Volume 3, Chapter 37 – A Soft Murmur (Two-in-One)

At the same time Zhang Xianzhi received his report, word also reached Bai Xiang.

But her information was much more complete than anyone else’s. It had been gathered by Steward Jiang Lai of the Demon-Suppressing Bureau, and before reporting to her he had already posted about it in the Bureau’s internal group chat.

“So what you’re saying is,” Bai Xiang sent a voice message on her phone, “the Ancestral Ground is showing ‘undying’ phenomena as well?”

“That’s right!” Jiang Lai confirmed. “Old Yu told us what they ran into. I did the math on the timing, and what happened over there started even earlier than the attack on Zhen’nan Circuit!”

Jiang Lai was also one of the four people Bai Xiang had saved at the food plant back then. Of the four, one was Yu He and one was Cao Chuan, the remaining two were Jiang Lai and Gu Qingyu—thick-as-thieves colleagues and close friends.

It was just that Gu Qingyu’s identity was unusual. He came from the Gu family of Hedong, one of the top noble houses in the region. Those big clans liked to send their disciples all over the Nine Provinces for training, and Gu Qingyu was one of those posted out.

He and Cao Chuan were both away from the south now. The reason was that when Gu Qingyu woke up and learned Cao Chuan had lost both legs, he insisted Cao Chuan had only been injured because he took the blow for him. So he made a single call back home, and a whole group came roaring over to carry Old Cao onto a helicopter, proclaiming they wouldn’t let him come back until they’d put his legs right.

Before leaving, Gu Qingyu had sworn to Bai Xiang: once Cao Chuan’s legs were healed, he’d return and work himself to the bone for her, and he would definitely not let her rescue be wasted.

Gu Qingyu was clearly the stiff, straight-laced type. Jiang Lai, on the other hand, was much more free and easy. As soon as his injuries were halfway healed he’d started hollering that he wanted to come scrounge a meal under Bai Xiang’s roof, and slipped into the Zhen’nan Army together with Yu He as a squad leader. Even Fang Xiaochun couldn’t call him away.

Bai Xiang asked again, “Any casualties?”

“There were, but not many,” Jiang Lai answered directly. “We had a secret terrain to fall back to, and nobody’s stupid—once they realized something was wrong, everybody ducked in there.”

“The entrance was blocked?”

“Yes.”

That would explain why the people at the Ancestral Ground hadn’t sent reports in time.

So that was it, Bai Xiang thought.

The Shenming Ancestral Ground was hidden inside a secret realm, and you couldn’t send communications outward from inside. And with the only exit blocked by a horde of undying demon beasts polluted by the blood sea, that was why Zhen’nan Circuit had never received any warning from the Ancestral Ground.

“But someone helped draw the demon beasts away,” Jiang Lai went on. “They should have come from the direction of Chilong Circuit. We don’t know who they were, but we found quite a few corpses at the scene.”

Bai Xiang asked him, “You think they were from the Chilong Army?”

Jiang Lai said no. “Doesn’t seem like it. They were well-equipped, but judging from their movement routes and the traces left on the battlefield, their quality is way below the Chilong Army’s.”

Bai Xiang shook her head. “The demon beast pack you ran into was fewer than a hundred head, and yet how many demon beasts live in the entire Southern Mountain range? Well over a million.”

“Steward Jiang, you served in the army same as Commissar Cao and Commandant Huang. Why don’t you help me analyze this. If one-tenth of the demon beasts in the south were affected by the blood sea and entered an ‘undying berserk’ state… could Chilong Circuit hold?”

Huh?

At those words, not only Jiang Lai, but even Bai Zhuqing, Ma Yue, and the others taking notes on the side all froze.

But once they’d followed that thought through, every one of them broke out in a cold sweat.

Right.

They weren’t too worried about Zhen’nan, because all of Maozhou had the terrain on its side.

