In the early spring of the eighteenth year of Yonghe, the Li and Wei factions' failed rebellion was quelled, and all involved were executed.
Those sentenced to immediate beheading were temporarily held in the imperial prison for execution in autumn, while those exiled were escorted by officials to their designated locations by early March.
The Li family's crime of rebellion was grave, and the implicated nine clans spanned far and wide, entangling numerous intricate marital connections—effectively encompassing half the court and many retired Confucian scholars.
To demonstrate benevolence upon his ascension, the new emperor issued a general pardon. Ultimately, only the three closest clans of the rebellious Li and Wei families were executed—namely, blood relatives, marital relatives, and maternal and paternal lineages.
Those beyond the three clans but within the nine were exiled three thousand li away.
Li Huaian, as the grandson of Grand Tutor Li, fell within the five clans.
After being captured by Xie Zheng in Jizhou, he had been imprisoned and tortured. Though he appeared to be nothing more than a frail scholar, his resolve was unyielding. Even Gongsun Yin personally attempted to extract information from him but failed.
At the time, he lay wounded on a pile of straw in his cell, his breath forming white mist in the bitter winter cold.
To Gongsun Yin, who had come to persuade him, he only smiled bitterly and said, "Your esteemed reputation precedes you, Huaian has long admired you. I simply never imagined our first meeting would be under such circumstances."
"What the Li family has done is an unforgivable crime. The world may revile us, anyone may push against this crumbling wall—but Huaian cannot. For over twenty years, I have lived under the shelter of my clan's grace. As the Li family's great house collapses, I may be crushed beneath its ruins, but I will not be the force that brings it down. I know I am a sinner, and in death, I willingly descend into Avīci Hell. I beg you, sir... to grant me this."
Gongsun Yin gazed at the man in a bloodstained blue robe and said slowly, "The Li family has already abandoned you. Is this worth it?"
Li Huaian answered with a faint smile, "Twenty years of nurturing—that is enough."
Determined to die and lacking the physical resilience of a martial artist, further torture proved futile.
Only after the Li family's sentencing was he transferred to the Court of Revision's prison.
That spring, shortly after the emperor's enthronement, Li Huaian set out on the road to exile alongside the Li clansmen beyond the three closest generations.
Born into silk and satin, these people had thought the sky had fallen when their homes were raided and they were imprisoned. But only upon truly embarking on exile did they realize how much suffering existed in the world—what they had endured before was nothing in comparison.
The officials were harsh, enforcing strict daily travel quotas. Those who lagged behind were whipped with leather lashes, polished to a shine from years of use. A single strike could raise a swollen welt across half one's back, lingering for days.
In prison, bribing the jailers with silver could secure a decent meal. But on the road, conditions were dire. Most of their hidden savings had already been extorted by the jailers, leaving little to offer the escorting officials. Their daily fare consisted of nearly inedible blackened cornbread, often insufficient to stave off hunger.
Within days, the exiled Li clansmen had all visibly thinned, their faces haggard and gaunt, their former noble bearing utterly gone.
The young children, unable to walk far, were carried in turns by the adults.
With worn-out shoes and no replacements, Li Huaian's feet soon blistered from the relentless march—let alone the women among the exiles.He watched helplessly as his young nephews fell ill one after another.
He didn't have a single copper coin left to his name. When he tried to persuade other clan members who still had some savings to pool money for medicine for the children, all he received were complaints of hardship and curses.
Grand Tutor Li's children had all been sentenced to execution in autumn, leaving Li Huaian, the eldest grandson of the Li family, as the sole remaining direct descendant. All the implicated collateral branches and distant relatives who had once clung to the Li family tree—now uprooted—faced confiscation of property and exile, cursing and resenting the Li family without exception.
When Li Huaian knelt on the ground, kowtowing and begging his clansmen to pool their savings to save his feverish nephews, he was spat upon and beaten by resentful relatives who harbored hatred for the main branch of the Li family.
