Three Steps: From Assassin to Empress - Chapter 10: In Time, He Will Be the Best...

Chapter 10: In Time, He Will Be the Best…

Ying Xiu had no idea what the retainer was thinking. The young assassin was resting his chin in his hand, lost in thought, his eyes watching the commoners carrying logs back and forth. Many of them were from Jianxiafang. After Jianxin had the wealthy families increase their wages, the hard labor of building the canal at the Yuan River weir became a desirable job. Many people were rushing to the government office to sign up. The commoners of Jianxiafang wouldn’t have had the chance if the team leader hadn’t taken them in for Ying Xiu’s sake.

Even hard labor like building a canal, as long as it had a small benefit, no longer belonged to the commoners. How much more so for a port that facilitated trade?

Adding a small ferry in Jianxiafang for the commoners downstream to sell fish to passing trade ships was not as easy as Ying Xiu thought. The young assassin was good at eliminating the wicked but not at helping the good.

Ying Xiu was troubled for a long time. He couldn’t help but talk to Xie Zhou. After hearing his worries, Xie Zhou calmly said, “You can borrow influence.”

“I can’t,” Ying Xiu said subconsciously. “Jianxin is too busy, and I’m just a scholar. I’m not really that close to him. I can only talk to him a few times.” He knew very well that there were retainers and servants in the Wang clan of Langya who disliked him and thought he wasn’t a good retainer because he wasn’t loyal to his master.

What those people thought didn’t matter. What mattered was that the master of the Wang clan, Wang Daokui, seemed to see him that way, too. In their eyes, an assassin was no different from a knife or a tool and was not qualified to befriend a master. Wang Daokui was Jianxin’s father. He didn’t want to put Jianxin in a difficult position between him and his father. He had to build the ferry in Jianxiafang himself.

Xie Zhou was silent for a moment. “You can borrow mine.”

Ying Xiu suddenly looked up at him and shook his head solemnly. Xie Zhou was just a retainer of the Xie clan of Jianzhang, and a retainer of the Grand Chancellor’s at that. He had been sent to Jiangzhou to herd deer. If he accidentally angered the Grand Chancellor, he might not even have the chance to herd deer anymore.

“No, what you’re doing is too dangerous.” Ying Xiu shook his head very resolutely, showing he would not agree.

…Dangerous how?

Xie Zhou found that he didn’t understand what was going on in the assassin’s mind. For him, adding a small ferry on the Jiangzhou map was just a matter of a single sentence. It was also not a difficult thing for a retainer of the Xie clan of Jianzhang. But Ying Xiu didn’t want his help or the Wang clan’s son’s help. He insisted on doing it himself. In the Southern Dynasty, where officials were interconnected, a commoner with no distinguished background could barely move an inch, let alone build a ferry.

Xie Zhou thought that Ying Xiu would eventually have to borrow influence from either Wang Shouzhen or him.

After returning to the tavern he was staying at, Ying Xiu knocked on Xue Hao’s door, wanting to borrow books about ferries and water transportation from him. Xue Hao, as a scholar who had studied for many years, had books, but they were mostly on classics and divination. He didn’t have such specialized books. After inquiring among his scholarly friends, he finally managed to borrow two for Ying Xiu.

Ying Xiu held the worn books and read them for a long time by candlelight. Combining what he read in the books with the landscape he had seen in Jianxiafang, Ying Xiu picked up a brush and wrote on a piece of paper. Building a ferry for the common people required an application to the government office. He had to write the application first.

The next day, at the Jiangzhou prefectural office, several clerks looked at the roughly but carefully written application in front of them and then at the scholar who had submitted it.

“Which family are you from?” a clerk asked Ying Xiu.

“My family name is Ying,” Ying Xiu said.

The clerk had never heard of a powerful Ying clan in Jiangzhou. He nodded. “You can go back and wait.”

Ying Xiu asked, “When will there be news?”

The clerk said casually, “We’ll let you know when there’s news.”

Ying Xiu had no choice but to leave. After reading the books last night, he learned that building a ferry had to be done at the same time as building the canal. If he waited until the canal was finished, it would be difficult to build a ferry.

After thinking hard, the young assassin once again thought of Xie Zhou’s words about borrowing influence.

At the tavern on the Xiao Qinhuai, a group of scholars, old and young, sat together. They all stared at the application on the table. It was said that literati looked down on each other, and in their eyes, this application was clearly not up to standard. The writing was crude, the parallelism was uneven, and the tones were mismatched. It was obvious that the writer hadn’t studied for many years.

But this application wasn’t for fame. It was for an application to the government office to build a ferry in a place called Jianxiafang, a place full of northern gentry. And the young man had said that if they could persuade the government office to agree to build the ferry, their names would all be on a banner at the ferry. The young man also said that there were sixteen people in this small tavern, so the ferry would be named the Sixteen Ferries.

Jianxiafang was an unheard-of place, and the people living there were commoners. But after all, it was a way to leave their names in one place. An older scholar stroked his beard and nodded, bluntly saying that his name should be at the top. Several younger scholars argued over the last spots, claiming they should be at the front of the sixteen.

Xue Hao, one of the sixteen, patted Ying Xiu on the shoulder. “You borrowed books from me for this? That’s great. To bring good fortune to the people. Did you find a wealthy family willing to fund it?”

“No, I didn’t,” Ying Xiu said. Xue Hao frowned slightly. The next moment, he heard Ying Xiu add, “I’ll pay for it myself.”

