely reversed his grip on the dagger and practiced stabbing backward, hoping to make his movements faster and cleaner.
Duan Yan let him finish the final repetition before suddenly stepping forward and catching him by the arm. “Your arm and wrist will definitely ache tonight. Even self-defense techniques have to be learned gradually.”
Song Fengsui looked up at Duan Yan. Seeing that he still would not release his arm, he obediently put away the dagger. “Once I stop, it’ll be difficult to pick it up again. My hands are already starting not to obey me.”
Duan Yan massaged along his meridians, then rubbed his wrist. “If every soldier on the training grounds were as willing to work hard as you are, our towns would be invincible in attack and victorious in every battle.”
Song Fengsui smiled. “I’m not one of your soldiers.”
The two of them sat down amid their banter and drank some tea. Just then, Song Wushen and Song Xuemu returned home from the administrative office.
They had finished getting the discipline at Chishan’s mining site in order, and the two of them could finally leave work on schedule.
“More than a dozen carts of iron ore have been transported from the mine here to Yanzhen in stages. We’re speeding up the process of equipping all the soldiers with weapons. They’ve also sent food over, and we’ve selected several farming households with good crops to come here and teach the locals. Once the new year begins, both places should be able to grow their own crops.”
Song Wushen chatted with Duan Yan about the progress of the administrative arrangements.
Aside from what he had mentioned, the blacksmith shop here had also become busy. Following Yanzhen’s improved farming tools, they were forging new implements as well. The method remained the same: collecting the old iron tools from the farmers below and reforging them into new ones.
This made for good recycling. Although Chishan had a mine, it was not a large one, so it was best to conserve its resources wherever possible. After all, iron had many uses, including increasing the power of the artillery shells.
Fortunately, Chishan had accumulated a fair supply over the years. Since it had once controlled a mine, the farmers here possessed more iron farming tools than those in Yanzhen, and their resources were considerably more abundant.
Simply taking the old tools to the blacksmith shop for improvement was already sufficient. There was no need to allocate additional iron from the mine to manufacture new farming implements.
Song Xuemu had also gotten a fairly thorough understanding of Chishan Town’s layout. Its defenses had been built to a decent standard and only needed some fine-tuning; there were no other serious problems. Pei Shan had truly put a great deal of effort into its construction.
In short, the merger of the two towns could be considered a success, and all those in charge were finally able to loosen their grip a little. Yet there was one worried sigh they could not quite let go of.
Human problems could at least be solved with enough thought and effort. The weather, however, was not something people could change by their own strength.
As the twelfth lunar month began, snow fell day after day, swirling thickly through the air—more fiercely than it had in the previous month. By now, the entire land was wrapped beneath a heavy blanket of snow. Forget going into the mountains; even upon rising in the morning, people found their windows sealed shut by ice.
The towns were densely populated, and every day, after finishing their morning drills, the soldiers went into the streets to shovel snow and clear paths. The villages, where households were scattered far apart, could only rely on the village heads to summon the villagers each day to check on every home.
Every so often, in the dead of night, an earthen wall would collapse or a roof would cave in under the weight.
The old shack where the Song family had once lived in Liu Village had long stood empty. It was near the foot of the mountain, where the wind blew hard and the snow piled deep. One night, there came a tremendous crash. The following day, some villagers went out into the snowy fields to dig for vegetables and felt that something was missing near the mountain’s foot. They stared at the vast, unbroken expanse of white for quite some time before remembering that the old storehouse was gone.
Seeing nothing but a perfectly level stretch of snow, the villagers felt a chill run through them and did not dare investigate on their own. They hurried to notify the village head, who gathered a large group of villagers to go and inspect the place. Only then did they dig the walls and thatched roof of the old building out from beneath the thick snow. The whole house had collapsed flat.
There were trees standing close to the houses in the village. The farmers had watched them grow for many years and could not bear to cut them down, so they merely trimmed away their branches, fearing that the trees would be unable to bear the weight of the snow, suddenly snap, strike someone, and then crash into a house.
Things were still fairly manageable over in Yan Town. They had no shortage of firewood or grain. All they had to do was clear the snow from their roofs and knock down the hanging icicles each day. The rural households around Chishan, however, were suffering badly.
Back in the previous month, they had been ordered to enter the mountains to gather firewood. Feeling pressured and unwilling, they had not worked very diligently once they got there, collecting only three or five bundles before the twelfth lunar month arrived. Now, with snow blanketing everything as far as the eye could see, even those who wanted to enter the mountains could no longer do so.
Without a fire or charcoal brazier burning in the house, it was like living inside an ice cellar. Their whole bodies grew so stiff they seemed scarcely different from corpses. Forget the elderly and weak—even young people could not endure it. Roll up their sleeves and trousers, and their arms and legs were covered in sores, frostbitten and swollen from the cold!
Every breath they drew into their bellies felt as though their intestines, spleens, and stomach had all frozen solid. How could anyone withstand that?