If not for the intervention of the guards, Li Huaian would have been too injured to walk for days.
On that chilly spring night, he wrapped his only tattered coat around his delirious, feverish nephew for warmth. Holding the child against the broken door of the post station, he stared blankly at the pitch-black sky visible through the cracks.
The little nephew curled in his arms, cheeks flushed red from fever, yet still shivering and murmuring about the cold.
Li Huaian futilely tightened the coat around the child. His own lips and face had turned blue from the cold, and his bony shoulder blades protruded sharply through his thin robe, like a withered bamboo stalk on the verge of death. Gently patting the boy's back, he whispered soothing words.
The child weakly opened his eyes and asked, "What are you looking at, Uncle?"
Li Huaian's voice was hoarse. "At the sins of the Li family."
The boy's voice was as faint as a dying kitten's, his eyelids slowly drooping. "What's that?"
Li Huaian's chest tightened, his throat bitter. Gazing at the night sky, he said mournfully, "The Li family did many wrongs... killed many innocent people. I was thinking... whether those ordinary folk who suffered because of us... felt just as helpless and desperate when facing separation and death..."
He couldn't continue. Looking down, he realized the child in his arms had stopped breathing. Unable to contain his grief any longer, he buried his face against the small body and let out a choked sob.
"I should be the one to die... I should be the one punished..."
That night, stifled weeping echoed intermittently from the post station's woodshed.
After his nephew's death, Li Huaian fell gravely ill.
He became gaunt and hollow-eyed, bearing no resemblance to the refined, noble young master of the Li family he once was.
The guards escorting the exiled prisoners thought he wouldn't survive, yet Li Huaian clung to life, enduring all the way to Suzhou.
He grew taciturn, often spending entire days without speaking to anyone.
But he quietly performed many small kindnesses. The exiled prisoners barely had enough food for themselves; to stave off hunger, they would split a single steamed bun in half, saving one portion for later. Yet whenever Li Huaian encountered beggars along the way, he often gave away his own precious half portion.
Occasionally, when someone dared to speak to him, he would teach them a few characters, even naming some of the beggar children.
Both the guards and his fellow exiles regarded him as a joke—a clay idol fording a river, incapable of saving himself yet still finding time to pity those beggars.Li Huaian never explained anything, stubbornly persisting in his ways.
When a clansman saw him always saving half a steamed bun to give to the next beggar he encountered, they simply snatched it from him.
After being beaten, he went to the river to wash the blood from his face. The guard watching him, disgusted by his calm composure, sneered: "Young Master Li, you've fallen so low yourself, who are you pretending to be kind for? As if the corruption cases during the Guanzhong drought and Jiangnan floods, or the Luchang massacre colluding with rebels, weren't all orchestrated by your Li family?"
The water murmured as Li Huaian gazed at his blurred reflection in the stream, dirty hair obscuring his bitter expression: "You're right, officer. The Li family's crimes concern tens of thousands of lives—they can never be atoned for. But this guilty man feels remorse. Rather than dying to escape it, I wish to do something for the people betrayed by my family, to repay our sins."
The guard was momentarily stunned by his words, then laughed scornfully.
But Li Huaian remained indifferent to such mockery, quietly continuing his actions. At first, the guards and fellow prisoners treated him as entertainment, but eventually, finding his reactions dull, they stopped bothering to provoke him.
The hardships of exile wore his cloth shoes to tatters within two months of leaving the capital. Learning to weave straw sandals from an old man at a post station, his feet—once accustomed to fine boots—blistered and calloused until they no longer felt the straw's prick.
The hands that once held brushes to paint were now rough and cracked.
Along the way, he made straw sandals for many clansmen.
Yet when the Li clan reached Suzhou in December, of the hundred who began the journey, few survived.
Such was exile—"death penalty spared, living penalty unavoidable."
Suzhou, in the desolate northwest frontier, was a barren land of deserts, with earthen-walled towns only where water allowed.
