At Wang Yu's words, Fang Shaobai's whole face went red, and he very nearly came up off the cart.
"Fruit wine?! This is monkey wine! MONKEY wine!"
Tell Fang Shaobai his swordsmanship was lacking, and he would answer with a smile and let it pass. Tell him his taste in wine was lacking, and he would fight you over it to the bitter end.
"Mountain macaques gather a hundred fruits and brew it! Picked in autumn, fermented through winter, drawn in spring!" He yanked the stopper out again. "The crown of all wines! A hundred-fruit fragrance you can smell hundreds of paces off — a few sips and you're drunk!"
"I went into the southern hills myself to find this jar — days it took me! There may not be much more of it in the whole world!" He shoved the gourd at Wang Yu. "Taste it, if you don't believe me!"
Wang Yu took the gourd, eyebrows up. "So this is the monkey wine of the old records — brewed by mountain macaques from a hundred gathered fruits; 'its fragrance overflowing, limpid green and lovely'?"
"The very same!" Fang Shaobai nodded and nodded.
Wang Yu regarded the gourd in his hand with genuine curiosity.
Back in the modern world, he had once watched a documentary about liquor — and, seized by the idea, bought and tasted his way through the country's entire catalogue: the great sauce-aroma, strong-aroma, and light-aroma baijiu; Shaoxing yellow wine; Hakka rice wine; the fruit wines of every season; and the whole apothecary of infused liquors besides.
The documentary had covered the legendary monkey wine too. That one, he had never managed to taste — a genuine regret at the time.
The wine his last life couldn't buy him, this life was handing over free.
"Then don't mind if I do." He didn't. He tipped the gourd, took a mouthful, worked it slowly across his tongue, and swallowed.
"Well?" Fang Shaobai leaned in, expectant.
What he saw was Wang Yu's brow crease — then smooth itself flat by force.
"Mm. Not bad at all." Wang Yu handed the gourd back and recited blandly, "Clean and bright, sweet on the finish. Lingers nicely."
Fang Shaobai's eyebrows drew together, unsatisfied. "That was not the truth."
Wang Yu's eyebrows answered. "You want the truth?"
Fang Shaobai took back the gourd. "Naturally I want the truth."
A day's road had given Wang Yu the measure of the man, so he gave it to him straight. "The truth is: the greater the expectation, the greater the disappointment. Monkey wine is a mighty name wrapped around a wine that can't carry it."
Fang Shaobai's eyes went perfectly round.
Inside the canopy, Li Yunxiu and Ziling felt their hearts climb into their throats. That is the Little Sword Immortal, Fang Shaobai. You couldn't spare him a scrap of face?
"The hundred-fruit fragrance is real enough. But it's a hundred fruits at war — nothing matched, nothing married — and underneath it, sourness and murk with nowhere to hide.
And 'not strong, yet a few sips fell you'?" Wang Yu went on with his verdict. "Consider that the felling may be done by something in there that shouldn't be. Drink less of it, for your body's sake."
"Eh?" Fang Shaobai wobbled, half-stunned. It can be read that way?
"Never mind the famous names of the realm — set village turbid-brew against it, and beyond that fruit sweetness, I'm not sure monkey wine wins on taste at all." Wang Yu handed down his conclusion.
Fang Shaobai rallied to argue. "Monkey wine is in record after record, and the unofficial histories besides — impossible to find, praised to the skies! How does it reach your mouth and turn into 'can't carry the name' — with something unclean in it, no less?"
"Do you actually find it delicious?" Wang Yu asked. "Or is it that everyone says it's delicious — and so it must be?"
Fang Shaobai froze. Something in his chest gave a small, unbidden jump.
"Men have known how to brew since the oldest days. The first farmers broke the land, planted in spring, reaped in autumn — and once the grain outran their bellies' need, they invented brewing to please their tongues.
Thousands of years since. New grains discovered, new fruits raised; houses built ever finer, robes woven ever finer, cookery growing subtler by the generation — and the brewer's art reinvented right alongside, generation upon generation."
Wang Yu had this world's memories — the original had seen a little of life while his parents lived — and layered over them, an entire other world's worth of eyes and information. He could look at this world from angles it did not know it had.
"Rice wine runs sweet and clean. Yellow wine runs deep. Fruit wine runs fragrant. Fired spirits burn." He counted them off on his fingers like sums. "And you're telling me the accumulated craft of a thousand human years loses to a troop of monkeys mashing fruit into a hollow?"
Fang Shaobai: "..."
Wang Yu gestured at the roadside as it went by. "Tell me — is the robe on your back more comfortable and better-looking, or would leaves off that tree be?"
Fang Shaobai said nothing.
"Which eats better — wild fruit off the hillside, or orchard fruit a farmer grafted and tended? A fish hauled out of the river and boiled as it is, or the same fish with salt, ginger, and garlic to draw the mud out of it?"
Fang Shaobai still said nothing.
"I'll grant the mountain macaques may have been brewing since before we were — I'll grant them the seniority, and the hundred-fruit fragrance too. But that monkey wine outdrinks the named wines of the world? That, I will never believe." The conclusion, restated.
"As for what the old records say about it..."
"Go on," said Fang Shaobai.
"Some of it is literati who worship wilderness — love the crane, love even its droppings. Some of it is scarcity dressed up as excellence. And the rest is the oldest game there is: the game of standing above."
"Standing above?" Fang Shaobai didn't follow.
"I have drunk it, and you cannot." Wang Yu spread his hands. "The harder I swear it is heaven-rare and earth-hidden, the further above you I stand — and you can't even check. If you doubt me, that's simply your impotent rage talking.
