bayedsolid 010 Was the torture inflicted on Niu Xiantong truly a tacitly approved "official execution&quo
010 Was the torture inflicted on Niu Xiantong truly a tacitly approved "official execution&quo
When Niu Xiantong's heart was passed around on the gilded plate, Zhen Xiaosi saw the truth about high-ranking official positions and generous salaries—it was nothing more than a piece of Xuan paper pasted with human blood, and what she was learning was how to prepare the most vibrant cinnabar to paint it.
Zhen Xiaosi stood on the viewing platform on the west side of the execution ground, the silver fish tally from the Court of State Ceremonial at her waist feeling icy cold. She had originally gone to organize the documents for the tribute envoys from the Bohai Kingdom, but her superior's words, "All officials of the seventh rank and above in the capital must witness the executions," had brought her here. A gust of wind swept in from the center of the execution ground, carrying the stench of rust and a certain sweet, metallic smell; her knuckles turned white as she gripped her sleeves.
Cognitive dissonance was ringing sharply in her mind.
She was still in the archives of the Court of State Ceremonial, meticulously copying Zhang Shougui's memorial on the "Great Victory at Huangshui" with vermilion ink. The writing was breathtakingly beautiful—"Where the banners pointed, the barbarian cavalry scattered; where the royal army marched, the tribes submitted." She was even moved by the description of "slaying twelve valiant Khitan generals in battle," and secretly drew a small victory symbol in the margin. At that time, she believed that the *Kaiyuan Records of the Submission of Barbarian Tribes*, which she had helped compile, was recording an era surpassing even that of Emperor Wu of Han.
At that moment, the eunuch who delivered the news of victory was being dismembered three hundred paces away.
“Look carefully, Registrar Zhen.” The old clerk beside him spoke in a dry voice, like sandpaper rubbing against pottery. “This is the consequence of deceiving the Emperor.”
She forced herself to open her eyes. The psychological detachment mechanism automatically activated—she imagined herself observing a Khitan shamanic sacrificial ceremony, not an execution ground in the Tang Dynasty. But when Yang Sixu picked up that still-beating piece of heart muscle with her jade chopsticks, her stomach suddenly convulsed.
The mirror neurons caused her to experience empathic, intense pain.
What's even more terrifying is that she suddenly understood the theatricality of this punishment. Every action conveyed a message: to the civil service (look, this is the fate of eunuchs who overstep their bounds), to the border generals (can your victory reports withstand such dissection?), and even to the envoys from various foreign tribes who were about to come to court (this is the price of betraying the Heavenly Khan). Niu Xiantong was no longer a person, but a dismantled symbol, every piece of his flesh speaking the language of power.
As the execution concluded and the procession dispersed, she stepped into a pool of blood that hadn't yet congealed. Dark brown, it seeped into the cracks of the bluestone slabs, like a distorted map. She suddenly remembered the map of Youzhou she had just filed yesterday—the Huangshui River meandering, the Khitan camp marked as a tiny vermilion dot. Now she suddenly realized how many false reports of victory, how many bribes of pearls, how many "consumables" like Niu Xiantong might have been needed to maintain that vermilion dot's state of "submission."
That night, the guards at the Honglu Temple were on duty, and the lamps were dim.
Three documents lay spread out before Zhen Xiaosi: Zhang Shougui's latest "Petition for Peace from the Khitan," a copy of a secret report from the Xi envoy complaining about the "Tang army's cross-border killing and plundering," and her own half-drafted "A Study of the Customs of the Bohai Kingdom." The three documents confronted each other in the light and shadow, like three ghosts accusing each other.
She dipped her brush in ink, the tip hovering above the four characters "Border Peaceful" for a long time before finally putting it down.
Piaget's theory of cognitive equilibrium collapsed at this moment. The schema she had built over the past twenty years—"Tang is civilization, and the four barbarians are barbarism"—was shattered simultaneously by the bloodshed of the execution ground and the lies of the archives. The adaptation process was accompanied by physiological nausea—she rushed outside and dry heaved under the locust tree in the courtyard, but only vomited bile.
The old clerk appeared in the corridor, holding yellowed files in his arms. "Miss Zhen," he addressed her without her official title for the first time, "in the fifth year of the Kaiyuan era, I accompanied a delegation to the Khitan to swear an oath. But Tugan—the Khitan king later beheaded by Zhang Shougui—pointed to the grasslands and said to me: 'We are not submitting to the walls of Chang'an, but to the trustworthy emperor behind those walls.'"
He paused for a moment: "Nowadays, the Khitans probably point to the city wall and say, 'There lives an old man who loves to listen to stories behind that wall.'"
Zhen Xiaosi wiped the stain from the corner of her mouth and suddenly asked, "You knew all along that those victory reports were fake?"