Most inhabitants were border soldiers or exiled convicts; few locals endured this harsh place.
With the new emperor's ascension, Wu'an Marquis returned from the frontier to assist the young ruler as Prince Regent, while barbarian tribes grew restless.
After repeated raids, Suzhou's commander ordered fortifications strengthened, and Li Huaian's group of new exiles was sent to repair the walls.
A frail scholar, unable to lift heavy loads, Li Huaian was whipped severely on his first day, his back striped with wounds. The next day, he was driven back to work.
His slender frame buckling under heavy bricks, he once fell and damaged one. The overseer flew into a rage, lashing him mercilessly—each strike burned like a scorpion's sting.
Often he thought he might die there, yet he felt no resentment.
The cold night his nephew died of illness, he suddenly understood the helplessness of commoners who lost everything to the Li family's schemes.
Only by enduring suffering firsthand does one truly know its taste.
The toil of rebuilding walls paled beside being hacked apart or trampled if the city fell.Yet it was in the hellish crucible of war that the Li family had once personally orchestrated such suffering.
In the past, Li Huaian had served as an Army Supervisor sent to oversee the frontlines. He had witnessed the horrors of war and felt moments of pity and doubt. But recalling his grandfather’s words—that overthrowing Wei Yan was for the sake of bringing a better life to more common people—he chose to turn a blind eye.
Now, as he became the one laying each brick and stone, he finally understood the suffering and struggles endured by the common folk and soldiers coldly sacrificed by the Li family.
He also comprehended the fury Fan Changyu and Xie Zheng had felt upon learning that everything had been the Li family’s doing.
One came from the lowest rungs of society, the other had joined the military in his youth—no one understood better than they did the harsh realities faced by the common people and soldiers at the bottom.
The Li family’s schemes had effortlessly destroyed countless families barely clinging to survival.
The more he realized this, the heavier the mountain of guilt weighed upon Li Huaian.
In the end, his awakening had come too late.
Dying here would not absolve even a fraction of his sins, but it was the best end he could hope for.
Yet he did not die.
The young officer guarding the city, upon learning he was Grand Tutor Li’s grandson, regarded him with disdain. But given that barely a handful in the entire border town were literate, Li Huaian was tasked with organizing the rosters of exiled convicts and low-ranking soldiers while assisting in fortifying the city defenses.
The burly, ill-tempered squad leader barked, “You better sort these damn rosters properly! Anyone under my command—be they soldier or convict—who dies defending these walls when the barbarians come, deserves to have their name remembered!”
After the hardships endured during his exile, Li Huaian had thought himself numb to any stirrings of emotion. Yet the squad leader’s words sent a surge of bitterness and reverence rising from his chest to his throat.
He bowed deeply to the squad leader, his eyes moist as he lowered his head. “This guilty man will not fail in his duty.”
It was guilt.
The Battle of Lu City—how many such officers and soldiers had perished because of the Li family’s schemes?
In early the second year of Yongxing, the border town of Suzhou suffered a surprise attack. It was Li Huaian’s first time facing the cold blades and savage roars of the barbarians. Paralyzed with fear, he stood frozen on the battlements, unable to flee or raise a weapon, deaf even to the squad leader’s hoarse shouts. None of the exiled men moved an inch.
Blood sprayed like rain. Living men one moment, corpses beneath blades the next.
The unfinished defenses could not withstand the barbarians’ ferocious assault. When the hot-tempered squad leader saw the earthen walls of the border town could not hold, he roared at his soldiers to cover the retreat as the rest evacuated the civilians to Suzhou’s main city.
The raid ended when Suzhou’s reinforcements arrived in time. After plundering valuables and grain, the barbarians withdrew from the captured town without lingering.
But the squad leader died on the battlements. The officer who had once whipped Li Huaian during the fortifications fell defending the gates. Countless others—soldiers Li Huaian knew and didn’t know—held the line with their lives until reinforcements came.
