Volume 5, Chapter 109 – Li Wenyu’s Confusion

After a whole night had passed, Li Wenyu was still tossing and turning in bed. It was all because Bai Xiang’s visit had stirred up far too many worries in her heart.

She had spent almost the entire night wandering through nightmares and had barely slept at all.

By the second half of the night, she had simply given up. She turned on the screen on the wall instead, and only felt a little better with the sound of television programs filling the room.

The first thing she saw was a female reporter, and the one being interviewed was a half-grown boy who looked no older than a junior high student.

The background in the image was pitch-black. Was that the collapsed wreckage of a building beside him?

This could not be a live broadcast, could it?

She had only been stunned for a moment before the voice had already sunk into her mind.

“…It didn’t really feel like much, I guess. I practice martial arts properly all the time anyway, so when something like this happened I didn’t panic that much. I just had to push the obstacle aside.”

The boy spoke shyly.

Subtitles appeared at the side as well, explaining that when the disaster struck, he had held up a doorframe by himself and won his family extremely precious time to escape.

“So practicing qi arts really is useful,” the boy continued. “It’s different from the old Sword Dao, completely different. It boosts your strength fast, and it’s more well-rounded too, and it doesn’t have those side effects. My grandfather used to say he wanted to practice Sword Dao before, but didn’t dare to. Qi arts don’t have that problem.”

This is praising someone, isn’t it?

Li Wenyu felt agitated. She picked up the remote and changed the channel.

This time, the picture that appeared was even dirtier and messier. As the camera shook, she could see that in the dark night a defensive line had been set up with coal lamps and firelight. Many adult men and teenagers were mixed together, all wearing bulletproof vests.

Was this disaster relief too?

Why was everyone everywhere doing disaster relief?

Li Wenyu parted her lips. She suddenly realized that beyond the overly peaceful Zhennan, it seemed as though this world had undergone some enormous changes overnight.

She kept switching channels, kept watching news from every direction, and finally understood. The phenomenon known as “Celestial Change and Earthly Upheaval” had happened again.

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There were many news reports, most of them from within Great Xia. Mixed in among them were detailed introductions to disaster-response efforts, rough estimates of the scale of losses, and of course the largest portion consisted of interviews by frontline reporters. Presumably that too was meant to bolster public morale.

“It’s not that scary.”

On the screen, a pretty girl with a ponytail, dressed in green camouflage and a bulletproof vest, said this with a smile.

“Mutated rats are already one of the easiest kinds of trouble to deal with. On average they’re only about the size of a cheetah. As long as you’ve got cover and long weapons, it doesn’t matter how many of them come.”

The girl held a spear that had been welded together out of steel bars. One end had been sharpened to an extremely keen point, and there was quite a bit of dried blood on both the spear tip and her body. Even her pale, tender face was streaked with some of it.

Although she looked filthy and bedraggled overall, her eyes were very bright, and when she spoke the movements of her facial muscles showed no sign of convulsive twitching. Presumably none of the blood was her own.

The blood of demon beasts?

A girl that young, at most only in high school, already had the ability to be assigned to a militia unit like this to resist a demonic outbreak.

And most importantly, what reason did she have to stay and help?

Li Wenyu felt both confused and shocked.

“Celestial Change and Earthly Upheaval” had already broken out once at the beginning of Zhengyuan, and Li Wenyu had experienced it herself. The fusion back then had been far more intense than it was now, so she knew very clearly just how many dangers were involved in the process.

The greatest threat came from changes in terrain. Some parts of the surface would rise, while others would collapse. There was no shortage of settlements unlucky enough to merge directly with the terrain of a deep ravine. In such cases, an entire town was basically ruined on the spot. Evacuation had to happen immediately, or everyone would die.

That was the more obvious threat. The indirect threats came from the secondary disasters brought on by those changes.

For example, some towns might sink, but not all that deep. At moments like that, some people would start cheering, thinking they were lucky, that their lives had been spared. Before long, they would discover they were in terrible trouble.

The first thing to strike would be flooding.

Whether it was groundwater or rivers diverted by the changed terrain, floodwaters would mercilessly swallow every low-lying place.

Second, because earthquakes had damaged the defensive works, the voidfiends that had already existed on the outskirts, together with the voidfiends that descended along with the fusion, would begin to eat people.

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That kind of scene was truly no different from surviving in an apocalypse: the water and electricity cut off, supplies insufficient, proper rescue nowhere in sight, all kinds of demon beasts lurking in the shadows waiting for a chance to harm people, and some deadly Demon Pools beginning to spread along with death.

In a situation like that, shouldn’t everyone be looking out only for themselves and trying their best to flee toward nearby settlements that were still intact?

At least, in Li Wenyu’s memory, that was what Yu people did.

