Chapter 846: Martyrdom!

Zheng Fan finally noticed Hero Chen.

When he had first met Hero Chen, the man had been alone with a sword, looking somewhat wooden yet radiating uprightness from head to toe. One glance and you knew he had to be an expert.

After all, a weakling who carried himself like that tended to get beaten to death in the jianghu very early.

Now, as Hero Chen’s cultivation and state of mind continued to rise, he had begun to acquire more and more of the Sword Saint’s current plain, unadorned quality. Put simply, once he restrained his aura and disappeared into a crowd, he was genuinely difficult to notice.

Hero Chen watched Zheng Fan push aside the guards in front of him. He watched Zheng Fan walk behind the Sword Saint, circle around him, come straight up to Hero Chen, spread his arms, and pull him into a great hug.

“You’re taking advantage of me.”

For some inexplicable reason, that was what this Qian jianghu swordsman blurted out while being hugged by Great Yan’s Prince Pingxi.

Zheng Fan gently patted his back. “Easy. Don’t make it sound quite so Jin-style.”

Hero Chen had no choice but to endure it. He did not struggle free, only sighed and then fell silent for a long while.

Zheng Fan patted his back again. “Come on. Say it.”

Hero Chen tilted his head slightly and looked at Zheng Fan’s profile. “Say what?”

“You know. Hurry up.”

Hero Chen sighed again.

Zheng Fan patted his back once more and urged him on. “Come on, ask me: ‘Aren’t you afraid I might run you through with my sword?’”

Hero Chen rolled his eyes.

“Hahahahaha!”

Prince Pingxi burst out laughing. He released the hug, caught Hero Chen by both shoulders, and gave him a shake.

“Truth be told, I really am a little afraid. If I met you in Jin, I wouldn’t be. If I met you in Chu, I wouldn’t be either. But right now, the ground under my feet belongs to Qian. I really am a little nervous.”

“So you do know.”

“Of course. You know me. I’m terrified of dying. I don’t want to take even the tiniest unnecessary risk. Besides, both my wives have children in their bellies now. I can’t bear the thought of inexplicably dying out here.

“But how should I put it? Once I saw you, if I didn’t come over and greet you like this, I’d have felt wrong about it. I, Zheng Fan, have been cautious all my life. There are very few friends I truly trust. But once I decide someone is my friend, I’ll give him my whole heart.

“I fear death because I want to keep living well. But I can’t be so frightened that I turn into a mouse without even the courage to poke my head out of the hole. A life like that would be boring as hell.”

“If only the Prince Pingxi of Yan weren’t named Zheng Fan.”

“Hey, good thing he is named Zheng Fan. Otherwise, wouldn’t you be finished?”

If Prince Pingxi had not been Zheng Fan, Hero Chen would have drawn his sword.

And the consequence of drawing it was that he probably would not manage to kill anyone. Even if the Sword Saint, A’Ming, Fan Li, and the others were absent, the mass of cavalry all around them would still grind Hero Chen into mud.

Hero Chen looked at Zheng Fan. “You once said, ‘The greatest hero serves the country and the people.’”

“I was just spouting nonsense because I had nothing better to do. You know me. I’m the sort of person who can’t even eat a skewer without sighing about life.”

“But I think you were right.”

“No. I wasn’t.” Zheng Fan looked at Hero Chen and said very seriously, “Jianghu heroes are, by nature, people who violate the law through martial force. Nobody wants a whole bunch of jianghu people living next door.

“And once a country actually needs jianghu people to stand up for it, that country truly has no hope left at all.”

Zheng Fan put an arm around Hero Chen’s shoulders and pointed toward Su Mingzhe standing ahead.

“By the way, what office do you hold?”

Su Mingzhe replied, “Your Highness, this humble official is Assistant Director of the Court of State Ceremonial.”

“Recite that poem you just wrote for this Prince again.”

“Very well. I ask Your Highness to correct any faults—”

“Stop. Don’t recite it.” Zheng Fan turned to Hero Chen. “See how obedient he is?

“He eats his sovereign’s grain. And where does that grain come from? The people’s blood and sweat. Yet here he is before me, flattering me like this just to stay alive.

“His teacher is honored as the Literary Saint and adored throughout Great Qian. How much advantage has he enjoyed because of that? And yet what about him?

“He doesn’t want to die.

“He won’t die, so what are you in such a hurry to die for?”

Zheng Fan pointed again toward Su Rongrong and Wu Xiang.

“Their two families swallow Heaven knows how much reward from the Qian court every year. Ordinary people elsewhere in Qian have to pay taxes, turn over grain, and perform corvée labor. These two don’t, right?”

Wu Xiang and Su Rongrong exchanged glances, then nodded.

