Xie Jing set out just as the first light of dawn was about to break, taking only a few household servants and traveling lightly with Xie Jun as they escorted the coffins of his parents, his elder brother, and his sister-in-law back to Chen Commandery. The official roads heading north were originally supposed to have been sealed since the previous night to make way for the Tiger Division’s upcoming expedition, but given Xie Jing’s unique status, a decree had been sent from the palace notifying the guards to grant the Xie uncle and nephew passage.
When the group arrived at the city gates, a carriage was already waiting by the roadside. Inside were only Lu Shuqing and Lu Shuning; despite the early hour, the siblings had come this far to see him off.
Xie Jing signaled for Xie Jun and the attendants to wait a moment while he climbed into the carriage. “Why have you two come all this way specifically? Have you had breakfast?”
Lu Shuning nodded and handed over a food box. “I brought some snacks for Mother and Cousin to eat on the road if you get hungry.”
Xie Jing opened the lid and glanced inside; it contained four types of pastries, all of which were varieties Lu Lingcong was accustomed to making.
He froze for a moment, then put the food box away and said softly, “There was no need to see me off. It’s not as if I’m leaving never to return. Didn’t we speak of this in the palace last night? I will certainly return to the capital in three months at most, or by the end of the year at the latest. You should really go and see off your father instead. Swords and spears have no eyes, and the battlefield is perilous; spending more time with him is what matters most.”
Lu Shuqing replied, “When the Emperor personally goes on an expedition, he must offer sacrifices at the ancestral temple to seek the protection of the ancestors. After we bid Mother farewell, we will head back immediately.”
Xie Jing advised further, “Qing’er, while you act as regent during these days, you can rely on Lord He and Master Xiao for all military and political affairs. Although General Li is away with the Tiger Division, General Zheng and the Li siblings are also trustworthy. The stage has been set for you; now is the time for you to boldly test your wings and win over the hearts of people to your own side. If there is an emergency, just send word to your father and me.”
Lu Shuqing nodded to each instruction. Xie Jing added a few words of casual advice and prepared to rise and take his leave, only to have his sleeve suddenly caught by Lu Shuqing. The youth’s expression was strained as if there were words he dared not speak. Xie Jing had sensed this anomaly from the moment he entered the carriage, so he sat back down and asked, “Qing’er, is there something else you want to say to Mother?”
He continued to hesitate until Lu Shuning, unable to watch any longer, said, “Gege is afraid!”
Lu Shuqing hissed a quiet protest, “Ningning!”
Xie Jing was taken aback. “What are you afraid of?”
Lu Shuqing turned his head away, wavering for a moment, before Lu Shuning finished voicing his concerns for him, “Mother, you said you would definitely return to the capital, but Gege doesn’t dare fully believe it. He fears you hate Jinling for being a place of sorrow and that once you return to Chen Commandery, you won’t be willing to come back again.”
Stunned, Xie Jing pulled Lu Shuqing by the shoulder and leaned in to speak softly to him, “If you were afraid in your heart, why didn’t you ask me when we bid farewell last night?”
Lu Shuqing’s eyelashes fluttered. “…I was going to ask, but because I was uneasy and couldn’t make up my mind, I consulted Ningning first. But Ningning said that whether Mother stays in Chen Commandery, goes elsewhere, or even… even if you only seek death—as long as it is what Mother truly wants, then anything is fine, and she can accept it. Mother shouldn’t have to force yourself to return to the capital, or to Father’s side, just for our sake.”
“I felt that Ningning’s words made sense and that I was being selfish. That’s why I didn’t ask; I was afraid that if Mother heard it, you would simply return out of a soft heart.”
As his voice trailed off, not only was Xie Jing silenced, but even Lu Shuning looked somewhat flustered. Clearly, she had not expected so much deliberation behind her brother’s casual question, and she momentarily regretted her own impulsive concern, which had led her to blurt out Lu Shuqing’s fears to their mother.