Every person was the first person responsible for themselves, and every person only needed to be responsible for the health and safety of their own life. True, the stories and myths of the Yu people were not lacking in righteous knights-errant, but no matter how one looked at it, the word “knight-errant” simply did not belong with the boys and girls on the screen.

Weren’t they just mere commoners?

They were all people without rank or status, still at an age when even their worldviews had not fully taken shape. They should have had no motivation to risk their lives for fame.

And yet the very group that, in every story, was the weakest and most in need of rescue by others had now united the strength around them, formed so-called militia squads, and begun using ruined urban wreckage as cover, standing firm amid the battering of nature and gaining the upper hand in their struggle against demon beasts.

“…”

Li Wenyu fell silent.

She realized this was not, in the slightest, news meant to praise or flatter Bai Xiang. Rather, it was simply that certain things, once done, had with time finally borne fruit, and the effects they could produce, the influence they could wield, had at last blossomed.

This was the impact qi arts had brought to ordinary people’s lives.

Something like this could never have happened in the era of Great Yu or Great Xuan. Even a ruler like Emperor Feng could never have granted power so readily to a group like this.

But in Great Xia, it had happened. Not only had it happened, it had happened so often that it seemed everyone regarded it as perfectly normal whenever they spoke of it.

That was not to say they felt no pride. Those faces still carried pride.

But it was pride in themselves, pride that they themselves could hold back floodwaters, kill demon beasts, survive within the illusory gods of Demon Pools and break them.

Thinking of it that way, Li Wenyu suddenly felt as though she could no longer clearly see Bai Xiang’s face.

She had long since ceased daring to face Bai Xiang as Bai Xiang’s birth mother. Her impression of Bai Xiang was simply that of the upright, imposing female emperor of Great Xia.

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Every word that suited a ruler could be applied to that person: cold, merciless, tyrannical, domineering…

At least, whenever Bai Xiang faced Li Wenyu, she was like a storm, leaving Li Wenyu utterly unable to breathe.

Combining those impressions with Bai Xiang’s earlier statement that “all the demon races unwilling to submit will be killed,” Li Wenyu had once thought that Bai Xiang simply liked being a tyrant, that she was determined to rule the world single-handedly.

But…

How could a tyrant be willing to do something like this?

How could a tyrant be willing to share her own transcendence, her own sacredness, with lowborn commoners…?

The Bai Xiang Li Wenyu saw with her own eyes, and the Bai Xiang she observed indirectly through the news and through Great Xia’s institutions, were practically two different people.

It was too contradictory.

She could not make sense of it.

Knock, knock.

“Your Highness?”

Chongniang’s voice came from outside the door.

“Are you unable to sleep?”

Li Wenyu glanced at the time on her phone. It was only five in the morning.

At this hour… I suppose I did turn the television up a bit too loud.

“I am well,” she replied. “Chongniang, go get some rest.”

The next day, after washing up, Li Wenyu ate breakfast with Chongniang beside her, changed into a light-purple palace dress with less elaborate decoration, and asked the guards at the courtyard if she might go out onto the streets for a walk.

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There were no real experts in Li Wenyu’s party, so after asking for instructions, the soldiers standing guard allowed it.

“These southerners are truly rude!”

All the way there, Song Qiaoshu kept complaining in the carriage.

“That Xia Code has almost abolished all traditional ritual propriety!”

They had already been in Great Xia for some time. Through what they had seen and what they had learned online, they more or less understood the local atmosphere by now.

“I actually think it’s fine.” The scholar Dong Biyan said this cheerfully. “Some forms of ritual propriety are just too cumbersome. They don’t fit modern society all that well.”

What they were mainly talking about was the etiquette between masters and servants, and between ruler and minister.

As far as Song Qiaoshu was concerned, he could ignore the abolition of other kinds of propriety, but for propriety in these areas to be suppressed… what exactly was Great Xia trying to do?

Could it be they wanted to imitate the Western barbarians?

The speaker had no special intent, but the listener did. In the back seat, Li Wenyu frowned slightly and lowered her head, sinking into thought once again.

Song Qiaoshu was right. The ritual propriety in this respect had been stripped away far too severely.

If the rights of servants were greatly elevated, then the interests of masters would naturally be weakened as well.

That kind of influence also touched the Imperial Court and imperial authority. Li Wenyu could not understand it. How was centralized rule supposed to be maintained like this?

At present, Great Xia looked fine, but that was only because the Xia Emperor was too strong.

The absolute obedience of the entire populace and all political institutions of the nation to the Xia Emperor was not actually founded on her identity as emperor, but on her personally invincible martial power.

In other words, if someone else were placed on the throne within this system, they would absolutely face enormous constraints.

She had even heard that Bai Xiang had suppressed the direct line of the Bai family… what exactly was she trying to do?