A week later
The Agrarian Zone bore little resemblance to either the choked thoroughfares of the Lower Ring or the indulgent grandeur of the Upper Ring. Its treasure lay not in marble or jade, but in its living abundance, an emerald jewel crowning the northern and barren parts of the war-torn Earth Kingdom.
Across horizons ruled by mountains and rivers stretched vast fields of gold and green. Villages nestled amid seas of wheat and barley, while herds of cattle ambled serenely between terraces heavy with ripening rice. For a girl raised on a diet drawn from the sea, Mayumi still found such lavish crops an astonishment. She wondered how many sweet confections might be baked from these endless stores of grain, which are luxuries on Kyoshi Island.
"Are we there yet?" Satchiko asked the White Scholar. The weight of scrolls and tomes in her pack pressed heavily against her shoulders. Though she controlled the complaint as Shan carries twice books and scrolls without as much without faltering. The scholar had insisted upon this journey, promising that their lessons required not only words, but walking. Their destination is a bustling build site beyond the Lower Ring's reach.
"The journey will take as long as it must," Shan replied evenly, his words suppressing the usual tinge of coldness and harshness reserved for those he deemed truly unforgivable. "Yours truly will not be outdone by the pedantic ilk of Earth Sages, men who drape themselves in wisdom and sagacity, yet never set foot beyond their cloisters."
In truth, Shan himself had likely never ventured past Ba Sing Se's outer walls. Yet for an Upper Ring scholar to tread even into the Agrarian Zone was uncommon, marking him apart from his peers who are more polished in etiquette than acquainted with the wider world. Still, Sachiko wondered what hidden lesson awaited them, and what errand her sister was delegated, for Mayumi too is among their company.
"Here," Mayumi said, offering her sister a modest ball of rice.
Satchiko cradled it carefully. Though rice is very abundant here, she still handled it with the reverence of one accustomed to scarcity. Glancing ahead, she spied Shan, burdened by his chest and satchel of books, yet walking with unbending composure.
"Aren't you going to eat as well?" she asked, hoping to soften his sternness with a spark of camaraderie. But Shan's hand remained firmly upon the wooden chest at his side, his silence heavier than his baggage.
"Did you commit the Earthbending scroll to memory?" he asked at last, not breaking stride.
"Y-yes," Satchiko answered reluctantly. Though a seasoned Kyoshi Warrior, she found Earthbending an alien discipline. Her movements clumsy, as if she were a child learning to walk. Without her familiar metal fans, she felt unbalanced, one of which is still lost amid the chaos at Hao Jing.
To soothe her unease, she let her gaze wander to the rice paddies that unfurled like mirrors of the sky. Farmers waded barefoot in the water, tending shoots with patient hands. Tiny fish flickered between the stalks, their presence nourishing both soil and crop. A simple, perfect harmony of nature.
Yet even in such harmony, disputes brewed. Mayumi had once said that Ba Sing Se knew no wars. But within its mighty bastions, conflicts of another sort are ever waiting to be sown.
Thus, Shan's lesson began.
"When a king secures peace for his realm, how should he reward the lords and nobles who fought at his side?" The White Scholar's fan flicked lazily as he tested his pupil.
Satchiko, caught unprepared, scrambled to conjure a passable reply.
"Wealth," she answered at last, with the practical certainty of one schooled by experience in Hao Jing. To her mind, even the most foolish ruler may keep his throne if he proves generous to those beneath him. In most cases, coin speaks louder than virtue.
Their journey carried them along the boundless sea of rice paddies. Farmers stooped in the water, their bare feet sunk into the soil as they tended the fields. Yet the quiet rhythm of labor was broken by a disturbance. Voices, shouts, the dull roar of many hands at work.
At Shan's command, the three of them halted. Mayumi unburdened herself of their luggage as the White Scholar instructed the pupil to turn her eyes toward the commotion.
Not far from the path, a massive canal is being carved into the earth. Earthbenders, their motions precise as chisels, gouged trenches that ordinary workers hurried to shape and reinforce. The project is immense, extending across the wide, undeveloped reaches of the Agrarian Zone. Perhaps no other state in these chaotic times could hope to match such an undertaking with spare manpower and resources that would have otherwise been spent on wars.