Silence lingered in the carriage for a long time as the sky outside approached dawn. Xie Jing said with difficulty, “…There was never a kingdom of tiny people inside a lamp wick, and once a person dies, they are separated by the divide of Yin and Yang. If I truly departed from this world, we would never see each other again—Ningning, you have always understood this in your heart, haven’t you?”
Lu Shuning said nothing. Naivety is a luxury, and in truth, from the moment she left Prince Zhao’s Mansion at the age of four, she no longer possessed the right to believe in fairy tales. It was her mother, father, brother, her late aunt, and her elderly grandmother who had, one after another, woven honey-coated illusions for her. But she was born with clear eyes; she could see for herself, and she understood.
With the departure imminent and no time for lengthy talk, Xie Jing could only reach out and pull both children into his embrace. Lu Shuning’s cool nose pressed against his neck, while Lu Shuqing buried his head with his cheek resting gently against Xie Jing’s.
Finally, he spoke in a solemn yet warm voice, “Listen. Not as a mother, but in the name of Xie Jing as an individual, I swear to you that I will return. Until then, do not be afraid of anything anymore.”
Lu Shuqing and Lu Shuning paid their respects to the four coffins and offered liberation of wine, then stood inside the city gates to watch them go. The night frost had withered the autumn scenery; early travelers set out covered in the dust of the capital. The official road was broad, occupied only by a few carriages and four lonely coffins, moving further and further away in the faint light of dawn. Grief upon grief, following the curves of distant mountains; departing and departing again along the banks of the long river.
After an unknown amount of time, the sound of hoofbeats suddenly came from behind. Lu Shuqing turned around and said in surprise, “Yi Yun? Why are you here?”
Yi Yun had moved to the Eastern Palace with him. She wore no saddles or bridles now, having clearly broken out on her own while the palace attendants were adding feed to the stables in the early morning. She rarely showed such a state of anxiety, galloping to the siblings’ side and craning her neck to gaze in the direction where Xie Jing had departed.
“That is Mother and Cousin; we are here to see Mother off to his hometown,” Lu Shuqing guessed at her intent. “Father hasn’t left the capital yet. Are you looking for him? Do you want to go with the Tiger Division?”
Yi Yun, of course, could not answer him, but she ceased her anxious snorting and slowly calmed down.
Xie Jun had grown up in the capital since childhood, and after suffering a family upheaval in his early teens, he had; by the time he came of age, never once returned to Chen Commandery.
In the month or so since moving back to Wuyi Lane, he had renovated the old residence and selected new servants, trying his best to restore everything to its original state. He had also ordered people to track down the families of the Xie household servants who died in the seventeenth year of Zhenyou, either providing financial aid or offering work to help them support themselves.
The group traveled for more than a dozen miles before leaving the official road at a fork, embarking on the mountain path toward the Huai River ferry. Xie Jing lifted the carriage curtain and sat up front side-by-side with Xie Jun. The latter suddenly said, “Little Uncle, if you find living at Prince Zhao’s Mansion—I mean, the Hidden Palace—inconvenient, why not move back to Wuyi Lane? The house has just been repaired, and it’s a waste to leave it empty. His Majesty won’t say much either.”
Xie Jing shook his head. “First, my status is awkward; under what pretext would I move back to my maternal home? People outside love to gossip about such things, and it would reflect poorly on you and your younger siblings. Second, if you put an ‘elder’ like me in the house, how would Li Ye be expected to conduct herself in the future?”
Xie Jun neither agreed nor disagreed, offering only a faint, bitter smile. Observing his expression, Xie Jing asked pointedly, “During these months you are away from the capital, will the affairs of the Hewei be left entirely to Li Ye?”
Xie Jun nodded, “I heard from Li Kuang that since Fangchen took the lead in the Hewei, Madam Li has also let go of her supervision. With her in full charge, I need not worry about official business.”
Upon hearing this, Xie Jing understood that there were still lingering adolescent knots between Xie Jun and Li Ye to be untangled, so he refrained from further interference.