“See? No taxes, no grain levy, no corvée. And every year the court still has to reward them. What a life. They’re people above people, the masters above all you Qian people.

“But are they willing to die?

“No.

“Quite the opposite. Deep in their hearts, they look down on you Qian people. They don’t even think of themselves as Qian people.

“Now look around here. Over there. All across this place. Oh, and just now there was a whole crowd of great lords following the Military Commissioner back to help me open the gates. Even if I count those few earlier groups who had enough backbone to try running away as loyal and righteous men...

“That’s still only this tiny handful.

“The rest of this vast crowd are beasts in official robes who want to stay alive. Every bite they eat is flesh carved from the common people.

“You, Hero Chen, suffered from childhood. You relied on your own ability and climbed step by step to where you are today. Have you ever taken a court salary? No.

“So why should all of them get to live while you have to die first?”

For a moment, the newly captured dignitaries around them all raised sleeves to hide their faces.

They were ashamed and furious, but not one dared rebuke Prince Pingxi.

Hero Chen looked at Zheng Fan. “What you say sounds very reasonable. But what I choose to do has nothing to do with what anyone else chooses.”

“Oh? Progress. Real progress.”

Zheng Fan nodded, then continued, “Go, then. If the chance comes again, come back to the Residence as a guest.”

“All right. I’ll head south. If we meet again, I’ll draw my sword against you. I know...”

Hero Chen glanced toward the Sword Saint standing nearby.

“With Teacher beside you, killing you will be very difficult. But if, by some chance, by one chance inside ten thousand chances, I do kill you, I’ll take my own life afterward and accompany you.”

“Don’t, don’t. If you kill me, I’ve still got two children who haven’t even been born. Don’t rush off to die. Go back and help raise them for me. If their real father is gone, then you, their godfather, obviously have to step up.”

Hero Chen took a deep breath.

The Sword Saint had watched the entire exchange from the side, lightly tapping a fingertip against Longyuan. He wanted to laugh. He truly wanted to laugh. But for the sake of the atmosphere, he held it in.

He had noticed something about Zheng Fan a long time ago.

Those gentlemen around him called it “personal charisma.”

Whether it was an act or genuine did not really matter. The fact that he could create this feeling was already enough. Once it produced results, there was no longer much point distinguishing true from false.

Hero Chen picked up his sword and saluted Zheng Fan.

Then he turned and walked away.

Prince Pingxi raised a hand, and the armored soldiers on the perimeter opened a path.

At that moment, the Sword Saint lightly tapped Zheng Fan’s armor with Longyuan’s scabbard.

“Sweating?”

“Good thing I’m wearing armor. Otherwise it would’ve soaked through where everyone could see it.”

Not long afterward, a military report came from Lanyang City.

Lanyang City had fallen.

...

Having changed back onto his Pixiu and into his own black armor, Prince Pingxi entered Lanyang City surrounded by armored guards.

It was a newly expanded city. Its footprint was not especially large, nor was its scale particularly impressive. All in all, it was fairly ordinary.

Qian had originally intended to use Lanyang City as a pivot and construct a defensive screen along this line. Once that pivot was broken, however, the rest of the screen had effectively lost its purpose.

Under Zheng Fan’s orders, aside from the force left behind to suppress Lanyang City, the rest of the army scattered outward to clear nearby Qian troops.

Inside the city, the common people had already shut their doors. Very few could be seen in the streets.

Every so often, groups of disarmed defenders were marched past under guard. Yan soldiers could be seen everywhere.

“Pass down the order. Keep the men under control.”

“Yes!”

Chen Yang personally went to arrange it. Of the fifty thousand troops Zheng Fan had brought into Qian, more than half came from the former Sushan Camp. With Chen Yang stepping in himself, the soldiers below would not dare cause trouble.

A soldier’s ferocity was sometimes very difficult to control, especially after entering a conquered city.

Fortunately, this Yan army had not spent a long time besieging Lanyang before finally breaking through. Had that been the case, even Zheng Fan would have found it difficult to step in and stop the soldiers from burning, killing, and looting afterward.

He was not doing this because he was benevolent. Had he truly been benevolent, he would never have let the troops sweep Zhao’s countryside for provisions.

The first reason was that the army still needed to continue driving deep into Qian, and the soldiers could hardly march while dragging plundered wealth with them. The second was that Zheng Fan wanted to leave himself a road of retreat.

It was the “hypocrisy” and “false kindness” of an invader.

Grain and military supplies, of course, still had to be requisitioned.

According to reports from below, Lanyang City’s government storehouses contained a substantial stockpile of grain, fodder, weapons, and equipment.

They had originally been intended for transport into Liang. But because Zheng Fan’s capture of Zhao’s capital had compromised the security of this supply route, a large quantity had accumulated here instead.

