Where Immortals Once Walked

Longchuan had originally belonged to West Ji. After Panlong City conquered the entire State of West Ji, Longchuan naturally became part of Panlong City’s territory as well.

Because of its peculiar geography and the complications left behind by history, Longchuan became one of He Lingchuan’s greatest challenges after he took command of Yuheng City.

He wanted to see how Longchuan’s story had actually unfolded in the real world.

Being able to look back more than a century into the past was one of his greatest advantages.

When he first opened the materials, he was still in a fairly good mood. But the more he read, the graver his expression became.

The records were far beyond anything he had expected. In real history, after Panlong City took control of Longchuan, the bandit problem was suppressed for a time, but never eradicated. In fact, toward the later years, it only grew worse!

Five years after conquering the State of West Ji, Panlong City was forced to abandon the southern trade route.

That meant commercial traffic between Panlong City and White Sand Bay had been severed. The external route of communication Zhong Shengguang had yearned for had nearly come to nothing.

As for the reason, the county annals recorded only a single sentence:

Panlong City’s army governed too harshly, provoking an uprising.

He Lingchuan could hardly believe it.

He had always assumed that with Panlong City’s military strength, wiping out Longchuan’s water bandits would only be a matter of time. However, history said otherwise.

Because the events had taken place so long ago, and because Longchuan itself had been bandit territory that outsiders knew little about, the county annals contained only a handful of brief entries.

How many bloody struggles, desperate reversals, and back-and-forth conflicts were hidden between those few lines?

The reason recorded here was obviously incomplete. One could even call it biased and one-sided. Even so, He Lingchuan read the passage word by word four or five times before turning to the histories of the local families.

History was always written by the victors. Where the victors had little interest, official histories often had little to say. Fortunately, prominent local families tended to compile genealogies and clan chronicles of their own. In doing so, they sometimes recorded fragments of truth without even realizing it.

Of the two clan histories He Lingchuan was reading, the Zhang Family had once been local gentry, while the Li Family had been wealthy residents of Tu County.

No one knew where either family had ended up.

Their clan histories had both been hidden away in a private library somewhere in Tu County, and the backs of both books bore the seal “Lu Library.”

Clearly, Wu Shaoyi had even visited local scholars and elders to gain access to these privately held writings.

For someone in Tu County to still preserve old texts amid such chaotic times was a stroke of good fortune for He Lingchuan.

Both books were tattered and fragile, so he had to turn the pages carefully.

In the Li Family’s records, Wu Shaoyi had already circled every passage related to Longchuan in brush ink.

𝓯𝙧𝓮𝓮𝒘𝓮𝙗𝙣𝒐𝒗𝒆𝓵.𝓬𝓸𝒎

The wording here was considerably bolder. It stated that Panlong City’s army had been extremely forceful in suppressing Longchuan’s water bandits, acting swiftly and ruthlessly. During one deep raid into Longchuan’s interior, the army encountered fierce resistance and killed more than six hundred people.

Those six hundred were not all bandits!

That was the nature of battle. Sometimes it was nearly impossible to distinguish bandit from civilian.

The people of Longchuan were fierce by temperament. Panlong City’s actions immediately inflamed local resentment.

Several of Longchuan’s largest water bandit gangs even joined forces in retaliation. They slipped south of Yuheng City and slaughtered two villages.

The main inhabitants of those villages were people of West Luo who had migrated there alongside Panlong City’s army.

After that came endless suppression, as well as endless rebellion.

One of the Li Family’s ancestors had nearly died in the fighting. Only then had he abandoned his former livelihood and moved to Tu County.

Reading between the lines, He Lingchuan realized that although the Li Family’s genealogy dressed the man’s past up beautifully, this ancestor had most likely begun his career in some sort of capital-free business. In other words, banditry.

The Zhang Family’s records were much rougher. It merely recorded that as the southern trade route gradually declined, the family’s papyrus business suffered greatly.

After finishing the passages Wu Shaoyi had marked, He Lingchuan was about to close the book and think things over. Then, almost absentmindedly, he flipped another two pages. One sentence jumped out at him:

The following spring, Yuheng City’s commander was assassinated and killed.