Xie Jun stared aimlessly at the road ahead for a moment, then suddenly asked, “During those years in the Hidden Palace, did Little Uncle and His Majesty ever have fallouts?”
Xie Jing replied without any hesitation, “Of course.”
During the long years of being together day and night, they hadn’t just had fallouts; the number of frictions, large and small, was countless. They hadn’t come to blows only because the disparity in strength was far too great. Lu Lingcong, of course, would never unilaterally hit him, but had their physical skills been evenly matched, a scenario involving a mutual brawl wouldn’t have been entirely out of the question.
Although they were the people who knew each other best, they didn’t always approve of one another. Moments of differing opinions were the majority; occasionally, they even failed to fathom what was going on in the other party’s mind or why the other party would make a certain choice. In short, they “knew but did not understand” each other.
Xie Jing was famous for his pampered and willful temperament, and while Lu Lingcong had a good nature, he was ultimately a high-spirited young man; once his temper flared, he wouldn’t back down. Thus, there were times they fought fiercely, and even more times when they couldn’t stand the sight of each other during a row. In the heat of anger, they would lose their heads and couldn’t help but wonder, “Exactly what quality did I see in this person back then?”
“Why ask this all of a sudden?”
Xie Jun shook his head with a smile, “I had encountered some difficult problems that I didn’t know how to solve, and I wanted to ask Little Uncle for enlightenment. But since even an ‘immortal couple’ like Little Uncle and His Majesty have no lack of moments of anger, it seems my troubles are simply a part of human nature. They cannot be solved haphazardly; one can only rise to the challenge.”
Xie Jing paused briefly, then spoke more directly, “As for the matter between you and Miss Li, I cannot decide for you, so I will not ask about marriage or starting a family. I only want to ask about your career what are your thoughts on it?”
Xie Jun pondered for a while before slowly saying, “In my heart, I have planned it like this: Currently, Little Uncle is not in the palace. Although the Xie family are the maternal kin of the Eastern Palace, Qing’er has not yet inherited the throne, so the attention we draw is limited. I will continue my duties in the Hewei to assist Qing’er; whatever cannot be said in official channels, I will go down and speak it myself; whatever matters are complex and difficult, I will go down and handle them personally.”
“But if, in the future, Little Uncle enters the Central Palace, being close to the seat of power and able to protect Qing’er, then I think I can resign from this burden. It is not that I doubt His Majesty’s sincerity toward Little Uncle; it is just that… I am someone who has walked through the gates of hell. When I think about official status, titles, and stipends, they truly seem quite meaningless.”
His gaze drifted slightly, “However… Grandfather and Father always held great expectations for me, ultimately wanting me to follow the conventional path of self-cultivation, family regulation, state governance, and bringing peace to the world.”
Xie Jing patted him on the back, “They walked that conventional path themselves, so it is inevitable they hoped you would establish a career. Yet, no matter how heavy those expectations are, they can always be compromised in the face of flesh-and-blood affection. If you can truly live without worry or fear by following your heart’s desire, then the spirits of our parents, brother, and sister-in-law in heaven will surely breathe a long sigh of relief.”
It had been nearly ten full years since the last time Xie Jing returned to Chen Commandery. Lu Lingcong had made a special trip there while providing disaster relief at the beginning of the year; although he hadn’t spoken in detail about the state of their hometown upon his return, Xie Jing could guess eight or nine parts of it.
Yangxia, close to their ancestral home, had lost nearly half its population compared to the prosperity it once showed during their Mid-Autumn night stroll years ago. The shops along the streets opened only sporadically, and very few pedestrians could be seen.
The immediate cause was a natural disaster, but the deeper, long-term devastation lay elsewhere: the Xie family, as a leading local clan, along with their allied in-law families, had once accounted for nearly half of the city’s population. Once they were implicated in a crime, the men were forced from their hometown, and the elderly, weak, women, and children left behind could not sustain the family estate; they too had moved elsewhere to seek a living.
