“Oh my, oh my, how did you two youngsters end up in such a state…”
Aunt Hong rowed the boat while frowning and nagging.
The small boat quietly left the shore, and by the time the soldiers arrived, the riverbank was pitch black again, with not a single soul in sight.
Lin Yuchan found a rag, wiped the mud and water off her hands and body, and properly bowed to Aunt Hong.
“Thank you…”
“Oh my, oh my, don’t be so polite.” Aunt Hong laughed heartily, “Which official did you offend? How did so many people end up chasing you?”
Aunt Hong was loyal enough, knowing the soldiers were pursuing them, she still readily rescued them. But if she knew what they had done, she might not be laughing anymore.
Lin Yuchan hesitated for a moment: “Well… there were rebels causing trouble by the river, we shouldn’t have walked so close, and got hit by stray bullets.”
Aunt Hong inevitably cursed the dog officials again for being senseless, just like foreigners in nature, wrongfully accusing good people like Young Master Minguan. The soldiers were unreasonable, injuring civilians without compensation—truly a silent loss.
Su Minguan lay quietly in the cabin. The buttons on his long shirt were scattered, the bleeding had mostly stopped, soaking through three or four of Aunt Hong’s foreign cloth towels.
His face was extremely pale, like a Western plaster statue, only distinguished from a plaster statue by the weak rise and fall of his chest.
Disheveled hair lazily stuck to the area behind his ears. Actually, during the late Qing period, men’s hair wasn’t like in TV dramas where the front half of their forehead was always mirror-bright—only wealthy, idle people had the leisure to fuss with such things. Common people had no time for haircuts, so the front of their skulls were often fuzzy with hair, covered with a hat, and that was that.
Old traditionalists were heartbroken by this: such an unkempt appearance, in Emperor Kangxi’s or Emperor Qianlong’s time, would be grounds for execution!
So Su Minguan’s image after shedding his braid wasn’t particularly bald—he naturally had a layer of short, cropped hair. Usually wearing a hat, he didn’t need any styling, just let it grow freely and unrestrained. Every so often, he’d randomly take a razor and shave it himself, creating a refreshing buzz cut. Combined with his injuries, he looked exactly like a young soldier who’d just enlisted and immediately gotten wounded.
It made his entire person seem to have traveled from the Qing to the Republic, crossing an entire era.
Lin Yuchan couldn’t help but smile slightly, thinking that in fifty more years, all the young men on the streets would look like him.
But when Aunt Hong saw this, she was extremely frightened, touching the back of her head: “Where’s the braid? That long, thick braid?”
Lin Yuchan quickly said, “It was burned off, don’t be afraid.”
Aunt Hong asked: “Where to? Should we go to my place first?”
Lin Yuchan quickly waved her hands: “Let’s just drift on the water for now. Please.”
What they needed most right now was to find a foreign medical clinic for Su Minguan. But as soon as they went ashore, nowhere would be safe.
Fortunately, no internal organs or bones were injured, so his life wasn’t in danger. It was just that he was covered in mud and dirt and urgently needed cleaning.
Lin Yuchan asked Aunt Hong to boil a basin of hot water, requested a box of salt and a clean towel, walked into the cabin, and began unbuttoning his clothes.
Grand Helmsman Su had originally been pretending to sleep, following the principle that the more you say, the more mistakes you make, trying to speak as little as possible with Aunt Hong.
Pretending to sleep gradually became real sleep, as a warm darkness surrounded him, inescapable.
He remembered his mother’s embrace in childhood, the Western clock ticking in the bedroom.
He vaguely knew that his family belonged to “secret societies.” Since the Qing dynasty’s founding, resistance forces had been constant, especially in the south. People unwilling to submit fled to remote border islands, to Taiwan, to Southeast Asia, Burma, or simply became pirates, raising a flag and making the four seas their home.
Those who remained in their homeland watched over each other, lying low and waiting for the right moment.
The Qing court implemented a sea ban, forbidding even a single sail to go to sea, leaving only Guangzhou as a trading port to attract merchants, mainly responsible for purchasing Western treasures for the emperor in the capital.
Respectable people had no opportunity to engage in foreign trade. Those who dared to go to sea to strike it rich had more or less countless connections with those outlaws.
This was the birth story of the Thirteen Factories.
When the Thirteen Factories developed and expanded, local officials were shocked to discover that these merchants who earned fortunes daily were half secretly members of societies, privately worshipping the Ming Zhu family!
—The officials wisely chose not to make a fuss. The Thirteen Factories were the Imperial Household Department’s money bags. Without these merchants, where would their clocks, vases, enamelware, ivory carvings, and military funds for campaigns come from?
Moreover, the Zhu family bloodline was now barely traceable. As times changed, those who cherished the old dynasty had mostly died. The Heaven and Earth Society’s threat to the court diminished daily, becoming an ordinary, harmless underworld gang.
But fate is unpredictable. As foreigners bombarded the nation’s gates and the Qing court’s foundation shook, these “society members” seemed to see opportunity again, beginning to stir restlessly, organizing rebellions!
The court finally decided to deal with this persistent threat. Cooperating with foreigners, they gradually strangled them. The Thirteen Factories fell one by one. Even though they desperately tried to distance themselves from society, they couldn’t stop those greedy eyes coveting their enormous wealth from all directions.
The young master dimly remembered that after the house raids, there was chaos everywhere, with women’s crying and screaming filling his ears. All kinds of real and fake creditors came flocking, lying on the corpse of the wealthy family, trying to suck the last drop of blood.
At that time, he was still a child with no ability to protect himself. Uncle Jin Lanhe rescued him, sheltered him, and when he was a bit older and showed the family talent for business, introduced him to Jardine Matheson & Co. to earn respectable foreign wages.
He didn’t like it there. In the past, foreigners had bowed and scraped, begging the red-capped merchants of the Thirteen Factories to give them a path to striking gold in the East; now the tables had turned, and it was the Chinese who had to bow to foreigners.
However, fortunately, he was capable and could make money, so the foreigners could tolerate his coldness.
“Heaven destroys the Qing, sending foreign devils.” He remembered Jin Lanhe saying, “Don’t fear the humiliation. Get along well with the foreigners—when we destroy the Qing in the future, the foreigners might even lend us a hand.”
Su Minguan, who had been a second-class citizen under foreigners for a few days, disagreed: “Foreigners only care about profit; they won’t genuinely help us.”
Jin Lanhe scolded him for being ignorant.
When he turned fifteen, at the moment of joining the society and swearing brotherhood, he caused trouble again. He pointed at the portrait of Emperor Taizu of Ming and shamelessly said, “Who is this guy? I don’t know him. I won’t kowtow.”
This made the roomful of elders so angry they were fuming from all seven orifices, lamenting that each generation was worse than the last.
So his status was always awkward. Although he had memorized all the code words, received full training, and knew all the Heaven and Earth Society’s secrets, he had never lit those three and a half incense sticks and could never become an official member.
But fate plays tricks. When he found Jin Lanhe riddled with bullets and on his deathbed, he couldn’t help but shed tears, accepting his mantle, cutting his hair to show his resolve, and swearing to carry the anti-Qing cause to the end.
So… who exactly was he?
“Hiss…”
He awoke from the pain. Looking down, he discovered his upper body was completely bare, and Lin Yuchan was holding a towel, gently wiping away the mottled, colorful stains from his chest, revealing clean skin and a gaping wound.