To the southwest was Longchuan to block them; in the north, the confluence of the Jing River cut things off. To the east, toward Chilong Circuit, the Nanluo Mountains were a barrier, so there was really only a single small gap they had to choke off.

Even though most of Maozhou’s cities were still just in their early stages, and there were still demon beasts lingering inside the region, with Zeqi’s efforts, plus squeezing a mass of shimu labor and a pile of foreign-backed, Luo Hou–country advanced machinery, Maozhou had already been declared to be in a preliminary “reclaimed” state. No matter what, it was much safer than the outside.

But Chilong Circuit was different… First, the blood sea spring lay very close to it. Second, once the Nanluo Mountains reached the Chilong side, they became scattered, with one gap after another and no way to truly block anything.

On top of that, the Circuit had just gone through the Prince of Nanling’s rebellion, and now the “Shenli” pollution triggered by the Marrow-Washing Poison Pills. From end to end the circuit-city was riddled with damage; it had already lost the ability to face a large-scale demon riot head-on.

Put plainly: Chilong Circuit absolutely could not be held.

In fact, people like Jiang Lai had an even more pessimistic chain of thought… They all knew that once the Roads Directorate failed to command the circuit army to halt the demon riot and the demon tide penetrated into the circuit-city and started tearing things up, once it reached that stage, the main force resisting the demons would have to be the self-organized civilians.

And what would that kind of organization even look like?

Neighborhood ties alone were useless. At the grassroots level there were only three real pillars: “schools,” “communities,” and “gangs.”

Communities were the base—clan councils, village elders’ committees and the like would naturally organize people to fight.

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Schools already had a certain military flavor to begin with, especially the universities. The sword institutes of each school had more combat power on paper than the Inspectorate.

And most importantly, the only organizations that could really link up the young and able among the common folk were the gangs. On the one hand because gangs naturally attracted those young and able to join, and on the other because the human networks that gangs relied on to survive were exactly what allowed them to connect people when crisis came.

They weren’t going to stand in perfect unity, but at least they could keep each other in the loop and pass along critical information.

Say… the Jinlong Gang took a beating at the hands of the Yinlong Gang last time and can’t swallow the humiliation. If you want them to join you in killing demons, forget it.

But they could at least agree to draw the lines: we hold this side, you hold that side.

If either side couldn’t hold, they’d go ask the other for help. Once they’d made it through together, then they’d divide the spoils.

Don’t look down on this kind of “awkward tacit understanding”—if a circuit-city’s formal front line really did collapse across the board, and they were reduced to relying on self-organized grassroots resistance, that tacit understanding mattered a lot.

And right now, even that tacit understanding no longer existed in Chilong Circuit.

The reason was simple: Zhang Xianzhi had indulged the Jingyi Gang in sweeping in as a foreign strong dragon, and had driven off a large number of local gangs and the small Sword Dao dojos entangled with them.

So what if the Jingyi Gang had three thousand members? Make it thirty thousand, then what?

In just over a month, with methods that brutal—could the neighbors truly rally to them?

Did they even know how many people lived on the street by their compound?

If something really happened, did they have the prestige to muster everyone together to fight?

Even if you gave them a list of names, they wouldn’t recognize half the people. What good would they be then?

That was what really had Jiang Lai sweating cold right now.

Originally, that connective role was supposed to fall to people like Pei Jian and Jiang Qian.

Or, given more time, once the Jingyi Gang had finished digesting the resources and turf they’d eaten, they too could have shouldered that responsibility.

Otherwise, why keep these gangs around at all?

They weren’t just there to share the Inspectorate’s burden; they were also meant to help against situations like this.

But now that wouldn’t work.

The main line clearly couldn’t hold, and at the grassroots level the Jingyi Gang was no help. Rely only on schools and communities…?

Hard.

No other circuit-city was in such a miserable state. In Zezhou and Qiyun Circuit, a huge amount of blood mist had drifted to gather at the Jing River. Even if the Blood-Cloud Great Marsh erupted in full, at most it would affect the Jing River region.

