Chapter 730: The Great Instructor Ximen Qing (2)

Qing looked at Youngban.

She watched that ridiculous figure cling to the bars, calling his subordinate’s name with infinite grief and ramming his head between the iron rods.

A man who knew how to cherish and love his own subordinates—

how could he be that merciless to everyone else?

He’d set off a bomb just to save his own skin, and he hadn’t hesitated to slice open an innocent girl’s belly and use her as a sacrifice.

Yet faced with the mangled state of his own subordinate, he was screaming his lungs out.

What was it? It was... honestly pretty funny.

“Why—why are you going this far? What kind of hatred do you have to carry to—”

“I could ask you the exact same thing. Why you going this far? Heaven-Shaking Thunder, really? If that bomb had gone off, do you have any idea how many people would’ve died? Somebody’s son, daughter, husband, wife, father, mother, someone’s friend—do you think all their grief would somehow be less than the sadness you’re feeling right now?”

“Heh heh. Then what about you? My men are also somebody’s—”

Qing cut him off immediately.

“Nope. Wrong. Your men don’t count as people. Are the bastards who set a tavern on fire just to catch a kid who isn’t even of age yet, are those people?”

“It was an imperial command! An imperial command!! Do you not understand what that means! We were carrying out the Son of Heaven’s will!!”

“Imperial command, my ass. Did the Son of Heaven specifically command you to set a tavern on fire and throw bombs into crowds of civilians? To slice open some passing woman’s belly and chuck her at me, then tell you to run while she’s still clinging to life?”

“What—what of it!? An imperial command is absolute! If His Majesty’s subjects were harmed, that is a sin I must atone for before Him, not something you get to yap about!”

“Wow. Wow. Okay, what the fuck.”

Qing’s words caught again in her throat.

Youngban, on the other hand, was utterly unshaken.

Of course. The Son of Heaven was the owner of all things.

He was the lord of all the land, and of everything that existed on that land.

Every blade of grass and wildflower by the roadside was the Son of Heaven’s property; anything that walked on two legs or four belonged to His Majesty as well.

So if you broke some of that property in the course of carrying out His Majesty’s orders, why on earth would that be some terrible crime?

Qing was reminded, once again, just how primitive this ancient Central Plains really was.

When you thought about it, this was exactly the sort of country it was.

...Yeah. No point talking anymore.

She grabbed Jang Cheonho by the hair.

His head came up with it, the air rasping out through the hole Qing had punched under his Adam’s apple. GRRG, GRRG—wet, blood-bubbling breath rattled loudly from his throat.

“Jang Cheonho, got anything you want to say? Come on. Want to say a few words about all this?”

Qing clamped her hand over his breathing hole.

Air that had been escaping uselessly through his throat redirected to his vocal cords and came out as human speech.

“G-ghaaak, kill me, just kill me al—hrrk. Please, aaagh!”

Only then did Youngban understand Jang Cheonho’s state.

It wasn’t that he’d been silent; his throat had been punctured, so he simply couldn’t make sound. He’d been screaming nonstop and begging for death this whole time.

His torso convulsed in seizure-like spasms, while his limbs hung limp, swinging only with the dead weight of their own butchered flesh and bone.

He was like some boneless slab of meat, a heavy, wobbling chunk of flesh.

“You wretch!!!”

Youngban’s bellow shook the cell.

Qing, of course, was delighted.

Whoever gets angry first loses.

So, I win.

“What have you done... what have you done to him... Jang Cheonho! Jang River Battalion! Hold on, just hold on a bit more, I—aaaagh! Open this! Open it, I said!”

He rattled the bars like a madman.

Without inner power, he couldn’t bend a single iron bar; with his heart racing ahead of his strength, the only thing shaking was his own body, not the cell.

“What’s he supposed to ‘hold on’ for? And what exactly are you going to do if the bars open? You a god or something? His bones are crushed into thousands of pieces—how are you planning to put that back together? Breaking things is easy. Putting them back is the hard part.”

“You—!!”

“Don’t glare at me like that. You’re making it sound like I did something really extreme. I just crushed his arms and legs a bit, pulled his fingernails out, ran them over the wall. Oh—that bit about running them over the wall? I mean like this.”

She held up Jang Cheonho’s hand for him to see.

Unlike the somewhat-intact thumb, the other four fingers were each missing their last joint. Qing waggled the mangled stumps lightly, then mimed pressing those severed tips down and grating them along a washboard.

“How—how can someone wearing a human face do something like this! How—how could you...!”

“A human face? Oh. Good line. I like that. Mencius once said: if you saw a child about to fall into a well, you would of course try to stop it. Not because you wanted the parents to like you, not because you wanted to gain a name for saving someone, and not because the child’s screams were unpleasant to hear. You follow?”

Of all the things she’d studied in Confucianism, Qing liked that passage best. Mencius’s human-qualification test.

“If you have no heart of compassion, you’re not human. If you have no heart of shame, you’re not human. If you have no heart of yielding, you’re not human. If you have no heart that wants to distinguish right from wrong, you’re not human.”

You could say being human was a pretty high bar. That’s why Mencius specifically said heart—he was saying you had to feel guilty and weighed down by your conscience when you did something wrong.

“So if, instead of stopping the child, you’re the one shoving him into the well—what does that make you? Are the ones who harm unrelated civilians to save their own hides human, or are they something else wearing human skin?”

“That’s what you dare say—”

“And this is the Emperor, right? The one who’s supposed to strengthen the riverbanks and tame the floods is at the front line hacking his own people down. Wow. Seriously. Not human.”

Mencius said human goodness was as natural as water.

Just as it was natural for water to flow downward, so it was that natural for humans to be good.

But did water always flow downward?

