The Lu clan house on Fuliu Street was small and exquisite, yet held a hidden world within — even the lady of the Xu clan from Qingfeng City felt they had made a meditation-chamber of a snail shell, and carried the craft so far nothing more could be demanded. In a waterside pavilion facing the lake, the lady who had just so cleanly pocketed the Liu clan's mole-scale armor reposed against the railing in high spirits. So good was her mood, indeed, that the fly called Lu Zhengchun on the steps no longer grated on her eye.
Her son, in a gown of unrelieved scarlet, stood on a long bench flinging bait into the little lake; close on a hundred red-backed carp crowded and jostled in a rolling tide of crimson, a sight of some grandeur.
The lady gave orders to Lu Zhengchun: "You needn't linger here. When this business is done, you'll come with us to Qingfeng City. Besides taking you as my husband's disciple of the inner chamber, I'll grant your grandfather's somewhat impudent request, and see to it you one day rise into the middle realms — mind you, of all promises that one is the dearest, so your grandfather may be called a wily old fox." And she smiled to herself: "Had your grandfather been at the Lu helm, the dynasty need not have crumbled so quickly. Even the lofty vassal king of Great Li, Song Changjing, freely grants that in destroying a whole kingdom within the year, half the book of merits is the Lu royal house's. But this branch of yours in town shares ruin with the main line without sharing its fortune. So grasp well this chance Qingfeng City hands you — one that comes but once in a thousand years."
Lu Zhengchun bent low in a deep bow, weeping: "Lu Zhengchun will never forget Mistress Xu's great kindness, and will serve her like an ox or horse in Qingfeng City — I swear this life I shall be loyal to the lady alone!" The lady smiled bewitchingly, half-closing her eyes. "Such heartfelt talk — best my husband, your future master, not hear it. Or you might repeat it before him." Perhaps because, since kneeling to Liu Xianyang in Mud Vase Lane, Lu Zhengchun no longer resented such things, he dropped at once to his knees and prostrated himself, trembling: "Lu Zhengchun would never dare forget his roots!" The lady waved him off: "Enough, get up. Whether you've forgotten your roots will surface when the waters fall and the rocks appear."
Lu Zhengchun withdrew backward down the steps. This rake of the first rank, who had once lorded over the whole town, seemed never to have stood up straight in the lady's presence.
Beyond the town, the Lu clan — a surname that had held a dynasty's scepter — had been gravely wounded by Great Li's border soldiers and could hardly rise again soon; from top to bottom, direct line and branches alike, all that remained was to live with tails between their legs. Were it not so, Qingfeng City, for all its wealth and fame, would never have dared pull the cuckoo's trick of lodging in the Lu nest in town and order Lu scions about from on high — even the master-servant pair from Zhengyang Mountain strained their luck. But now the Lu dragon lay stranded in the shallows; the times were hard, and they had to swallow their pride.
The boy in scarlet sneered: "A born lackey. Why keep such trash, Mother? Promise him a middle realm besides? Since when did middle realms grow so cheap?" The lady smiled: "Lu Zhengchun is not without merit; but in the end he is only a small garnish on a great bargain. As for the surface show — Mother has promised this town's Lu a great deal: the fled royal kin could take refuge in Qingfeng City and put down roots, honored as high guests; indeed, we have set aside a whole quarter of the city as their private ground, for a hundred years."
The child dashed out to gather a fistful of pebbles and pelted the carp with glee, then turned his head: "Mother, was coming to town just a blind, by which the Xu clan means to bring the Lu under its thumb? A centipede dies but does not topple; they say the Lu's homeless curs number over three thousand royal kin alone, and with the eunuchs, bondservants, and diehards of the fallen dynasty they'd swell Qingfeng City's numbers handsomely. So is this the true nerve-centre of the ruined Lu's affairs?" The lady beamed: "That you've thought so far shows my son is sharp. But you're still wrong." The boy frowned, waiting. The lady blinked. "There is a secret within that mole-scale armor — in short, no poorer a thing than the sword scripture."
The boy hurled a pebble hard, striking a carp on the back so that blood flew. His eyes burned: "Father excels at attack and slaughter, yielding little to Song Changjing — only he is hampered by a weak frame and dreads a foe's trade of wounds for wounds, and so could never make his name, but was made a laughing-stock, mocked even by Qingfeng City's own. Once he has this armor, can he match Song Changjing?" The lady shook her head. The boy slapped the railing, aflame: "Stop playing riddles with me!" His teeth bared, he looked a cub of tiger or leopard. The lady had never found his shouting amiss — for from birth he had won from a great adept a prophecy of no small praise: "a bearing of tiger and wolf, the stuff of a sovereign of men."
