Chapter Thirty-Nine How Much More

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

HOW MUCH MORE

By the time the green of summer leaves turns into the red of autumn, I can distinguish Shimin’s remnant signature in Tang Anding no matter where she is in Chang’an. It’s amazing how far my spirit sense can stretch, especially after I visit more places Shimin used to frequent. His school. The underground fight ring he worked at, now repurposed into a club called The Split Peach. If only he could witness how the establishment that used to pit him against other Rongdi men for the entertainment of the rich has been turned into a place where working men do jelly shots off each other’s bare chests to resounding cheers.

I turn on my bar stool in my Phoenix Lady disguise to quip about it to Yizhi, only to feel my heart plummet like a stone when I remember he doesn’t come with me on these trips anymore.

I don’t know if I can ever heal from the wound he left in me. But at least I won’t have to bear with it much longer. Plus, I have Wan’er, Taiping, Qieluo, the Iron Widows, and the Alliance. For these last few months of my life, I’ll be far from alone.

The Split Peach aside, I think Shimin would’ve been most excited about the new, fairer civil service exams. There’s no shortage of smart, competent people who’d do good governmental work to usher Huaxia into a better future after Qin Zheng and I are gone. It’s just a matter of finding them.

Whereas the exams used to be laden with corruption and restrictive criteria, Qin Zheng announces a new round with only one requirement for takers: that they not own any property.

“If you wish to make decisions for the people, you must prove you are more loyal to community than property!” he says in a thunderous broadcast.

Since gender is no longer a limitation, Wan’er and Taiping decide to try their hand at the exams. I discontinue our lessons and redistribute their Alliance duties so they can prepare. Instead, I ask for Di Renjie to tutor me. I may be leaving this world soon, but I’m still interested in learning as much about it as possible.

It hardly takes any convincing for Qin Zheng to agree to let Di Renjie come to Chang’an with me after my monthly battles. No objections from nosy officials either. To them, Di Renjie is no longer a man. It continues to perplex me. Are genitals all that makes a man to them?

Di Renjie is certainly a man in his perspectives, lacking Wan’er’s or Taiping’s knowledge of women’s writings and women’s issues. He is also a harsher tutor, unafraid to call me out on mistakes. But I appreciate his no-nonsense attitude, and he’s never condescending the way Qin Zheng is. He’d make a great official. I plan on making Qin Zheng pardon him before we set off on our mission so he can take the exams in the future.

It takes a different caliber of person to be an official nowadays. Those who refuse to accept the idea that they must serve the masses instead of the other way around are a high-risk group for defection to the reactionaries. Gewei Bu agents keep close watch on every high-ranking scholar-bureaucrat, rooting out any sign of corruption or treason. It’s rumored that officials bid their families a tearful goodbye every morning in case they don’t make it back from work. They are so melodramatic.

I can’t deny there’ve been a lot of executions in general, though. They’ve become a performance, happening every day in the Phoenix Nest stadium, witnessed by thousands of cheering spectators and broadcast on millions of screens. The reactionaries call us cruel and terrible for it, but what they refuse to understand is that we’re the temperate, orderly force compared to the raw will of the people. It’s like how the Red Cliff Dam dampens the primal power of the once flood-prone Chu River that runs across Huaxia, and instead harnesses that energy to fuel twenty percent of our electricity needs. If we fail to diffuse the people’s wrath through official channels, it will readily burst past us and drown everything in sight.

Entry to the stadium stands is first come, first served. I hear some old ladies bring their needlework and stay there all day to watch criminals get—depending on the severity of their crimes—hung, beheaded, or shattered by a contraption called The Hammer of Judgment, literally a huge metal block that swings up on a hydraulic system before smashing down. Reserved for the worst offenses imaginable, it guarantees that the culprit won’t have a dignified form in the afterlife, if there is one. It was devised as an alternative to older extreme punishments that the central court talked Qin Zheng out of bringing back, such as death by a thousand cuts or drawing and quartering.

I never watch Hammer executions, even though they’re usually quite the event, and the list of crimes read out beforehand tends to turn any sympathy to ash. They remind me too much of the crushed bodies in my nightmares.

While The Hammer is reserved for the worst of the worst, the milder methods have taken the lives of some who haven’t committed any crimes themselves. Di Renjie criticizes this extended punishment policy harder than anything else.

“Basing guilt on whether someone had ‘reasonable opportunity’ to report a crime is far too vague and subjective,” he says after a particularly bloody day of executions that spiraled out of several Chang’an officials getting caught communicating with the reactionaries. “Extended punishment condemns more innocent parties than guilty. It does not work. You cannot execute one innocent without making ten more enemies.”

I shake my head and change the topic. There’s no swaying Qin Zheng on this unless we can present a more effective way to root out enemies. Reports from family, friends, and neighbors have nipped so many counter-revolutionary plots in the bud, yet who would’ve turned their loved ones in if they weren’t terrified for their own safety?

At this point, stopping the executions will not magically bring harmony to Huaxia. What the old elites want is to return to power, and they can’t do that without retaliating against the common people. I can’t bear the idea of people like my brilliant Alliance staff getting dragged into the streets and slaughtered. We need to win this civil war before we can go after the gods.

We don’t execute children, at least. Though that hasn’t stopped the reactionaries from claiming we do.

“This madness, this bloodshed, it must stop!” Zhuge Liang cries in the messages the reactionaries broadcast any way they can.

It’s a game of cat and mouse between us and them. We send operatives to infiltrate their ranks; they have informants within ours. There are double agents, triple agents. The most fiery Yellow Sash at a rally could be a rebel provocateur. The most bitter defector who joined the counter-revolution after their family’s executions could be funneling information back to us because they never liked their family anyway. The most well-trained Gewei Bu agent planted in a rebel hideout could turn against the revolution for real. No one can be entirely trusted. There’s no telling what someone truly believes in until it’s too late.