Hit it hard enough and a pillar of water could rise higher than someone’s head. Dam it up, and you could raise the water level to a mountaintop.

That wasn’t because water didn’t want to flow downward. It was because the environment didn’t let it.

When a river bent, water turned and flowed along the bend. If the river was blocked, the water pooled and rose.

That was what governing a country was supposed to be.

You trimmed away the crooked bits, opened the blockages, dug out the shallows so that human nature, human goodness could flow smoothly, quietly along; so that it could stay good.

So if the ruler didn’t protect people’s goodness, if he became the thing that blocked water from flowing downward—

Was that kind of existence really necessary?

No. It wasn’t. Something that wasn’t human but a beast—beat it to death.

Revolution. This was literally revolution material.

That was Mencius’s theory of revolution. And Qing’s words were exactly that.

No wonder Youngban exploded.

“Treason—this is treason! You—utter such lawless—”

“Okay, okay. Let’s just see if you’re really human. I’m curious. Let’s open you up and check. You never know. Maybe once we peel that human mask off, some kind of beast will crawl out from underneath.”

“What?”

“Open you up” didn’t register at first. But that only lasted a moment.

The instant he saw Qing’s snow-white hand—pale even in the firelight’s glow—grab Jang Cheonho’s lower jaw, he understood.

“Wait, wait! Stop! Stop that at once!”

Qing sliced along under Jang Cheonho’s jaw and began slowly peeling back the skin.

His torso jerked and his head shook, but his skin, glued tight to the muscle below with fat, was tough. There was no unfortunate tearing in the middle; the whole thing came off in one clean piece.

Qing whipped the broad flap of raw, hair-topped face skin and threw it straight at Youngban.

“See? I said I’d make him beg me to kill him, and I kept my word. This is what it means to do your best in the position you’re given and to always follow through on what you say. A fine and beautiful virtue. So here’s your choice: you can cough up everything you know and die painfully, or you can not talk, and die painfully. Those are the only two options.”

If Youngban’s mind had been a little clearer, he might have wondered: if I’m going to die painfully either way, why exactly would I spill?

But once your favorite subordinate’s face skin was sitting in your hands, it wasn’t exactly easy to maintain a normal state of mind.

“You—you—!”

“SCREECH!! SCREEEEECH!!”

Just as he was about to let a string of curses fly, Qing jumped in first, shrieking at the top of her lungs and jamming the words back down his throat.

With his mouth hanging open and no sound coming out, Youngban stared as Qing wagged her index finger side to side.

“You want to scream, don’t you. I think it’s going to get pretty loud, so I’m going to step outside for a bit. If you try to bite your tongue or hurt yourself again? Think of your remaining family. Unless you want to see every last one of your relatives’ flayed faces hanging in the marketplace.”

Dumping everything she wanted to say, Qing casually turned for the door.

“Then, see you again in three weeks—no, three weeks is too long. Let’s say one watch.”

With that, she slammed the iron door shut.

Only then did Youngban really come back to himself.

His roar—AAAAAAAGH!!!!—filled the sealed cell block, echoing off the walls.

If Qing had been there to hear it, she would’ve been properly impressed he had that much lung power left.

But Qing had already stepped outside and closed the door. All she heard through the iron was the faintest ghost of his bellow, which earned nothing more than a tiny bit of admiration.

Wow, the soundproofing down here is insane.

Is air even getting through?

If we leave them, aren’t they just going to suffocate?

It was fun in the moment. Cleaning up after was a slog.

Alive, they were villains, and tormenting them was fun.

Once they were dead, they were just meat you couldn’t even eat—filthy, disgusting, ugh.

But what Qing found filthy and disgusting, other people did too.

If she didn’t clean it up, who would?

She went from room to room, collecting the bodies.

She swept the shattered remnants of every smashed skull into sacks and wrapped the headless torsos one by one in straw mats, tying them tight into neat bundles.

“Ugh.”

She winced with pain.

They’d left the deeply embedded shrapnel where it was, just smeared on medicine and wrapped her in bandages. Of course it hurt when she used strength.

Still, if she sat still, it was bearable.

Well—“bearable.” Every time she drew a breath in or out, a sharp ache rose here and there, like scratching a mosquito bite and picking off the thin, half-dried scab. It hurt, but there was something weirdly relieving about it too. Net effect? Not that bad.

Although, uh... was this normal?

Was this the reaction you were supposed to have when you had god-knows-how-many metal shards lodged in your trunk and thighs?

With that many fragments in her body, she wasn’t running a fever, her wounds weren’t festering, there wasn’t even the usual pus. Her Corpse-Blood Poison Body constitution keeping things from festering and getting infected was one thing, but this—what, immune response?—this had to be something different.

Granted, her body was a sorcerous construct; it didn’t exactly sit inside neat causal chains.

Still, full-body fractures or muscle tears were the sort of thing that could, with proper rest and a bit of luck, heal up okay.

But this was the Central Plains. The kind of primitive age where, if you were unlucky, you could die from nothing more than a human bite.

Hmm. I really hope they don’t all just think this is weird. Maybe I can come up with an excuse... another Divine Art? No, more Divine Arts would be weird too. Elixir? Maybe I can say it’s because I took some great big Rebirth Pill or something...?

Mulling that over, Qing set down the sack of what used to be a head and stacked the straw-wrapped torsos neatly.

That should be more than enough time.

He’d have cooled off a bit by now.

Just then—

ScreeEEE—her sharp hearing caught the twist of iron. The upper iron door at the top of the stairs had opened.

Qing waited a moment, and sure enough, screeE—

the warehouse entrance door swung open.

And in stepped a very unexpected face.

“Mm? Officer Mandarlo?”

The Sichuan Young Master. The dog scrap Mandarlo himself—the epicenter of all this chaos—had arrived.