Three days' walk from Yangzhou, Li Yuan began to feel the shift in the landscape—not just in the physical sense, but in the spiritual.
Villages grew scarcer.
Rice fields lay abandoned, their stalks yellowing in the wind, with no one to harvest them.
The roads grew empty of merchants, but more and more marked by the footprints of soldiers and the ruts of war carts.
Li Yuan walked against the current of refugees still streaming up from the south. The faces he passed showed exhaustion, fear, and loss. They carried whatever they could—clothes, a little food, small children who cried without understanding why they had to leave home.
These are the faces of war before war begins, Li Yuan thought. The destruction that comes before the first sword is drawn.
That evening, Li Yuan came across a group unlike the usual refugees.
Four young men, raggedly dressed, hurried north. One of them was wounded, his left arm wrapped in a bloodstained bandage.
Li Yuan recognized the look in their eyes. Not the fear of refugees, but something else—shame. Shame mixed with relief, guilt mixed with gratitude.
Deserters, Li Yuan understood without asking.
When the group saw Li Yuan, they stopped, wary. Their hands moved toward their waists, though there were no weapons there—perhaps thrown away or left behind.
"Who are you?" asked the one who seemed to be their leader, a man of about twenty-five with a scar on his right cheek.
"Li Yuan. A wanderer."
"From where?"
"Yangzhou."
"Going where?"
Li Yuan glanced south, where a thin column of smoke was visible on the horizon. "To the front lines."
The four exchanged looks—difficult to read, somewhere between disbelief and… something else. Respect? Pity? Perhaps both.
"You're mad," said the wounded one. "Or very brave. I don't know which is worse."
Li Yuan smiled faintly. "Perhaps both."
"Why?" asked their leader. "Why go to the place everyone else is trying to avoid?"
Li Yuan sat on a large roadside stone and gestured to the space beside him. "Sit. You look tired."
After a moment's hesitation, the four men sat. Li Yuan took water and bread from his pack, handing it to them without a word.
"Thank you," said the wounded one, drinking greedily. "It's been two days since we've had a real meal."
"Where are you from?" Li Yuan asked.
Their leader—who introduced himself as Wang Tao—answered heavily.
"From a Lu army training camp. Three days ago… we ran."
"Why?"
Wang Tao looked down at his hands. "Because we were afraid. Because we didn't want to die for something we didn't understand. Because we…" He paused. "…because we were cowards."
The others lowered their heads, none disputing the words.
"They put us in the front ranks," Wang Tao continued. "Said it was a 'test of courage.' But we knew what it meant. We'd be the first to die when the battle began."
Li Yuan listened without judgment.
"Our commander said, 'You will die with honor for your homeland.' But that wounded one—his name is Xiao Bing—he's from my village. His mother's a widow. He's her only child. If he dies…"
Wang Tao trailed off, but Li Yuan understood.
"You feel guilty for running?" Li Yuan asked.
Xiao Bing nodded. "Very. Our friends are still there, preparing to… maybe die tomorrow or the next day. And we ran like cowards."
"But you also feel relieved."
"Yes," Wang Tao admitted plainly. "Relieved not to die for nothing, in some place we don't even know, for reasons we can't explain."
Li Yuan felt the torn hearts of these young men. They were not true soldiers—just farmers and craftsmen forced into war. They hadn't chosen this fight, but had been dragged into it. And when they chose to save themselves, guilt haunted them for leaving others behind.
"Wang Tao," Li Yuan said quietly, "may I ask you something?"
"Go ahead."
"If you had stayed in the front line and died in the first battle, who would benefit?"
Wang Tao thought for a moment. "No one, I suppose."
"Your families?"
"No. They'd only grieve."
"Your country?"
"Perhaps a little. But there are thousands of other soldiers."
"The enemy?"
"Perhaps worse for them—they'd have to waste resources killing us."
Li Yuan nodded. "Then who benefits if you live?"
The four were silent, thinking.
"Our families," Xiao Bing said at last. "My mother won't lose her only son."
"Our village," added Wang Tao. "After the war, it will need people to rebuild."
"The children we might have someday," said the third. "They could live in peace."
Li Yuan smiled. "Then why feel guilty for choosing life?"
The simple question was like opening a door that had been shut for years. They looked at one another, their expressions shifting—from shame and guilt toward… understanding.