The Jing River itself was a natural moat. Chilong Circuit didn’t have that convenience; it might well be the circuit-city in the worst defensive shape right now.

“We can’t hold,” Jiang Lai said firmly.

“If one-tenth of the southern demon beasts are really affected by the blood sea, the entire Chilong Circuit could fall.”

“I see.” Bai Xiang nodded and sank into thought.

They were in another small meeting room nearby. She’d casually picked a seat and sat down; Bai Zhuqing, Ma Yue, Hu Hu and the others all watched her, and even Jiang Lai on the phone waited for her next instructions.

It wasn’t that Jiang Lai was incompetent and needed someone to hand-hold him through the follow-up.

It was that this matter was too big. He needed to know what Bai Xiang intended before he could offer proposals.

After all, this was the seed of a demon riot…

If this situation spread, it was hard to imagine just how big a shock it would cause.

“Notify Yu He and have him pass word on to Dao Lord Xiang and the old Dao Lord Bai that all four circuits of Maozhou are to enter maximum alert from this moment on,” Bai Xiang said.

“Then, I’ll have to trouble Steward Jiang to notify Lord Fang as well, and ask Lord Fang to tighten defenses in the other circuit-cities. It’d be best if he could also assemble a reserve stock of supplies.”

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“The Chilong Army may be short on manpower…” Jiang Lai reminded her tactfully.

“I’ll call Commander Lu myself and ask him to bring his troops to reinforce as much as he can.”

She’d hit it exactly.

Jiang Lai was a little shaken, and felt a bit more awe for Bai Xiang.

Yes—what little chance they had of breaking this situation might lie with the three-province coalition army commanded by Lu Neizhi.

Even after splitting off quite a few forces to filter into Zeqi’s various regions to maintain order, Lu Neizhi still had nearly a hundred thousand men under him.

Whether they could get this fresh army to ride to the rescue would decide Chilong Circuit’s fate.

What is all this even…

Bai Zhuqing felt completely numb on the side.

And it wasn’t just her—Hu Hu, Ma Yue, and the others all felt numb.

Weren’t we just here to negotiate a truce with that Zhang Xianzhi, pick up the rank-confirming edict, and buy some supplies?

At worst, we got harassed by the Jingyi Gang on the road, and on our way out we discovered a small pack of berserk demon beasts.

How did all those bits of information suddenly line up into some world-shaking catastrophe?

“Cous—Sister Xiang’er?”

Seeing Bai Xiang hang up, Bai Zhuqing immediately leaned in. “So this is…? Are we really about to have a ‘great demon calamity’?”

“It’s still hard to say for sure,” Bai Xiang didn’t confirm.

Her right hand held the phone loosely at her side, black-stockinged long legs crossed under her robe and skirt, left hand propping her cheek in a fist, the very picture of calm poise.

“With the intel we have right now, we can’t say how big this will get,” Bai Xiang said. “But this isn’t something we can gamble on.”

No, they couldn’t.

The disciples present all looked at each other.

If this really was a delayed eruption of the blood sea’s effects, then it was a catastrophe that would sweep across Ze, Qi, and Mao, affecting tens of millions of common folk.

Who dared gamble on that?

Someone had to stand up first, expose it, be the one to blow the whistle.

“In any case, I’ll take all the responsibility,” Bai Xiang said, tapping her screen as she began composing messages. “Dry Jade Palace already has it in for Shenming Sword Dao. If I’m the one to take the lead, all those timid officials in other places won’t be so scared to respond.”

That was… too cool.

Just a light, casual sentence, but it captured the full weight of “taking responsibility.”

Now it wasn’t only Bai Zhuqing—Ma Yue and the others were also looking at Bai Xiang with fever-bright eyes, full of admiration for her decisiveness and courage.

“Pei Jian and the others were taken in as part of responding to this as well.”

