Chapter 1: Born Guilty

In the eighth year of the Jinghe reign of Great Zhou, winter, the second month. The first snow.

In a side room of the Wei residence in the capital, Wei Nisheng set down his brush and rubbed his reddened fingers. The ink on the paper before him had yet to dry.

Frost crowns the roof of the noble Wei,
Two sons of one mother, kept far away.
The elder holds jade books in halls on high,
The younger drinks leftover broth and sleeps on a bed of ice.

If word got out that a ten-year-old had written something like that, people would call him scheming and ungrateful. But if he hadn’t written verses like it years ago, letting the household’s gossiping servants repeat them until they spread beyond the residence, he might not even have been able to keep this room in peace.

Wei Nisheng was not from this world.

In his previous life, he had held a doctorate in Chinese language and literature and been the youngest candidate for a place among the academicians of the Academy of Social Sciences. He had worked himself to death pursuing that position, on the very day before the candidates were announced.

When he opened his eyes again, he was the supposedly stillborn younger twin of the Wei family, a respected noble house of Great Zhou.

His elder brother had arrived safely. Nisheng had come feet first, causing their mother to bleed to death.

His grandfather Wei Zheng, a member of the Grand Secretariat, had been overjoyed to hear he had two legitimate grandsons. Then came the news that his daughter-in-law was dead and the younger child stillborn. The shock of such joy followed by such grief brought on a stroke. He died the same day he was carried home.

His mother and grandfather, both gone in a single day. Then Nisheng had come back to life, and suddenly he was the ill-starred child who had traded their lives for his own.

Barely drawing breath, he had heard his own father say to him, “Born the wrong way, bringing death to your mother and kin. Nisheng… Born backward. Better never born.”

Guilty from the moment he entered the world, he was given the name Nisheng—Born Backward. As it happened, it was exactly the same name he had borne in his previous life.

At least he was a legitimate second son, unlike some transmigrators who ended up born to concubines. Otherwise, with a grandfather in the Grand Secretariat dead on the day of his birth, he would surely have been dashed to death then and there.

Being spared only to be hated by the whole family wasn’t much better. As soon as he was old enough to hold a brush, Nisheng had begun finding ways to protect himself. Those catchy little verses made the Wei family, so proud of its dignity and propriety, exercise some restraint. It would sound terrible if word got out that they mistreated a legitimate son of their own blood.

His winter clothes were thin, but at least they were clean. His meals were plain, but they kept him from starving. That was all.

……

“Good thing I transmigrated,” Nisheng murmured. “An ordinary child given a few lessons and then left in this courtyard for ten years would have been ruined long ago.”

He tucked his hands into his sleeves and looked out the window. The first snow of the year was light, fine flakes settling in a thin layer on the lattice.

By rights, he should have had the monthly allowance of charcoal fragments in his room. But rules were one thing; the people carrying them out could always make a little “mistake.”

“Shorted again, I suppose…”

He picked up his brush and used the half dish of ink to continue writing on the small sheet. His ten-year-old hand still lacked strength, but there was already some character to his strokes. Before long, the Chinese character for Zhou stood neatly on the page in standard script.

It had taken half an hour of practice every day, without fail, to go from barely holding a brush to producing passable standard script. At three, his hands had been too small to grip one, so he had traced characters in sand with a twig. Only four years later did he get paper and brushes, though the paper was the cheapest rough kind and the ink watered down. He hadn’t minded.

Calligraphy was essential. He had understood that early on, especially after his tutor explained that the appearance of an examination paper was the first hurdle in Great Zhou’s civil service exams. A stray mistake or two in an otherwise excellent essay could lower its grade or disqualify it outright. If the handwriting was poor, an examiner might not even bother reading it. Nisheng had grown used to simplified characters in his previous life; brush writing had to be learned from scratch.

The character he had written, Zhou, was the name of the dynasty he lived in. He had learned what little he knew of it at four, when he and his brother began their lessons and their tutor taught them the history of the present dynasty.

Great Zhou’s name meant that the cycle began anew and opened a new era. Its imperial house bore the surname Jiang; more than a century had passed since its founding, and five generations had ruled.