That line genuinely shocked him.

In Yuheng City’s actual history, there had never been a He Lingchuan.

Someone else had served as the commander responsible for the city’s defenses. After Xiao Maoliang was transferred back to Panlong City, another person had taken over the post.

However, the Zhang Family’s record was far too vague.

Does “city’s commander” here refer to Wen Daolun, who administered the city’s civil affairs? Or is it referring to the new military commander responsible for Yuheng City’s defenses?

There was no way to tell.

He Lingchuan hurriedly flipped through all the other books from beginning to end, hoping to find the time and place of the assassination.

Unfortunately, he found nothing.

At any rate, an important figure in Yuheng City had been assassinated. That was probably one of the lingering consequences of the failed suppression of Longchuan’s banditry.

He Lingchuan dropped the book onto the table, rubbed his temples, then picked up Wu Shaoyi’s letter.

The envelope was intact and bore the words: For the eldest young master’s eyes only. However, He Lingchuan suspected that He Chunhua had already inspected the letter before feeling comfortable enough to pass it along.

Wu Shaoyi was a military man, after all. His handwriting on the envelope was hardly elegant to begin with, and it would not have been difficult to imitate.

He Lingchuan unfolded the letter.

He had expected Wu Shaoyi to complain about how difficult these materials had been to obtain. Instead, the letter contained even more useful information.

After He Chunhua defeated the main force of the southern rebels, he immediately sent Wu Shaoyi and others into Longchuan to continue hunting down the remnants.

When evil was being rooted out, it had to be eliminated completely.

The assignment was not especially difficult. Once the rebel remnants inside Longchuan learned that their main force had collapsed, they were like homeless dogs whenever Governor-General He’s army approached; most surrendered immediately at the mere sight of the official troops.

While in Longchuan, Wu Shaoyi found an old water lizard more than 230 years old.

The old monster was a native of Longchuan. Its magical energy was mediocre, but it had lived a very long time and seen just about everything. It had even served as a local water spirit for twenty to thirty years.

When Wu Shaoyi questioned it, he found that the old creature had not gone senile. It could still recount events from more than a century ago in remarkable detail. Hence, he personally took up his brush and recorded more than ten full pages of testimony from the old water lizard, then included them with the letter to He Lingchuan.

Most of those dozen or so pages concerned trivial details of Longchuan’s history. He Lingchuan skimmed them rapidly, his eyes moving ten lines at a time.

Before long, he extracted the information that mattered.

The Zhang Family’s records had stated that Yuheng City’s commander was assassinated.

The old water lizard remembered this very clearly. That commander had been named Zhao Yin’an. He was Yuheng City’s military commander.

“Hm.” He Lingchuan scratched his chin. So in the real world’s history, the commander who succeeded Xiao Maoliang at Yuheng City was Zhao Yin’an.

He continued reading.

Shortly after Zhao Yin’an assumed office, water bandits launched a night raid on Yuheng City, inflicting severe losses upon the city.

So the water bandit raid on Yuheng City really had happened in history. And it succeeded?

Yet in the Panlong World, because of He Lingchuan’s involvement and command, the same event had ended in the complete opposite result.

According to the old water lizard’s testimony, Zhao Yin’an had indeed later been assassinated.

That matched the Zhang Family’s records.

Naturally, the old water lizard had not been present and knew nothing about the details.

Heh.

If the enemy wanted to play that game, He Lingchuan was not afraid.

He had died so many times in the Panlong World that he was practically used to it. One more death hardly mattered.

However, the very next line made his expression turn ugly.

The following year, Yuheng City Administrator Wen Daolun also died.

A chill ran through He Lingchuan’s heart. He immediately remembered his recent visit to the Panlong World, when Wen Daolun had told him that his divination had revealed an ominous and dangerous fate.

So in the end, just like his beloved son Wen Xing, Wen Daolun failed to escape his fated death as well.

Neither father nor son had managed to defy their destined end. Was there anything more despairing than that sense of inevitability, the feeling that some things had already been decided in the darkness, no matter what anyone did?