Chapter 503: Karma Drips Along the Thread of Life and Death (5)

Shandong Province, Jiaozhou City.

This is not the Jiaozhou of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms—that southern Jiaozhou (the “Two Guang,” today’s Guangdong + Guangxi) is written with different characters.

The inner sea scooped into the peninsula that made Jimo prosper is called Jiaozhou Bay.

If you go by terrain alone, Jiaozhou City sits in a far better trading spot than Jimo, which requires ships to turn right after entering the bay.

Jiaozhou needs no hard turn, its shore is lower and easier for berthing, and above all it lies closer to the Central Plains proper—every advantage for commerce.

In reality, though, Jiaozhou is the opposite of a trading port. Not even fishing boats nose around it.

Why? Because Jiaozhou houses Shandong’s Provincial Commander—an army garrison at the prefecture-city level.

Whatever carnival of chaos rages on Mount Lao, the soldiers today, as ever, sweat blood doing their “proper duty.”

Though one might wonder: what is a soldier’s proper duty, exactly?

What are the men in each post actually doing?

Bandits run rampant—we don’t care.

Foreign raiders run rampant—we don’t care.

There’s no declared war, so we don’t march to meet one.

Do we train hard under the creed that standing armies are the best defense?

No again.

Then what is a soldier’s true work?

Farming.

Farming is the great foundation of the realm, the business that makes a state exist at all.

“Ugh. That was a day. I’m dead on my feet.”

“Chief Yeon, have you heard? They say the martial artists are hacking each other to bits on Mount Lao.”

A “fifty-leader” commands fifty men.

Under a “hundred-chief” who commands a hundred, you split the hundred into two fifties, and under each lay five “ten-leaders.”

Thus the hundred-chief post totals one hundred and thirteen souls.

For convenience, the table of organization rounds it to about one hundred and twenty.

“Those bastards swing blades for a living. What’s so special about that?”

“They say the greatest divine art under heaven has appeared.”

“‘Greatest under heaven,’ my ass. What’s it to us? We just do our jobs. Shit—I don’t want to. I really don’t want to.”

“They also say the greatest beauty under heaven was there—”

“Ten-Leader Lee, report in detail.”

Whatever the world, soldiers have the same interests. Call it an instinct baked into humanity.

Join the army and you start starving for women.

“So, as I was saying, on Mount Lao the greatest divine art—”

“Hey. Third Ten-Leader Lee—no, not that. Start with the greatest beauty. How pretty are we talking?”

Third Ten-Leader Lee of the Dorin River Hundred-Chief Post cleared his throat.

Chief Yeon found him a bit irritating—this punk from the Lower Yangtze keeps trying to put on airs by writing letters, bragging about being ‘ink-soaked.’

Still, curiosity won out.

“Ahem. To merit the title ‘greatest beauty,’ one must check the ideal against absolutes. First, hair black as a crow, glossy, cascading like a waterfall without tangles. The lips must be apricot-tinted—soft, not thick; the lower lip full, the upper gleaming. The teeth should be white, dazzling, seamless and unjagged, yes?”

Yeon swallowed.

“Also, the bosom should be pale as a snowed valley; the brows should flow like distant hills; and the gaze—you know it—the head tips just so, the eyes meet yours as if seeing and not seeing, wet with a teardrop’s brink, casting that pleading come-hither—”

“Holy shit, I’m losing my mind. And then? And then?”

Lee poured out the vision of beauty he’d nursed in secret.

“Since we’re on eyes—the pupils should have a touch covered by the lids above and below, and two cold little moons should rise in them and glitter; the whites should be utterly clear—no flecking, not even fine blood vessels.”

“Goddamn, that’s arousing. Ten-Leader, write a book. You could sell that. Why’d you enlist? Put that in a book and every man alive would come running with bullion.”

“Huh? You think so? Should I sell my enlistment papers?”

“Anyway—and then? More?”

Lee let it all spill.

When they say Lower Yangtze, they usually mean the Suzhou–Hangzhou belt—the empire’s greatest pleasure cities.

Literati there do little but play with courtesans and sing of elegance; lately, the craze is to duel one another with their personal ideals of the ultimate beauty, each claiming his sensuous canon outstrips the rest.

So the ink-soaked Ten-Leader’s aesthetic from the south was, to Shandong bumpkins, positively incendiary.

