“Minister Ning! If you’d rather not get a reputation for starving your youngest son, kindly send someone over with a few thick quilts and some warmer clothes.”

Ning Chen shouted it after him at the top of his lungs.

He knew Ning Ziming cared enormously what people thought. He wouldn’t let a name like that stick to him.

Ning Ziming heard it. His face only went uglier.

Ning Gan hurried to catch up, fawning. “Don’t be angry, Father. Ning Chen only wants your attention — this is how he’s decided to get it. Ignore him. Starve him a few days, and once he sees it isn’t working, he’ll come crawling to beg your forgiveness.”

“Exactly. We can’t let him get away with it. Threatening Father, throwing firewood at us — he respects nothing. Not the law, not heaven.”

Ning Mao piled on.

Ning Ziming said nothing. He walked on to a room in the back courtyard.

Before he even reached the door, he could hear crying.

Ning Gan lifted the curtain for him, all eagerness, and Ning Ziming went in.

The room was lavish, and warm.

Ning Xing lay in bed with white cloth wound around his forehead, blood soaking through it dark red.

Beside the bed, a plump woman sat weeping.

She was the daughter of the sitting Left Chancellor, Chang Chengyun. Chang Ruyue.

When Chang Ruyue saw Ning Ziming she dried her eyes, rose, and bowed, her voice thick with tears. “You’re home, Master?”

Ning Ziming grunted, looked at Ning Xing on the bed, and asked, “How is Xing’er? Has a doctor seen him?”

Chang Ruyue answered through a sob.

“The doctor has been and gone. Xing’er is badly hurt. He says the boy will have to keep to his bed and rest a while.”

Ning Ziming’s brow furrowed hard. His face was grim.

“That bas—” Ning Mao was about to say bastard, but one look from Chang Ruyue and he changed course. “Poor Second Brother. Any time there was something good to eat or drink, he always saved it for Ning Chen. And Ning Chen steals his jade pendant and then does this to him. It’s just too much.”

Chang Ruyue’s fine brows drew together, and she corrected him gently.

“Don’t speak about your younger brother that way. Ning Chen did come from a small village out in the country, after all. He hasn’t had proper raising — and that’s my failing, as his mother. I didn’t bring him up right.”

Ning Gan said quickly, “Mother, what does this have to do with you? This is plainly Ning Chen’s own fault. How can you take the blame onto yourself?”

Chang Ruyue dabbed at the corner of her eye, where there was no tear at all, and sighed.

“Ning Chen is a little unruly. But it isn’t all his fault. Mother didn’t teach him well enough.”

“The two of you mustn’t hold this against him. He isn’t Mother’s own son, but I have always treated him as though he were.”

Ning Ziming had meant to ask about Ning Chen going short on clothing. But hearing Chang Ruyue talk this way, he became all the more certain the boy had been lying.

Hmph. Unruly to the bone, and nothing out of his mouth but lies. The child cannot be taught.

“Ning Chen has raised his hand against his elders, and by vicious means. Someone — seal the West Court. Without my order, he is not to set one foot outside it.”

Ning Ziming said it with disgust all over his face.

A strange little smile touched the corner of Chang Ruyue’s mouth. She was playing several levels above her three sons.

In the West Court, Uncle Chai helped Ning Chen back to his room.

“Fourth Young Master, you frightened the life out of me back there.”

“What was the point of it? Give in to the Master, tell him you’re sorry, and it would have been over. Now he’ll like you even less than he did before.”

Ning Chen laughed coldly. “Uncle Chai. Have I not given in enough?”

“All these years I’ve walked on eggshells trying to please them. I swallowed everything. If a dog in this house bit me, I had to go apologize to the dog. And you saw it — I came this close to meeting the King of Hell (TL Note: the judge who rules the underworld and decides where the dead go next. “Going to see him” is the everyday way of saying you nearly died.).”

Uncle Chai sighed, and his whole face ached with it.