For the first time since the night his nephew died during the exile, Li Huaian wept uncontrollably again.
Not for family this time, but for the loyal bones strewn across the earth.
He felt not only guilt—but a regret deeper than any he had ever known.Countless soldiers had sacrificed their lives to defend this peace—how could internal strife within the court reignite conflict?
In that battle, he had been crippled by a barbarian’s blade, but he managed to save an infant for a civilian woman.
The woman had died under the barbarian’s sword, her last words telling him only that the child’s father was in the army, surnamed Cheng.
When reinforcements arrived, Li Huaian protected the child and barely escaped with his life. But when he searched the army for the child’s father, he learned that the man had also died on the city walls.
The child became an orphan.
Li Huaian adopted the child and named him Cheng Lang.
Lang—a gemstone as beautiful as jade.
It was said that a gentleman should be like jade. He hoped the child would grow into a truly upright man.
The Northern Turks grew increasingly restless. That year, not only Suzhou but also Jinzhou and Yanzhou suffered frequent raids.
By autumn, Tang Peiyi had been appointed commander to suppress the increasingly rampant foreign tribes. Fan Changyu, now a general, followed with the supply convoy.
Hearing news of Fan Changyu again, Li Huaian felt as though lifetimes had passed. When he learned she had married Xie Zheng, a pang of bitterness struck his heart before giving way to acceptance.
In this world, aside from the Wu'an Marquis, he truly could not think of a second man worthy of her brilliance.
Those two had been bound by fate since birth—truly a match made by heaven.
In a remote border town of Suzhou, Li Huaian helped the newly assigned garrison captain organize documents and strategize on fortifying the city. Because his insights were valuable and his knowledge vast, despite his status as a convict, the captain made an exception and promoted him to Record Keeper. Seeing his lameness, the captain also spared him from the grueling labor of construction.
But after expressing his gratitude, Li Huaian still went to the city gates every day without fail, carrying bricks or assisting the craftsmen.
Only when both body and mind were exhausted could he find some peace, feeling as though he were atoning for his sins.
For years afterward, he remained in that border town, seeing off one garrison captain after another. The captains, having benefited greatly from his counsel, all wished to take him away from the frontier and keep him as a permanent advisor. But Li Huaian declined each time.
He said he was a sinner, and he had come here to atone.
Later, the war ended. The female general who had held the northwest alone for years repelled countless Northern Turk invasions—so much so that the sight of her Commander's Flag eventually deterred them from further attacks. In the end, her military achievements earned her a marquisate.
With no more battles at the border and the city’s defenses complete, Li Huaian started a private school in his humble farmhouse, teaching local children to read and write without charging tuition.
The female marquis and her husband, the marquis, retired from the political whirlpool of the court and returned to the northwest, guarding Great Yin’s great frontier together.
Suzhou and Huizhou were only a few hundred miles apart, yet Li Huaian never saw those two again.
He could not face his old friends.
But he heard many stories about them. In the sixth year of Yongxing, the female marquis gave birth to twins—a daughter named Xie Congyun and a son named Meng Xingchuan.
The bloodlines of the two loyal families wrongfully slaughtered in the Jinzhou case would live on forever.
He also heard they had adopted many orphaned children of fallen soldiers. Those who knew their original surnames kept them; those who didn’t took the surnames Xie, Fan, or Meng, all raised as their own.
…
Sixteen years of wind, frost, rain, and snow passed in the blink of an eye.
By the time Li Huaian reached forty, he was already gravely ill, his temples as white as a man in his sixties.For days, heavy snow had been falling. After catching a chill at the onset of winter, he had been bedridden for half a month with no signs of improvement.
The child he had adopted years ago had now come of age.
When Cheng Lang brought in water to wipe his face, he calmly and weakly instructed his own funeral arrangements: "When I'm gone, there's no need for elaborate funeral rites. Just bury me hastily on the back hill."
