Too-Late Regret
Word that the Zhenguo Commandery Princess would return to Suyang and open the ancestral shrine had spread through all of Suyang. With it traveled another rumor: that she would punish the clansmen who had run rampant under cover of clan law, tormenting the people and sucking them dry, then hand them over to Magistrate Zhu to be punished to the fullest extent of the law.
The common folk, who had endured harassment at the hands of the Bai clan branches until they could stomach no more, held differing opinions — but all of them agreed to wait outside the gates of the Bai shrine and see for themselves whether the Zhenguo Commandery Princess would truly seek justice on their behalf.
There was also talk that the Commandery Princess was searching for a child whom a Bai clansman had shoved into the river that day — a girl called Anang, whose mother had drowned trying to save her.
The story went that the Commandery Princess had gone to the house next to Anang's to look for her, and only then, too late, discovered that the girl had vanished.
The adults who had run a street stall alongside Anang's mother heard the news and immediately began fanning out through the city in search of her. The matter set all of Suyang buzzing.
The madam of a pleasure house, too, ordered her servants to check whether any of the girls she had recently purchased was unable to speak. If she had unknowingly bought Anang, she would incur the wrath of the Zhenguo Commandery Princess, who would soon be arriving in Suyang — and her business would be finished for good. Her heart pounded with anxiety.
The Zhenguo Commandery Princess. The woman who had burned a hundred thousand surrendered Liang soldiers to death in the Southern Border.
Besides, everyone knew the Crown Prince himself had sent his personal guard to bolster her prestige. Who in their right mind would dare incur the displeasure of someone with such ruthless methods and such unshakable backing?
As it happened, one of the girls the madam had bought really was unable to speak. Terrified that something might go wrong, she hastily tidied herself, personally led the girl out, boarded a carriage, and hurried toward the Bai shrine.
It was not yet noon, but a dense crowd had already gathered outside the Bai shrine. A few of the bolder young men clambered up the great tree before the gates and craned their necks to peer into the courtyard.
The Bai ancestral shrine was the grandest building in Suyang City. Its neat rows of glazed tiles and its intricately carved pillars overflowed with splendor and majesty alike.
Several centuries-old trees with luxuriant foliage stood outside, symbols of the Bai clan's prosperity and enduring greatness.
The clan head sat in his seat of honor, leaning on his staff, his face a sickly shade of blue. The clan elders occupied their places around him, their expressions grave.
Behind the elders, the descendants of the Bai clan stood in a row, all of them scowling deeply.
The Fifth Old Master, the clan head's own younger brother, sat in the seat directly below him, elbows propped on the armrests, turning a string of prayer beads over in his fingers. His gaze drifted toward the seat beside the clan head.
That seat had belonged to Bai Weiting all his life. And now it was to be given over to a woman.
From outside the shrine drifted the cries of peddlers hawking their wares and the shouts of children at play. The faces of the clansmen darkened in unison.
This was the dignified, solemn shrine of the Bai clan — a place the lowborn had never dared so much as approach. Now it was as loud and unruly as a market street.
"Half the people of Suyang City must be camped outside our shrine," one of the old clansmen sighed.
The Fifth Old Master had never gotten over being driven from the ancestral mansion, and the mere thought of Bai Jingyan set his blood boiling. He slammed his prayer beads down on the table and spoke up in a loud voice.
"And you intend to let her run wild like that! Brother, you're far too soft — that's the whole problem."
"Hold your tongue!"
The clan head opened his eyes and jabbed a finger at him, roaring.
"Isn't all of this your doing? If you hadn't seized the ancestral mansion, Bai Jingyan would never have come to Suyang for the property deeds, and none of this mess would have happened!"
Faced with his elder brother's furious glare, the Fifth Old Master shrank back as if trying to pull his head into his body. Then he asked in a crawling voice, "Then... you truly mean to cast the children out of the clan?"
"I told you already — leaving the clan costs us nothing. We can simply help them in secret. What wrong is there in caring for descendants who share our blood?"
The clan head drew a slow breath and went on.
