Chapter 8: The South Burns
I knew something was wrong the moment the courier stumbled through the palace gates at dawn, his shadow long and crooked under the pale blue light. Dust clung to his lashes like frost, his robes were stiff with dried sweat, and the left side of his sandal was torn open, revealing a blood-crusted foot with missing nails. He didn't speak. Just dropped to his knees in the middle of the courtyard, drawing the attention of two guards who paused with their spears mid-step.
He looked up at me as if he didn't really see me, like he was looking through me—past me. Then, with a trembling hand, he held out the scroll.
The wax seal was broken. That meant it had been read on the road. Either by bandits, soldiers, or his own trembling hands when no one else was watching.
I took it anyway.
He let go of the parchment like it weighed more than his life.
It nearly did.
The words inside were simple, almost boring in tone, but they rang through my chest like a funeral bell. Langqi Province—rebellion confirmed. Multiple villages mobilized. Rumors of unifying leadership. Casualties unknown. Requesting immediate directive from the capital.
Langqi.
A place the court forgot even existed, until it started to burn.
A small, mountainous, poor place. The kind where winter came early and stayed long, where rice had to be carried up cliffs on human backs because the terrain broke carts and beasts alike. Where taxes were paid in grain, and when the grain ran out, in children sent to work in distant cities. A place where even ghosts didn't linger.
The court had ignored Langqi for decades. Overlooked repairs. Appointed governors too lazy to write reports and too greedy to leave a copper behind. Sent no help when the floods came, or when the landslides swallowed hamlets whole. Even the monks had stopped coming, because there was no one left to offer incense.
The spark was small: a rice storage scandal. Spoiled grain, sealed bags filled with mold and mouse bones. Meant for distribution after the drought.
The fire spread fast.
I was still holding the scroll when I entered Zhao Rui's chambers. He stood facing the windows, hands clasped behind his back, watching the city wake.
He didn't turn when I approached. Just said, "Report."
I handed him the scroll. He didn't take it. Didn't need to.
"I know what it says," he said.
And then silence.
He took his time. Minutes passed, slow and heavy, like waiting for a sword to fall. When he finally spoke, it was with a voice as calm as still water in a frozen lake.
"Burn them to the ground."
My body tensed before my mind caught up.
"Sir?" I asked, careful to keep my tone neutral.
His head tilted slightly, like he'd noticed a gnat.
"Their villages," he said slowly, as if explaining arithmetic to a child. "Their crops. Their storage barns. Whatever feeds them, hides them, shelters them. If they want war, we'll show them what war means."
He turned then, finally, and looked at me, not as a man looks at another, but the way a general looks at an inconvenient pebble in his boot.
I opened my mouth. Then shut it.
Carefully. Slowly.
I'd only held this post, Junior Strategic Advisor, for twenty-three days. My appointment had come with no ceremony, just a folded note slid under my door one night and a summons the next morning. I was too young, too inexperienced, and too obviously the son of someone powerful enough to make people nervous. The kind of nervous that made courtiers smile with their mouths but draw blades with their eyes.
Speaking now could be my last.
Still, something inside me rebelled. A quiet, trembling voice, curled around my spine like a candle against a storm. I spoke.
"...There may be other options."
He smiled then. Or at least, something moved on his face that pretended to be a smile.
"Of course there are," he said softly. "But mine is faster."
He turned back to the window. The morning sun struck the side of his face, revealing the ghost of a scar beneath his cheekbone. A gift from a war ten years past, Zhao Rui never spoke of which one.
He continued, voice distant: "And faster means fewer coffins here in the capital."
The way he said here carried a chill. I felt it slide down my spine like meltwater.
He didn't care about coffins in Langqi.
As I left the room, the scroll still clutched in my hand like a brand, my thoughts twisted like smoke.
Langqi was dying.
And we were about to kill it faster.
I kept walking, past the whispers of servants and the silent nods of guards who wouldn't meet my eyes. I didn't stop until I reached my quarters and locked the doors behind me.