Shan spoke only briefly of the great canal works that had been underway for many years, for irrigation lay far beyond the sphere of his expertise. Yet it is widely held that once completed, this vast project would transform Ba Sing Se's agrarian heartland, conjuring new fields of abundance capable of sustaining millions more mouths. Though the undertaking drained coffers and consumed labor without mercy, the discerning eye would perceive in it more than mere husbandry of the soil. For such bounty promised not only fuller granaries, but also the swelling of an army already so colossal that it dwarfed the other armies of the northern Earth Kingdom states just beyond the walls.
"To the state, the completion of this great enterprise will no doubt prove beneficial," Shan lectured, fanning himself languidly.
Satchiko struggled to grasp the staggering logistics of assembling such a multitude of laborers, overseers, and planners for a work so deceptively simple, yet in truth labyrinthine in its complications.
"But," Shan continued. "There will always be those who resist new measures, even when such measures promise prosperity for the masses."
The student cast a hesitant glance toward the scholar, uncertain how to reconcile his apparent cynicism with the promise of progress. Shan, perceiving her doubt, chose to expand upon the lesson he had imparted previously. He pressed her toward a broader understanding, reminding her of what he deemed the gravest of errors committed by Earth Kingdom rulers of old. Errors whose poisonous roots still entangled the realm, leaving it wracked by ceaseless war and fractured by hereditary patrimonies that mocked the dream of peace and harmony.
"If there is one lesson I would have you carry for life," Shan intoned solemnly. "It is that the scourge of countless avoidable sufferings in our nation can be traced to a single inalienable tradition. The practice of Enfeoffment. Since the most ancient of eras, even before the days of the first Earth Sage, sovereigns parceled out fiefs to nobles, seeds that sprouted inevitably into rivalries, wars, and rebellion. Too often have decrepit sages excused this practice, feigning blindness to its ruinous harvest. In their folly, most rulers comforted themselves with the illusion that shared bloodlines might nullify discord, that idealized kinship alone could guarantee harmony. The most barbaric and horrific wars across history are the consequences of their childish ideals. From them sprang the progenitors of civil wars, of weak and inept rule. And it remains a bitter truth that those nepotists suffered least, even as the masses groaned beneath the weight of their errors. Yours truly considers this grave mishap an injustice that endures still beneath the heavens."
To illustrate his conviction, the legalist scholar took a detour from lecture to spectacle. With Mayumi serving as their vigilant escort, they arrived at a site where construction had come to a jarring halt. The place bore little sign of progress, no ordered labor and no steady rhythm of tools. There are only the discordant shouts and furious cries of men embroiled in quarrel.
"What is happening here?" Satchiko asked, bewildered.
Two different parties are soon identified. On one side is the canal's laborers and supervising officials. On the other, a band of armed soldiers, conspicuously lacking the insignia of Ba Sing Se's golden coin.
"The Ximen family," Mayumi muttered darkly, her eyes narrowing at the sight of purple banners.
Some three hundred soldiers, sworn to the Ximen household, had descended upon the works to obstruct progress. Their claim was that the canal, in its present course would encroach upon lands tethered to the family's holdings in the Agrarian Zone. Though the channel had not yet trespassed upon the Ximen fief itself, its direction left little doubt that such infringement was imminent.
"Outrageous!" cried one of the supervising officials, who railed at the interlopers with venom. Unlike the local workers under his charge, his curses spat in a dialect foreign to the city, but familiar enough to convey the insults. "Those who obstruct this construction defy the will of the city itself, and they shall answer for it!"
Yet the soldiers' captain remained unmoved. He demanded that the engineers alter their designs, bending the canal away from the Ximen fief. What he presented as a simple redirection was in truth a demand of staggering impracticality, one that would consume immense resources and delay the project indefinitely. This minor dispute has certainly placed the city's ambition at the mercy of parochial privilege.
Perhaps emboldened by the gravity of the irrigation project, the supervising official rallied the laborers, who seized their shovels, mallets and pickaxes with newfound defiance. Together they challenged the Ximen clan's private soldiers, who dared to obstruct the work that could reasonably alter the very course of Earth Kingdom history.
Or in more simple words for the regular folks, delay meant scrutiny for the official and withheld wages for the workers.
Steel soon gleamed in the sun as both sides brandished their weapons. The Ximen soldiers leveled their spears, sensing the threat of open conflict. Already, bricks and stones flew across the field. One stray projectile whistled past Shan's face, with him simply lean aside with the usual nonchalant expression.
