Beyond the Zenith

I have a keen blade...

Heads falling upon the yellow dust...

The hot blood still runs deep crimson.

I have a red tassel; with it I can bind the great dragon...

The far-off song drifted on throughout Tradition Night, becoming background noise for Han Qingyu’s dreams.

Despite not having any other memories of Tradition Night, in the dream, he beat down four veterans alongside a few people with blurry faces.

Those blurry figures threw him up into the air, caught him, then again, and again.

More and more people joined the group. There were many smiling faces too, applauding and cheering for him in the darkness and firelight, but he couldn’t make out a single one clearly.

As he fell into their arms once more, it suddenly felt as though he were falling from very, very high up. Turning his head to look down, he suddenly found that the space below had become empty, with no more arms to catch him.

Han Qingyu jolted awake, drenched in cold sweat.

The sky was already starting to lighten.

Han Qingyu sat up, thought for a moment, then, figuring the dream was probably caused by lingering resentment from the previous night, got out of bed and washed up.

While he had never been to a military camp, he could still guess that the dormitories of regular units were probably not quite the same as the Azure Coalition’s. The beds here were bunk beds, and the room’s balcony had three sinks, which meant that washing up early in the morning wasn’t a crowded affair.

The iron locker for clothes and other items was extremely old, with inner walls that bore the traces of iron hook attachments and slanting iron bars.

Based on his experience in Lao Jian’s vehicle, these designs were originally meant for organizing and storing maneuvering devices. Perhaps because the locker had later been given over to recruits, or for some other reason entirely, these attachments had, at some point, been torn out.

Before long, the others got up one after another. When they saw that Han Qingyu had already finished washing up, they remarked in low voices that eating cooked meat really did give one more energy.

Yang Qingbai, holding his towel, was standing in the doorway when he suddenly turned his head and called out in bewildered shock, “Come over and look, all of you!”

“What is it?” Everyone gathered around. A glance left them all similarly baffled.

The evaluation form at the door had a new entry. For the first time since Dormitory 11 was formed, points had been added, and thirteen points at that. With this, the gap between them and the second-to-last spot was down to just six points.

Everyone racked their memories for whether they had done anything positive lately, but came up with nothing.

At that moment, people from some of the other dormitories on the same floor passed by, gossiping about how the dormitories whose members had stepped up and fought the veterans last night had all gained points this morning. Three points per dormitory.

“So,” Liu Shiheng said, glancing at the evaluation form on the door. “Is this because we performed well when we were grabbing the meat?”

After everyone discussed it, they agreed that had to be it. There really was no other explanation apart from that.

Han Qingyu was not only the one person to successfully grab any meat at all, but also the one to turn off the lights. As rumor had it, this was also the same person who had struck Head Instructor Zhang on the head. Han Qingyu had become famous among the recruits overnight.

“Then why thirteen points? That number isn’t even round, and it’s not a multiple of what those other dormitories got,” Yang Qingbai wondered aloud as he hung up his towel.

This one was harder to puzzle. Everyone discussed it right up until they headed out for morning exercise, still with no conclusion. That was until Wen Jifei, walking along, suddenly turned his head and glanced at Han Qingyu.

“It couldn’t be... the weight of that chunk of meat, could it? Thirteen catties[1] for thirteen points? Little Qing, how heavy do you reckon the meat was?” he asked hesitantly.

Recalling the heft of it at the time, Han Qingyu nodded. “At least a dozen catties, probably, yeah.”

They were stunned.

They had figured out the answer, but it was an absurd one. This revelation left no room for joy or excitement about getting points for the first time.

We want meat! Meat! Take however many points you like! Thirteen points? What’s the use of points to us? We’re still dead last! We want meat...

After their morning exercise, they had breakfast. There was still some time before training began, so Han Qingyu hurried off to mail a letter. This was the first time he had written home since coming to the unit; he had only just been granted permission.

On the envelope, he had written only the home address, and it was not sealed.

He handed the letter to the officer in charge of this particular task. The female soldier glanced at the unsealed flap, then looked up and said, “Sorry.”

Han Qingyu nodded. Since the rule about checking mail existed, it was better to do it openly than to secretly read it later.

After reading the letter, the soldier looked up with a stiff smile. Rather than offering presumptuous thoughts, understanding, or words of sympathy, she simply said, “There’s a limit on how many times you can send mail, but no limit on the weight or type of item. Do you have anything else to send along with it? For instance—”

“I’m still a new recruit,” Han Qingyu interrupted.

“Oh, right. I didn’t notice.” With that, the female soldier pulled a notebook out of the drawer, flipped to one of its pages, turned it around, and held it out in front of Han Qingyu. “Copy down this return address. Copy it exactly. Don’t miss even a single character. Here’s a pen.”

Han Qingyu copied it down and sealed the envelope before signing his name on a sender’s registry sheet.