Xue Hao couldn’t catch his breath and fell to the ground on the spot. Wait, we’re both scholars. How are you so rich?

In Xunyang, Jiangzhou, in the autumn of September, a group of scholars knocked on the gate of the Jiangzhou prefectural office, petitioning to build a ferry in a place called Jianxiafang to save the people from their hardships and bring them wealth.

Scholars from commoner backgrounds were especially weak in the Southern Dynasty, where family background was valued. They were like floating duckweeds, and under the system of recommendation and recruitment, the only way for them to advance was to attach themselves to the aristocratic families. But the voices of these floating duckweeds, when put together, were enough to cause a slight ripple.

The clerk in the government office thought for a moment, went out, and called Ying Xiu inside. “Actually, we had news a while ago, but too many things got in the way.”

The people living downstream in Jianxiafang were mostly refugees from the north, a slum equivalent. And Jiangzhou was a state governed by the Wu people. For a northern commoner to build a ferry for other northern commoners, when Ying Xiu first submitted his application, the southern officials in the government office just smiled and were noncommittal. Now they weren’t smiling. A group of people used their pens to draw lines on the map, shifting things around. They turned to the unknown young scholar and said, “Building a ferry will cost a lot of silver. Do you have the money?”

Ying Xiu thought for a moment, a little troubled. “Is this enough?” With that, he took out a handful of silver notes from his chest. They were the ones Jianxin had given him when he first arrived in Jiangzhou. Seeing the young man in a cloth robe casually pull out a stack of silver notes, the officials in the government office’s eyes widened. They were instantly silent. Build it, then. It’s still being built in Jiangzhou, and the people of Jiangzhou will benefit.

As the news spread throughout Jiangzhou that a group of sixteen scholars, old and young, had requested to build a ferry for the benefit of the people, the official approval for the ferry in Jianxiafang came down. The approval was titled “The Sixteen Ferries.”

The group of scholars who had been studying history and classics were so excited they couldn’t control themselves. They held the approval in their hands, looking at it over and over again. Although he had grown up upstream and had never been to this place called Jianxiafang, Xue Hao was still so excited that he paced back and forth in the small tavern. “We’ve made our names in history! The local records of Jiangzhou will have a trace of the Sixteen Ferries in the future!”

“By the way, what’s your name again?” Xue Hao suddenly stopped and asked Ying Xiu. In his impression, the young man in front of him was always especially mysterious. He had moved into this small tavern on the Xiao Qinhuai a few months ago and had lived a reclusive life. Other than occasionally saying a few words to the owner and secretly coming to borrow and return books at night, reading all of their old and young scholars’ books, he had almost no contact with the outside world. He used to feel that the young man had a kind of spiritual murderous aura about him. It wasn’t a bloodthirsty desire to kill, but a sense of having actually shed bl00d, like the difference between a sharpened sword and an unsharpened one, which could make people stop in their tracks. Now, he felt that this person, how should he put it, had a bit of a naive, youthful arrogance for helping the world.

Ying Xiu was stunned. Since becoming an assassin, he had never told anyone his real name except for Jianxin. The beautiful and charming retainer was an exception. Just when Xue Hao thought the young man in front of him wouldn’t tell him his real name—

“Ying Xiu,” the young man said. “My name is Ying Xiu.”

Ying Xiu, one of the sixteen signatories of the Jianxiafang ferry.

The Sixteen Ferries. He used fame to lure the scholars and then used the scholars’ fame to force the Jiangzhou prefectural office to agree to build the ferry. He went to great lengths just to build a ferry for commoners he had no relationship with.

Shang Wei-jun felt that this young assassin was truly interesting. No wonder His Majesty was willing to play house with him. He thought this as he looked down. Below the building, bl00d flowed all over the ground, cold and foul-smelling. It was a scout who had come to investigate, sent by the eldest son of the Wang clan of Langya, Wang Shouzhen. He had probably mistakenly thought this was the retainer’s residence and had climbed over the courtyard wall alone, attempting to find “Xie Zhou.” Unfortunately, the Xie Zhou they were looking for wasn’t here. Where there was no assassin Ying Xiu, there was no retainer Xie Zhou. There was only a cruel and bloodthirsty emperor.

On the building, Emperor Zhaosu, dressed in white, was playing the zither. The music of the konghou sounded like metal and stone, or like a thousand galloping horses, full of murderous coldness. Emperor Zhaosu rarely had the interest to play the zither. He would only occasionally play a tune when he killed someone. This also meant that he had a new source of amusement, such as inciting the two clans, the Northern and Southern gentry, to split and watching them bite each other, leading to a mutually destructive outcome. Balancing them to control them—this was the art of an emperor.

As for the young assassin’s actions… Emperor Zhaosu suddenly stopped plucking the strings. Ying Xiu had indeed borrowed influence, but he hadn’t borrowed it from the aristocrats. He had borrowed it from the desires of people. He was very smart. He was only seventeen years old. In time, he would become the best knife, cutting open abscesses and draining pus, with every cut drawing bl00d. This knife would not remain in the hands of the Wang clan of Langya for long.

Emperor Zhaosu looked at the sticky bloodstains below with cold eyes. The gaze that was always gentle and indifferent in front of Ying Xiu was now dangerous and cold. “Give Wang Shouzhen some trouble. Don’t let him have the chance to be with Ying Xiu.”

The first cut to divide the northern and southern gentry would start with Wang Shouzhen.