Before long a crowd had mobbed around him—soldiers swallowing hard, ears pricked, faces solemn to catch every word.

Thus a Central-Plains smut lecture on the Ideal Beauty flowed on and on.

“And of course the waist should be ant-slender; the body slim and fine, so even if she isn’t tall she’s lissome—”

“Hold it. No. The waist can be thin, but the chest and rump have to be big.”

Chief Yeon lodged a protest.

“Wouldn’t that be vulgar and wanton? Such extreme curves are fit for brothel women—crude, aren’t they?”

“This is your ink-soaked problem. ‘Vulgar,’ my ass. Paint a cheap face and you’ll be vulgar even with a thin body. Does the figure decide the vibe? Top and bottom packed, waist cut narrow in the middle—that’s the final form.”

“A woman with such a figure can never look pure or innocent. If the flesh itself is lewd, isn’t it... dirty?”

“Kid. Even our forefathers liked big-breasted, big-hipped women.”

“Their fore-forefathers said slender was supreme.”

In truth, the Central Plains’ beauty ideal ran from the stick-thin women of the Wei–Jin and Northern–Southern Dynasties, to the very full figures of Sui–Tang and the Ten Kingdoms.

In the present day, the consensus was: the waist should be pronouncedly narrow, but shape trumps sheer size.

Roar, roar—

“Woman means breasts! That’s motherhood!”

“This guy wants to mount a sow. Do udders turn you on? It’s all illusion, idiot.”

“Uh, I... prefer smaller—”

“Shut it!” “Shut it!”

Team Plush and Team Proportion went at it.

A tiny faction of “the more the merrier” types only hunched their shoulders and watched the mood.

So passed another peaceful slice of soldier life after the autumn harvest.

Up to this point.

Until the woman who dropped straight out of the sky appeared.

“Gasp! A fairy! A fairy!”

“Hhh—” “Hhhk!” “H-Hey, that—that!”

What? Why are they freaking out like this?

Never seen a martial artist?

Qing tilted her head.

That only made the soldiers gasp harder, about to swoon.

“My. Sorry to startle you. Are you men under the Shandong Provincial Commander? I’m headed there now—could you point me the right way?”

Her brows drew a soft inverted arch of apology; beneath them, small black pupils held that Taoist trademark of wise clarity.

The soldiers forgot how to breathe.

Ah. A fairy. That’s celestial beauty.

No human could look like that.

Lucky immortals. Bastard immortals.

Among the men turned to statues, their commander—Chief Yeon—managed to speak.

A stranger asking the location of the command tent—wasn’t that prying into military secrets and trampling the law?

So Chief Yeon answered:

“Y-Yes, um, over... over there...”

“Ah! Thank you! Then—!”

Qing flashed him a beaming smile.

More splendid than any flower on earth and yet bright as a child’s—the smile of a peerless beauty.

The soldiers all had the same experience at once:

Their hearts thudded and dropped; then, though on the floor, those hearts pounded far too hard—bang bang bang—and it felt like every vessel in their bodies would burst in time with it.

Light as a petal, she rose in an elegant arc—Moon Maiden’s weightless walk—and flew toward the Provincial Commander’s garrison.

The soldiers left standing there—

Something in the lingering air even smelled fragrant; all that remained were their rough, shuddering breaths—huff, hoo, huff, hoo—

“Chief Yeon. I... I was wrong. A woman’s waist must be slender as an ant’s, but her bosom and hips must be as grand as Mount Tai so her garments seem ready to scream and burst—slender waist, snowy skin, massive breast and massive hip; the bigger, the better. This, this is the ultimate beauty—the law of the Immortal Realms.”

Lee muttered to himself:

“I must... I must sell my enlistment. I have to write a book about what I’ve just seen and spread it wide. This was the mission given to me.”

He clenched a fist.

Had Qing been versed in Central Plains letters, the name “Lee” might have made her recall one of the greatest classical authors.

But who, honestly, cares about Central Plains literary history?

So the chance of her doing so was about one in ten billion universes.

Qing knew how much Central Plains officials fussed over appearances—

Because Scholar Cheon had told her.

Even after seeing it firsthand, she only understood because he told her; Qing, by nature, doesn’t overthink.