He truly did hurt for Ning Chen. Sensible, kind, well-behaved. So why couldn’t the boy earn a single smile from the Master?

It came down to this: the Fourth Young Master had no family behind him. He was no use to the Master’s career.

“Fourth Young Master — but what does doing this get you? It only makes things harder.”

Ning Chen smiled. “At the very least, Ning Gan and the other two won’t dare shove me around whenever they feel like it.”

The old man’s chest tightened at that.

“The exam is finished. The results go up in three days, don’t they?”

Uncle Chai nodded, not understanding why Ning Chen was asking.

The corner of Ning Chen’s mouth lifted. “Do you think Ning Gan’s name will be on the list?”

“The First Young Master was taught by the Master himself. His learning is sound, naturally. Barring some accident, his name will be on it.”

Uncle Chai said it, then sighed from deep in his chest. “The Fourth Young Master only started his letters too late. If you’d begun earlier, you might have won a rank of your own, and then nobody would dare bully you.”

The Ning family kept a tutor.

After Ning Chen came to the house, he had studied his characters alongside the other young masters. But he had started far too late, and his learning naturally lagged behind the other three.

“Uncle Chai. Do you believe there are geniuses in this world?”

Uncle Chai looked at him, baffled.

Ning Chen laughed. “Uncle Chai, the truth is, I am a genius. Everything the tutor taught, I learned. My learning isn’t one bit behind Ning Gan’s.”

“Before, I didn’t want to stand out. I was afraid it would make them jealous. But I don’t have to hide anymore.”

“Just wait, Uncle Chai. Before long, my name is going to shake the whole literary world.”

Uncle Chai only looked at him with worry. The fever hasn’t cooked his brain, has it? Why has he started talking nonsense?

Once the Little Prince of Freeloading gets going, Ning Chen thought, you can forget about ever getting your head above water in this lifetime, Ning Gan.

The current emperor was fond of poetry, and so in recent years the literary fashion had swept the Great Xuan. Poems and verses came pouring out by the cartload.

The story went that the Left Chancellor had risen on the strength of a single poem. It made the Xuan Emperor look at him twice, and after that he climbed without stopping.

So every literary man in the Great Xuan wanted to produce the one masterpiece that would outshine everything written before it. It might just catch the emperor’s eye.

Ning Chen thought about selling poems.

A good poem was worth a fortune.

Ning Chen couldn’t write poetry to save his life. But this world had no Li Bai, no Du Fu, no Bai Juyi (TL Note: the three most celebrated poets in Chinese history, all writing over a thousand years ago. Every schoolchild can recite them. In our world their work is common property; in Ning Chen’s world, nobody has ever heard a line of it.). He couldn’t be a giant himself — fine. He’d climb up onto the giants’ shoulders and let everyone assume the height was his.

From now on he was Bai Juyi’s little brother. Bai Piao (TL Note: 白嫖 — a slang term for taking something without paying, “freeloading.” It happens to share its first character with Bai Juyi’s surname, so Ning Chen is claiming the poet as family and naming himself after the theft in the same breath.)!

Necessity had driven him to it. He trusted the old masters wouldn’t hold it against him.

Money first.

Once he had money, he’d find a way to move out.

Though that part was going to be hard.

First: his registration papers (TL Note: 牒籍 — the household document proving who you were and where you belonged.) were in Ning Ziming’s hands.

Registration papers were the equivalent of an ID card. Without one there was no buying property, and he might well be hauled in as a drifter.

And Ning Ziming, for the sake of his own reputation, was never going to hand them over easily. He’d try later. See whether there was some way to steal them.

Second: under Great Xuan law, an only son had to remain at home and serve his parents. A family with several brothers could divide the household, but a son had to be at least sixteen. In this world, sixteen was adulthood.

All of it was written into the statutes, and breaking it carried heavy punishment.

That part was manageable, though. He was a few months short of sixteen. He could wait it out.

Never mind all of it. Money first.