I sank into my chair, heart still pounding, and stared at the mountain of reports I had yet to read—daily patrol logs, old case studies on rural uprisings, trade imbalance charts, disease outbreak statistics, rainfall tables. All of it noise. All of it meaningless now.
Still, I read.
I read not because I thought it would save Langqi.
But because I had to believe I wasn't useless.
Zhao Rui had already made up his mind. He saw this not as an opportunity for reform, but as a chance to make an example. He didn't want peace. He wanted obedience. And if he couldn't buy it, he'd burn it into the people's bones.
I stared at the ink bleeding across parchment. I imagined the hills of Langqi black with ash. Children choking on smoke. Old men trying to carry rice up a hill only to watch it turn to dust in their hands. A thousand little deaths that no one in the capital would ever see.
There had to be another way.
There had to.
I rose, pulled out a fresh scroll, and began to write.
---
That night, I didn't sleep. Again.
The candles burned down to stubs, weeping wax onto a desk already cluttered with ink pots, map scrolls, and hastily folded memorials. I sat hunched over it all like a monk over a battlefield—hands ink-stained, spine aching, eyes bleary, mind racing too fast to rest.
I wasn't scared of the rebellion.
I was scared of the response.
The palace would never admit it, but rebellion wasn't the disease. It was a symptom. A fever. The real rot ran deeper—years of neglect, decades of exploitative policies, provincial governors who answered to no one but themselves. And above them all, a court that spoke of "mandate" and "harmony" while sipping plum wine in rooms that smelled of sandalwood and silk.
Zhao Rui didn't see rebels. He saw weeds. And weeds, in his mind, were not to be examined, only uprooted. Root and stem.
He was trained that way. I knew his type. Once a war hero, always a hammer in search of a nail. Even peace felt like a delay to him, an interlude between the next necessary purge.
But the people of Langqi? They weren't strategists. They didn't stage their anger in terms the court could understand. They were hungry. Forgotten. Their anger was clumsy, loud, untrained. They weren't rebels. Not yet. But they would be, the moment Zhao Rui sent fire instead of food.
There had to be another way.
So I wrote three proposals.
The First Proposal: Emergency Reparations and a Truth Tribunal.
I kept this one dry, factual, dressed in the kind of stiff language bureaucrats liked. I made it sound like a compromise, though it wasn't. It called for rapid reparations: rice shipments, drought relief, temporary tax halts. Most importantly, it proposed a tribunal staffed by neutral arbiters from rival provinces—people Langqi had no blood grudge against.
I knew it would be seen as weakness. Zhao Rui would scoff. He would call it coddling.
But I also knew history.
In 304 A.H., a similar approach had calmed the flood riots in Meiqi. In 228 A.H., the Five-House Accord ended a near civil war between merchant guilds in Nanling by using third-party mediation.
Facts didn't lie.
But the court didn't often listen to facts unless they wore gold and carried spears.
The Second Proposal: Rerouting Trade Through Langqi.
This one was trickier. It addressed the root, not the flame.
Langqi's poverty was partially geographic—but not entirely. For decades, trade routes had bypassed it in favor of more stable regions. But if we could redirect grain flow through Langqi—just a fraction—we could elevate the province into relevance. Stability follows commerce. Prosperity breeds loyalty.
But this proposal had the stink of patience.
The palace didn't like patience. Patience didn't parade in victory robes.
Still, I argued the numbers. I drafted charts, appended merchant estimates, dug up an old canal blueprint from the Ministry of Waterways. I reminded them that revolts are expensive, but infrastructure pays dividends for generations.
It was the kind of plan that would only appeal to someone thinking about the next decade.
Zhao Rui wasn't thinking past next week.
The Third Proposal… was me.
It was the most dangerous of the three.
I offered myself as envoy. Unarmed. Unranked. No troops. Just my title, my scroll, and whatever my mother's name still meant in the southern hills.