After sending the message to Lu Neizhi, Bai Xiang lifted her head to look at them, adopting a teacher’s posture.

This was the first generation of Bai family inner disciples. They weren’t all here, but it truly was a rare chance for tempering.

“Prepare on two fronts,” she nodded. “If it’s only a small-scale eruption and not too serious, we take these people back with us and proceed according to plan.”

“But if it blows up…”

She paused.

“I’ll wipe out the Jingyi Gang to the last.”

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“The grassroots organizations in Chilong Circuit will go back to those small gangs and little factions.”

“Huh?” Hu Hu’s eyes went wide. “Wouldn’t that just be letting them off cheap?”

In her mind, if Chilong Circuit took a beating, Zhang Xianzhi would definitely face consequences for turning a blind eye to the Jingyi Gang.

But if they shoved the small gangs back in and let them play their role, on the one hand that would share out some of Zhang Xianzhi’s blame. On the other, those people wouldn’t come back with them to Maozhou to help with construction anymore, meaning they’d be losing a whole bunch of capable hands for nothing.

Most of the others were probably thinking the same.

But when they turned back to Bai Xiang, they saw she was smiling in an oddly amused way. “Did I ever say I was letting them off cheap?”

“Zhuqing.”

“…Eh?”

“Repeat again—what did we come here to do?”

“Uh…” Bai Zhuqing opened her mouth. “Negotiate a truce with Zhang Xianzhi, get the rank-confirming edict, buy some supplies, and recruit some people to take back to Zhen’nan to use…”

“Very good.” Bai Xiang nodded, her golden eyes meeting hers.

“Then what if I say I’m no longer satisfied with just buying some supplies and recruiting some people… what if I want to take everyone?”

Plop.

Chen Jing had been peeling an apple for Bai Xiang. At those words her hand shook, and the apple rolled straight onto the floor.

What does she mean…

Everyone present felt their scalps tingle and their whole bodies go numb.

Not “what does she mean?”

What did “take everyone” mean???

“No rush.” Bai Xiang weighed the phone lightly in her hand. “For now, let’s see what kind of person this Watchman Zhang really is…”

Bzz, bzz—

Almost as if answering her calculations, her phone started vibrating, displaying an unfamiliar number.

Bai Xiang hit speaker.

After a brief silence, a gentle, cultured man’s voice came from the other end. “Dao Lord Bai, I hope you are well. I am Zhang Xianzhi.”

“I’m somewhat ashamed to say, I only heard this morning that Dao Lord Bai had returned to reside in Chilong. Unfortunately, I’ve been swamped with work. The whole circuit-city is in ruins and there’s too much to do, so I haven’t had a moment free to call on you in person. I beg Dao Lord Bai’s forgiveness for having to resort to this telephonic invitation.”

“Lord Zhang is too polite.” Bai Xiang lightly swung the tip of her foot, her expression blank as she said to the other end, “May I ask what business Lord Zhang has in inviting me?”

“There are, of course, many things to discuss with Dao Lord Bai!”

Zhang Xianzhi sounded highly enthusiastic, his enunciation crisp and proper. “On the one hand, the two lords from Yujing have asked me to introduce them to Dao Lord Bai. That way they can properly confer on Dao Lord Bai the ‘rank-confirming edict’ and fully cement your achievements in quelling the rebellion.

“On the other hand, I’ve heard there have been some misunderstandings between Dao Lord Bai and the Jingyi Gang. I’ve therefore arranged a banquet for Dao Lord Bai and Gang Leader Lian, with ‘Master Kong An’ of Fright-Bamboo Dao also present as witness.”

Here his tone slowed. “Might Dao Lord Bai be willing to grant me a chance to mediate?”

“Lord Zhang,” Bai Xiang’s tone was very level, “you’re being a bit disrespectful to me.”

Oh?

Zhang Xianzhi lifted a brow. “What does Dao Lord Bai mean by that?”