Give it a few generations, and drinking monkey wine stops being about wine at all: it becomes a badge of standing. Every man who has had it swears by it — because the swearing is the point. Whether it actually tastes good stopped mattering long ago."
He knew this racket cold. His old world had dissected the luxury business down to the bone, and everyone had cheerfully gone on playing anyway — because the game was never the goods. The goods were the membership card: a credential and a label, not a goal and never a result.
Wang Yu's speech left Fang Shaobai sitting in silence. In the canopy, Ziling's eyes had gone starry; even Li Yunxiu's held a shifting light, and what they aimed at Wang Yu was close to open admiration.
"You've simply been led by old books and old legends." Wang Yu delivered the diagnosis kindly. "You don't write books. You don't sell wine. The world is full of wines refined through a hundred generations of hands — and you're up a mountain drinking macaque mash. For whose benefit, exactly?"
Fang Shaobai's mouth worked. Nothing came out.
Inside the cart, Li Yunxiu was quietly baring her teeth. Yes, Taihua was an orthodox house, and Fang Shaobai wore his chivalrous name honestly — but the man did just save you a world of trouble. Would one spoonful of courtesy have killed you?
"If you're serious about wine, go taste the great wines of the realm. Learn each one's history; know its proper vessel; drink its meaning. And if, at the end, you can tie all of that back into your martial arts and your sword — then the name 'Sword in the Wine' finally earns its keep," Wang Yu said.
"How so?" asked Fang Shaobai — and this time it was a student asking.
"Take the Hexi Circuit, right under our wheels. The ancients grew sorghum on this land, and the first thing they brewed it for was the sacrifices — wine offered to Heaven and the ancestors," Wang Yu said. "So drink sorghum spirit from a bronze jue, and taste what the first men felt under that enormous sky — and if the wine carries you to your sword, let the sword come out old, and plain, and vast.
But drink Jiangnan's Daughter's Red or Top Scholar Red, and it wants a porcelain cup — the mist and rain of the south, prosperity and lantern-light; and the sword that follows should be a young man's sword: all spirit, all morning."
Fang Shaobai's eyes shone brighter with every sentence, and when Wang Yu stopped, he actually grabbed for more. "Keep going!"
"Keep going where? Which of us is the Sword in the Wine — you or me?" Wang Yu rolled his eyes at him. "The rest is yours to taste out yourself."
"Right! Right — exactly as it should be!" Fang Shaobai was nodding before the sentence finished.
The more he turned Wang Yu's words over, the finer they rang. He couldn't unpack the half of them yet — but his sword-heart had been struck like a bell, and the true qi in him was stirring on its own.
Let him sit quietly with this awhile, get it truly clear — and if it wasn't a great leap in his arts, it was the next thing to one. Call this talk a debt of guidance, and the word would not be too heavy.
"One evening's talk with you outweighs ten years over books. Elder brother — accept this bow from me!"
And with no further ado, Fang Shaobai made to bow to him then and there on the moving cart. Wang Yu grabbed to stop him; Fang Shaobai insisted on completing it; and grabbing without thinking, Wang Yu even drew on his internal energy — and failed to stop him all the same.
The bow made, Fang Shaobai straightened — and asked, "You've trained, brother?"
Inside the canopy, two hearts skipped a beat. Wang Yu answered as if it were the most natural thing in the world: "Traveling far roads with a pretty wife and her young sister? Of course I've trained. Without some martial arts to guard them, I'd never dare walk this far."
Fang Shaobai laughed despite himself — thinking: with that thimbleful of thin internal energy, you'd manage a common road-tough or two, provided there weren't many of them; one real practitioner, and you're finished inside a breath.
Still — the arts were shallow, but the sight ran deep and wide; and on the subject of wine, the man had scratched Fang Shaobai precisely where he itched. He was, on the whole, thoroughly won over.
"Train in earnest, brother, and there's no telling how far you'd go," he said with real feeling — then thought to add: "But keep your arts hidden on the road, whatever you do. The northwest jianghu is in a stir just now. No sense inviting misunderstandings."
"Why is the northwest jianghu in a stir?" Wang Yu asked.
"Because the old Westguard Prince, Zhao Zheng, has died — and his heir Zhao Yu has been enfeoffed and is traveling to his seat."
Fang Shaobai laid it out. "They say this Zhao Yu is twisted-tempered and insufferably arrogant, and that he offended half the capital. So now that he's on the road to his post, a great many people want him dead.
The capital's people can't be seen doing it themselves, so they posted bounties — and jianghu men of the white way and the black have been pouring into the northwest: some to earn the reward, some flying the fine flag of ridding the people of a scourge. One and all, they mean to see him buried."
Wang Yu: "..."
"Except that a few days ago, Zhao Yu's party up and vanished — went to ground, the word is: disguises, hidden movements. So the hunters searching for their target have gotten rough about it, and some of the worse sort have let their true natures off the leash. It's chaos out there."
Fang Shaobai went on. "My own errand in Puning County is one of the ugliest of them — a flower thief. Made himself quite the name down in Jiangnan, followed the crowd northwest, and his rot slipped its leash entirely: he has already ruined the granddaughter of Old Master Zhou of the Golden Lion Fort — and he's still lounging in Puning County as we speak, boasting he'll bed the daughters of three more martial households."
Wang Yu grimaced. "That brazen?"
"That brazen." Fang Shaobai nodded — and then seemed finally to remember something, and turned to Wang Yu, sheepish. "Forgive me, brother — all this road, and I never once asked. Your honored name?"