Nisheng knew no such dynasty from his former life, but its founding emperor had been formidable. He raised an army in the year Zhu Wen usurped the Tang throne. Fighting south first, then north, he destroyed Later Liang, pacified Jiangnan, and dealt with the regional military governors one by one.

In the hard-fought campaign to establish his dynasty, he routed the eighty thousand Khitan horsemen of the Liao founder, Yelü Abaoji, who died on the retreat. Abaoji’s successor, Yelü Deguang, meekly submitted and withdrew to the grasslands.

Sixteen years after raising his army, the founder took the throne. He adopted Jianwu as his reign name, made Nanjing his capital, and founded Great Zhou.

How large was Great Zhou? His tutor had been too busy praising the founder to say, and Nisheng hadn’t set foot outside the Wei residence in ten years. How the hell would he know?

The door creaked open. A gust swept in, making him shiver.

The visitor was Wei An, a former study attendant to whom his grandfather had granted the family surname. In his forties, slightly stooped, he had a face as stiff as old wood. Standing in the doorway, he glanced first at the gaps in the window, then paused over Nisheng’s noticeably thin winter clothes, before looking at the paper on the desk.

He didn’t read the poem. He stepped forward, crumpled the paper and tucked it inside his robe.

“Second Young Master, the master wants you in the ancestral hall.”

Nisheng’s heart skipped. “In this snow? The ancestral hall?”

Wei An had already turned to take a half-worn cloak from the rack. He shook it open, draped it over Nisheng’s shoulders, and stepped back to wait by the door.

Nisheng asked no more. Pulling the cloak close, he followed him out.

……

The moment they stepped outside, snow brushed cool against his face.

“It really is cold today, isn’t it, Uncle Wei?”

“Second Young Master, don’t drive yourself so hard practicing in this weather. Your hands are half frozen.”

Nisheng smiled, then looked at Wei An’s back and felt a pang.

He remembered little of what had happened ten years ago. He had just arrived in this world, and as an infant he’d spent most of his time in a haze. Only later, from the private chatter of servants bound to the household for life, had he pieced the story together.

His father had loathed him but couldn’t openly act against him. Instead, he had quietly let it be known that no one was to feed the baby. No servant had dared.

It was Wei An who had saved him. The study attendant had served his grandfather for most of his life, been granted the family surname and freed from his bond long before. Carrying the old master’s spirit tablet, he had stormed into the main hall, knelt before Nisheng’s father and held it high.

“When the old master heard that a second legitimate grandson had been born to continue the line of his eldest son, who died young, he was overjoyed! Then he was told the child was stillborn, and grief took him!

“The old master has scarcely passed, and now you would starve his legitimate grandson—the heir who would carry on the eldest young master’s line?

“If you allow your own legitimate son to starve today, all the capital will be saying tomorrow that the new head of the Wei family could not tolerate his dead brother’s orphan, that he has neither virtue nor decency! The old master’s lifelong reputation for integrity will be destroyed by an unfilial son who has no love for his own brother!”

The words had struck like thunder. Nisheng’s father, caught between the family’s reputation and his duties to father and brother, had reportedly turned green. But Wei An was the only trusted servant his father had freed and granted the Wei surname, a man treated almost as family. He couldn’t touch him. In the end, he had swept out of the hall.

That was how Nisheng’s life had been saved.

Wei An had thoroughly offended his father in the process. Before long, he was sent from the main courtyard to this one, ostensibly to look after the second young master, but really to share his exile.

He had never been a man of many words. Yet every winter, old strips of cloth mysteriously appeared in the gaps around Nisheng’s window. His winter clothes were thin, but each year they were an inch longer than the last.

Wei An said nothing about any of it. Nisheng knew all the same. In the whole vast Wei residence, he was the only person who truly treated him well.

“Second Young Master.”

Wei An stopped and turned. The sky was gray, and snow clung unmelted to his graying temples.

“It’s cold. Let’s walk faster.”

Nisheng paused, then nodded. He pulled the cloak tighter and quickened his pace.

He couldn’t imagine why his father had suddenly summoned him to the ancestral hall in the snow. But it couldn’t be good.