No one had sent a diplomat. No one had even spoken to Langqi leadership since the first reports came in. Just reports from scouts and courier rumors. The court didn't want context. It wanted cause for punishment.
I wanted a reason to hope.
I wrote that proposal last. My brush shook a little when I signed it.
Not because I was afraid of dying.
But because some part of me—buried deep, behind duty and pride—was afraid they might actually let me go.
Dawn was just kissing the windows when Baoyu slammed my door open.
She didn't knock. Never did.
"Are you out of your mind?" she demanded, storming across the room. Her boots left muddy streaks on the stone floor. Her hair was tied too tight, a sure sign she hadn't slept either.
"You're going to Langqi?" she snapped. "As an envoy? Alone?"
I didn't answer right away. Instead, I blotted the last scroll and laid it flat to dry.
Baoyu snatched it up.
"You submitted this?"
"Yes."
She threw it down. "You're insane."
I turned toward her, rubbing my temples. "Baoyu, ...."
"No. Don't 'Baoyu' me. Do you even know what it's like down there right now? Every report says they're armed. Some of them are forming militias. There are rumors of executions."
"They're not rebels," I said quietly. "Not yet. They're starving people who lit a match."
"They'll still shoot you."
"Then maybe they'll listen after they do."
She stared at me like I'd grown a second head.
There was a pause.
A long one.
Then she said, with a bitterness that cut more than her shouting ever did: "You sound like your mother."
I tried to smile. Failed.
"That's not always a compliment."
"No," she said. "But it's the truth."
Baoyu was one of the few people who remembered my mother not as a name in the court records but as a voice in the hallways. Lady Nyi Raraswati (Li Shuyin), the Listener of the South, they used to call her. She could end a dispute with a sentence. She brought tea to the stonemasons with the same dignity she brought petitions to the emperor. She believed in people way too much, the court would later say. And it cost her.
She died not in disgrace, but in silence. Her voice slowly excised from scrolls. Her allies reassigned. Her memorials never responded to.
I remembered her best in the quiet moments. Reading with one hand, listening with the other. Always listening.
"She wouldn't want you to die," Baoyu said, more softly now.
"I'm not planning to."
"You think plans will protect you?"
"No," I said. "But maybe principles will."
Baoyu sat down without asking. She looked tired in a way I hadn't seen before—less from sleep, more from hope cracking under the weight of realism.
"Do you really think Zhao Rui will approve this?"
"No," I said.
She blinked. "Then why write it?"
"Because someone should."
That silenced her.
For a moment.
Then she leaned forward, speaking slower now, each word deliberate.
"If you do this, and if it fails, even if it some how succeeds, the court will use it against you. You'll give them a perfect excuse to tie your name to treason."
I nodded. "I know."
"And you'll go anyway?"
"Yes."
She looked at me.
Then said, quietly: "You really are your mother's son."
The sun was rising fully now, warming the edge of the desk with soft gold light. I reached for the proposals and tied them together with a crimson ribbon.
I wasn't naive. I didn't expect acceptance.
But I wanted them to read it.
To know another path had been offered, before the blades came down.
And if nothing else like if no one else remembered, I would.
Because memory, I had learned, is its own kind of resistance.
And sometimes, the only kind left.
---
The palace court rejected all three proposals.
Of course they did.
They didn't even bother with ceremony. No summons. No formal memorial rebuttal. Just a thin slip delivered in the hand of a junior clerk barely old enough to shave, who refused to meet my eyes as he muttered, "The Prime Strategist has reviewed your suggestions. They are deemed inappropriate in light of current security concerns."
I didn't ask which suggestion. I knew what he meant.
I nodded once and took the slip with the courtesy expected of me, then shut the door with more force than I meant to.
Zhao Rui didn't even sign it himself. That was his way. Authority without presence. Power through distance. He didn't need to say the words. The silence was the message.
I stood there for a long time, that useless slip in my hand, staring at nothing.
I wasn't surprised. Not really.