"Observe, pupil," Shan said, using the paper fan to gesture toward the fray in hopes that Satchiko grasped the importance of this lesson. "The state and patrimonial lords are rivals, though the latter should in principle bow to the former. To serve the masses does not mean to ignore the nepotists who gnaw at the roots of order. Many rulers throughout history failed to learn this. Tragically, even the Avatars who ought to know better, have too often turned a blind eye as a result of their own flawed favoritism. Here we are, still living in their consequences."
Satchiko's gaze lingered on the confrontation, watching the tension swell. Just as the clash threatened to erupt into bloodshed, a detachment of light cavalry thundered onto the scene. Soldiers of the city's official garrison were dispatched to quell the rising tumult. Yet their arrival did little to erase the reality. A substantial portion of the Agrarian Zone lay firmly under the dominion of the Ximen family, a fact that would dog this irrigation effort at every step.
"You must have witnessed worse beyond the city walls," Shan remarked evenly, testing her perception. "Out there, patrimonial fiefdoms and petty kingdoms rule even more unchecked than here, far greater in scale than the Ximen family's petty domain. You can surely attest to their severity."
"I saw a governor slain," Satchiko admitted softly, though omitting her shameful attempt of retreating during the siege of Hao Jing. She had yet to reconcile that moment when her courage faltered, leaving innocents to die without the privilege of escape. "Not by invaders, but by one of his own lords."
She now remembered that the one who slew the governor was also an in-law, affirming Shan's bleak outlook towards using familial ties as a guarantor of peace.
Satchiko spoke also of the ghastly carnage between Jian Xin and Xiao Zhong. Fields thick with corpses, earth soaked and darkened by blood. Though strangely the grass was very green despite the surrounding deserts near the battlefields.
Shan, ever composed, remained unmoved by these vivid descriptions. He is after all a scholar whose philosophy dismissed notions of innate goodness long extolled by the Earth Sages.
"As expected," Shan replied coldly. "All the ruin you have witnessed stems from the sin of enfeoffment. Granting fiefs against the principle of central authority inevitably festers into squabbling states and ceaseless wars. To believe otherwise is childish."
He turned back to the confrontation, where the city's soldiers struggled to restrain the hostility, nearly dragged into combat with the Ximen men, whose purple plum insignia marked their allegiance.
"If I am in my mentor's place," Shan muttered with a trace of bitterness. "My methods would be far less subtle."
Satchiko did not dare to ask what he meant. What mattered is the lesson. To divide authority into patrimonial hands is both impractical and morally corrosive. Such indulgence destabilized the realm, plunging millions into famine and war.
"The realm is scarred by the incompetence of those who came before," Shan observed coolly, recognizing that today's standoff is but a pale reflection of the chaos raging across the fractured realm. "Yet circumstances are not immutable. Yours truly holds that merit must outweigh birthright, whether in kings or in Avatars."
"Y-yes," Satchiko agreed hesitantly. Rarely did he sound so approachable. She too believed that even the privileged must prove themselves by merit. Though she revered the Avatar as a Kyoshi Warrior, she admitted it is reasonable to weigh that sacred mantle against the same standard demanded of rulers, which is to serve the people and preserve the peace.
But Shan had a second purpose in this excursion. To remedy her lack of Earthbending skill, a weakness unusual for her age. He resolved to dirty his robe by visiting a construction site. Since the great walls of Ba Sing Se had long been raised, the next best example lay in the canal builders, whose bending shaped waterways and carved the earth into arteries of life. There, she would see how Earthbending itself could transform society, altering the fate of civilizations even.
Before their arrival, Shan had briefly recounted a tale from the mists of myth, the story of a sovereign whose deeds transcended even the annals of ancient time. In that primordial age, when floods raged unchecked and the world knew no dynasties, there arose a mighty Earthbender. He bent not just stone alone, but the very will of rivers. With patient strength he tamed the waters, redirecting their fury until the drowned marshlands yielded to fertile fields. From that rebirth of soil and harvest sprang the first glimmers of civilization, long before the founding of the Earth Kingdom's earliest dynasties.
Such lessons are daunting for Satchiko at first. She is no expert in grand histories or the intricate ways how bending can influence the entire trajectory of civilizations. Yet the chance to witness seasoned Earthbenders sculpt the land and to partake of a meager meal at the site is not an unwelcome arrangement.
"Takeko," Shan addressed brusquely. "You know the location to which I want the items delivered?"
Mayumi nodded, though puzzled. The White Scholar care intently about a wooden chest bound for some discreet corner of the Agrarian Zone. His insistence on secrecy suggested this task mattered far more to him than the entire ordeal with the Ganjinese.