"But if we refuse Bai Jingyan's demands today, and she confesses her grievance before the ancestors and walks out of the clan of her own accord, then the arrest of the children will only be the beginning. There is no telling what greater calamity may follow!"
His gaze distant, the clan head looked out at the sunlight beyond the shrine doors and continued.
"What matters is that our Bai clan can continue to rely on the Zhenguo Commandery Princess. Even the Crown Prince has stepped forward to aid her. Only by preserving that connection will our appeals to Magistrate Zhu carry any weight. But if Bai Jingyan leaves the clan, those fair-weather officials who trim their sails to the wind will trample our branch into the dirt!"
The elders who had followed the clan head to Dadu nodded along. They could not forget what the Grand Princess had said to them.
It was true that the Dadu Bais had propped up the Suyang branch. Time and again the clansmen had crossed the line, and time and again the Dadu Bais had yielded and borne with it. That was precisely why the branch had grown so shamelessly reckless.
Some of the clansmen had begun to reflect. Only now did they understand that the branch had survived not because it mattered to the Dadu Bais, but because the Dadu Bais chose to cherish the Bai clans of Suyang. If the Dadu Bais ever stopped cherishing them, the branch would amount to nothing.
Yet a few, like the clan head's brother, still failed to grasp where they stood.
"Is the compensation silver ready? Have the goods the children extorted, the property deeds, the land deeds — has everything been brought?"
the clan head asked.
The elders of the clan nodded with faces twisted in pain, as though flesh were being carved from their bones.
The clan head allowed himself a small measure of relief. Then, recalling that Bai Jingyan had made a particular point of seeking out Bai Jingping, he turned to his second son, who stood at his side.
"Where is Jingping?"
Bai Jingping's father, Bai Qihua, hurried to answer with a bow.
"He's been on his knees for days and can barely rise. His mother has gone to fetch a physician."
The Fifth Old Master shot a withering glance at his useless son, as if laying blame. The boy could do nothing but read old texts and bamboo scrolls, yet he had failed to raise even one child properly — and it clearly grated on him. It was the look of a man damning a son ignorant enough to inform on his own cousins to the magistrate.
"Bai Jingyan will surely ask to see the boy, so bring him at once. If he cannot stand, move a chair over and seat him beside me," the clan head said, frowning.
"Yes, Father."
Bai Qihua stepped over the threshold and out into the courtyard, where he gave the waiting servants instructions to bring Bai Jingping.
A man perched in the tree caught sight of Magistrate Zhu's procession approaching from a distance and shouted at the top of his lungs.
"They're here! They're coming!"
Shen Qingzhu, Bai Jinchi, Zhan Yu, and Magistrate Zhu were walking toward them, their arms laden with documents, while twenty-one young men of the Bai clan were being dragged along by the constables.
Magistrate Zhu had shown the Bai clansmen no leniency for their name, and every one of them had passed miserable days in the county jail. Though they still wore the fine robes of their rank, they were disheveled and wretched beyond recognition.
Bai Jingjie was being led at the very front, a far cry from the arrogant figure he had cut before Bai Jingyan.
Imprisoned behind bars, he had come, belatedly, to understand a great many things.
All his life he had feared neither heaven nor earth, blinded by the misguided doting of his grandfather and father. He had watched his fifth great-uncle seize the ancestral mansion that rightfully belonged to the main house, and he had heard him say that the women left behind in the Dadu Bai household had no one to rely on but the Suyang branch.
His fifth great-uncle had insisted that though Bai Jingyan had become a Commandery Princess, she was still a woman of the clan, and would have no choice but to meekly obey the elders of the branch. Bai Jingjie had believed it.
Rumors circulated endlessly among the clansmen that, having sworn never to marry, she would have nowhere to turn in her old age but the branch. He also knew that even after his fifth great-uncle had moved into the main house's ancestral mansion, Bai Jingyan had raised no objection.
And when he learned that the elders of the clan spread such talk freely without his grandfather ever lifting a finger to stop them, Bai Jingjie ran wild through Suyang all the more brazenly.
