Chapter 578: - The Jianghu (Part I)

An imperial capital was often a miniature of the country itself. In this age, barring the unexpected, the political, economic, and cultural center of a state began at the imperial capital and radiated outward, diminishing with distance.

The romance and sentiment peculiar to the people of Chu reached their peak here.

And “romance” did not refer merely to affairs of the heart between men and women. More precisely, that was only one tiny branch of it.

Just as Chu men liked to walk against the wind, deliberately leaving long locks at their temples to stream behind them, the romance beloved by Chu was really an attitude toward life: free, unrestrained, and carefree.

It was not the exclusive property of nobles. Nobles simply had the means to play with it most extravagantly.

In the magnificent Great Chu of Meng Shou’s histories, beneath the romance cherished by eight hundred years of mountains, rivers, and state lay something else it had nourished all along: the popular will and fighting spirit usually hidden deep below the surface.

The State of Qian had been founded for barely more than a century.

When Count Pingye marched south against Qian, had he not encountered a Fortress Commander who had turned his fortress into a Red Tent yet still climbed the beacon tower when the time came?

Had he not encountered an old man who advanced against the tide with spear in hand, and the old man’s son, who could have survived yet still loosed that final arrow?

Qian’s armies and military preparations had performed miserably that year, but there had still been enough flashes of brilliance. There were still people willing to offer up their own light for the land that had raised them.

Great Chu had stood for eight hundred years.

How could it lack the same?

Do not say that beneath the nobles of Chu everyone was merely a slave, while Qian possessed a flourishing scholar-official class and brilliant literary culture.

Strip away the names and the different-colored robes, and all that changed was who sat at the meat-eaters’ table. What they did remained the same: drink human blood and fatten themselves.

The Yan army arrived.

Ying Capital shook.

The highest nobles immediately sensed something wrong. Great Chu’s Phoenix Nest Guards, an organization nearly comparable to Qian’s Silver-Armored Guard, had somehow failed to send warning of this military development back to the capital in advance.

Those who vaguely guessed what that meant pressed their lips together and found only bitterness.

The middle ranks of the powerful immediately began running around. Flee or stay? How to flee? How to stay? They needed a plan at once.

The lower ranks immediately went looking for the greater nobles they normally fawned upon, hoping someone above would point out a road. Whatever you were going to do, take me along too.

Because the Yan army had come far too quickly, Great Chu’s central administration was still operating, and still operating by sheer inertia.

For example, several minor noble officials in one bureau beneath the Capital Prefecture Yamen were sitting in their signing room discussing which great noble they should attach themselves to so they could advance and retreat together.

Then a petty clerk under their bureau actually walked in and posted the issue originally scheduled for discussion that day on the office wall:

Should the osmanthus trees along the Imperial Avenue north of Mingfeng Gate be cut down?

The noble officials looked at one another.

With disaster already at the door, they genuinely began wondering:

Should they first grab their families and fortunes and run?

Or should they first produce a preliminary plan on whether those osmanthus trees ought to be cut?

One could only say that, deep down, none of them possessed the correct instinctive reaction to an enemy army reaching the walls of the capital.

On this point, Chu people truly needed to learn from the people of Qian.

Ever since Qian’s Emperor Taizong suffered that disastrous northern expedition a century ago, generations of Qian people had periodically suffered nightmares of Yan iron cavalry riding south. And several years earlier, Li Fusheng’s troops had leapt across the Bian River and given them a practical refresher course.

Chu people genuinely had no experience.

Unlike officials and nobles, whether farsighted or shortsighted, panicked or forcing themselves to remain calm, the “jianghu” inside Ying Capital displayed the peculiar boldness and carefree spirit of the jianghu.

You could call them simple-minded.

After all, the court’s usual opinion of the jianghu was that simple-minded men could never rise to the proper stage.

But when the army of an enemy state was already outside your capital, insisting on taking the long view and discussing matters slowly seemed more like the behavior of someone genuinely diseased in the head.

Wherever people gathered, there was a jianghu.

The jianghu looked different in every place.

It was not a location.

More often, it was a way of doing things.

People of the jianghu had the rules of the jianghu, and those who followed those rules were, in turn, people of the jianghu.

Some men liked to establish sects in remote places.

Why remote places?

Because in densely populated regions there was already one enormous sect.

It was called the court.

Others preferred to establish their lineages in crowded places. Such people usually possessed some semi-official identity of their own.

Yao Zizhan once said that the so-called jianghu was nothing more than black, white, red, every color stirred together into one mess. Jianghu, after all, was just a pot of paste.

