"Aren't the Qishan Bandits inside the Central Plains?" Wang Yu asked. "How did they get deep enough west to raid the Western Regions?"
"The Qishan range runs unbroken for a thousand li and more. Its northwest arm reaches into the Western Regions; its eastern spur probes the Central Plains; the northwest trade road rides its northern flank, and to the south it leans on the Tibetan lands and the Xingxiu Sea. The bandits mostly work the Central Plains side — that doesn't mean they can't go west."
Lu Yunzhou continued, "Last year, as I read it, the Western Regions horse-raiders sniffed out a hole in Cheshi's defenses, feared they couldn't crack it alone, and cut the Qishan Bandits in for one big job."
Qishan Bandits nesting in their range, horse-raiders holding their desert oases — both were thick with martial talent, but both were still jianghu outfits in the end. At storming cities and breaking kingdoms, neither matched a drilled regular army.
Cheshi was no minnow among the Thirty-Six Kingdoms either; with soldiers on its walls, nothing short of a neighboring kingdom's army should have cracked it.
But the raiders had found the seam, brought in the Qishan Bandits, and made their one big strike — stripping every trading caravan then quartered in the city to the boards, a windfall for the ages.
"Not that it's all bad news for us." Lu Yunzhou allowed himself a smile. "If the Black Qiang turn west, the weight on our line lightens. And this year only the outermost Qishan camps have come down the mountain at all — the caravans' losses are light."
"And if the Black Qiang push into the Western Regions and wreck the northwest trade road?" Wang Yu asked.
Lu Yunzhou took it for a test of his reasoning, and answered at once. "Whoever holds that ground, the last thing they do is drain the pond to catch the fish. The northwest trade road is a goose that lays gold. The Thirty-Six Kingdoms have sat on it collecting tolls into fortunes beyond counting; the horse-raiders and the Qishan Bandits mostly do the same — passage fees, and a decent living off them. Caravans stripped to nothing are the rare exception. It comes down to who draws the short straw."
High risk, high return: that was why silk and tea moving west, and gems and spices moving east, all sold for the price of a small estate.
Wang Yu nodded — and then a thought surfaced. "We sit right on the seam of the Anxi and Hexi Circuits. West of us there are a few more prefectures, but they're thin-peopled and wide-open, with the Qishan Bandits pressing their flank.
Which would make us just about the last stretch of the road that's both rich and safe before the Central Plains," he said, with a certain pointedness.
Lu Yunzhou's smile deepened. "Just so. Every caravan entering or leaving the Central Plains passes through Longshan or Fengming — and ours are the great border markets besides. How else do you suppose we feed fifty thousand men of the line, three thousand heavy cavalry, and a pasture of thirty thousand horses?"
Wang Yu: "..."
It finally landed on him: he was rich. Seriously rich!
***
"Rich, my ass!"
Once Peng Hu, Lu Yunzhou, and Zhao Defang had been seen off — with Zhao Siqi lodged under courteous house arrest and the Manor's guard dispatched to take the Xionglue Army's camp in hand — Zhao Rong walked Wang Yu through the household accounts.
Which was how Wang Yu learned the truth. Yes, the Manor's holdings were vast: the tax take of three prefectures, plus farms, shops, and workshops of its own. But fifty thousand soldiers and thirty thousand warhorses ate — men and beasts both — and the number they ate was astronomical.
The Manor's income was enormous. What was left of it each year was not.
Call it poor and you'd be lying. Call it a mountain of idle treasure and you'd be lying harder.
"Fine. All of this goes to the consort."
One look at the sheer thickness of the registries had Wang Yu's head swimming. If that stack had been the complete manual of some supreme art, fine — but ledgers? What was he supposed to do, cross-check them?
So he cut straight to the part that mattered. "Does the Manor hold any elixirs? Cultivation-boosting, constitution-improving — anything in that line?"
Zhao Rong's answer was just as direct. "No."
He elaborated. "Our roots are simply too shallow — barely thirty-some years since the family truly rose. We never built the pill-refining arts the old sects have banked for centuries. Why do you think your father had to go begging to the court for its Hundred Spirits Yang-Restoring Pill?"
"Raw materials, then. Century-old ginseng, thousand-year lingzhi, a fleshed root of heshouwu — anything like that?"
Zhao Rong looked at his prince, speechlessness rising off him like steam. If not for yesterday's display of peerless poise and princely authority, he might actually have said something cutting.
"The Manor has never collected such things on purpose. There are, as it happens, two old mountain ginseng roots in the treasury — century potency, or near it. Thousand-year lingzhi and shaped heshouwu, no."
"Fetch me one. I'll have a taste!" Wang Yu said instantly.
All along the road home he'd found excuses to buy medicinal herbs, boiled them into tonics, drunk them down — and the turtle shell had not so much as flickered. Only things genuinely dense with potency woke it at all.
A century ginseng had never been refined into a pill, but the energy banked in the root was real. It ought to be enough to get the shell's attention. Worth the test.
Besides — the treasury held two. If one went to waste, wasn't there a spare?
Zhao Rong, faintly despairing, tried a reminder. "Ginseng tonifies the qi. It might add a sliver to your cultivation — a sliver, against days of honest practice. You would gain more by training."
Wang Yu waved him off. "Relax. I know exactly what I'm doing."