He had caught her just as she was about to dash straight into the Provincial Commander’s compound, hid her, then immediately bought silk robes, flowered shoes, gold-leaf ornaments, and pressed them into her arms.

Go like that, and you’re not a “guest”—you’re attacking a camp.

Thus made up, Qing truly achieved brain-kill—beauty that stopped men’s minds.

“Is the Provincial Commander inside? Hm? Hello? Are you listening to me?”

She waved a fine white hand with slender fingers in front of the sentry’s face.

No reaction.

Hm? What—did he die standing?

Then—gasp—he remembered to breathe.

Even if the brain stalls, one must still breathe—but at the Peerless Brain-Kill level, you can make a man forget even that.

“Peerless Thunder-Smile Girl” was no exaggeration; it was the literal, luminous truth.

Grow old with Qing, bear eleven children to fill a ten-man squad, then take peaceful rest among your grown sons—wives, don’t grieve too much,—

Right around that daydream, a sentry snapped awake and blurted out:

“Um—ah—what business brings you, honored one...?”

“Here. This.”

“Would you take this to the Provincial Commander and tell him a guest has come to call?”

“Eh?”

He took what she offered on reflex, glanced down, and recoiled in shock.

A mere sentry couldn’t possibly recognize the Empress’s identity tablet.

But any soldier should at least see it was no common token.

“Ghk. Yes! I obey! Loyalty!”

The main-gate sentry of the Provincial Commander’s compound snapped a full military salute—to an outsider—then sprinted with all his might.

The Provincial Commander is the overall commander of a prefecture-city’s soldiers.

Not that all such troops are piled in one place; within the compound, he directly commands roughly twelve hundred men, and keeps four additional thousand-units stationed nearby to pull at need.

Even in peacetime, he can swiftly mobilize five thousand men across five thousand-units—formidable power.

So picture his swagger.

Shandong’s Provincial Commander, Wang Ssangryong, was currently sprawled on the massive bed in his—well, “camp”—in truth a grand mansion like a palace—writhing with boredom.

Usually, when bored, Wang Ssangryong executed his mission to enrich the state and strengthen the army by “training” (i.e., grinding, tormenting) the troops.

But during the harvest, even that was poor form. Farming, after all, is serious business.

So bored. So very bored.

The men were getting slovenly, blaming the busy harvest. Should he order a compound-wide deep clean today? He was weighing it when—

—General, are you in?

Yang, the camp steward—the factotum for camp errands—knocked.

“Mm? What?”

—A guest has come. She left an identity tablet. I’ve never seen its like...

“Yeah? How’s the ‘gift’?”

“Gift” here meant the courtesy present—i.e., the bribe.

“Bribe” sounds ugly.

By customary law in the Central Plains, a basic token of respect is expected.

The higher the person you seek to meet, the larger the “basic” token.

And the Provincial Commander is among the highest powers under Heaven.

Below the Emperor, if you rank by power, the Provincial Commander sits somewhere around the toes—

To drop in without appointment, you bring at least a few wagonloads, or gold that takes two strapping porters to heave.

—They say she came with nothing but her person.

“What? What does she take the Provincial Commander for, some village clerk? How dare she—show up empty-handed? Send her away.”

—Yes, I’ll do that.

Wang snorted.

For a Provincial Commander, he was on the cleaner side—but no gift is not a profit issue, it’s face.

There’s a limit to being taken lightly. Who comes barehanded and asks to be seen?

He didn’t assume she was someone exalted.

If a great personage were coming, the procession would announce it; no way would she arrive alone.

Except... there are no absolutes.

Some time later, Steward Yang spoke again.

—Sir, the guest said, “Even after checking the tablet, you treat me like this?” She seems... unusual. What shall we do?

“Hah. Is that so? Let’s see which lordling presumes to ‘come or go’ at will. Bring that tablet.”

The steward opened the door with great respect and presented the tablet on both palms.

Wang glanced at it, unimpressed—and then—

“Ghk!”

“General?”

“B-Bring her at once! What are you doing! Bring her—no, no! Where is she!? Of course you seated her in the finest reception hall with full courtesies!? Go—tell her this fool was so buried in urgent duties he failed to check the tablet; if she would kindly wait a moment, I will come personally!”

“Sir?”

Wang roared:

“Do you want to see us all die together!? Move!!”