Yet when you bit into it, somehow it still came down to two words: crisp and satisfying.

Clang!

The doors of the Ma Family Saber Hall opened from within.

Ma Lao’wu came out with his Ma Family Linked Saber over one shoulder, followed by a crowd of disciples.

Looking at the common people fleeing in panic before him, Ma Lao’wu laughed.

Once the master laughed, all the disciples behind him laughed too.

There were moments when a person simply had to go looking for some sense that he existed.

Like the most troublesome student in an academy, always making outrageous faces or pulling absurd stunts just to make his classmates laugh. Even when the teacher beat his palms with a ruler afterward, his heart was still sweet.

Everyone was born human.

Everyone wanted, from time to time, to feel a little different from everyone else.

Just like now.

You people are running around in terror.

But us?

We are preparing to go against the current and risk our lives fighting the Yan dogs!

The more panicked the neighbors and local commoners looked, the more impressive that made us look, did it not?

The Ma Family Saber Hall had already passed through five generations. The reason it could maintain its own lineage directly beneath the Son of Heaven’s feet in Ying Capital, with three hundred formal disciples and more than a thousand registered disciples elsewhere, was that every generation of the Ma Family Saber tradition had sent men into the army.

The saber-and-axe troops of Great Chu’s Imperial Clan Guards actually practiced routines improved from the Ma Family Saber.

Not because the Ma family had handed some secret manual to the court.

The founder of the Ma Family Saber had himself originally been a Centurion among the Chu army’s saber-and-axe troops.

From then onward, every generation of Ma Family Saber disciples sent roughly half its men into military service.

It was tradition.

And it was the foundation upon which the hall stood.

Ma Lao’wu led his disciples to the street ahead. An archway stood there, bearing three characters:

Buddha-Hand Cui!

The street itself was also called Buddha-Hand Street.

One sixty-year cycle earlier, a Chu emperor had left Ying Capital on an imperial tour and his procession encountered assassins. A guard surnamed Cui led the others in defeating the attackers, then pursued them alone. Three days later he returned carrying the heads of three assassin leaders.

The Chu emperor asked what reward he wanted.

The guard answered that he asked only for the skills he had learned in his life to be passed on.

The man specialized in Buddha-Hand, a palm art. After returning to the palace, the emperor personally bestowed the name “Buddha-Hand Street” upon one street in Ying Capital and permitted him to open a school and establish a lineage.

The current master of Buddha-Hand was that guard’s descendant. In the jianghu, people called him Cui Buddha-Hand.

Unfortunately, the Ma Family Saber Hall was also on this street.

Both were jianghu schools.

Naturally, they did not get along very well.

The Ma Family Saber Hall?

Where is it?

At the end of Buddha-Hand Street!

Humiliation!

Humiliation!

Ma Lao’wu roared:

“Is Lord Buddha still at his devotions?”

“Heh.”

A laugh came from one side of the street.

Cui Buddha-Hand emerged with a crowd of disciples. He was tall and broad, a string of prayer beads around his neck and another string of bodhi seeds turning through his hand.

“I was planning to wait a little longer and see whether that saber of yours still dared show itself against the Yan dogs. Not bad. You didn’t make me look down on you.”

“Peh!”

Ma Lao’wu spat hard onto the ground.

“Your dog eyes must be blind. You think my Ma Family Saber was raised on fear? So what if they’re Yan dogs? However fierce they are, do they have three heads and six arms? Can they take one saber from me and still hop around afterward?”

“Not necessarily. Yan men have horse sabers too.”

The Yan “horse saber” was a style of weapon.

The “saber” in Ma Family Saber referred to a saber art.

“Damn you, Cui. Stop looking down on people. We’ll compare later. If I cut off more Yan dog heads than you, this street gets renamed Ma Family Street!”

“Heh. Wouldn’t I be the one losing out then?”

“Stop fucking arguing. The Imperial Clan Guards outside the city have lost. The Yan dogs are about to break in!”

The speaker was a man in Daoist robes holding a longsword. Behind him stood a crowd carrying all manner of weapons and dressed in every imaginable style.

Strictly speaking, they were not truly jianghu men.

They belonged to the Canal Gang.

The Daoist leading them was not particularly pure of heart or free of desire either. His surname was Chen, and people called him Chen Lotus.

He controlled the docks from Ying Capital to the Mijiang and commanded all sorts of people from the three teachings and nine professions.

Normally, his people also trafficked in human beings, issued usurious loans that drove no shortage of families to ruin, and performed dirty work that powerful officials and nobles did not wish to stain their own hands with, thereby obtaining protection from above.