Cheng Lang's eyes stung, but he forced a composed tone: "Master, don't speak nonsense. It's just a chill—a few more doses of medicine and you'll recover."
Li Huaian wouldn't allow Cheng Lang to call him foster father. He said he was but a sinner, and the only reason he still lived was to atone for his crimes, insisting Cheng Lang address him simply as "Master."
"I know my own body... cough..." Before he could finish, a fit of coughing wracked his frail, hunched frame, like a spent candle in the cold night, ready to be extinguished by the slightest breeze.
Cheng Lang patted his back to ease his breathing, holding back his reddened eyes: "This spring, many children in the city still wish to come to you for their first lessons. You're still strong—you'll recover soon!"
As if afraid Li Huaian would continue with his funeral arrangements, he added: "Today, the city lord's residence hosted two distinguished guests. Though one was a woman, Magistrate Liu addressed both as 'Young Marquis.' Quite unusual—they must be from the Xie family of Huizhou. The young lady, upon hearing from Magistrate Liu how you've taught the villagers without tuition fees for over a decade, said she wished to visit you someday..."
Cheng Lang rambled on about his observations at the city lord's residence, but Li Huaian could no longer hear him clearly.
Exiled to this bitter, cold land for twenty years, he had not seen a single familiar face. Now, with his time running short, the children of old acquaintances had arrived here.
Amid his scars of guilt, a sudden wave of sorrow overwhelmed him.
Just then, a knock came at the courtyard gate.
"Is Master Li at home?"
Cheng Lang set down the towel and glanced outside: "I'll get it."
Opening the gate, he found people from the city lord's residence and a group of young men and women standing outside. At the forefront were the twin siblings he had met earlier that day—the two distinguished guests.
Though twins, their appearances and temperaments were nothing alike.
One wore crimson riding attire, with almond eyes and a delicate nose, radiant as the sun. The other was clad in dark, fitted robes, refined and reserved, mature beyond his years.
Though Cheng Lang worked at the city lord's residence, he had never encountered such noble figures before and was momentarily at a loss.
The city lord's son quickly interjected: "Brother Cheng, after you left early today, the two Young Marquises heard of Master's grave illness and came especially to see him."
The crimson-clad girl immediately clasped her fists: "We apologize for the intrusion without prior notice."
Cheng Lang assured them it was no trouble and led them into the courtyard.
Li Huaian had already heard the commotion outside. When Cheng Lang brought the two into the room, his gaze lingered on the bright-eyed girl in red, lost in thought for a long moment.
She was the spitting image of that female marquis from years past.
The girl and the boy clasped their fists toward Li Huaian: "We apologize for disturbing you, venerable sir."
But Li Huaian only smiled at them. As he smiled, tears welled in his already clouded eyes. He said, "The sins of the Li family... I can never atone for them all..."The young girl seemed to know who he was and said, "The calamity back then was not caused by your efforts alone, old sir. You have remained here for over twenty years, going to the city gates to oversee battles and offer strategies whenever war broke out. For years, you have worked tirelessly to secure trade routes for the city's people and taught countless impoverished students to read and write. Your achievements cannot erase the Li family's past mistakes, but they are enough to leave you with a clear conscience."
Li Huaian looked at the black-robed youth standing beside the young girl.
The youth's brows and eyes bore a striking resemblance to the Martial Marquis who had intimidated the Northern Jue for over two decades. He gave Li Huaian a slight nod.
Through them, Li Huaian seemed to catch a glimpse of old friends. His eyes remained brimming with tears, yet he smiled again—a smile tinged with the relief of release.
That night, the old man, who had spent half his life atoning for his sins, passed away with a faint smile on his lips.
His funeral was kept simple, as per his final wishes. The local townsfolk, aware of his lifelong repentance and remorse, did not extol his virtues. Only the students he had once taught planted peach or plum trees on the hillside where he was buried.
The following spring, the entire mountainside bloomed with a riot of peach and plum blossoms.
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