When night fell, Zheng Fan did not sleep inside the city. He stayed in a military tent outside.

By the following afternoon, the troops sent out the previous day to sweep nearby Qian forts and camps began returning one after another. They had encountered almost no resistance and immediately entered a period of rest.

Three more days passed.

The Yan army maintained control over Lanyang City without interfering too deeply in its affairs.

Large quantities of military supplies were removed from the city warehouses. To avoid slowing the army during the next stage of the march, provisions were distributed down to individual soldiers, each man carrying as much food as he could without affecting his movement.

A great deal still remained.

Chen Yang asked whether they should burn it all. Whatever Yan could not take should not be left for the Qian army, even if the supplies had belonged to Qian in the first place.

Zheng Fan rejected the suggestion.

Instead, just as he had done years ago the first time he entered Chuzhou City, he distributed the remaining goods from Lanyang’s government storehouses to the common people.

And so, several days after the Yan army’s arrival, Lanyang City had settled into an extraordinarily strange situation.

Because the city had fallen without a battle, the traditional horrors of fire and steel had never appeared.

The Military Commissioner and a series of senior officials had merely been placed under temporary house arrest. As for the much larger number of middle- and lower-ranking officials who had originally served inside the city, almost all of them except the military officers had been left untouched.

Thus Yan soldiers now patrolled the city while some Qian officials still sat in their yamens, continuing to perform their normal duties.

Moreover, because the Yan army was distributing grain, the attitude of the people in and around Lanyang City toward the Yan soldiers improved enormously.

Qian’s campaign in Liang had imposed immense corvée demands on the Lanyang region, along with heavy tax assessments. Ordinary people had not been living easy lives to begin with.

This time, Prince Pingxi had unexpectedly become their “Timely Rain.”

Every day, quite a few commoners came to the military camp bringing vegetables and fruit. Some petty merchants even gathered nearby to sell... souvenirs.

Prince Pingxi himself bought a small stone carving to hold and play with, one of the local handicrafts.

At that moment, Zheng Fan was sitting in his command tent, turning the little carving over in his hands.

The Sword Saint leaned off to one side. Through the gap in the tent flap, the corner of his eye caught sight of his son boiling water outside.

“No Qian troops are coming? We’ve been resting here for quite a few days.”

Zheng Fan set down the carving.

“There are some. We’ve seen signs of Qian forces approaching from the southwest and northwest. They’re formed units, but none are particularly large. Until someone unifies their command or more forces gather, the Qian won’t dare attack us first.

“After all, more than half the new armies Qian has trained over these past few years are still in Liang.

“As for why we’ve deliberately delayed here, there are two reasons. First, the army needs rest. What comes next is another long-distance forced march, so both men and horses need time to restore their strength.

“Second, we need to give Qian time to react. The Qian army in Liang and the Qian troops inside Qian itself both need time. If we thrust in too quickly, Qian won’t have time to feel anything.

“We need to give every region time to shake. Give their armies time to panic. Give the common people time to grow anxious. Give the court time to convulse.”

“War ought to be a clean, satisfying thing. In your hands, it’s become rather...”

“Dragging and messy?”

“Not exactly. It’s just that what you’re considering stopped being merely war a long time ago.”

“When you can’t destroy a state in one battle, war is the continuation of politics.

“Whether this operation can actually draw Qian’s elite troops out of Liang, bring them back to defend, lure them into the pit, and make them commit a mistake is still impossible to say.

“But at the very least, I have to stomp the popular and military morale Qian gained from that great victory in Liang right back into the dirt.

“There’s no need to seize cities and territory in this campaign. We don’t even need to chase some great tally of routed Qian troops and severed heads.

“Hell, I can’t even promise the soldiers under me that before we leave Qian and go home, they’ll get a chance to find some place to loot and make themselves rich.

“But what I want is simple.

“I want to cross the Bian River again. I want to ride beneath the walls of Shangjing again and say good night to that Emperor.

“You can understand this expedition like this: for the ordinary soldiers below, they’re fighting purely for... glory.”

The Sword Saint smiled. “Like the speech you gave the army last night?”

“Yeah. You heard it too?”

“My son did. He was so excited he stayed worked up for half the night.”

“Heh.”

“Only you could mobilize these soldiers with something called glory.”

Follow you through life-and-death danger deep into another country, not to expand the frontier, not to loot wealth, but purely for this so-called glory.

For a single image.

Their own Prince sitting on the back of his Pixiu beneath the walls of Shangjing, while the Emperor of Qian stood above in panic and humiliation.

It was a call divorced from material gain, aimed instead at the same sort of spiritual satisfaction pursued by masters of calligraphy and painting.

If anyone else tried to rally soldiers with something like that, the men would hate him for it. At best, they would obey in public and ignore him in private. At worst, they would simply mutiny.