His swordsmanship was excellent. In his early years, when he first fought for territory around Ying Capital’s docks, he had already been a Fifth Grade swordsman. He had drawn his sword less often over the past several years, but presumably his skill had advanced even further.

Chen Lotus had a terrible character and an equally terrible reputation.

But at a time like this, he had managed to gather the brothers of his Canal Gang and bring them over to help the government troops fight the Yan dogs.

At least on the greater question of righteousness, no one could fault him.

Ma Lao’wu and Cui Buddha-Hand stopped arguing. They led their disciples toward the North Gate together.

Along the way, quite a few wandering heroes joined them, swelling their numbers to around fifteen hundred.

Ying Capital was large enough and populous enough.

Only a pond with enough water could raise fish.

But when this crowd reached the South Gate, they happened to run straight into routed Chu soldiers fleeing back into the city. Yan troops followed close behind, though they did not pour through the entrance in one mass. Their first choice was to seize control of the gate tower.

“Motherfuckers! Kill them! Turn around and kill your way back!”

Ma Lao’wu roared.

It did no good.

The routed soldiers cared only about fleeing into the city. There was no way to gather them into a formation again.

In truth, among the Chu troops who had collapsed outside Ying Capital earlier, the smarter half had never even considered fleeing back into the city. They had scattered on the spot outside the walls.

They understood one simple thing.

They themselves had been Ying Capital’s final line of defense.

If even they had collapsed, then after retreating into the capital, exactly whom were they supposed to rely on to protect them?

So the routed troops still fleeing into the city now were, broadly speaking, the foolish ones.

The Yan had followed the retreating soldiers in and already occupied the gate.

Ma Lao’wu led the jianghu crowd forward to try to retake it, only to be stopped by Yan crossbows.

Jianghu men were not regular soldiers.

They had no coordination, no bows or crossbows, no armor, and no shields.

They possessed martial skill, yet had no way to bring it to bear.

Meanwhile, more and more Yan troops occupied the gate tower. They still did not rush wildly into the city, but the density of black armor along both sides of the gate kept increasing.

Ma Lao’wu, Cui Buddha-Hand, and Chen Lotus all abandoned the idea of using their personal strength to break through and forcibly retake the gate.

They themselves might be able to charge in.

But the men behind them would probably fail to keep up.

Then the only ending waiting for them would be to become trapped among the Yan and butchered.

At that moment, a middle-aged man in a blue official robe came riding over. Astonishingly, the men following him were runners from the City Patrol Office.

Every country had something like a City Patrol Office. In essence, it was a local public-order force, not much different from a police station in later generations.

“This official is Qin Hai, Commandant of the City Patrol Office. I ask all you heroes to restrain yourselves for the moment. My superior has already gone to gather the routed troops. Wait a little longer. Then we will advance together, fight our way out, and seize back this gate!”

Qin Hai’s superior was Zhao Yuelin. The office above the City Patrol Office was actually the Ministry of War, and Zhao Yuelin happened to be responsible for this area.

After seeing the Yan dogs from the Star-Gazing Tower, Jing Mingxuan had immediately returned to the Jing Clan residence in the capital to find the clan’s old ancestor.

Zhao Yuelin, meanwhile, had immediately begun organizing men to reinforce the Imperial Clan Guards fighting the Yan at the front.

Only even Zhao Yuelin had not expected that before his reinforcements could be assembled, the Chu troops ahead would already be in such a hurry to collapse.

But whatever happened, they still had to do something, did they not?

Ma Lao’wu, Cui Buddha-Hand, and Chen Lotus could only nod and agree.

The entire scene was, in truth, almost absurd.

And that did not refer only to these jianghu men or to Qin Hai, Commandant of the City Patrol Office.

It also referred to the Yan army outside the city.

After crushing the Chu troops with ridiculous ease, the Yan had not immediately poured into the capital. They had merely seized the gate as the opportunity presented itself.

Under normal circumstances, even a battlefield novice who understood war only from books would know to pursue a victory.

You had already fought your way to the gates of an enemy capital.

Unless the enemy sovereign and ministers had water filling their skulls, they would never play some game of feigned defeat right in front of their own capital.

It was as though they had already pawned their underpants, yet were still pretending to be elegant young gentlemen.

And yet the Yan army displayed an astonishing degree of restraint.

Before a capital city lying almost completely open in front of them, those wolfish Yan soldiers could only stare, swallowing saliva again and again.

They were not allowed to enter.

It was torment.