But after his imprisonment, sitting with his cousins and slowly taking stock of himself, he remembered what Bai Jingping had always tried to tell them — and at last, too late, he understood everything.
Magistrate Zhu had stayed close to his father not because the Suyang Bai branch was so illustrious, but simply because of the Dadu Bais!
That was why, when Bai Jingyan had ordered Magistrate Zhu to arrest them, the magistrate had so abruptly turned his back on Bai Qiyun and refused even to meet with him.
In the end, it meant that without the Dadu Bai household, the Suyang Bai branch was nothing to men like him at all.
The Fifth Old Master had ignored the Dadu Bais entirely, extorting and oppressing wherever he pleased. The clan head had watched it all and let it pass. And so the clansmen had come to believe that the Dadu Bais feared them and dared not restrain them.
That slow, creeping corruption was the most dangerous thing of all — like a drop of ink falling into clear water. Such a poison had spread through the branch at terrifying speed.
But regret came too late.
Merchants who had come to Suyang before had told them how Bai Jingyan had dealt with a scheming son of an official who abused the common people on the streets of Dadu. And Bai Jingyan had sworn a solemn oath: if the clan head did not cast the guilty out, she would take the Dadu Bais and leave the clan herself.
Bai Jingjie knew that the clansmen who had done wrong would be expelled today, no way around it — even the clan head's own grandsons would receive no exception.
Grandfather must have come to understand a great deal through this as well — that the Dadu Bai household is something the Suyang branch must never dare touch, and could never touch. If Bai Jingyan leaves the clan, the Bai branch is finished.
Given all this, expulsion was hardly the worst of it. They had cost a woman her life; whether they would even survive was anyone's guess.
Having thought this far, Bai Jingjie's legs gave out beneath him as he walked toward the great gates of the shrine, pinned beneath the stinging gaze of the gathered crowd.
The common folk could not enter the shrine. Magistrate Zhu led the Bai clansmen inside, and the clan head hurried out to meet them.
"Commandery Princess! Jingjie! Magistrate Zhu!"
With a beaming face, the clan head greeted them, then hastily called for servants to prepare seats for Zhan Yu, Magistrate Zhu, and Bai Jinchi, and to serve tea at once.
The young clansmen each cried out for their own grandfathers, weeping and wailing and begging for their lives, all of them clamoring at once about how grueling the jail had been and how dreadful the food.
Curiously, it was Bai Jingjie — the most pampered and indulged of them all — who knelt in silence and said nothing.
His heart aching beyond bearing at the sight of his son, Bai Qiyun longed to rush to him at once. But when he saw his father's face frozen hard as stone, he could only stand mutely behind the clan head, clutching the hem of his robe, worry knotted in his chest.
Bai Jinchi swept a cold, contemptuous gaze over the anxious faces of the clan. She found it sickening — these men who so badly wanted to run to their darling sons yet dared not, standing meekly behind the clan head with nothing but reddened eyes. She turned and spoke to Magistrate Zhu.
"My eldest sister will arrive shortly. Wait just a moment."
"Of course. Of course, Commandery Princess."
Magistrate Zhu bowed to Bai Jinchi again and again.
Just then, the madam of the pleasure house hurried down from her carriage with the mute girl in tow and called out loudly at the entrance to the Bai shrine.
"Magistrate Zhu! Magistrate Zhu! I heard the Commandery Princess is searching for a girl called Anang. I bought a girl only yesterday who cannot speak. Might this be her?"
"How dare a brothel keeper set foot before our Bai shrine!"
Bai Qiyun bellowed in fury.
Magistrate Zhu hastily raised a hand, signaling the constables to drag the madam away. This was, after all, the shrine of the Zhenguo Commandery Princess's family, and the sight troubled him.
But Bai Jinchi, entirely unbothered, walked straight out the gates. Zhan Yu hurried after her, and Magistrate Zhu — who had only just sat down — leapt to his feet and followed the moment he saw Zhan Yu go.
Bai Jinchi had seen Anang before, too. She was worried about the girl.