Questioning Heaven, Desiring the Way - Chapter 196: Commandery, Prefecture Seat, Government Office

“Young Master, why don’t you let them take the carriage? Even if you make them sit on the beams, that would be better than what they’re sitting in right now.”

Taohua had a sweet personality, so when she saw how the young man seemed to be in such pain as he clutched his wound, she couldn’t help but feel sympathetic toward him. So, after thinking about it for a while, she rested in Gu Suihan’s embrace and decided to persuade him in a gentle voice.

Unfortunately for her, Gu Suihan merely smiled indifferently, and a nonchalance as unfeeling as a frozen lake flashed in his eyes. He seemed to be answering her, but also sounded like he was talking to himself. “Mere ants must be aware that they are mere ants. There are some lines that cannot be crossed, and there are some rules that cannot be broken.”

His voice was flat, empty, and void of any feeling, making Taohua’s face pale involuntarily.

She knew that Gu Suihan was warning her.

He was warning her to know her place and never question the decisions of her master.

This young man looked like he had walked right out of a painting, but his thoughts were as unfathomable as the bottom of a bottomless abyss. It was impossible to guess or grasp what he was thinking about. Taohua looked at Gu Suihan’s perfect and flawless face, then buried the strange emotions she had earlier deep in her heart.

She was a princess, actually. She had been the princess of a nation from one of the small worlds conquered by the empire. Ever since she was born, she had been given the best food and the best clothing, she never needed to lift a finger, and she hardly even left the palace. But one day, a powerful army suddenly appeared and destroyed everything in the way as though they were all made from bamboo. It only took the army three days to completely annihilate the country. She became a prisoner of war and was eventually sold to the slave market. Perhaps it was because she was frail yet carried a tinge of elegance, so the slave trader decided to train her to become a maid instead.

Those days were like hell to her, but after Gu Suihan bought her, her life changed completely, which made her feel like she had been transported to a different world. The liveliness and kindness she had buried deep inside her were slowly coming out again.

That was why she tried to plead on behalf of the young man suffering outside the carriage. But Gu Suihan’s words cast a shadow on her heart once again.

That’s right – she was still a slave in the end. She wasn’t the princess she used to be. She was lucky even to be alive. She didn’t have any extra kindness left to give away.

Moreover, this young man, the young man who bought her, was one of those cultivators she had heard about. A person who could change the world by just breathing or make the sky collapse with a thought. Someone with supernatural powers. As a princess in the past, she had some understanding of such people with incredible powers. Anybody who could go down this path became successful and well-loved by all. But more than that, their temperamental and unpredictable moods were something that terrified the common people.

Gu Suihan looked at the distracted Taohua in his arms and smiled faintly. In that moment, it was as though the ice in him had melted into water. He looked kind and warm, and the gaze that had nearly frozen Taohua over was gone as well. “Are you very scared?”

Taohua instinctively shook her head a little frantically, but when she looked straight at Gu Suihan’s discerning stare that seemed to be able to read her mind, she began to panic and nodded vigorously.

“Actually, what you need to do is simple. Just don’t question my orders.”

Gu Suihan smiled and pulled her into his arms before slowly picking up a book that he was reading halfway. He mused, “Perhaps, I could help you two to get into cultivation and live for a thousand years.”

“Ooh…” Taohua’s eyes flew open as she looked at Gu Suihan in shock.

“Having a good spiritual root is like having an entrance ticket to cultivation. You might not have one, but you can always take one from someone else,” said Gu Suihan with a chuckle as he added this comment, as though he could tell what Taohua and Lihua’s concerns were. After that, he went back to reading.

He wasn’t kidding. For him, catching hold of a cultivator, pulling that cultivator’s spiritual root out, and putting it into another person’s body was a piece of cake to him. Even though it was inevitable that this robbed spiritual root would lose a little of its quality along the way, this was almost a miracle to ordinary people who didn’t even stand a chance to cultivate previously.

“Taohua, this book says that the empire comprises 49 regions, each region has 100 commanderies, each commandery has 100 prefecture seats, and each prefecture seat has 100 government offices. Is that true?” asked Gu Suihan suddenly as he pointed to a passage in the book.

“It’s true. The area we’re in right now is within a place named Fengyang Commandery.” Taohua snapped out of her daze when she heard Gu Suihan’s voice and quickly started explaining, “It is said that each city with a government office usually has cultivators at Origin Core to guard them, while the prefecture seat city has cultivators at Nascent Change. Commanderies have Divine Soul cultivators. I don’t know what’s the rule for anything higher than that.”

