Futile Devices Scans

So, in other words, while the Crow Guards were still circling Yun Lake and scouting the area, Longsha’s assassins had already slipped onto the island without anyone knowing, killed every living soul on the island, and then retreated unharmed with the records right under your noses. Is that what you mean?”

Zhong Yi knelt perfectly upright on the cold, smooth golden-brick floor of Xianxiang Palace, where the seams were almost impossible to discern. His head, shoulders, waist, and knees formed one perfectly straight line, his posture extremely proper and extremely sincere, without the slightest hint of shirking or trying to be slippery.

“This subject and the others were incompetent in carrying out our duties and lost the initiative. I beg Your Majesty to punish us.”

The clear sunlight by the window fell upon the emperor in his golden crown and black robes, as though gilding him with a faint rim of gold. Far from softening his aura, it made his imposing dignity appear even more stern and awe-inspiring.

“‘Incompetent in carrying out your duties?’”

Without even lifting his head from the memorials, Mu Heng gave a cold snort through his nose and mocked him coolly, “Too modest. You are my capable general. You even rush to do work that isn’t yours. How good you are at saving me trouble, aren’t you?”

Zhong Yi lowered his head and said submissively, “This subject would not dare.”

“Is there anything in this world that you, Zhong Chuiyun, would not dare to do?”

His Majesty was handsome and rarely spoke with harsh anger in ordinary times, but his accumulated authority was very heavy, and at this moment his sarcasm stung far more than a direct reprimand would have. “I personally handed the task to the Crow Guards, and the Commander of the Egret Guards slipped in without so much as a squeak. Since you have such ideas of your own, why don’t you become the emperor instead?”

Under his cold words and icy tone, Zhong Yi continued lowering his head and admitting fault. “This subject would not dare.”

Mu Heng furrowed his long black brows and glanced at him in dissatisfaction. “You have nothing else to say?”

Zhong Yi remained silent for a full while, and finally lowered his head even further, knocking it against the floor in a proper and formal plea for punishment. “The crime of deceiving one’s sovereign is unforgivable. This subject has failed Your Majesty’s trust and has no face to defend himself. I await Your Majesty’s punishment.”

This aggrieved-bag attitude of his could be called “admitting fault and accepting punishment” if described generously, but if one truly examined it, it was more like “a dead pig unafraid of boiling water”: I have my own difficulties, but I will not explain a single word; I will carry all the blame myself, so hurry up and abandon me.

This manner of his was extremely infuriating, infuriating enough that Mu Heng even found himself missing Wei Fu a little—at times like this, it would have been nice to have someone around to smooth things over.

Moreover, although Wei Fu was also stubborn, he was the sort who would exhaust every possible means and wear his mouth out elevating and beautifying his own intentions, then pry open and crush them apart and stuff them into other people’s ears; Mu Heng only had to be responsible for saying “no.” Unlike now, when he had to patiently tug back and forth with this stubborn river clam, because the moment it sank into the mud of suspicion, the clam would immediately close itself up and stubbornly sink back to the bottom of the water.

But then again…

Mu Heng lowered his head and glanced at the secret report sent back from Longsha in his hand, tossed the memorial onto the desk, and leaned back into the round-backed chair with his long fingers rubbing at his forehead, intending to properly reason this out with Zhong Yi. “Tell me then. What were you thinking?”

Zhong Yi froze for an instant, seeming not to understand his intention. After thinking for a moment, he said, “This subject believes that Longsha did not find the Yanyuan stronghold by following behind us and picking up our leftovers. Yeguang’s advantage was not gained in a day or two. It is very likely that the first time Yu Gong Zhao Ye left the sinkhole, he had already dispatched subordinates to secretly infiltrate Yanyuan and search for the stronghold’s whereabouts, and successfully confirmed its location. Once he escorted Shuchen back to Bihan City, he immediately moved ahead of us and cleared out the stronghold before we could act.”

“The Yanyuan plague is a grave hidden danger to Longsha. Yu Gong Zhao Ye would never allow this blade to fall into another country’s hands. But the cause and course of this matter are closely tied to Shuchen, so he could not possibly hide it from Xiling. Thus he openly repaired the plank road while secretly crossing at Chencang, keeping even Shuchen in the dark, while Shuchen helped us come up with ideas, and we were misled by Shuchen’s attitude. That was why, that day, both sides tacitly assumed that Longsha and Xiling would work together to take down the stronghold.”

“Of course, in the end, neither side followed that assumption.”

Mu Heng: “…Although your deduction is very accurate, nine-tenths correct, that was not what I was asking.”

His sigh and helplessness were far too obvious, and Zhong Yi finally looked up at His Majesty in confusion.

Mu Heng abandoned the imperial self-address and went straight to the point. “I’m asking you: I assigned the Yun Lake matter to the Crow Guards. You clearly knew that interfering would be thankless and unrewarding, so why did you insist on mixing yourself in?”

Zhong Yi froze, thinking that Mu Heng had not merely been making sarcastic remarks just now; he truly wanted to know why.