Genuine torment.

The Chu soldiers and civilians inside the city, meanwhile, had a blade pressed against their necks and were still forced to wait.

That was torment too.

Everyone suffered together.

They almost wished the blade would simply come down cleanly.

Quickly.

More quickly!

But the man holding that blade still had not given the order to enter the city.

So many soldiers and common people, inside and outside the imperial capital, could only endure anxious waiting because of one man’s will.

...

Prince of Jingnan did not order the army into the city, even though the gate was already in his hands.

He rode his Pixiu before his own central force.

Prince of Jingnan was commander-in-chief of the army campaigning against Chu.

But everyone beneath Heaven knew the Jingnan Army was his true direct force. Prince of Jingnan had taken command of it more than ten years earlier, and every Lieutenant Commander in that army had been personally examined and promoted by him.

Within the Jingnan Army was one formation of roughly ten thousand men. In wartime, it was almost invariably the force stationed closest to Prince of Jingnan’s banner.

Every Jingnan soldier considered it an honor to enter that formation.

They always charged first.

They always suffered the heaviest casualties.

But when they charged, they were closest to their prince.

Prince of Jingnan’s gaze swept across the cavalrymen before him.

“Those with wives or children at home, ride out!”

Soldiers rode from the ranks.

“Only sons in your families, ride out!”

More soldiers left the formation.

“If father and son both serve in the army, the son rides out. If brothers both serve, the younger brother rides out. All who have ridden out remain outside the city. All who remain, mount and await my signal. Follow this Prince into the city!”

In the end, three thousand cavalrymen were permitted to follow Prince of Jingnan inside.

Every other rider wanted to go.

If they could accompany their prince, they would willingly die beside him.

But the Jingnan Army placed military law and discipline above all else, so there was no scene of men crying and wailing that they wanted to go too.

Tian Wujing sat atop his Pixiu.

His wrist flicked lightly forward.

Three thousand cavalrymen formed ranks and began charging through the gate.

After being delayed for so long, the Yan army’s entry into the city finally began.

...

Zhao Yuelin finally managed to gather one force of routed soldiers. He also pulled together a batch of armed men from another government office.

The jianghu crowd of Ying Capital had not been idle during this interval either.

Their first flush of hot blood had cooled. Two or three hundred quietly slipped away.

That could not be helped.

But most remained.

They tore doors from nearby houses and shops to use as makeshift shields.

The runners and armed government men behind them produced some bows and crossbows.

Whatever else one might say, because the Yan had deliberately delayed instead of charging into the city at once, this hastily patched-together counterattack force had managed to take shape.

Zhao Yuelin did not know exactly what he was accomplishing.

He understood perfectly well that after the Imperial Clan Guards outside the city collapsed, unless divine soldiers descended from Heaven, vast Ying Capital lay completely open in Yan eyes.

It was a dish already sitting on the Yan table.

For some reason, perhaps they thought it too hot to eat, they simply had not picked up their chopsticks yet.

Even so, Zhao Yuelin believed he ought to do something.

He had no interest in joining the secret calculations among the nobles, even though he himself was one of them.

He sat on horseback with Qin Hai beside him and raised his saber.

“This official will go with all of you. Kill the Yan dogs!”

Several thousand men gathered near the South Gate, a motley crowd of yamen runners, armed government men, routed soldiers, and jianghu sect members.

They immediately raised their weapons and roared with him.

Then they advanced toward the South Gate again.

Yan bowmen and crossbowmen on the gate tower and walls were already prepared.

Below, the Yan troops waited in battle formation.

Truthfully, the Great Yan Jingnan Army, which had ridden across the world almost without rival, did not take this rabble seriously at all.

Then the muffled beat of hooves sounded.

The Yan soldiers who had been formed beneath the gate immediately parted.

A towering figure in gilded armor, riding a Pixiu, slowly emerged through the gateway.

Behind him rode two standard-bearers.

One carried Great Yan’s Black Dragon Banner.

The other carried Prince of Jingnan’s princely banner.

In an instant, the Great Chu volunteers whom Zhao Yuelin had just roused into such heroic spirits had not even exchanged blows before more than half of them broke and scattered.

Inside Yan, Prince of Jingnan had a poor reputation among the common people because he had exterminated his own clan.

Yan parents often used him to frighten disobedient children.

“Keep crying. Keep making trouble. I’ll have the Southern Marquis come eat you!”

What they did not realize was that outside Yan, the name of Prince of Jingnan was enough by itself to scatter an enemy army’s courage.

[End of Chapter 578]