Li Si had no memories of anything before the age of five.
He often heard Grandma say that back then, he neither cried nor fussed. He could talk and laugh, was clever and quick-witted, and was an obedient little darling whom everyone loved on sight.
When he was five, a young man with a face full of thick beard returned from outside. The moment he entered, he dropped to his knees at Grandma’s feet, crying as he called her Mother. Li Si rushed over, hugged his leg, and called him “Father.”
Li Si thought this was the father he had never met. Only later, after watching Grandma and Mother cry day and night, did he learn that the man was his second uncle and that his father was already gone. Not long afterward, his mother, who had been weeping day and night, also fell ill and died.
On the day his mother was buried, Li Si knelt on the ground and watched as the crude coffin containing her remains was lowered into the earth together with his father’s clothing and cap. Suddenly, it seemed as though an invisible coffin had closed around him too.
From then on, a layer of wooden planks seemed to separate him from the world, leaving everything blurred and distant. He could neither hear clearly nor see through them. His small, young self was trapped alone inside that narrow coffin. He could not get out, and no one else could get in.
He became wooden and withdrawn, barely able to make sense of what people said. He was also thin and small, so the older children in the military camp all came to bully him. Their crude mockery and insults meant nothing to him. When they shoved and beat him, he silently endured it without reacting.
Later, his second uncle discovered what was happening, dragged those older children out, and beat every one of them. Li Si enjoyed a few peaceful days after that. But before long, his second uncle was transferred to Hedong to suppress bandits. The older children held a grudge. They cautiously watched for a while, and when a year or two passed without any sign that his second uncle would return alive, they began bullying him again.
They beat Li Si until his entire body was covered in injuries. When he returned home and Grandma saw what state he was in, she marched out with a rolling pin to demand an explanation. Most of the older children’s elders had also died on the battlefield. With fathers dead, mothers scarce, and no adults around to discipline them, the children even mocked Grandma. She came home with her eyes red from anger, then held Li Si that night and wept.
Grandma’s crying faintly seeped in through the cracks between the coffin boards. He heard it.
That year, Li Si was eight. Every day, he began crouching beside the fence around the drill ground, peering through the gaps as different drill instructors led soldiers through martial training. When he returned home, he struggled to lift the woodcutting blade and copied their movements. A single chopping motion—he practiced it hundreds, thousands of times from morning until night. A set of fist techniques—he clumsily copied those too, hundreds and thousands of times.
The bruises and wounds from being bullied never stopped appearing. At night, his horse stance remained unsteady, and every so often he toppled to the ground.
After countless days and nights, there finally came a day when he pinned the ringleader of those older children to the ground and brought his small fists down again and again. No matter how they tried to drag him away, no matter how badly they beat him—even when his own face was covered in blood—he did not stop.
From then on, whenever Li Si walked through the military camp, those bullying children avoided him from a distance. He could not understand pleas for mercy or read expressions. Whenever he encountered someone who had bullied him or anyone else, he beat them without mercy. Unless they ended up covered in blood, he would not stop.
When he was thirteen, his heavily bearded second uncle returned with a small amount of military merit and a meager reward. More importantly, he moved Li Si and Grandma out of the impoverished, dilapidated lower army camp and into the somewhat better-off camp of the Upper Four Armies. Military discipline there was stricter and the camp far more orderly. Li Si no longer had to beat people, and he finally gained the opportunity to enter the drill ground and formally practice martial arts.
Elio’s Notes: The Upper Four Armies were the four elite Imperial Guard forces with the best treatment: Pengri, Tianwu, Shenwei, and Longwei, or the Dragon Guard.
When he was fourteen, his second uncle falsely reported his age and had him inherit his father’s military registration. His unit designation was tattooed onto him, and he enlisted as a Dragon Guard cavalryman. He became proficient with bows, crossbows, sabers, and spears alike.
At seventeen, his exceptional archery earned him promotion to mounted-archery drill instructor, making him the youngest instructor in the army.
Unfortunately, he had never been given any chance to put all that martial skill to use. When his second uncle transferred units years earlier, he had arranged a “donation” of every bit of his savings and carefully chosen the Dragon Guard Army, which remained stationed around the capital year-round. As a result, Li Si could do little except train on the drill ground. Even during military reviews, when they left the city for field exercises, it was already the farthest he had ever traveled.
