It was not difficult to take my possessions up to the house Bailian had lent me. Natsuki simply dropped everything into her sleeves, then teleported us both there, and finally pulled everything from her sleeves. Everything— by this I mean some books and notebooks, and some small utensils and tools. I hardly needed any of the old rotting furniture.

I slept on a fluffy bed that night, but I was so beset by doubts that I could not sleep well.

The next day I woke up late and made my way down to the sect entrance. As soon as I stepped through the Gate of Glory, several outer sect disciples began crowding around me, offering me little pouches filled with spirit stones and elixirs.

"I once borrowed a spirit stone from you, Senior..."

"Sister Wu Meiyao wishes to repay this debt to you..."

"This is a gift for the kindness you showed me not long ago..."

I rubbed my temples. I could not remember most of their names or faces. Honestly, I hardly cared anymore. I silently took their offerings in my hands and walked past them, down the stairs to the outer sect grounds.

I was not planning to cut firewood— no, I did not need to anymore— but rather to head down to the city. After all, I still had some preparation to do before heading off to the Imperial University. When I reached the entry gate, I mounted my swordboard and flew off towards the city.

—If it were not for the eyes of all the disciples now watching me attentively, I would have simply asked Natsuki to take me down to the city.

Some minutes later I landed in a field by the edge of the city— one of the fields where Xiaolan liked to take naps, though he was not there today. I dismounted and called out, "Natsuki."

I felt her presence behind me.

"Where are you planning to go today?"

I turned around. She was looking back at me, her head tilted to the side.

"The library. I need to brush up on my classics, so I can do well on the entrance exam for the Imperial University. Natsuki, you should come too. The library is a nice place."

She nodded. "I am actually quite interested in what your libraries are like. I have not visited any libraries in the age before mechanized printing. And yet I must. Only by clawing through the waves of history can one form a complete understanding of truth."

"Wait, mechanized printing? What's that?"

"Ah, well, you see... several centuries hence, in Hubei Province, an inventor named Bi Sheng..."

----------------------------------------

We entered the library, a small but ornate building in the shadow of the Alchemist's Tower. Past the entrance was only a lobby staffed by one receptionist, behind whom was the door to the library proper.

"Can you show me your identification?" the receptionist asked when we went up to him.

I reached deep into my robes and pulled out my Bai family token. I did not like showing people this token. I always felt like I did not deserve to carry it. But the Phantom Orchid Sect was detached from the civilian world, so my sect token carried no weight here in this civilian library. On the other hand, the Bai family— like all great families— had one foot in the civilian world and one foot in the cultivation world. So of the two tokens I carried, only this latter served as civilian identification.

The receptionist turned his gaze to Natsuki, utterly unaffected by her unusual appearance. "And what about your identification?"

I suddenly realized that I had made a grave— no, rather a fairly minor— mistake! I could not get Natsuki into the library as "my guest". Regulations mattered more than relations in the civilian world! Here at the city library, everyone needed civilian identification recognized by the city. But Natsuki had not procured any civilian identification from the city of Kangtian. In the first place, since she was a "foreigner", she would need to have papers from the border provinces or from the Imperial Court in order to get temporary identification from the city. But of course she didn't have that! What a pain!

"Identification...? To enter a library?" Frowning, Natsuki reached into the sleeve of her robes and pulled out an unfamiliar token. "Does this suffice?"

The receptionist scanned the token. "You're a guest of the Alchemist's Tower? I suppose that's fine." He opened a small gate and let us pass.

"Where did you get that?" I whispered to Natsuki.

"A few days before Feixing's negotiations with the sect were finalized, I "left" the sect and told them I would be staying in the city for some time. She gave me the token then."

We stepped into the library proper. Natsuki turned her gaze upwards and frowned. "I thought there might be a trick involved, but this building really only is four meters tall."

I flinched. "...How tall did you expect it to be?"

"...Twenty meters, maybe?"

I put a hand to my head.

"That's like... as tall as City Hall..."

"Since this building is only four meters tall, there must be something to compensate, no? In the yet-unborn Eternal Mittelland of Laoghairíocht, I visited a library with an infinitely-descending spiral staircase, so deep that not even that land's so-called God-Emperor knew its extents. Do you have something like this?"

I put my other hand to my head. The outside world was a bit more extreme than I had expected.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

"This is just... a normal single-story building."

"I see," she said flatly, though I could hear a twinge of disappointment in her voice.

I sighed and shook my head. "Well, at the least, you should be able to enjoy some of the books. "

"Of course. A library is by its essence a repository of knowledge, regardless of its size."

So we wandered down to the classics section of the library, and I pulled out a dusty old book on Confucianism that I had heard about from Professor Jibeidi once before. I sat down at a table and began reading, and after a few minutes, I noticed that Natsuki was still hovering restlessly around the same set of shelves.

"...Are you looking for something?" I asked slowly.

"Yes. I have heard that the Analects serve as a critical foundational text to this land's governance. Thus, if I wish to fully comprehend the truths of this land, I must read this book and its contemporary analyses. However, I cannot figure out how these shelves are ordered..."