But it still hurt.
Not just the dismissal. Not even the cowardice behind it.
It was what came after.
The whispers began quietly.
Aide to aide. Guard to guard. Scribbled marginalia in otherwise bland reports. Half-statements, layered with implication. Not loud enough to confront. Just loud enough to stain.
"Curious how young Master Li always seems to know where the rebellion flares next…"
"I heard his mother had contacts in the southern hills…"
"Maybe that fire in Langqi wasn't entirely… accidental."
I pretended not to hear.
But they multiplied like mold in shadow. Spreading.
In the Ministry of Records, one of the scribes no longer greeted me with a nod. In the tea courtyard, two scholars stopped talking when I walked by. Even Baoyu, a sharp-tongued, loyal to the marrow one had a line of worry between her brows when I mentioned attending tomorrow's morning court.
"You're being watched," she said simply.
I gave a weak smile. "Everyone in this palace is being watched."
She didn't smile back. "Not everyone is being suspected."
The logic was elegant in its cruelty.
They didn't have to accuse me directly. Just imply.
My proposals were too sympathetic. My knowledge, too accurate. My mother's history, distant, dormant, suddenly woke from the archive like a ghost returning to claim a second death.
Nyi Raraswati: the Listener. The bridge-builder. The one who thought even the mountains could be persuaded to kneel.
She had once brought peace to the southern frontier with nothing but words and water rights. And for that, the court remembered her not as a diplomat—but as a woman who gave too much.
And now her son, submitting proposals about mercy.
It was easy, then. Frighteningly easy.
From diplomat to sympathizer.
From sympathizer to conspirator.
From conspirator to… rebel.
I didn't defend myself.
What would be the point?
The court didn't care for truth. They cared for usefulness. And scapegoats were always useful.
I told myself I was above it. That I didn't need their approval. That legacy, not perception, was what mattered.
But late at night, I'd find my hands trembling just before ink met paper. I triple-checked every sentence in every memorandum, terrified that an ambiguous phrase might be twisted into something damning. I ate less. I slept worse.
And sometimes I found myself tracing my mother's name on parchment without meaning to.
Nyi Raraswati (Li Shuyin).
I had buried her once.
But now the court was exhuming her, not to honor, but to weaponize.
A week passed.
Langqi burned.
The latest courier brought news of five villages razed. One of them had a school I once visited as a child, clinging to the side of a stone bluff like a bird's nest. Gone now.
Zhao Rui was praised in the Grand Hall for his "decisive response to disorder." Silver chains were added to his ceremonial robes. The court historian wrote a poem comparing him to a thunder god.
I watched it all from the second tier, expression blank. A shadow among silk.
Baoyu leaned toward me and whispered, "You need to disappear for a while."
I blinked. "You think they'll arrest me?"
"No," she said. "That would be clean. They won't do clean. They'll let you stay, just long enough to call your silence guilt."
"And if I speak?"
"Then they'll say you protest too much."
I rubbed my eyes. "Poison either way."
"You need an antidote."
She pressed something into my palm.
A slip of folded parchment. Small. Coded.
"You wrote this," she said. "Months ago. I found it behind the lining in your trunk. A cipher."
I frowned. "I wrote a lot of ciphers."
"This one," she said, "mentions a fourth plan."
I had almost forgotten.
A scribbled thing. Unsubmitted. Unread. Half fantasy, half contingency. Written in a haze of fear and fury the day after Zhao Rui dismissed me for the third time during war council.
The Fourth Plan wasn't strategy. Not in the usual sense.
It was insurance.
Not for me.
For the truth.
I unrolled it alone, by candlelight, after Baoyu left.
The cipher took me ten minutes to decode. My hand shook by the time I finished reading.
The plan was simple. Daring. Possibly suicidal.
It named names.
Detailed the corruption in the supply chains. Identified the noble families funding private militias in Langqi under the guise of "self-defense." Charted a map of silent saboteurs, those in the palace who wanted the South to burn, because war meant contracts. Chaos meant coin.