At nineteen, His Majesty issued a secret decree urgently seeking skilled and courageous men whose Five Phases were aligned with Fire. The officer in charge selected Li Si from the military rolls. For the first time in his life, he left the capital, crossing mountains and ridges and traveling a thousand li…
Only to end up inside a ruined earthen fortress, flattened by the chest of a tall, bare-chested man.
His ears rang.
In the pitch-black darkness, he heard the coffin boards around him shatter into pieces.
——
He had been smacked awake.
And with that awakening came his mother’s softly hummed lullaby, his second uncle standing protectively before him as he cursed the vicious children, Grandma’s worried tears, the cruel children and burly thug Li Si had pinned down and beaten, magnificent flames soaring into the sky, enormous rocks cascading down the mountain…
One after another, the images flashed past like scenes spinning through a revolving lantern.
The carefree innocence of his earliest years, the despair of childhood, the anger of adolescence, the agony of growing up, the pain of death and separation—all the joys and sorrows, meetings and partings of human life crashed over him like a giant wave and swallowed him whole.
At last, he saw clearly his second uncle’s bloodstained, deathly pale, ruined face and heard clearly that weak, exhausted sigh. “People like us… tiny as ants… what have we spent our whole lives struggling for…”
His second uncle was dead. The second uncle who had shielded him, taught him martial arts, dragged him away from trouble, taken him out to eat sweets, and cared for him as both father and mother was dead. Just like Li Si’s parents, he had died as small and abruptly as an ant.
Li Si’s entire body trembled. Tears poured from his eyes like a spring, endless and unstoppable.
——
In the darkness, an impatient voice suddenly sounded. “Little brat! What the hell are you crying for? Aren’t you done yet?”
Li Si groggily opened his eyes and looked over. He found himself inside a cramped cavern resembling an underground cellar. Lamplight flickered, and his hands and feet had been tied with hemp rope before he was thrown into a corner.
A wooden bathtub stood in the center of the cavern. Amid the rising steam, a man was scooping up water with a wooden ladle and scrubbing mud from his hair.
Hearing Li Si sit up, the man lowered the ladle and raised his head. Through the drifting mist appeared a pair of bright, sharp eyes.
The man looked to be in his twenties. His features were handsome and striking, his contours sharp, his gaze blazing. Sword-like brows swept toward the loose, disheveled hair around his face. Water gleamed across his wheat-colored skin, like a field of ripened wheat bathed in golden light after an autumn rain.
Li Si stared at him blankly. He had never seen anyone so dazzling, like the blazing sun itself.
The man frowned, his expression turning fierce, and all the beauty of that sunlit wheat field vanished in an instant. Speaking in a Hedong accent, he cursed, “Whimpering and sniveling—you’ve been crying for as long as an incense stick burns! Shut up already. Cry again and I’ll punch you flat!”
Only then did Li Si realize that his face was covered in tears. Bewildered, he lowered his head and rubbed his face against his lapel.
Seeing that he had finally gone quiet, the man turned away impatiently and scrubbed his hair a few more times before throwing aside the wooden ladle. With a loud splash, he climbed out of the tub, grabbed a ragged strip of hemp cloth from the stone couch beside him, casually wiped the water from his body, wrapped the cloth around his waist, and walked barefoot toward Li Si.
Watching those full pecs draw closer and closer, Li Si finally remembered that this was the tiger bandit who had knocked him unconscious earlier. His face instantly turned bright red, and he shrank backward.
“What are you getting shy for?” the man scolded with amusement. “Do I have something you don’t?”
He made as if to lift Li Si’s lapel. Li Si hurriedly twisted aside to avoid him, but the man chuckled and followed the movement. His damp, hot hand caught Li Si by the chin and turned his face back, as though he were teasing some innocent village lad.
“Such a soft-looking face, but you’re pretty tall. How old are you, growing this big?”
Li Si opened his mouth. Although he was somewhat more alert than before, he was still unaccustomed to speaking much. After a long pause, he answered, “Nineteen.”
“You’re already nineteen? Why do you still look like a little brat?” the man scoffed, rubbing the faint stubble on Li Si’s chin. “I thought you couldn’t grow a beard.”
Unable to stand it, Li Si turned his face away and tried his hardest to escape those fingers, but the man kept his grip firm.
The man turned Li Si’s face to one side and examined the hidden line of tattooed characters beneath his left ear. He sounded them out. “Dragon… What’s this character? You’re from the Dragon-what Army?”