To our endless frustration, the reactionaries have gotten very good at sabotaging supply chains, causing the shortages Taiping predicted and contributing to the economy spiraling out of control. The average person isn’t thinking about how Huaxia will have a better future as long as it can ride through this bumpy transition; they just know everything costs ten times more now, if they can even find it in stores. That compels them to either join the reactionaries in thinking we’re destroying Huaxia with our far-fetched policies, or to march with the Yellow Sashes and shout about us not going far enough . Not enough profiteers and saboteurs being purged, not enough pressure on manufacturers and producers, not enough restrictions on prices. There’s no longer any middle ground. The two sides clash on the streets and in the countryside, each act of violence and hatred pushing each other further to the extremes.

Some days I come close to exploding with exasperation. The setbacks and unrest have stalled many issues we’re meant to fix. In rural villages, parents still get caught binding their daughters’ feet, ingrained as they are with the belief that their daughters won’t marry well otherwise. To reassure them, the Alliance organizes events where young boys make dramatic vows to marry only unbound girls in the future. Yet that then makes women with still-bound feet feel repulsive and ashamed, which isn’t ideal either. Although reversal surgeries are free, the wait lists are extremely long. It doesn’t feel possible to solve every issue like this before I go after the gods.

Then again, isn’t that why I created the Alliance? The bonds between the Phoenix Ladies will outlast me. Now that they’ve experienced the power they can hold when they band together, they won’t forget so easily.

It makes me more anxious for Wan’er’s and Taiping’s exam results. If they can get positions in the central court before I go, the Alliance’s future will be even more secure.

The day the national scores are set to be posted online, I await them with the Alliance’s central management council at our North Gate outpost, which I returned to working at after I no longer needed to be at Tang Anding’s branch to train my spirit sense.

At our meeting table, I make Qieluo refresh the rankings page on her tablet over and over. Everyone else does the same on their own devices. All of Huaxia will find out who the top scorers are at the same time, once an algorithm matches the anonymous tests to their identities.

When we reach the exact reveal hour, the page gets stuck loading. I come close to springing out of my seat to pay the system engineers a stern visit before the rankings finally appear. They’re filled with serial numbers at first, then the digits decode into names.

Cries of shock erupt around the room. Taiping screams. It takes me a second longer to read what they saw.

3. Shangguan Wan’er .

Wan’er is the tànhuā , the third-highest scorer in the nation.

I join Taiping in screaming. Wan’er gawks at the rankings, looking like her mind has detonated in her skull. Her mother, Auntie Kudi, clutches Wan’er’s shoulder, her eyes shining with joyful tears.

“ Tànhuā !” Taiping shakes Wan’er. “You’re the tànhuā !”

“And you’re in thirty-fourth place, Taiping!” Auntie Fu, another woman on the council, has scrolled farther down her screen. “Congratulations!”

“Oh, shit, really?” Taiping shrieks, checking her tablet again.

“Not bad.” Qieluo grins and starts clapping.

The rest of us break into louder cheers and applause. Taiping yells “Group hug!” with almost growling aggression. We maneuver around the table to huddle together. Qieluo stays in place at first, mouth warping in disgust, but I tug at her arm until she relents. She joins the huddle with a roll of her eyes.

An even greater tide of noise rises outside the room. We open the door to find our Phoenix Ladies and the women sheltering with us screaming and jumping. Local North-Gaters are gathering beyond the glass front doors. Wan’er and Taiping get marshaled out into the crisp autumn day and lifted into the air by the crowd. Wan’er squeaks and Taiping throws her arms up, hollering. As I laugh while watching them get paraded through the streets we’re cleaning up, I don’t think I’ve been more happy in my life.

This. This is what I’m fighting for.

I just wonder how much more blood I’ll have to spill to defend it.

I’m preparing to leave for the palace to discuss Wan’er and Taiping’s potential government positions with Qin Zheng when two men enter the Alliance building.

Frowning, I pause my conversation with a single mother seeking help. Everyone in the reception area shifts more alert. Few men have dared to step foot in Alliance branches after the beheading incident.

The two look like typical Yellow Sashes, with shabby tunics and trousers and carelessly cut short hair, yet the armed guard outside the glass front doors stares over her shoulder in terror.

“Can we help you, citizens?” I say after exchanging greetings and salutes with the men.

“Gewei Bu,” they say in sync, flashing their badges, which have an emblem of a dragon head in front of a shield.

The air goes still. Qieluo subtly moves her arm in front of me.

“We hope Your Highness will not impede our work,” one of the Gewei Bu agents adds.

Shit, are they finally coming to investigate Taiping for being born so rich? I listen carefully to any movement in the back of the building. She’s still in a meeting room there. Would it be too suspicious if I sent a signal for her to get out?

To my surprise, the other agent turns to Wan’er, who’s at my side. “Are you Shangguan Wan’er, daughter of Kudi Suiye of the Qiang tribe?”

“Yes?” Wan’er tilts her head.

“Where is your mother?”

“In…the back?”

The agent marches past the front desk.

“Hey!” I shout, unease building inside me.

Wan’er puts a calming hand on my arm while speaking to the first agent. “What does the Gewei Bu want with her?”

“Did she recently write a short story titled The Journey of Miss Meng Jiang ?”

“I…think so?”

The agent takes a pair of handcuffs out of his trouser pockets. “Shangguan Wan’er, you are under arrest for failing to report Kudi Suiye’s counter-revolutionary rhetoric.”