So a servant was sent to the inner treasury, and returned with one old mountain ginseng. Whereupon Zhao Rong watched Wang Yu take the root — unwashed — and bite off a mouthful.
Zhao Rong: "..."
A wild old mountain ginseng looks nothing like the fat farmed roots of later ages. The true wild article is small-bodied, all its age gone into a long beard of root-threads.
As the reigning sovereign of the entire pharmacopoeia, old ginseng was dosed accordingly: pluck one thread of that beard and you'd brewed three bowls of medicine.
Wang Yu ate the whole root in a few crunching bites, like a radish. Crack. Crunch.
Zhao Rong's eyes went round, and he settled in to watch the nosebleed arrive.
No nosebleed arrived. Wang Yu simply felt the shell in his sea of consciousness give one more flicker. The usual dividends came first — endowments polished, meridians widened another degree, the third layer of his internal art shored solid. Then, instead of pushing the Seven Forms further, he spent the remainder on the lightness art: running The Swallow Carrying Spring toward fluency.
The Westguard line had no lightness inheritance of its own. Zhao Zheng's internal power had been so deep that his lightness arts were nothing to laugh at — but a specialist he was not.
The Swallow Carrying Spring was no minor art: it ran the foot-shaoyang gallbladder and foot-jueyin liver channels, and under the shell's derivation it had even taken a few small adjustments to fit him — enough, all told, to lift his footwork by a real margin.
Wang Yu smacked his lips. "Big name, modest potency — weaker than the Lesser Returning Pill, if anything. Which tells you the herbs in that pill outrank even century ginseng. No wonder they only manage one furnace a year."
"But it proves the principle: top-grade herbs carry real energy. No pills? Fine — raw materials will do."
He considered, then turned to Zhao Rong. "Put out a standing purchase order. Aged herbs, potency-dense: century ginseng, thousand-year lingzhi, ten-thousand-year heshouwu — that class of thing."
"Yes, yes. Understood. Now will you please go circulate your energy and digest what you just ate."
Zhao Rong's teeth were mildly on edge, but he talked himself around: the boy had lost years and was hungry to make them up. Impatient, yes — but it was medicine he'd swallowed, not poison. Circulating to digest it would waste most of the potency, and still leave more good than harm.
***
Over the following days, the Xionglue Army's reorganization was completed. Its commandant, Zhao Jingjun, was promoted to general — another Zhao clansman, martially sound, well-regarded, fully able to carry an army.
Li Yunxiu formally put her hand to the Manor's affairs, and began setting the administration of three prefectures and one enormous household in order.
Inside the Manor's walls, however, Qianqian's standing ran higher still. Because...
"Brother Yu is amazing!"
In the rear garden, Wang Yu ran through the Seven Forms of the Setting Sun while Qianqian watched from the side with two maids in attendance, applauding on cue — then took a handkerchief from one maid and came forward to dab his sweat herself.
Wang Yu had never in two lives acquired that habit. He took the handkerchief and wiped his own face.
Qianqian's mouth curved; she leaned in closer. "Brother Yu works so hard. Training day after day — you must be exhausted."
Wang Yu waved it off. This? This was nothing.
He was a man from the modern world — a world where martial arts existed only in stories. To train the real thing in his own body; to run qi through his own channels; to walk up walls and over eaves; to put out one thrust and watch it bloom into three sword-flowers — what more could a man want? A bicycle?
Besides, he had a cheat riding shotgun and a future without ceilings. All it asked of him was practice. If he couldn't even eat this much bitterness, what had he transmigrated for?
Qianqian's eyes moved. She caught his hand and swung it, voice going honey-soft. "A caravan's come in from the west — they say it's carrying real Damascus sabers and Persian carpets, and some marvelous new thing called perfume, made just for ladies. Take me to see, Brother Yu!"
That face. That voice. What man alive holds the line against both?
And anyway — hadn't he been training hard for days on end? A man's allowed a rest day.
"We go!"
***
Next morning, Wang Yu, Qianqian, and Zhao Yingjie set out with four Manor guards in escort — and two hidden masters shadowing them besides.
Longshan was the easternmost prefecture of the Anxi Circuit: first ground past the Central Plains, seat of the Westguard Manor, garrisoned year-round by ten thousand men. Safe as houses — and so the people gathered, and kept gathering, until it was the most flourishing city in the whole northwest.
Caravans westbound out of the Central Plains and eastbound out of the Western Regions all paused at Longshan to rest and refit; often enough, if the price was right, they simply did their business on the spot and spared themselves the rest of the road.
Merchants of the Central Plains skipped the gamble of the desert; merchants of the Western Regions skipped the slow bleed of inland distribution. Beyond the caravans themselves, trading houses from the Thirty-Six Kingdoms and half the great families of the Central Plains kept permanent shops here — and on their backs rode Longshan's whole roaring commerce.
Longshan was laid out on the capital's pattern: an East Market and a West. The East traded luxuries, art, and retail; the West raw goods, livestock, and bulk freight. The East was swept and gleaming; the West was loud and rank.
Wang Yu, naturally, was headed East.
"Well, well. Not bad at all."
"Nothing to the capital, of course — but in the northwest, our Longshan is the very first rank," Zhao Yingjie said, grinning. "And around the two markets: inns, wine-houses, tea-houses, pleasure-houses — all booming."
Wang Yu's eyes lit up. "Pleasure-houses?"