Li Si pressed his lips together and refused to answer. The man grinned, lifted his wet hair, and showed Li Si his own right cheek. “I’ve got two.”
Low on his cheek was a tattoo far more conspicuous than Li Si’s: Zhenwu. Then he turned over his left hand. Beside the web between thumb and forefinger was another tattoo: Shengjie.
Great Xuan valued civil officials and looked down upon the military. Soldiers had low social standing and terrible treatment, so desertion was common. To prevent soldiers from fleeing, the court tattooed their unit designations onto conspicuous places such as the face or arms as soon as they enlisted. People contemptuously called them “branded convict-soldiers.” As far as Li Si knew, his own Dragon Guard was a cavalry designation, while the Zhenwu tattoo on the man’s face belonged to an infantry unit. Both were common army designations.
Elio’s Notes: “Branded convict-soldiers” reflects the contempt behind the original term: military tattoos resembled the facial tattooing historically associated with criminal punishment, even though the soldiers described here were not necessarily convicts.
The Shengjie tattoo on the back of the man’s hand, however, was quite unusual.
Li Si had heard about it from his second uncle. The Shengjie Army was a newly organized elite force established by Grand Preceptor Tong, who had fled south.
Three months earlier, word had spread that the Xiao Kingdom intended to invade Great Xuan from the north. Grand Preceptor Tong, Commander-in-Chief of the Xuan forces, had been ordered to defend Kuiyuan and conduct peace negotiations with the Xiao army. His Majesty appointed him Pacification Commissioner of Hebei and Hedong, granting him authority over a total of two hundred thousand Imperial Guard troops stationed throughout Hebei and Hedong. From those forces, he personally selected twenty thousand fierce and capable soldiers to form a new army called the Shengjie Army.
But the Xiao army came on ferociously. When Grand Preceptor Tong saw the situation turning against him and the peace negotiations failed, he abandoned Kuiyuan without fighting a single battle and led the Shengjie Army south to the capital. That elite force had since escorted the Emperor Emeritus out of the capital and continued farther south.
His entire army had gone south, yet this man was here alone.
Li Si raised his eyes and looked at him with surprise and suspicion. His mouth opened, hesitated, then finally produced a question. “You… are a deserter?”
The man instantly released Li Si’s chin and slapped him across the face—not particularly hard, but not lightly either. “Deserter my ass! That old traitor surnamed Tong is the deserter! The bastard picked me as his personal guard and wanted me to protect him while he fled south. I turned around and came back halfway there! That donkey-ass son of a bitch—if I’d gotten the chance, I would’ve stabbed him a few times!”
Li Si was young, and the skin on his face was soft. Even that slap left a red mark. When the man noticed it, he frowned and rubbed his thumb across the mark twice, unconsciously trying to smooth it away. His tone softened without his realizing it as well. “Not all of the Shengjie Army went south. Three thousand men stayed behind in Kuiyuan. The only reason Kuiyuan has held this long is because they’re defending it to the death. Don’t lump the Shengjie Army together with that old traitor Tong. We’re not cowards who run away.”
He patted Li Si’s cheek again. “What about you? What Dragon-what Army are you from? You speak standard speech, so you’re stationed in the capital, aren’t you? What’s a little brat whose hair hasn’t even grown in yet doing all the way out here?”
Li Si’s face had been pinched, rubbed, and toyed with for ages. His ears burned bright red. Gritting his teeth, he kept dodging the man and refused to answer.
Finding his reaction amusing, the man became even more obnoxious and leaned closer. Warm breath pressed against Li Si as he reached to his waist, pulled free the Imperial City Directorate token, and slapped it against Li Si’s cheek. “What kind of identity token is this?”
A thin flash of light streaked past!
The man jerked his head backward just in time to avoid the dangerous blade, then immediately answered with a heavy punch. Li Si rolled aside, shook free of the hemp rope he had secretly cut through, gripped the sleeve dagger, and lunged at him again.
——
The two rolled across the floor fighting, smearing dust and mud all over the man’s freshly washed hair and body. Hearing the commotion, the ragged men from the surrounding caverns all rushed over to watch.
When the older brother from the sentry platform returned from changing shifts, he found them fighting from the ground onto the stone couch, one sprawled on top of the other. He could not help exclaiming, “Aiya! Boss, why’re you pinning the little brat down again? Don’t knock him unconscious this time!”
“If I don’t pin him down, how am I supposed to control him?” the man snapped between blows. “Look how stubborn he is! I barely tried to talk things through, and he pulled a knife on my face!”