In truth, Zhong Yi’s overstepping in this matter was not that difficult to understand in other people’s eyes. The answer could even be said to be obvious at a glance: as the leader of the Egret Guards, he could not bear to see the Crow Guards being entrusted by the emperor, so he had deliberately sought to compete with the Crow Guards for power—this was exactly how the Crow Guard Commander had complained to Mu Heng.

The Xiling emperor held two sharp blades in his hands: the Egret Guards in the open, the Crow Guards in the shadows. For many years, one had risen as the other fell, each balancing the other. Since Mu Heng ascended the throne, the Egret Guards, under Zhong Yi’s leadership, had grown increasingly powerful and increasingly favored, and the balance of authority between the Crow Guards and the Egret Guards had already clearly tilted. At this moment, Mu Heng had suddenly bypassed the Egret Guards, who had always been responsible for Yanyuan affairs, and handed the important task of attacking the stronghold to the Crow Guards. To both sides, the signal this seemed to send was one of “restoring balance.”

As for why Zhong Yi had personally entered the field, why he had stood out on the spot and handed others a handle against him, why he had used such a foolish method to oppose the emperor face-to-face… all these unreasonable things were naturally because he had been spoiled dizzy by imperial favor, had forgotten his own surname, and, relying on the emperor’s affection as his backing, dared to act so recklessly and lawlessly.

Would explaining be of any use? Was sincerity worth anything? A subject before his sovereign had best wag his tail and beg for pity, rather than wishfully try to move him with sincerity. Would it be better to simply admit to the charge of “tyrannical overreach”?

“This subject…”

The first word had barely left his mouth when Mu Heng cut him off. “Either tell the truth, or leave if you don’t want to talk. Who are you putting on this ‘this subject’ act for?”

They had accompanied each other for nearly twenty years and had never been apart. They had bickered and supported each other all the way to this day, closer than many blood brothers and real married couples in the world. In private, it was always “you” and “me” between them; sometimes, when tempers flared and Zhong Yi called him directly by name, Mu Heng would not say anything either. The only thing he could not stand was Zhong Yi properly and formally placing their relationship in the most distant position of “sovereign and subject.”

Just like today, when he came before him without a single word of defense, impossible to stop, and dropped to his knees with a thud.

“Zhong Chuiyun, have I done anything over these years that forced you to swallow your anger and made you dare be angry but not dare speak?”

This should originally have been a very dangerous matter, yet Mu Heng argued as though he had discovered Zhong Yi had another dog outside, coldly questioning him, “Is it so difficult to hear one honest sentence from you?”

Zhong Yi knelt there perfectly straight, his posture tall and proper, unmoving in the slightest, yet from the strands of his hair down to the hem of his robes trailing across the floor, every part of him carried an air of hesitation and struggle.

It was as though Mu Heng was not asking him to speak honestly, but asking him to split open his chest on the spot and dig out a true heart.

“I…”

He truly used up all the strength of carving open his heart, and in the end, like a clam shell sealed without a single gap, he forced out with difficulty one grain of sand that had ground his heart raw as if by knives:

“Fear.”

If Mu Heng were a deeply suspicious emperor, or if anyone else had been here today, hearing this word would have made him suspect that what came next would be a tearful complaint about how this subject’s heart was wholly loyal, and how he had only resorted to such a poor strategy because he feared His Majesty’s favor had grown distant.

But this was Zhong Yi, the “A’Yi” who had shielded him countless times, who had not retreated even when swords and blades nearly killed him.

“What are you afraid of?”

“Yanyuan turned plague from a ‘natural disaster’ into a ‘man-made calamity.’ It can easily destroy a city, kill tens of thousands of people, even collapse an army on the battlefield and subdue soldiers without fighting.”

Zhong Yi lowered his head and looked at the rough calluses in his palm. They were marks left by countless swings of a blade, and although they no longer hurt now, he clearly remembered that unusual sensation of a blade cutting into flesh. With time and habit, it had already pierced through bone and blood and branded itself deeply into his soul.

“When killing with blades and swords, I can see blood, hear screams, and know that it was a living human life. When killing with plague, no matter men or women, old or young, soldiers or commoners, no one can hope to be spared. Corpses lie everywhere, soundless and silent, as though it has nothing to do with the one who struck.”

“If human life becomes so cheap and lowly, then where does the weight of rivers and mountains lie? Where does the weight of the state and its altars lie?”

“I heard that His Majesty’s order to the Crow Guards was to bring back all records and the living leader… perhaps I was judging a gentleman’s heart with a petty man’s mind, but I did not want that man to come alive before Your Majesty, to lay out profit and danger to you, to pledge allegiance to you, and to place you upon that throne piled high with the bones of the Yilin people.”

“To be honest, when I saw his corpse, I let out a breath of relief. If the Crow Guards had truly captured him alive, I would have snapped his neck on the spot.”

Breaking the jar and letting it shatter after all carried a kind of reckless satisfaction that ignored everything. Zhong Yi tugged at the corner of his mouth in self-mockery, revealing in a place no one could see a smile that was half-sour and not quite bitter, his voice so light it was almost a murmur to himself: “I don’t want my emperor to become that kind of ‘sage ruler.’”

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