# Chapter 153: The Justice You Imagine
Jiang Wang had deliberately chosen the city gate opposite the giant tortoise-beast's side to leave the city. Within the city he had kept an even, unhurried pace; once past the walls, he fled at speed, and in an instant had reached the wilds.
"Ah."
Amid the howling wind, he suddenly heard such a sigh.
"I wonder on what account this traveler runs so urgently?"
Jiang Wang stopped and rested his hand on his sword.
Gazing at the figure that appeared suddenly before him, he said slowly: "Fleeing for my life. I have no choice but to hurry."
Before him stood a handsome young cultivator in common dress, his face betraying nothing—yet his eyes gave one to feel morose.
The man laughed: "You are Youguo's great savior, the great contributor who destroyed the Thousand-Absolute Curse. What would you be fleeing for your life from?"
Jiang Wang let out a sigh: "Perhaps I am not."
"Tsk, tsk, tsk. I chased over here only to take a good look at what our champion of justice, our paragon of virtue, is really like." He shook his head and sighed: "So it turns out you are nothing more than this."
Jiang Wang said: "I did only what I ought to have done; it can hardly lay claim to justice. City Lord Yin, if there is nothing else, I must be on my way."
Back on the tavern's rooftop terrace, among that crowd of officials going up to report their duties, he had noticed one of them was Yin Guan. And so Jiang Wang had remembered his face.
Everyone believed Yin Guan still lurked within the twenty-seventh city. The Stele-Bearing Army searched the city still, its commander Zheng Chaoyang himself blocking the gate. Yet there he was, out in the countryside beyond the city, before the very eyes of all.
"Ha! You truly think you saved this city?" Yin Guan sneered coldly. "This Heaven-Blessed State is a nation without a shred of hope!"
"Perhaps saved, perhaps not. Either way, I saved at least one innocent girl." Jiang Wang said: "As for whether Youguo has any hope, that is a matter for you people of Youguo to consider."
"You stopped Muqing, and you wiped out the first thread of the curse—so you must already have met Muqing's wet nurse. Do you know why she harbored such resentment? Have you asked why she would risk everything to do such a thing?"
There was anger in Yin Guan's voice: "Do you know how her only son died?"
"I had no time to ask, nor any wish to."
"Her only son was, the year before last, the city lord of the twenty-seventh city!"
The Qing'er Su Muqing had spoken of?
Jiang Wang's mind trembled. He had imagined the old woman's son might have suffered some grievance or injustice, or else been persecuted by someone. All the sort of sorrowful tale one could imagine—pitiable, true, yet not sufficient cause to hate the world. A debt has its debtor, a grudge its one who deserves it; hate who you hate and kill who you kill, but you must not drag the innocent into it.
He had imagined many possibilities, yet this answer took him by surprise.
Almost in the same instant, Jiang Wang recalled Su Muqing's words—"My cousin is very good, he is very good. But no matter what he does, he will die."
Yin Guan was precisely the city lord who was to go to the upper city to report his duties today. By Su Muqing's account, his assessment today would inevitably fail, and he would meet his end devoured by the Guardian Sacred Beast. Instead he had laid his plans directly, provoked the Guardian Sacred Beast's madness, and escaped with his life. He had even come within a hair's breadth of destroying the twenty-seven cities—for if that giant tortoise-beast had grown madder still, the fall of the entire state would not have been impossible.
Was he merely saving his own skin?
"That was a very fine man. The three of us, Muqing and I, grew up together. The two of us cultivated with all our strength. In order to have more time to accompany Muqing, I deliberately hid my strengths, and let him become that year's city lord. I thought it a kind of compensation. I never imagined... that it would thrust him straight down into hell!"
"Do you know what a lower-city lord means?"
"Youguo divides only into upper city and lower city."
"Which is, above the tortoise shell and beneath it. There is but one upper city—the capital. The lower cities number thirty-nine in all, named simply City One to City Thirty-Nine. Have you ever seen a place whose cities have only numbers? You would not give a dog kennel a name, nor a chicken coop. Because you know they are a dog kennel and a chicken coop, and that is enough."
"Because the so-called change of city lords is nothing but a curtain! What this present political system of Youguo aims at is only to select, from every region of the land, the finest and most gifted cultivators, to feed that blasted Guardian Sacred Beast! The one who ranks worst in the assessment is in truth the one with the highest talent. But the talent becomes the very reason for his death!"
"Only in this way can it keep growing without cease, keep remaining in Youguo, keep—'protecting' this place!"
"Yet the protection all the people are grateful for is nothing more than a beast's instinctive guarding of its own food!"
Yin Guan's eyes were twisted by a kind of pain.
He was laughing. Laughing at himself, and at this misshapen nation.
"So that is how it is!" said Jiang Wang.
"So that is how it is?"
"I have simply understood one thing all at once." Jiang Wang said: "I had thought Zhao Cang meant to kill me. Now I understand—indeed he means to kill me. But he need not kill me himself. Declaring before all that I had resolved the Thousand-Absolute Curse, he did so in order to borrow your blade."
"Because you are shrewd. You refused him. A shrewd man can see the shape of this nation for what it is. If you had backing, so be it; but if you had none, then the fewer who knew of you the better. As for me... do you think I should kill you?"
"Perhaps I should." Jiang Wang gripped his sword. "Because you have your road, and I have mine."
"You still refuse to see that you are wrong?" Yin Guan frowned: "The justice you imagine is, in truth, nothing but aiding the tiger in evil!"
"Do you know—" Jiang Wang said, "that your little cousin truly loves you?"
"What are you trying to say?"
"Then do you know what effect that curse-paper effigy would have on her?"
"It would make her fall gravely ill. And every member of the Su family besides her would die."
"If I remember rightly, the Su family are your kin as well."
"Kin?" Yin Guan laughed: "Then do you know who revealed my true talent, making me city lord of the twenty-seventh city? None other than Su Muqing's father, my own uncle by marriage!"
"Only so that, with me as a morsel that could sate the tortoise-beast's belly, he might entrench his power. Even climb into the upper city. He has wholly forgotten how he became family head, forgotten how my mother died!"
Jiang Wang fell silent. Indeed, he could not bring himself to censure the man on that account.
But he too had his own road, and would not be shaken by another's tragic circumstances.
Jiang Wang said: "But have you not considered how many would die if that giant beast went mad and attacked the lower cities? You cannot mend one wrong with a greater wrong."
"That depends on how one defines wrong." Yin Guan said flatly.
"Then, one last question." Jiang Wang asked: "Why have you told me all this?"
"Ha ha ha ha." Yin Guan burst into laughter: "It is only now that I find you amusing."
He answered: "Because I am like you... we are both waiting for someone. You are waiting for him to come kill me, and I too am waiting... for him to come kill me!"
As his words died away.
From the direction of the twenty-seventh city, a straight, upright figure, like an arrow released from a bowstring, came streaking in with a speed that nearly tore space apart with its shriek!
If he were the arrow.
Then this bow must have the mountains for its back and the rivers for its string.
This arrow must break the heavens!
That powerful musculature, that crushing pressure—even from a vast distance, it told one his identity—Zheng Chaoyang, Commander of the Stele-Bearing Army!
And Yin Guan swept his great sleeve once, brushing past Jiang Wang as he veered aside.
"There is but one thing they missed. And that is—"
Even as he spoke, he began to accelerate toward the direction of Zheng Chaoyang!
"They have never truly understood how gifted I am. Just how strong I am!"