“You touched me!” Li Si said.
“What are you getting shy for? I’m not into men! Who’d want to touch you?!”
The fight grew increasingly lively. The man had already embarrassed himself once that day by falling flat on his face in front of everyone and knocking the little brat unconscious with his chest. Now the two were fighting so tightly tangled together that they looked practically glued to each other. The man clamped Li Si between his long legs, straddled him on the stone couch, and growled, “Keep fighting and I’ll burn that wax pellet of yours!”
Li Si’s expression changed. He reached into his loosened hair knot. While he had been unconscious, the man had neither confiscated the Imperial City Directorate token nor discovered the small dagger hidden in his sleeve—yet somehow he had found the secret letter concealed inside the wax pellet in Li Si’s hair.
For one instant, Li Si wanted nothing more to do with that secret letter. Let it burn. It was the Imperial City Directorate’s mission, never mine to begin with. Second Uncle had already died for it for nothing.
But then he remembered Grandma sitting in their earthen house with her clouded white eyes.
And the reward of 3,000 guan…
For all the years before this, Li Si had lived beneath his second uncle’s protection and had never needed to weigh matters like these for himself. For the first time, he hesitated.
Seeing his expression soften and his struggles cease, the man climbed off him with an irritated huff. He scooped up another ladle of water and rinsed the fresh dust and mud from himself, then looked back to find his men still peeking in from outside. “What’re you looking at? Get lost!”
——
After all that chaos, no one managed to sleep. There was no daylight underground, so Li Si had no idea how much time had passed. Eventually, several listless, yawning men came in, drained the bathwater into the channel outside the doorway, carried away the tub, set up a battered little wooden table, and placed two steaming bowls of plain sliced-noodle soup on it.
The man and Li Si had been glaring at each other for so long—one sitting on the stone couch, the other huddled in the corner—that both their eyes were tired. As soon as the food arrived, the man dragged the little table closer to the couch, sat on the edge, picked up his chopsticks, and began eating.
After only two bites, he noticed Li Si’s dark, unwavering stare. His throat caught, and he swallowed with difficulty. “What’re you staring at me with those big eyes for? I never said I was going to starve you. Come eat!”
Li Si had never been one to turn down food, nor was he any good at sulking. Still wearing his wooden expression, he obediently went over.
There was not even a stool in the cavern. Li Si stood opposite the man hesitantly until the man slapped the stone couch impatiently. “Sit here!”
Li Si chose a spot where he could reach the table while remaining as far away from the man as possible. Of course, the table was tiny, so they were still close enough to hit each other simply by raising a hand.
A layer of coarse grass covered the stone couch, topped by a ragged mattress. Li Si had grown up poor, but never this poor. He eyed the mattress, whose original color could no longer be identified, with obvious distaste. His backside hovered uncertainly above it for a moment. Then the fragrance rising from the bowl of sliced-noodle soup reached him.
For the sake of the food, he hardened his heart and sat.
The bowl had a chip missing from its rim, but it was large. Li Si practically buried his entire face inside it, his chopsticks moving rapidly. In the blink of an eye, nearly half the bowl was gone, yet he ate without making a sound.
The man paused his own chopsticks and watched this peculiar display. “What’s your name?”
Li Si kept his head buried in the noodles and did not answer.
The man snorted and stopped bothering with him. Each concentrated on his own bowl, and before long, both had completely emptied their sliced-noodle soup, broth and all.
Li Si set down his bowl and chopsticks. He poked out the tip of his tongue and carefully licked the corner of his mouth clean, then meticulously wiped it again with the back of his hand. Only then did he speak. “My name is Li Si.”
The man burst out laughing. This time, he was genuinely delighted. “Your parents sure didn’t fuss over names! What a coincidence—I’m Zhang San!”
Li Si explained seriously, “It’s the si meaning ‘shop,’ as in ‘teahouse,’ not the si for the number four.”
Zhang San laughed. “Then mine is the shen in ‘ginseng’!”
Elio’s Notes: Zhang San’s name is written 张叁, using 叁, the formal financial character for “three.” He jokingly treats it as the shēn in 人参 (“ginseng”).
Of course, he was not actually Zhang Shen.
Zhang San pushed the two large bowls aside and placed the Imperial City Directorate token on the table. In his Hedong dialect, he said, “Let’s talk things through.”