There was no other choice: people had to keep a fire burning for warmth if they wanted to stay alive. Unfortunately, firewood was scarce. After three or five days of burning through what they had, the households that had been too lazy to gather wood earlier, insisting on waiting until their supplies were nearly gone before entering the mountains, were the first to run out of fuel.
At a time like this, there was no one left to borrow from. If there had been anything to seize, others would already have seized it! Some farmers tried cutting down trees in the village and burning them instead. But the living trunks had been soaked through by the snow for so long that they would not catch fire at all. The only option was to split them open first and leave them out to dry.
Those who truly could not hold out had no choice but to brave the wind and snow and head into the mountains for firewood. Yet once they left, they were never seen again. The villagers went searching, but beneath the vast, blinding whiteness, they could not even find the bodies. They had simply perished amid the boundless snow.
Only then did people beat their breasts in regret for not heeding the authorities’ arrangements and gathering more firewood before the snow sealed off the mountains.
But unless a burning coal landed on one’s own foot, how could one know the pain?
Throughout the villages, elderly people too frail to withstand the cold lay on their beds and, at some unknown moment, simply stopped breathing.
Most wretched of all was that in such freezing weather, even burying the dead was difficult.
The children, too, were chilled until they wailed themselves hoarse. Too young to understand that it was the snow disaster and bitter cold, they knew only that they were suffering.
So in the villages and towns, people gathered up everything in their homes that could be burned for warmth. At first, it was only wooden stools, benches, and footbaths. Later, they were chopping up tables, cupboards, bed boards, and even bed curtains for fuel.
Neighbors huddled together for warmth. They cooked their meals together, each household contributing a little firewood for the shared brazier. At night, no distinction was made between close kin and strangers: the men slept in one room and the women in another, with ten or twenty people sprawled every which way around a fire basin.
The local authorities set up firewood and charcoal relief stations in both towns, distributing aid to households that had truly run out of anything to burn for warmth.
This helped steady the disaster somewhat. But Chishan had a large population; no matter how many loads of firewood and charcoal the authorities brought over from Yan Town, it was only barely enough to keep people alive.
Song Fengsui had always been especially sensitive to the cold. Faced with a snow disaster the likes of which came only once in many years, he suffered just as badly.
Seeing the misery outside, he had reduced the two or three charcoal braziers usually kept in the room over winter to just one this year. Saving even a little was worthwhile. With the common people suffering so terribly, how could he bear to squander such things on himself?
Thus, he relied entirely on Duan Yan. At night, he practically slept tucked into the other man’s arms. Fortunately, no matter how cold it became, his husband’s chest and embrace remained as warm as ever.
There was only one drawback. It was far too cold, and he had to wear two layers of soft clothing even to sleep comfortably. He was extremely reluctant to take them off.
Yet Duan Yan had little to do this month beyond drilling the troops, and so he devoted nearly all his attention to what happened after the bedroom door was shut each night.
Young Master Song had turned him down five or six times already, both openly and indirectly. But tonight, after eating the little wontons Duan Yan had made with his own hands, he found it hard to refuse. In the end, he agreed.
They had not been intimate for some time, and now that they finally did so again, it was especially enjoyable. They went at it for nearly two hours.
When it was over, Song Fengsui was so exhausted that he could barely lift his arms.
Satisfied, Duan Yan kissed his smooth, rounded shoulder. “You practice with your hands and feet every day. Setting everything else aside, your stamina has truly improved by no small amount.
“Look at you—you trained for an hour this afternoon, then kneaded dough with me on the stove this evening, and now...”
With great effort, Song Fengsui raised a hand and covered Duan Yan’s mouth.
“Don’t say it.”
The man had once been so proper, yet now he had even learned to deliver lewd remarks with a perfectly straight face. The tips of his ears were a little red, making it sound as though all his diligent practice had been for the sake of becoming better at this particular activity.
Duan Yan kissed the palm of his hand as well. “All right, all right. I won’t say anything more.”
Song Fengsui gave a couple of soft hums, as if he wanted to say something, but he was simply too exhausted. Leaning against him, he soon fell asleep.
The wind outside howled against the window. Duan Yan was about to hold him and go to sleep as well when his gaze fell upon the hand resting on his chest. The slender fingers were bright red. He gently rubbed them, and the redness faded for a moment beneath his touch, only to return at once.
Young Master Song, who had always been so diligent about applying creams and salves and taking the utmost care of his appearance, had actually developed chilblains!
Duan Yan’s brows drew tightly together, his heart aching.
He reached down and touched the feet Song Fengsui had soaked just before bed, only to find that they had already turned cold again.
Unable to lie still any longer, he carefully climbed out of bed and quietly fetched another brazier, placing it inside the room.
With an extra brazier burning, the room grew warmer before long. The man curled up in his arms was clearly sleeping more comfortably.
Only then did the crease between Duan Yan’s brows ease. Before dawn, while Song Fengsui was still asleep, he quietly removed the extra brazier.
He knew he was biased.
But wasn’t the ultimate purpose behind all his painstaking concern simply to keep Young Master Song safe and sound, and let him live as comfortably as possible?