And worse, much far worse, it outlined the steps Zhao Rui had taken to provoke Langqi.
False reports. Withheld relief. Quiet executions.
It wasn't just negligence.
It was orchestration.
I didn't remember writing it so clearly. I'd worked on it in fragments. Small pieces. A suspicion here. A margin note there. Over weeks. Over months.
Until I had a mosaic of treason—and it didn't belong to me.
I read it twice.
Then burned the original.
Copied it anew.
This time, cleaner. Sharper. Encoded again. And hidden, deep inside the hollow spine of my calligraphy brush. An old trick my mother taught me.
A listener listens.
But a listener survives by remembering what others forget.
This Fourth Plan wasn't for the court.
It was for the future. For the reckoning that would one day come—because fire does not destroy truth. It only delays its telling.
And when the ashes settle, someone will need to speak for the dead.
If I couldn't stop the war…
Perhaps I could ensure the world understood it.
When I looked up, dawn had come again.
The palace bell was ringing.
And the city smelled faintly of smoke on the southern wind.
---
Certainly. Here is the next continuation of your story, seamlessly integrating and correcting Li Tianhe's family background from Chapter 1, while maintaining the introspective tone, the narrative pacing, and deep psychological tension. The section expands beyond 1,200 words:
I didn't defend myself.
What would be the point?
The court loved a good scapegoat.
And I wasn't here to convince them of my innocence.
I was here for something deeper.
Maybe even older.
My mother once said, "Sometimes, the sky doesn't send thunder. It sends listeners."
But listeners, I've learned, don't survive long in rooms full of war drums.
Still, I wrote a fourth plan. I kept it secret. Hidden in a cipher only I could read.
I don't know if I'll ever get the chance to use it.
But if the South keeps burning…
Maybe it'll need more than fire to heal.
Maybe it'll need memory.
Memory.
That word clung to me as the day dragged by in lacquered silence.
Memory—not the kind you find in scrolls or beneath stone monuments, but the kind that lives in wounds. In the pause before a soldier draws his blade. In the crackling quiet after a mother learns her son won't return from war.
I closed my eyes and thought of my own mother.
Nyi Raraswati.
Not Lady Li, not consort, not widow.
She had never been of this world, not really. She came from somewhere else—Parahyang, she called it. A name no official cartographer had ever managed to draw. A place of breath-fog mountains and rivers that sang. Her robes carried symbols no scholar could read: ᮕᮛᮠᮡᮀ—the tongue of an island forgotten by empires.
They said she was strange. Unsettling. Quiet.
They were not wrong.
But they mistook quiet for weakness.
After Father died—murdered, though no one used that word but me—Mother did not scream. She did not beg. She did not plead to the Emperor for justice, though she had every right.
That night, she simply held me by the window and whispered stories in a tongue that moved like water. Her voice never rose, but the sky wept until dawn.
I never forgot that night.
Not the ache of the cold box of ashes.
Not the sealed scroll with Father's name and no apology.
Not the calm in her face as the rain fell so hard the roof nearly collapsed.
From that day, I changed.
I read. Not to pass tests or earn favor, but to understand.
History. War. Law. Stars. Medicine. Language.
I read because the truth had been stolen from my father, and if I couldn't avenge him, I would learn how to make sure the world remembered him.
They tried to bury him in silence.
But memory, I learned, can be louder than blood.
I traced the carved pendant I still kept hidden in my sleeve—a simple thing of dark wood, etched with the same flowing lines she wore over her heart.
Sometimes I thought it pulsed faintly when I touched it.
But I had long stopped believing in dreams.
And yet… sometimes I still dreamed of Parahyang.
Even though I'd never seen it.
A knock startled me.
Baoyu entered without waiting for a reply.
She didn't speak at first—just looked at me, then at the papers scattered across my desk like the wings of broken birds.
"I found out who started the rumor," she said.
I didn't look up. "It doesn't matter."