"Oh, nowadays they're ordered by radical. For the Analects, it would be the speech radical, so start from the number seven." I stood up and looked through the section on Confucian texts, and sure enough, found several copies of the Analects sitting on a high shelf. I reached for them, but I was just a few inches too short. My hands could not reach the books.

"I'll get the ladder," I chuckled sheepishly.

"You need not."

Natsuki reached up and, between her index finger and thumb, plucked the newest-looking copy of the Analects from the shelf— and only then did I finally notice that she was, and always had been, a few inches taller than me.

She turned to me with an eyebrow raised. "You could have pulled it down with your qi. It would not have been particularly difficult."

"Oh, uh— you're not supposed to use qi in civilian buildings. It's not allowed under the imperial regulations."

She raised her other eyebrow.

"How peculiar it is that you would require regulations for this. Well, I suppose the cultivators east of Altyn-Tagh are a particularly contentious people."

"Uh..." I was not sure how to respond to this. "Sorry..."

She laughed, for just a moment, and then sat down with her book.

As did I with mine.

The most elementary premise of Confucianism is asymmetrical reciprocity. The parents raise the child, and the child shows filial piety to the parents. Even in this relation where one party is higher in the hierarchy, both parties have duties to each other that they must carry out. This is the atomic dynamic at the heart of Confucianism. This dynamic spreads to every relation that occurs in the world— to the relation between teacher and student, government and civilian, emperor and minister, heavens and earth. Both parties have a role to serve, and only when they both serve their role does the relation function.

Confucianism is not fundamentally a theory of politics or a theory of sociology, though it is often applied to one of these two domains. It is a theory of relations, not necessarily even between humans, but between actors in a hierarchy, between superior and inferior. This is its most fundamental characteristic: it is hierarchical.

Perhaps, then, the logic of Confucianism would not apply to relations in a non-hierarchical grouping of actors. But this is no more than a theoretical fancy. Hierarchy is universal. In the civilian world there is noble and peasant, in the cultivation world there is inner sect and outer sect, and in nature there is predator and prey. If hierarchy is universal, then Confucianism is universal. That is why it is not wrong to say that Confucianism applies to the entire world.

The question we must ask of Confucianism, then, is not whether or not it applies— it always does!— but whether or not it is the best theory. It is a universal tool, yes, but precisely because it is universal, does it not run the risk of lacking the specificity that another model might provide? For a long time I have doubted— you can guess why— what happens when the reciprocity that Confucianism preaches fails to take shape, when the emperor abuses the people, or when the parents do not take care of the child. Obviously such actions lead to dysfunctional relations, but what is the corrective response? How do you fix it?

This was not the express topic of the book I was reading, which was a commentary on how government officials responded to various famines caused by weather and plague. It is, of course, the duty of the government to help the people in such times. But sometimes the local officials are corrupt, and sometimes even the ruling emperor is uncaring, and in such cases there is little recourse for those who starve— all one can do is bemoan the failure of the government to serve its duty.

"Natsuki," I whispered, and she looked up from her book, the white halo in her eyes ever-bright. "Natsuki, in the places you've been to, what did people do when their emperors were bad rulers?"

"Emperor?" She tilted her head to the side. "In most of the lands I have visited, there were no emperors, not in any meaningful sense. There were people, and there were armies, and they fought, and perhaps for a few moments one dominated the other, and for those brief moments alone something other than death was allowed to grow upon the earth of those lands. The exception would be... yes, Laoghairíocht, where a child of man wielded the gods' power to unify the land, and by means of that power maintained something like eternal rule. So I will answer a more general question thus: when your rulers dissatisfy you, you must wield your power to kill them, and if you wish to rule, you must wield your power to make submit your subjects. The law of might. Tenka-fubu.* This is, regrettably, the one and only law of nature, and it is the only law that describes what happens when societies fail."

I rubbed my forehead. Her words were logically unimpugnable, but I nonetheless felt a sense of unease about them that I could not figure out how to dispel. Perhaps it was because her words contradicted the reciprocity of Confucianism. Under her understanding, the weaker entity in the relation might owe a duty to the stronger, by virtue of being weaker. But what about the other way around?

"What about the duty that rulers owe to their subjects?"

Natsuki shook her head.

"Rulers owe no duties to their subjects. The only duty they owe is to themselves— to rule in such a way that their subjects do not kill them. After all, there is no power greater than that of numerical force, and the weak are blessed in nothing if not numbers."

I turned these words over and back. You could say that these words explained why a superior might wish to adopt Confucianism, whether in reality or in name only. If they carried out some semblance of duty to their inferiors, and could persuade their inferiors that their domination was thereby justified, then they could ensure that their inferiors would not rebel against them. It was, in a way, a proposed genealogy of Confucianism.

"But what about cases where the inferiors don't have any power? Like in the relation between parent and child?"

Natsuki shrugged.

"I am not sufficiently familiar with human family relations, so I cannot give any specific answers to your doubts. All I can say is that you must keep in mind that power is not only a matter of physical strength. The greatest power your family wields over you is your own sense of filial piety, and the greatest power you wield over them is the fact that you carry their name."

She turned her gaze back to her book, and I to mine.