Bai Xiang said, “Even if the rank-confirming edict hasn’t been bestowed yet, I am still a Divine Fetus cultivator just like Master Kong An, yet you put me on the same level as a gang leader. I don’t care for that behavior.”

So she really was a prodigy; tricks that worked on ordinary people were useless on her.

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Zhang Xianzhi’s brows drew together slightly, then smoothed, and he smiled again. “That was my oversight… but I assure you I meant no slight to Dao Lord Bai. I can promise you this here and now—so long as you come, all procedural honors and treatment you receive will match Master Kong An’s. Gang Leader Lian will also show you due respect.”

“Lord Zhang…”

Instead, Bai Xiang let out a quiet sigh.

“I’ve looked into your record. I know you once took first in the imperial exams and rose in one leap into the central halls.

“You once fought pirates along the Eastern Sea coast, and wicked men hated you to the bone.

“You also once governed disaster relief in the yellow sands of Western Province, and the common folk were moved to tears with gratitude toward you.

“What happened to turn you into who you are today, that you’d rather risk offending me than stop shielding a gang?”

This wasn’t her exaggerating; Zhang Xianzhi really had shown his ability as an official before.

“So Dao Lord Bai wants a heart-to-heart.” Zhang Xianzhi’s eyes narrowed.

After a pause, he switched to another tone. “In Dao Lord Bai’s eyes, I am a villain—the source of disorder, the indulgent one.

“Then let me ask Dao Lord Bai this: after the death of the Prince of Nanling, how certain are you that there are no demon spies or traitors among these gangs?

“Zezhou and Qizhou have suffered terrible blows. If we don’t set things right and cut away the rot at the grassroots entirely, how would I have the face to stand before the court? In what way are my actions wrong?”

“And the damage brought by the Jingyi Gang?” Bai Xiang asked.

“Without the Jingyi Gang, there would be a Dirty-Clothes Gang and a White-Clothes Gang,” Zhang Xianzhi shot back. “This is part of the lower strata’s order, part of the overall system. Why should Dao Lord Bai care about such minor losses?”

Without waiting for her reply, he went on, “Through all the ages, how many victories and defeats have there been?

“With the years’ changes, how many rises and falls?

“Our Great Yu has kept this system running for sixteen hundred years. The record proves this is the most effective system there is!

“I, Zhang Xianzhi, am willing to go through fire and water for this system without complaint. If Dao Lord Bai holds the moral high ground and the times require it, then by all means, take my life—I don’t care!

“But Dao Lord Bai… why press me like this, in the wake of a disaster?

“I know Dao Lord Bai’s talent is something that appears once in a thousand years. I truly can’t bear to watch as Dao Lord Bai walks down this mistaken path and ends up on the opposite side from the common folk of the Nine Provinces…”

As Zhang Xianzhi earnestly tried to persuade Bai Xiang, Bai Zhuqing suddenly took a call on the side and began speaking in a low voice.

“It’s from Grandmaster.”

Seeing Bai Xiang’s eyes on her, Bai Zhuqing quietly explained.

“Bad news.”

“It’s spreading. The overall scale is expanding…”

I see.

Bai Xiang nodded to show she understood. Then she brought the phone a little closer and, in a colder voice, said to the other end, “I’ll attend the banquet.”

“Dao Lord Bai has finally come around.” Zhang Xianzhi’s voice held genuine relief.

“What I mean is,” Bai Xiang closed her eyes, “I’m going to take Gang Leader Lian Di’s head. I’ll trouble Lord Zhang to look after it for me until then—don’t let him slip out of your residence.”

“Dao Lord Bai?” Zhang Xianzhi’s face darkened. “What do you mean by that?”

“In the neutral spring of the guimao year, in the third month…”

Bai Xiang suddenly began to murmur softly.

Holding her phone, she rose and walked quietly to the floor-to-ceiling windows, looking down at the bustling street below.

“I wonder, Lord Zhang… have you ever heard this poem?”