“That’s…very easy to understand,” murmured Gu Suihan to himself as he narrowed his eyes and heightened his guard. The cultivators in this place were a million times more formidable than those in the Lower World who had run away and lived like rats in a sewer.

As for the empire’s seemingly overly simplistic way of organizing the land, Gu Suihan could somewhat understand the logic behind it.

Ying Zheng was a leader who had built the Qin Empire all by himself. He was a king who had massacred millions and had power over the entire world. He was an overlord himself.

His incredible power and strength as well as his willingness to kill to get what he wanted was something that could quash any rats hiding in the darkness.

In the world of cultivators, fighting and conquering wasn’t a war over food or time, and definitely wasn’t about money. It was about resources. Inestimable resources.

Cultivators could go for months without food and water and had plenty of spells, techniques and weapons that could defeat ordinary people easily. Even cultivators at Foundation Establishment could live a few hundred years without any problem, so time wasn’t a factor here.

What did cultivators really want?

Strength? Freedom? Longevity?

Regardless of what it was, the most basic thing was to have their own strength. As long as their fists were strong enough, nothing was a problem.

The Qin Empire was a place that gave them a way to plunder resources. With a huge mountain like Ying Zheng weighing down on everyone else, they could go ahead and rob, kill and steal from the enemy all they wanted. As for who their enemy was, that depended on who the empire wanted to fight.

So, as long as the empire had Ying Zheng, nobody dared to make any trouble. It was clear that all the social status and etiquette that ordinary people placed so much importance on was actually just bullshit.

The size of your fist determined how successful you were and how many special privileges you would get. That was an unchanging truth that held true since the beginning of time.

“Huhai, Fusu, Lv Buwei, Li Si, Bai Qi, Wang Jian (these are all real people who lived during the Qin Dynasty, Huhai and Fusu being the royal names of two of Ying Zheng’s sons – you guys can read everything on Wikipedia),” murmured Gu Suihan to himself. His thoughts were everywhere as he muttered, “What…in the world did all of you do back then? Why did you do that? What…what did you know?”

In his daze, the scene that had been hidden deep inside his mind replayed itself once more.

That domineering and audacious middle-aged man stood beneath the skies with a crazed expression on his face as he held a seal in his hands and a sword at his waist. He seemed to know a powerful technique used by the Monkey God in Journey to the West, so his head was in the clouds, his back was like an army too vast to see the end of, and huge cities beneath his feet that resembled hibernating beasts.

Across from him was a darkened, deep set gigantic eye that was gigantic, half covered by clouds and made from a moving whirlpool that was the gathering of the laws of nature. Its gaze contained a fury, indifference and aggression as it glared fiercely at everything before it.

“This…will be the last time!” Gu Suihan mumbled to himself. He seemed to have understood this message from the gaze of the giant eye. In that instant, he seemed to have understood something. He slowly closed his eyes to hide the bright glint in them.

After that, qi dissipated, the ground collapsed, cultivators died and demons disintegrated. Legacies were cut of and history became legend. Specialists in various aspects, qi refiners, cultivators – everything was carefully buried and sealed up.

“By deduction, before this time, there was one more time, or even more than once. And during one of them, immortals disappeared. Heaven did not reappear either.” Gu Suihan rapped his knuckles gently against the windowsill and continued thinking. “Was it…the Investiture of the Gods? Or Journey to the West? Perhaps… I should be able to find out more from the corpse of the immortal that the empire got their hands on.”

After making a decision, Gu Suihan slowly stopped his thoughts from running on and on. He exhaled quietly, took the water that Taohua offered him and downed it in one go.

“This world…has a lot of people with extremely strong bodies. Is it because they don’t lack the resources? So they’ve all gone to become cultivators in the physical body?” asked Gu Suihan as he smacked his lips.

“That…I don’t know about that, but I heard that many people go through a process to beat and quench their joints and bones from a young age…” said Taohua quickly after initially being unsure.

“I see.” Of course, Gu Suihan knew why these people were beating and quenching themselves. The first step to cultivation was to hit Perfect Physical Realm. Both the inside and outside of the body had to be a mixture of elements without fail.

But this wasn’t the answer he was looking for.

Then again, Taohua was only a slave and wasn’t even from this world. It was only normal that she wouldn’t have answers for him.

And so, he didn’t make things difficult for her. He turned his gaze to the map in his hands and stared at the city of Fengyang Commandery.