Xie Jun had never seen Yangxia as it once was, so he did not initially share Xie Jing’s lamentations. However, when they returned to the ancestral residence and he truly beheld the sight of broken walls and ruined ridges, he froze in place while remaining speechless for a long time.
A few clansmen still resided within the mansion, yet they were now complete strangers to one another. The one who came to answer the door was a youth; upon hearing Xie Jing and Xie Jun announce their names, he was so panicked that he knelt to kowtow, thinking that some new criminal charges had been handed down from the capital.
Xie Jun hurriedly helped him up and explained their intent. Only then did the youth tremblingly lead the group inside while explaining, “When the trouble occurred in the seventeenth year of Zhenyou, the ancestral residence was also searched and seized. The quarters where the Princess Consort lived were destroyed then. His Majesty returned once at the beginning of the year and took away some old belongings; as of now, the walls are truly empty, and nothing remains.”
Xie Jun looked around the hall and murmured, “His Majesty has already issued a decree clearing the Xie clan of Chen Commandery of their crimes. Have no clansmen returned?”
The youth said helplessly, “How could there be any reason not to want to return? But how many can actually make it back? The family home is dilapidated; what would they rely on to settle down if they did return?”
Xie Jing walked slowly back to his old courtyard. The tattered window paper rustled loudly in the wind, and only half remained of the threshold where Lu Shuqing had once sat holding his bowl of egg fried rice. The two casement doors were blown to and fro, swinging slowly and listlessly as the years were whirling away into nothingness.
In the bedroom, his canopy bed still stood—the same one he had once slept in alone and later shared with Lu Lingcong. Nothing lay beneath it; that cloth tiger, stitched by his mother and later brought back to him by Lu Lingcong, was likely the final remaining trace of his childhood in Chen Commandery.
A seeping chill rose from the depths of Xie Jing’s bones. The last time he had returned, even the scroll left face-down on the table had remained on the page he had casually turned to before leaving.
In the courtyard, Xie Jun was still asking, “Shouldn’t the family assets and estates that were seized and confiscated be returned to their original owners? Why is it still in such a state?”
Xie Jing could not make out the youth’s reply clearly, but as for returning it to its original owner… how much of it could truly be given back? Most of it had likely already been converted into relief funds during last winter or spent over the past five years as official expenditures for the local administration, and was now long depleted.
Xie Jing suddenly let out a bitter, almost tragic laugh. On the bright side, at least during the reigns of Lu Lingcong and Lu Shuqing, the ministers would have little opportunity to submit memorials accusing “maternal clan for interfering in politics.” A family reduced to such ruin, with no close kin interested in official careers, and himself being nothing more than an unentitled “imperial consort of the sovereign” and “birth mother of the one in the Eastern Palace,” what kind of politics could they possibly meddle in?
Fortunately, the ancestral graves were still there. Though they were equally cold and desolate, at least someone was guarding them, occasionally tending to them and offering sacrifices. Xie Jun went to a temple in the city to have the abbot calculate the auspicious time and date, and the four elders were buried with a semblance of peace.
At the moment of burial, there were no loud cries or outward displays of grief. On Xie Jing and Xie Jun’s faces, it was even hard to discern any visible mourning. The suffering of the past had been too long, too protracted, and too overwhelming. Such emotions are also capable of making one weary; perhaps at the moment of loss, the bloody hole in the heart had already been pierced through, and every accidental scrape in the remaining years brought a taste of nothing but numb, dull pain.
Lu Lingcong used the most precious nanmu wood for the coffins during the enshroudment. In addition to providing funerary objects, Xie Jun had also interred the personal belongings left behind in Wuyi Lane to accompany the deceased. Had he truly cared for “posthumous honors,” Xie Jing would not have refused to bury his parents, brother, and sister-in-law at Mount Mang at the north. Yet the irony remained: whether one slept beside princes and generals or commoner kin, and regardless of how grand and widely mourned the funeral was, none of it could bring the departed back to the world of the living.
That night, Xie Jing remained alone in the ancestral hall. After wiping the four newly added spirit tablets, he knelt, pressed his palms together, and slightly tilted his face to gaze into the void.