"It does. It was Senior Archivist Zheng. He told the court secretary that your mother once corresponded with southern monks—ones with ties to Langqi."
"She sent poems," I said. "And herbs. That's all."
"I know. But the court doesn't care about the truth."
"No," I said, finally meeting her eyes. "They care about patterns. And stories. And blame."
Her hands clenched at her sides. "You're not a criminal, Tianhe."
"No," I said again. "I'm worse. I'm inconvenient."
She exhaled sharply and threw a folded parchment on my desk.
"I intercepted this."
I unfolded it.
A writ of monitoring. Not arrest. Not yet.
But enough to allow the court guards to search my quarters without cause.
Baoyu sat heavily beside me. "You have one chance. One move. After this, they'll close the gates."
I looked down at the writ, at the seal of the Minister of Order.
It was coming, then.
The fire wasn't just in Langqi anymore.
The palace had caught the spark.
That night, I didn't sleep. Again.
Instead, I did what I always did.
I studied.
Not just papers this time.
People.
I reviewed my mental map of allies and enemies—those who owed me favors, those who hated my mother, those who remembered my father not as a traitor but as a man who drew a line in the sand when nobody else would.
I counted them.
And they were too few.
Still, I wrote letters.
Quiet ones. Veiled in metaphors. Folded into the seams of blank scrolls. One to an old tutor of mine, now posted near the southern grain ports. Another to a spice merchant whose daughter I had once saved from an unjust arrest.
Not requests. Not warnings.
Just reminders.
That Li Tianhe remembered them.
And that memory, like fire, spreads fastest in silence.
By the third night, I knew what I had to do.
If they were going to mark me as the spark, then perhaps I should go south. Not in surrender. Not in flight. But with purpose.
I unrolled the Fourth Plan again.
A web of hidden truths. A blueprint of the rot that Langqi had exposed with flame.
I didn't need the court's permission to act.
I only needed a beginning.
I spent the next day in ritual.
Not incense and prayer.
But memory.
I walked to the old corridor where Father once stood in armor, offering a tired smile before another journey south.
I stood in the gardens where Mother whispered tales of rain-beasts and singing bamboo.
I touched the wooden beam above the west gate where I used to hide as a boy and eavesdrop on passing officials.
And then I returned to my chambers.
I took the pendant from my sleeve and held it for a long time.
Then I put it around my neck.
Baoyu met me just before dawn.
She didn't ask questions.
She only handed me a plain cloak, dust-stained and dull. A travel pack. A satchel of letters I had entrusted to her months ago, sealed and marked.
"What do you want me to say if they ask?" she said.
"Tell them I went to learn the truth."
"They won't believe it."
"I know."
She hesitated. "And if you don't come back?"
I didn't answer for a while.
Then: "Remind them that memory outlives fire."
---
The next morning, I received a letter. No seal. No sender.
Inside, just a single phrase: "You promised to come back. I'm still waiting."
Only one person could've sent it.
Ren Qilin.
We'd trained together under Master Yao. He went back to Langqi five years ago to tend to his aging father. I hadn't heard from him since.
If he's with the rebels now… Or worse, leading them…
Then this wasn't just a political crisis.
It was personal.
---
That evening, I caught sight of Zhao Rui in the courtyard, watching the koi pond as if it held state secrets. He turned to me before I could walk away.
"You're thinking of leaving," he said calmly. Not a question.
I didn't answer.
"You should know," he continued, "your mother didn't fall from favor because of her beliefs. She fell because she mistook *hope* for strategy."
His eyes bored into mine.
"Don't make the same mistake, Junior Advisor."
---
That night, I dug up the hidden cipher from beneath my floorboards. Read it again. Then again.
I hesitated. Then reached for ink.
And added something new:
*Contingency D: if Zhao Rui moves troops before official sanction…*
I stopped writing. Heard something.
Footsteps outside.
Slow. Careful. Watching.
I blew out the candle.
And listened.
---