"Because we were taught that dying in war is honorable," Wang Tao said slowly. "But never taught that living for peace might be more honorable still."
"But what about our friends still there?" asked Xiao Bing. "We left them."
Li Yuan looked south again, toward the thickening smoke.
"You can't save them by dying with them," he said. "But you might save them another way."
"What way?"
"By proving there's another choice besides killing or being killed. By living well after the war. By building something beautiful from the ruins."
Li Yuan stood and faced them.
"Wang Tao, do you know safe roads north?"
"There are a few. Why?"
"Because there will be more people like you—people who need a way out. And you can help them."
Wang Tao understood. "You want us to be… smugglers for other deserters?"
"I want you to be a bridge between those who choose war and those who choose life."
Xiao Bing's eyes brightened. "Helping others escape the military camps?"
"Helping others discover choices they didn't know they had."
The four fell silent, weighing the idea.
"But it's dangerous," Wang Tao said. "If we're caught…"
"Life is always dangerous," Li Yuan replied. "The question is not whether it's dangerous, but whether it's meaningful."
The sun was sinking as Li Yuan prepared to continue.
"Li Yuan," Wang Tao called after him. "Are you sure about going to the front? The situation there… it's not what you think."
"What's it like?"
The men exchanged a dark glance.
"The commanders on both sides," Xiao Bing said, "they're not ordinary men. They've mastered high-level martial arts. We saw their training… it was terrifying."
"How terrifying?"
"They can smash a boulder the size of a house with one strike. Leap higher than a tree. They can…" Wang Tao swallowed hard, "…make a man vanish, as if he never existed."
Li Yuan nodded, recalling Doctor Huang's story of Zhang Wei.
"And ordinary soldiers like us," Wang Tao went on, "we're just… grass under elephants' feet."
"That's why we ran," said the fourth man, who had been silent until now. "Not because we don't love our country. But because we don't want to be the grass trampled by elephants."
Li Yuan understood their fear. In this world, the gap between martial masters and ordinary people was a chasm no bridge could cross.
"Li Yuan," Wang Tao said, voice heavy with concern, "you're an ordinary man like us. At the front, you'll meet people who can kill hundreds with a single move. Why go?"
Li Yuan looked at their young faces—faces that reminded him of Mu Yi and Fan Tu from his childhood, innocent faces forced to face violence they hadn't chosen.
"That's exactly why I must go," he said. "Because there will be so many like you—ordinary people caught between the battles of giants. And when they're wounded, when they're dying, they'll need someone who sees them not as grass underfoot, but as human."
Wang Tao stood and bowed deeply.
"Li Yuan, we don't know who you really are. But today you've helped us see that choosing life is nothing to be ashamed of."
"And now we'll help others find that choice," Xiao Bing added.
Li Yuan smiled and returned the bow. "You are not cowards. You are people brave enough to choose the harder path—living in peace in a world that glorifies war."
Li Yuan continued on as the stars began to appear.
Behind him, the four deserters headed north with different steps—no longer burdened by shame, but walking with the purpose of helping others escape the madness.
Ahead, the smoke thickened, and faint sounds drifted to his ears—the clamor of military drills, the ring of weapons, the bark of commands.
Li Yuan walked on, the nine understandings in his Ganjing vibrating softly, readying themselves for the trials ahead.
Trials not just of healing the body, but of preserving humanity in the most inhuman of places.
That night, he camped in the ruins of a village long abandoned.
Before sleeping, he sat in the empty courtyard of a house, looking south to where the campfires of the armies glowed.
Tomorrow, he thought, I will meet the "elephants" Wang Tao spoke of—those with power to destroy hundreds in a single stroke.
But I will also meet the "grass"—the ordinary people like Wang Tao and Xiao Bing, trapped in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Li Yuan felt the weight of his responsibility—not to stop the war, for that was beyond him, but to make sure that amid the coming destruction, there was still space for humanity.
That there would still be places where people could die in peace, not in fear.
That there would still be someone to whisper: "It's alright. You've done enough. You can go home now."
Water flows to where it is most needed.
And now, that place was drawing ever nearer.
Li Yuan closed his eyes and let the silence of the night seal a decision that could no longer be undone.
Tomorrow, the road to the front lines would continue.
Toward where the new Zhang Weis were waiting.
Toward where humanity would be tested in the hottest fire.