Heaven had handed him a second life. He absolutely was not going to spend it as a doormat.

He didn’t need to rise to the top of the court. But he was going to be rich.

“Uncle Chai. Tomorrow — the Top Scholar Tower!”

There was a place in the capital called the Top Scholar Tower (TL Note: named for the 狀元, the man who placed first in the empire-wide examination. The single most prestigious title a commoner could win, and a fitting name for a house that trades in poetry.), where the literary crowd gathered.

The proprietor of the Top Scholar Tower loved poetry. Anyone who could produce a good poem or verse ate and stayed there for free.

So a fair number of fine works had come out of the Top Scholar Tower.

Ning Chen decided he would go there the next day and sell poetry. Make his first pile, then worry about moving out.

The next morning Ning Chen got up, and Uncle Chai came in carrying hot water.

“Uncle Chai, get yourself ready. As soon as I’ve washed, we’re going to the Top Scholar Tower.”

“Fourth Young Master, I’m afraid we can’t go.”

“Hm?”

Uncle Chai sighed. “The Master gave the order last night. You’re confined — not one foot outside the West Court. There are men watching the gate.”

Ning Chen’s face darkened.

Well. Ning Ziming had his grand strategy. Ning Chen had a ladder.

The woodpile stacked in the corner of the yard would do the job.

Ning Chen washed up quickly, walked out into the yard, and got ready to go over the wall.

Uncle Chai couldn’t come, though. He was old, and with the bad leg there was no climbing anything. “Fourth Young Master, maybe we shouldn’t. If the Master finds out, he’ll be furious.”

Ning Chen snorted. “Let him be furious. All that fire in the man — if he’s really got it in him, he can set himself alight and let me watch. Nobody gets between me and money.”

Ning Chen went over the top of the wall.

Since coming to the Ning estate he had rarely gone out at all. He had only ever heard of the Top Scholar Tower. He’d never set foot in it.

But it was famous enough, and by asking along the way he got there without trouble.

The Top Scholar Tower was a three-story building in deep vermilion, with water on three sides. Imposing, and beautifully placed.

Ning Chen was about to go in when three men came out.

The one in front was somewhere in his forties or fifties, richly dressed, with a presence that filled the doorway.

Two men followed him. One had a full beard, a heavy build, and a brutal face.

The other was pale and beardless, with something soft and womanish about him.

The richly dressed man shook his head and sighed. “A wasted trip. Not one good poem in the place. Nothing but a crowd of moochers in there for the free food and drink.”

“Don’t be angry, Master. A good poem is a thing you meet by chance. You can’t go out and find one. We’ll come again.”

The pale, beardless man’s voice was slightly high and thin as he offered the comfort.

Ning Chen’s eyes lit up. From the cut of the man’s clothes, here was somebody with money.

As he passed the three of them, Ning Chen suddenly stopped and bowed over clasped hands. “A moment, gentlemen.”

All three stopped.

The brutal-faced man and the soft-faced man both stepped forward, putting themselves between Ning Chen and the man in the fine clothes.

Ning Chen said quickly, “Don’t be alarmed, I’m nobody dangerous. I only wanted to ask — you came here to buy a poem, didn’t you?”

The three of them looked him over.

Ning Chen was thin and not tall, and the clothes on his back had been washed pale. He looked like a scholar who’d fallen on hard times.

The richly dressed man asked, “What, do you have a poem to sell?”

Ning Chen nodded. “Poetry, verse, song, rhapsody — I’m accomplished in every one of them. What do you want? Name it. If you’re not satisfied, you don’t pay.”

The middle-aged man started laughing. “Young, aren’t you. But you talk big.”

Ning Chen thumped his chest. “I told you. Not satisfied, you don’t pay. How about this — let me give you one to taste first. If you like it, then you buy.”

“When I do business, my whole approach is fair and square. I don’t cheat children and I don’t cheat old men.”

(End of Chapter 3)