The female soldier checked the envelope over and, after confirming the address was correct, tucked the letter into one of the stacks of mail sorted with large clips. “Alright. We forward both outgoing and return mail, so it might be a few days late. We’ll notify you when a reply arrives.”

“Thank you.”

With that, Han Qingyu left the building.

Assistant Instructor Hu Haipeng was standing outside the door waiting for him. When he saw Han Qingyu come out, he draped an arm over his shoulder and led him straight to an office.

This office had very simple furnishings and had the air of an old-style Oriental Republic soldier. Regiment Commander Li Wangqiang sat behind the desk. On the wall behind him hung a piece of calligraphy that read, Why does a man not take up the blade and seize back the fifty prefectures of mountains and passes?[2] This was the only piece of decor in the office.

Li Wangqiang silently stared at Han Qingyu from his seat, as though trying to bear down on the kid with the sharp killing intent from his twenty years of military service.

Then, the door behind Han Qingyu opened.

A male officer and a female officer, both around thirty, came in from outside, saluted the regiment commander, and then sat down on the wooden sofa with grave expressions.

“Han Qingyu?” the woman asked.

What a stupid question, Han Qingyu thought. He would have liked to claim he was Wen Jifei, but he had been named when he was brought over.

“Yes,” he reluctantly replied.

The woman lowered her head, then glanced back up and asked directly, “Where were you on the evening of August 13th, 1990?”

Han Qingyu was inwardly thrown into disarray, though no one else could tell. He had thought it was about last night’s meat, not that matter.

“On the mountain,” he replied simply.

“Where on the mountain?” the male officer asked next.

“In a ditch.”

The two officers, somewhat at a loss, turned toward the regiment commander, who at this moment was positioned behind Han Qingyu. The corner of the regiment commander’s mouth twitched slightly as he struggled to keep up his dignity. He nodded, signaling that there was no problem, and gestured for them to continue.

The female officer cleared her throat. “What were you doing in the ditch?”

“Lying face down.”

The two officers exchanged a glance and seemed to come to a silent agreement.

“How about this?” they suggested. “Why don’t you just go ahead and recount the whole situation that night yourself? From the start.”

This way of questioning was the most underhanded and also the most dangerous. A self-account, especially one given in a state like this, could easily expose points and details the other side did not actually know, allowing them to identify holes in the story.

A person with poor mental fortitude might even blurt out the thing they were most worried about right off the bat.

Han Qingyu, however, thought it over carefully and said, “At the time, I had taken a piss, but then I felt the piss had left a mark, and could even start to smell, so I was worried it would get me discovered. I also didn’t want to lie face down right next to where I’d pissed, so—”

“You don’t need to say all this,” the male soldier snapped, making as if to slap the table, but hesitating at the last minute and holding back. “Just give us the key points.”

It was a good thing the man stopped him, or Han Qingyu would have spent a long time on this part of the account.

“Okay,” he said. “The key points... I was really nervous at the time, so I can’t really remember many things clearly. How about you ask, and I answer?”

“You can’t remember clearly?” The female officer looked up at him, a sharp light in her eyes as she accused, “What about killing people? Or do you not remember that clearly either?!”

“That part I remember.”

After a brief pause, the two officers’ interrogation abruptly picked up pace. “How many?”

“Two.”

“How did you kill them?”

“Ambushed them from behind.”

“Where did the weapons come from?”

“Dropped by a dead man.”

“How many weapons?”

“Two.”

“What were they?”

“A cone-shaped dagger and a knife.”

“Where were the fatal wounds?”

“One at the back of the head, one at the back of the neck.”

The two officers stopped at the same time and looked at each other.

By this point in the interrogation, the answer was already clear.

Behind Han Qingyu, Regiment Commander Li Wangqiang’s heart was filled with both bewilderment and excitement at once. Despite this confirmation, he couldn’t help but ask himself, How is it possible? How is it possible...

Lao Jian had been listening in from the adjoining room and was left in much the same state by this revelation, though his shock and bewilderment were both greater. There was an element of pleasantness to this surprise, but also a strange displeasure.

Meanwhile, the two officers temporarily called in to help “interrogate” the boy were both more or less aware of the true state of affairs and knew that this was not actually an interrogation at all. In fact, when they heard Han Qingyu’s admission, they actually already had the urge to stand up and salute him.

However, they had a job to do first. The details and logic of this matter needed to be made sense of.

1. One catty or one jin is equivalent to 500 grams. ☜

2. 男儿何不带吴钩，收取关山五十州 is part of a poem written by poet Li He in the Tang Dynasty. The meaning behind it is that every ordinary citizen is also responsible for the survival of the kingdom. At the time, the fifty prefectures near the Yellow River had fallen to warlords and were not under the control of the central government of the time. The poet was thus questioning why the local men did not pick up their weapons to take their land back. ☜