Anxiety and Peace
The road back felt unusually long today, suspended between anxiety and peace. I usually walked with brisk steps to save every moment, yet now my strides were short and slow. My mind had grown tangled, crowded with overlapping thoughts.
'Zheng might become King of Qin.' It was not certain. As Zheng himself had said before, his father Ying Zichu had crossed into Qin and fathered a child with another woman. Unlike Zheng, who had lived like a beggar in Handan, that half-brother born in Qin would have grown up in luxury, receiving the finest education. People would have flocked to him. Treated as Ying Zichu’s only son, they would have revered the boy as the rightful heir. When I considered it that way, the chance of Zheng ascending the throne still seemed low, didn’t it?
“This is nothing but my own wishful thinking…”
The frustrated murmur slipped out before I could stop it. If Zheng did become King of Qin, the timing made it overwhelmingly likely he would be none other than that Qin Shi Huang—the very man I would one day order Jing Ke to assassinate.
'If Zheng truly is the future Qin Shi Huang, what am I supposed to do? Leverage our present bond and cling to him?'
I did not know much about Qin Shi Huang, but I knew the famous stories. How he drove the people into misery by building the Great Wall while raising the opulent Epang Palace. How he burned the profound texts of the Hundred Schools and buried the scholars who studied them—the Burning of Books and Burying of Scholars. How his fear of death led him to chase immortality until he became poisoned by mercury. I had heard all the well-known tales. Textbooks spoke of his achievement in unifying weights and measures, yet after unification his tyranny invited Qin’s collapse and opened the curtain on the Chu-Han Contention.
'If Zheng really is that man…'
“Dan? What are you thinking about?”
Only when someone blocked my path did I snap out of the swamp of thoughts. I looked around hurriedly and found the familiar sight of my residence before me. I had simply wandered wherever my feet took me, yet I had returned home exactly. How frightening a human being’s homing instinct could be.
Zheng had grabbed the hem of my robe to stop me. When I gave no answer, the girl pouted.
“You’re not even answering. You’re a little like this usually, but today you’re really strange, Dan.”
“Ah, no. I’ve been so busy lately that I must be tired.”
“Then let’s go inside and rest right away. Han Jing is away meeting Lord Pingyuan anyway. We can skip today’s studies, can’t we?”
Yes. It could not be. I could not picture the girl smiling in front of me, cheerfully suggesting we abandon today’s lessons and rest, growing up to become such a tyrant.
No matter that she was Ying Zichu’s eldest daughter, her mother was an unremarkable woman from Zhao, and Zheng had remained completely outside Qin’s interest until now. Given how thoroughly she had been neglected, perhaps Ying Zichu truly meant to forget his years in Zhao and begin anew. Moreover, since he had taken a daughter of a Qin noble house as his principal wife and even had a son by her, my interpretation was not merely convenient wishful thinking.
“Yeah. Let’s do that.”
It must not be.
As clear skies follow a typhoon, Handan returned to its daily rhythm as though the recent turmoil had never occurred. It was not simply that the assassination of the enemy general had been resolved. The long-standing feud between Lord Jianxin and Lord Pingyuan had finally reached its conclusion. The victor was Lord Pingyuan. The enemy general’s assassination proved decisive. Acknowledging his own inadequacy, Lord Jianxin voluntarily withdrew from the position of Chancellor and yielded the seat to Lord Pingyuan. Lord Pingyuan in turn promised there would be no purges or reprisals.
The King of Zhao reinstated Lord Pingyuan as Chancellor while granting Lord Jianxin the vacant post of State Minister left by Han Xiang’s execution. The line between civil and military office was not yet sharply drawn—officials still practiced the old ideal of serving as general in the field and minister at court—but the State Minister position leaned more toward military affairs. He could have been named Deputy Chancellor directly beneath the Chancellor, yet the appointment seemed to respect Lord Jianxin’s stated desire to step back from the political center for a time.
Handan’s stability proved a tremendous boon for me as well. The people, who had endured crushing stress amid fear and uncertainty, now sought to savor ordinary life regardless of rank. It was a form of compensation psychology. Having endured such hardship, surely I deserve a little pleasure, they told themselves, and plunged into hedonism.
This shift in public sentiment was exactly what I had been waiting for with bated breath. At last the xiangqi craze I had longed for day and night began to sweep the city.