The lady explained patiently: "Once your father has the armor and comprehends it, he'll advance at the brink of a hundred feet. What need has he of defense? One force, and ten thousand skills fall away — he has only to roll over his enemies in a single breath." The boy burst into delighted laughter: "Kill, kill, kill! Begin, Father, by slaying from within Qingfeng City itself — the foulest deeds are those one's own folk do you!" When the laughter died he grew calm: "And your trick on Zhengyang Mountain — aren't you afraid the dull-witted ape will come to himself and set upon us once we're beyond the town? And one thing I never understood: that Liu fellow, with a porcelain-buyer from early on, superb bone and sinew and, on top of it, armor and sword scripture — such a prize is rarer than rare. Why did his buyer keep so stubbornly to the shadows, letting you fish in troubled waters, and letting Zhengyang's old ape dispose of your messes — one punch killing Liu Xianyang, the whole mountain of trouble on Zhengyang's head, and great leeway for Qingfeng City?"
The lady answered with quiet confidence: "That thousand-year-old mountain-moving ape has no quick head, but he is not so dull as to be made a monkey of at will. He had long since guessed my ruse of killing with a borrowed knife. Why he holds his nose and leaps into the trap himself — the reasons are tangled, some in his pride, some in an old history unknown to any, and you need not worry over them."
She fell to thought, tracing the thread of her scheme once more, seeking any hole to patch, lest a train of misfortunes follow.
The buyer of the youth Liu Xianyang's life-bound porcelain had once been a faction that threw its whole weight behind the Lu dynasty; when the dynasty fell, it lost every copper and gambled away its stake. Before that it had been a first-class clan of the mortal dynasties below the mountains — else it could never have afforded to keep Liu Xianyang in town after confirming his sword-blank constitution, buying up the nine years that followed. Zhengyang Mountain learned of this by some channel, went to that ruined household and sought to buy the porcelain; one of its elders named a heaven-shot price. But the household, as though struck by madness, refused to yield, saying only they had sold it to another, and who, and of what origins, they kept sealed fast. Then Zhengyang caught wind that its sworn foe, the Wind-Thunder Garden, had seized the moment to plunder the burning house and stolen the first step — and naturally the household dared not own, before Zhengyang's sword-immortal, that it had sold the thing to that very mountain's enemy.
And who had leaked both matters to Zhengyang Mountain — the Liu ancestral armor and scripture, and the transfer of Liu Xianyang's porcelain? Far as heaven, near as one's own eyes: the lady of the Xu clan of Qingfeng City, from behind the curtain. She had been the chief plotter; this trip had cost her dear, and she meant at least to recoup the outlay, else her branch in Qingfeng City would totter and fall, to say nothing of ruling the city single-handed.
In truth this town harbored crouching tigers and hidden dragons. The true foundations of the four surnames and ten clans lay not in how many snakes with heaven-reaching arts had coiled there — those patriarchs were long past leaving; like the peach trees of Peach-Leaf Lane, moved they would die. Their strength lay in how many dragon kilns they commanded, which fixed how many pieces of life-bound porcelain they furnished outward each year; and when a fine embryo of cultivation turned up, the buyers who pressed their guesses aright would generally wrap a "great red packet" on top, as good as tying a knot of incense-and-kinship.
The lady said to her son with some feeling: "Never underestimate anyone, not even a worm like Lu Zhengchun. You thought to walk into town and pluck up fortunes at ease? It is not so. Fu Nanhua of Old Dragon City nearly shattered his dao-mind; Cai Jinjian of Cloud-Glow Mountain has vanished, alive or dead unknown. And a promising youth who, at that gallery bridge, seemed on a happy impulse to contemplate the water — had his very heart spoiled, as though a pit were smashed in the lake-bed of his heart. Such things can only grow more frequent. On the road of cultivation, there is not one man at his ease." The child thought it over: "A cautious heart steers the ship a thousand years, Mother." The lady nodded. "Best that you are."
The child cast his last pebble: "And what of this Qi Jingchun?" The lady, rarely angry, snapped: "Impudence! Address him Master Qi!" The child started, then corrected himself: "Has Master Qi run into trouble?" The lady hesitated, then said slowly: "Master Qi's teacher once not only assisted at the altar of that temple of culture, but sat at the left hand, in the second seat, of the very Master of the Confucian religion." The child was dumbstruck — the fourth in the long history of the Confucian way. For such a being beyond imagining, one would not dare call it all true, but one would half believe that, in a rage, he could stamp flat the greatest mountain of the Baoping Continent with one foot. And the lady whispered, her heart trembling: "Only now that sage of sages has sunk — below even the ruined, broken gods of this little town." The child swallowed, and asked idly: "And how shall we deal with Liu Xianyang's friend?" The lady considered. "That orphan surnamed Chen of Mud Vase Lane?" The child nodded. "Didn't you, on first meeting, call him an ant? Let them live or wither as they will."