So only Prince Pingxi himself could make such a call.

Only his prestige and standing within the army could make soldiers willingly chase and fight for this “spiritual pursuit.”

Zheng Fan said:

“The difference between people and beasts is that people understand restraint better. If you act purely on instinct, you become shortsighted.”

“Are you praising yourself? Saying you have long vision?”

“No. Plenty of people can see far ahead. But being able to see far ahead while also leading a whole group of people away from vulgar, low-level pleasures—that’s real ability.”

“You’re still praising yourself.”

“Of course.”

Liu Dahu came in carrying a teapot and replaced the tea for both the Prince and his father.

Zheng Fan took a sip, then seemed to remember something.

“Right. A whole household in the city just died. A major family. More than two hundred people, old and young. All dead.”

“They resisted?”

Zheng Fan shook his head. “Nobody touched them.”

“Then what happened?”

“The family was surnamed Qin. Their main branch originally lived in Litian City. They were loyal retainers of the Wenren Clan, I believe. After Great Yan’s army entered Jin, the Qin family refused to serve Yan and moved here as an entire household.

“Qian had always maintained an excellent relationship with the Wenren Clan in earlier years. The Qin family also owned property here in Lanyang City, so when the whole clan moved over, they had somewhere to settle. And because they had come over as defectors, they received certain preferential treatment.

“Yesterday, the entire family committed suicide.”

“Why?”

“The old patriarch left a blood-written letter on one of the house pillars. Roughly speaking, when the Yan came to Litian City, his family ran. Now the Yan had chased them here too. They didn’t want to run again. Run one more time and they’d become rabbits with three burrows, without even the face left to keep living.

“To preserve the clan’s honor, the entire household killed themselves to atone.”

The Sword Saint sighed.

“I never expected that after a city as large as Lanyang fell, the first household to truly die for the country would be a Jin family.”

“Want to go pay your respects?”

“You’re not going?”

“If I go, it becomes too much. There’s no need. But I already ordered people to collect their bodies.”

“I’ll go take a look tonight,” the Sword Saint said. “They’re worth a stick of incense.”

“All right.”

Zheng Fan stretched.

“About time. We march tomorrow. South!”

...

The Yan army set out.

Amusingly enough, quite a few local commoners spontaneously came to see Prince Pingxi’s army off.

The senior officials of Lanyang City, who had been detained all these days, were also released on Prince Pingxi’s order.

Years ago, Zheng Fan had once cut off a Prefect’s head and been beside himself with joy, hurrying to carry it back and claim merit.

Now... his accumulation of military merit from severed heads and the like was so full it was practically overflowing.

Besides, officials like these Qian men were far more beneficial to Great Yan with their heads still attached to their necks.

Kill them?

Wouldn’t that amount to helping Qian eliminate its own pests?

A loss. A terrible loss.

In any case, after remaining in Lanyang City for a period of time, the Yan army set off toward the southwest.

Only after the Yan army had left did a Qian force finally arrive from the north.

There were not many of them, only about twenty thousand, and even those had been cobbled together from local garrisons across the northern regions. Troops from the Three Frontiers still had not been able to reach them.

The commanders of this patchwork force had spent quite a few days watching from the outskirts.

You really could not blame them for cowardice. They knew the actual fighting strength of the troops under them. Against a larger force of Great Yan cavalry personally led by Prince Pingxi, taking the initiative to attack would simply mean serving themselves up as food.

That did not, however, stop them from arriving at Lanyang City as a “victorious army recovering lost territory” once they had definitively confirmed the Yan withdrawal.

The highest-ranking temporary leader of this “coalition” was a Regional Inspector.

No sooner had he led his troops into the city than he was greeted by Lanyang’s officials under Military Commissioner Zhou.

Military Commissioner Zhou led the officials in a deep bow.

“Many thanks, my lord, for leading your army through bitter battle and rescuing the people of Lanyang City from beneath the iron hooves of the Yan barbarians!”

The Regional Inspector immediately hurried forward to support him.

“My lord, you have suffered. You have borne a great burden as well.”

Military Commissioner Zhou wiped at his tears.

“So long as the people could be spared some measure of devastation at the hands of the Yan barbarians, there is nothing this official would not do.”

Then he added:

“There was a wealthy Qin household inside the city. They migrated here from Jin years ago. It was this Qin family who secretly colluded with the Yan barbarians and allowed the city to fall into enemy hands.”

“Outrageous! Absolutely outrageous!” the Regional Inspector said furiously. “Where are these Qin people now?”

Military Commissioner Zhou replied:

“After Your Excellency led your army to drive off the Yan barbarians, the Qin family realized their cause was lost and their end had come.

“The entire household has already... committed suicide out of fear of punishment.”

[End of Chapter 846]