“These past few days, I have often wondered: was I right to insist on bringing you all back to Chen Commandery?”
“Since you left, I have wavered in every choice I made, unsure of right or wrong or the weight of the consequences. Thirty years of life had been wasted. Father said there were things I would only understand once I turned thirty; you thought too highly of me.”
“Before I left the capital, Ningning told Qing’er that if it were truly my heart’s desire, and if living were truly painful for me, she would not stop me even if I chose to die. I never knew my daughter viewed the way of life and death and the bonds of flesh and blood in such a manner.”
“Jun’er said he encountered a difficult problem, but I am truly incompetent and cannot enlighten him. I, too, have encountered a difficult problem; can you manifest your spirits and show me the way?”
Beyond the ancestral hall, the vast wilderness lay in slumber. Following the ridges of the fields all the way down would lead to the stream where he, Lu Lingcong, and Lu Shuqing had once played in the water, and as he looked up at the night sky of the northern lands, it seemed to be adorned with the stars of Jin and the moon of Qin.
Xie Jing stood before the doors of the ancestral hall while gazing out at everything within his sight.
The Taichu Palace might indeed be a chilling place where life is hard to sustain, but could he truly be at ease anywhere else? Having grown up amidst the bustle and smoke of the marketplace from the moment he opened his eyes, could he truly endure the decades of solitude required of a mountain hermit? He and his clansmen stood in silence with nothing to say to one another, and even the scenery of his old home had changed its face. Today, to what extent could he still claim the “Chen Commandery” as his hometown in reality?
Lu Lingcong respected him and gave him freedom; his children were considerate and also gave him freedom. Yet could he truly accept all these fulfilled wishes with a clear conscience?
What, in the end, was the reason for his departure?
Did he leave to escape, did he leave for freedom, or did he leave simply for the sake of “leaving”?
Ultimately, so long as one is born into this turbid world, there is no such thing as “freedom” in the true sense of the word. And even if one could sever the troubles of the mundane world and cast aside this mortal coil, did he—Xie Zhiwu—truly possess the freedom “to die”?
If he had been forced to choose the moment he first learned the dire news of Lu Lingzhen, Xie Jing did not doubt that he might truly have chosen death. At that time, the great undertaking had not yet begun, and the great vengeance remained unexacted; he had been afraid that more people would lose their lives because of his hatred. Unable to bear the heavy price of “life and death,” he might have put an end to it himself.
Perhaps Lu Lingcong had anticipated this very point, which was why he had not discussed any of the inner details of the Bagua Islet Incident with Xie Jing. He feared Xie Jing would give up and feared even more that, being caught in the impossible choice between “persevering” and “giving up,” he would turn to death as an escape.
But now, everything had already come to rest. What had happened could no longer be undone, and those who had died could not be brought back. Between his own “death” and “life” lay too much bloodshed, too many lives, and the bleak, exhausting half-lives of ordinary men. If he still chose death, then, as Lu Lingcong had once said, those people would have “died in vain.” To discard his own life would be to trample on everyone who had struggled desperately to protect him and carve out even the slightest chance for him to survive.
The freedom to “die for oneself,” of which Cui Shushi spoke before her end, was a freedom he had no right to possess.
Xie Jing suddenly began to understand, in a faint, distant way, why Empress Dowager Xiao had ended the remainder of her life at Jiming Temple, and why Lady Wu had grown increasingly devoted to Buddhism over the years. When one could find no way out of fate, yet was unable to choose death, turning one’s gaze toward gods and Buddhas might be the option with the lowest cost, the least risk, and the smallest sacrifice.
From the distance came the crisp sound of fallen leaves being crushed underfoot. Xie Jing withdrew his gaze to see Xie Jun hurrying toward him, wrapped in a thick cloak and carrying a lantern. He held something in his hand, and while still a dozen paces away, he called out loudly:
“It’s a battle report from Yongzhou, written in General Li’s own hand!”