“Hahaha! Young master! A resounding success! They sell out the moment they’re made, and the backlog of orders has grown so large it’s becoming a problem!”
The fact that I could hear Nogucheon’s joyful shout in broad daylight spoke volumes about how completely my position had changed. Those who once monitored me had vanished, and I no longer needed to cringe at every sidelong glance. It helped greatly that Lord Pingyuan—who still retained mutual trust with me despite our public parting—had become Chancellor. Even more decisive was that Lord Jianxin, once my chief adversary, had changed his heart.
Unless his subordinates mentioned me, the King of Zhao would have no reason to spare me a thought. No matter how diligently officials worked, a king’s days were full. Of course, if he chose to drown himself in pleasure there would be no limit, but the present King of Zhao was, by and large, diligent in state affairs. If nothing else, his sense of royal duty and ambition burned bright. The trouble was that this very zeal led him to ignore his ministers and act unilaterally, often with disastrous results.
In any case, with xiangqi flying off the shelves and money piling up, the tacit protection of Lord Pingyuan who now oversaw the government as Chancellor, and the cooperation of Lord Jianxin who had been my greatest foe, the three factors combined to grant me near-perfect freedom.
'Of course, if the King of Zhao decides to interfere it would all collapse, but he is already occupied with Qin and Wei. Would he really bother with someone like me?'
Still, because the possibility was not zero, it fell short of true freedom.
'Even so, reaching this point with nothing but my own two hands is an achievement.'
I had clawed my way up from the very bottom with empty hands. Honestly, if I were sent back to do it again, I doubted I could repeat the success. With both material and mental breathing room, my interests began to shift. The intense study of letters that had once consumed me cooled after I narrowly defeated Zheng; my lessons with Han Jing became half-hearted at best. I had entrusted nearly all trading company matters to Nogucheon. For the time being, every effort had to focus on popularizing and selling xiangqi, so there was little need for my direct involvement.
Nor did I simply idle. I used the extra time to stay with Zheng. The possibility that she might become the future Qin Shi Huang refused to leave my mind. Each time the thought surfaced, I could not even name the emotion churning in my chest. Anxiety? Fear? Or was it relief that I might remain safe?
I could not dismiss the idea as mere groundless fantasy, because I had witnessed Zheng’s talent at closer range than anyone. The learning ability that allowed her to teach herself to read and write from childhood memories and surrounding books alone was astonishing enough, yet she also possessed the political insight to pierce the flow of events by reading the tensions between rival factions, like a veteran statesman.
That was why I speculated. If it was Zheng, even under these adverse conditions, might she not seize the throne if only she possessed proper justification?
'If I take good care of her mental state, perhaps even if she truly is Qin Shi Huang there might still be room for compromise?'
Assume for a moment that Zheng really is Qin Shi Huang. Just as many modern cases show abused children growing into heinous criminals, perhaps his future tyranny was the inherited curse of such evil habits. Conversely, if he belonged to that pattern, someone could break the chain of malice, guide him onto the right path, and lead him toward a better future.
That was why I continued to pay attention to Zheng despite Han Jing’s complaints.
“Like this—you grind the balsam flowers with salt and apply it to the nail. Then wrap it carefully with leaves. After a day or two, it’s finished.”
“Is that really all?”
“Yes. Just be careful the leaves around your fingers don’t come loose.”
What I was doing at that moment was dyeing Zheng’s nails with balsam. Once Lord Xinling had visited me with his own nails dyed a vivid crimson brighter than his hair. The sight must have left a deep impression; Zheng had tried it alone without success and finally come to me. Watching her beg to have her nails colored, I reflected on the worried face I had been wearing lately. Here was a child still delighted by something as simple as nail dye, yet I was already fretting that she might grow into a tyrant who would wage war on every state and rule with cruelty. I was hardly qualified to call myself an adult. If Jing Ke had seen me, she would surely have scolded me.
Still, it was a peaceful time. I wished the days would continue flowing exactly like this.
But in the Warring States, where blood and flesh flew and conspiracy reigned, such gentle times could not last long.
'It has already been nearly two years since the last war. Every state will soon begin to stir.'
Yet contrary to my prediction, what shook the tranquil world was not war. The disturbance began with the death of a single man.
The hegemon of the Warring States who had made the entire realm tremble in fear. The King of Qin had finally died. He was seventy-four years old.