“I know that every prosperous era needs stories.” The old man turned and left, his voice drifting in the night mist. “The duty of the Court of State Ceremonial is to translate these stories into versions that the barbarians can understand, and to translate their true cries into a language that Chang’an does not want to hear.”
She returned to the table and stared at a line of small characters she had unconsciously drawn on the observation record during the day:
“Niu Xiantong’s ribs are arranged like a fan, similar to the bone flutes used by the Khitan Eagle Masters.”
This is the intrusive thinking of post-traumatic stress disorder—irrelevant images forcibly intrude, yet grimly reveal the essence: human bones can be turned into musical instruments, human loyalty can be turned into commodities, and the praises of a prosperous era can be played by countless such "bone flutes".
She lit another lamp and began to do something dangerous: to draw a comparative chart of the number of beheadings in all the victories reported in Youzhou over the past three years, the amount of silk bestowed by the court, and the time points of the Khitan "rebellion".
As the lines extended across the paper, a pattern emerged—Skinner's operant conditioning model was perfectly reflected: Zhang Shougui was always richly rewarded after each "great victory" (positive reinforcement), and even when he suffered minor defeats, he was never punished (negative reinforcement deficiency). This directly shaped his increasingly extravagant pattern of fabricating victories. And Emperor Xuanzong, the one sitting at the top of this reinforcement mechanism, could he really not see through it?
Perhaps the sage simply chose the strategy of cognitive miserliness—accepting simple narratives of victory was far less strenuous than dealing with complex frontier crises. And the entire bureaucratic system, including the Court of State Ceremonial, became complicit in this strategy.
Seven days later, Chancellor Li Linfu inspected the Court of State Ceremonial.
Zhen Xiaosi was ordered to present the newly compiled "Rituals for the Tribute of the Four Barbarian Tribes". As Li Linfu flipped through it, his fingertip paused on one page – it was a note she had secretly added, quoting an old system of Emperor Taizong: "Appease with trust, and control with sincerity".
"You greatly admire the reign of Emperor Taizong?" Li Linfu's voice was devoid of emotion.
She lowered her head: "In my opinion, the key to a system is its consistency."
The prime minister laughed, a laugh that held a sharp, icy insight: "During Emperor Taizong's reign, the national treasury didn't have enough silk to cover the entire Longyou region. Now, if we bestow a single gift upon the Uyghurs, we could wrap the entire Yinshan Mountains in silk." He closed the ceremonial cabinet. "Registrar Zhen, do you know why the walls of the Court of State Ceremonial are so thick?"
She shook her head.
“Because outside the wall is the real world. And our duty,” he patted the ceremonial book, “is to ensure that those inside the wall never have to hear the whispers of the outside world.”
At that moment, Zhen Xiaosi completed her coming-of-age ceremony.
Not through marriage or official position, but through a thorough understanding of the role she was about to play: a patcher who used beautiful words to cover up a bloody reality. Niu Xiantong used flesh and blood to patch up the cracks in the frontier, and she and her colleagues will continue to patch up this prosperous age that has begun to bleed with parallel prose, auspicious illustrations, and songs of praise for foreign guests.
As she was leaving, she encountered the newly arrived foreign interpreter in the corridor, who was excitedly reciting, "The palace gates open to the heavens, and the officials of all nations bow before the emperor." The young man's eyes shone, as if he had seen the center of the world.
Zhen Xiaosi didn't tell him that this very morning, the Xi tribe delegation had once again submitted a letter accusing the Tang army of crossing the border and looting. And that letter was currently locked in the deepest drawer of her desk, waiting to be filed in a "frontier tribal affairs" dossier that would never be opened.
She touched the silver fish charm at her waist. The metal had been warmed by her body heat, but she knew that some things could never be warmed back—such as her faith in pure truth, and her expectation of a world that was simply black and white.
In the darkness of the night, countless windows of the Honglu Temple were lit, and under each lamp, someone was writing. They were writing reports of victory, lists of tributes, and edicts that the emperor would bestow upon the "loyal and obedient chieftains." The soft scratching of the pen against the paper blended together, like silkworms munching on mulberry leaves.
And Zhen Xiaosi finally understood the voice:
That is the empire slowly eroding its own conscience.
She picked up the lamp and walked deeper into the archives. There lay the work she had to complete that day—to delete the paragraph in Zhang Shougui's latest "Petition for Peace from the Khitan" that read, "Nieli gathered 50,000 cavalry," and rewrite it as, "The remnants have fled into the deep mountains and are no longer a threat."
As she put pen to paper, she recalled Niu Xiantong's dissected heart.
Perhaps from this day forward, with every lie she writes down, a small piece of her heart will be ripped out. Many years later, when she becomes the old official sitting on the veranda telling "stories" to newlyweds, her chest will be completely empty.
Meanwhile, high-ranking officials and generous salaries will continue their revelry in countless such empty spaces.