A trace of confusion appeared in Li Si’s eyes, and he tilted his head slightly. He had not understood the dialect.
Zhang San repeated in plainer speech, “Let’s talk.”
Having eaten the man’s food, Li Si found it harder to remain stubborn. Besides, no one was touching his face anymore, and his ears no longer felt so hot and uncomfortable.
He volunteered, “Dragon Guard.”
“What?”
Li Si pointed toward the tattoo beside his ear. “Dragon Guard. I’m Dragon Guard cavalry.”
Seeing how obedient the little brat had become as soon as his stomach was full, Zhang San immediately regretted fighting with him in front of everyone the previous night. If I’d known one bowl of sliced-noodle soup was all it took to make him cooperative, why did I have to embarrass myself like that?
“Little cavalryman, what did you come here for?” Zhang San asked, making his voice as gentle as he could, as though coaxing a child.
Li Si pressed his lips tightly together and stopped speaking.
He was honest, not stupid. He knew there were things he could not tell him.
“Secret mission, right? You’re carrying a wax pellet with a message inside, and you’ve got this token too.” Zhang San coaxed him. “What does the token say? Even if you don’t tell me, I can call someone outside who knows how to read and have him tell me. You might as well say it yourself.”
Li Si hesitated before answering, “Imperial City Directorate Envoy.”
“Aren’t you cavalry? What do you have to do with the Imperial City Directorate? This token isn’t yours.”
Li Si fell silent again.
Zhang San could more or less guess the rest himself. “You’re young and simple. They wouldn’t have sent you alone. There was a whole group of you, and whoever led you was from the Imperial City Directorate. There was a landslide last night, and everyone else got buried. You’re the only one who survived. You didn’t know the way, so you barged into my place.”
Li Si lowered his eyes without answering. I want to dig Second Uncle back out and shake him alive. He can deal with this troublesome, clever great tiger bandit.
All these years, apart from mounted archery on horseback, fist practice on foot, and occasionally reading military texts at home and indulging in a little armchair strategy, Li Si knew almost nothing. He had never handled anything important by himself. And in only a few sentences, Zhang San had already coaxed his entire background out of him.
His face remained wooden, yet somehow Zhang San could see the frustration on it. Amused, he smacked Li Si on the forehead.
Li Si immediately punched him.
Zhang San caught the fist in his open palm.
Laughing, he flung Li Si’s hand away. The little brat did not seem like an ordinary grown person with thoughts and schemes tucked away inside him. He was more like some bewildered little animal—though Zhang San could not yet decide what sort.
Using tricks and deception on someone so utterly guileless would only make Zhang San look despicable.
So he spoke plainly. “Little cavalryman, I’m not interested in your assignment. You know now that I’m from the Shengjie Army, not a real bandit. Those blockheads outside are just refugees who fled here. Nobody here wants your life. Let’s make a deal. Help me with two things, and I’ll give your wax pellet back. Agreed?”
Li Si raised his eyes and looked steadily at him.
An ordinary person might have found that dark, deep gaze unsettling, but Zhang San only felt as though a small animal hidden in the forest were quietly studying him.
After watching for a while and apparently finding no hostility or malice, the little thing obediently nodded.
Zhang San pushed the Imperial City Directorate token toward him. “First: I want you to use this token to take me into Ant County. I have something to do there. I can’t speak standard speech, and the tattoo on my face is too obvious, so I can’t get in by myself.”
Li Si had wanted to enter Ant County anyway, so he nodded.
“Second: I want to borrow this token to get into Kuiyuan and rejoin the army. Don’t worry. Once I’m inside, I’ll throw it back down to you from the city wall.”
When Zhang San finished, Li Si’s eyes widened in obvious surprise.
“What? Scared? The Xiao army may have surrounded the city, but there’s no way they can seal off all twenty li without leaving a gap somewhere. We’ll find an opening. Your skills aren’t bad. You can’t be that timid, can you?”
Li Si shook his head.
Zhang San assumed he meant to refuse, only to hear him say, “I… need to go to Kuiyuan too.”
Zhang San immediately brightened and gave Li Si a hearty slap on the back, nearly knocking his lungs out. “See? Zhang San and Li Si—what a coincidence!”
Elio’s Notes: “Zhang San and Li Si” echoes a conventional Chinese placeholder phrase using those two names for ordinary or unspecified people, rather like “Tom, Dick, and Harry.” The protagonists’ names deliberately play on that familiar expression.