Title Fourteenth Year of Chenghua (Tome 2).docx ✅

1 The Fourteenth Year of Chenghua (Tome 2) Written by Meng Xi Shi Original Chinese work (c) 2014-2015 Unofficial translation (c) 12/21/2020 - 01/14/2022 by Huang “Chichi” Zhifeng Both versions are protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Reposts are not permitted in any capacity. (No, not anywhere, no matter who you are, and no matter what you think you’re doing.) If you have found this translation anywhere except chichilations.home.blog, ko- fi.com/chichilations, or the huangzhifengtheosprey Google Drive, it has been stolen. There is absolutely no authorization for it to be posted anywhere else, especially not any site that charges money for access to those translations or has ads. I have never required payment to access any translations that I do, nor have I ever claimed ad revenue. Anyone else claiming my translation as theirs is fraudulent. Check the dates, eh? If you’re going to steal a translation, steal it from a machine. They don’t have feelings. Stealing from an anonymous bird on the internet is pretty… yeah. The original work was published on jjwxc. This translation was published originally on Wordpress. Translator Contact Information chichilations.home.blog ~ ko-fi.com/chichilations ~ [email protected] The blog is the source site, and the ko-fi has plans for further translations, though it’s a space solely for my original works, otherwise. Please send any inquiries, bug reports, typos, etc. regarding the translation to my email. Also let me know if anyone has reuploaded this translation elsewhere, especially if they’re redistributing it in epub/pdf format; I can and have dealt with them before, I’ll do it again. Ancient Chinese Units of Measurements, for your reading convenience shichen: one of the 12 two-hour time periods ancient Chinese folks used instead of hours cun: equivalent to 3⅓ cm li: equivalent to ½ a km chi: equivalent to ⅓ m zhang: equivalent to 3⅓ m catty: equivalent to 604.79g tael: equivalent to 37.8g Translator’s Foreword Welcome to the fanmade translation of The Fourteenth Year of Chenghua! This was originally an EPUB. I retired those originally, hoping that would prompt more official ebooks and translations. That didn’t quite go as planned, so now I made them hard to copy. Lessons learned, yadda yadda yadda. It’s not perfect, is less interactive than the blog (I like seeing comments :( ), and is missing
2 translator/author notes (for now), but GDocs does prevent copying and downloading. It’s the most I can do. (Don’t request edit access. Those emails go straight to the trash.) FYC is too massive for GDocs to handle, so I had to split it into four ‘Tomes’. Why did I name them Tomes instead of Parts? Because my name’s Chichi and the definition of chichi is ‘pretentious and overelaborate refinement’. That’s your explanation, bye. Here is a content warning for the whole book: pretty much every arc involves one or more dead bodies, so you can imagine the details surrounding it are not pleasant, and this time period is rife with sexism and double-standards. Be sure to buy the work from JJWXC, or donate directly to the author. If you lack in money, you can still contribute to the author’s works by viewing all the chapters that you can, liking everything, giving high ratings, and commenting (in Chinese only, or it’ll be auto-deleted). This helps their algorithms on jjwxc. It’s free to do this, so please do. JJWXC Raws — In-Depth English JJWXC-buying Guide
3 The Case of the Ancient Coffin in Luo River 59: Wanting to Run Away From Home Henan was the birthplace of the Yin-Shang Dynasty, and had been basking in glory since time immemorial. After the Great Ancestor of Song, Zhao Kuangyin, had selected Kaifeng as the capital, Henan had turned into the unmatched heart of the realm. All the Emperors of Northern Song had been buried there in sum. However, in the wake of Song moving down South, Henan’s former status had also incrementally declined. Following the invasion of the Jin people, it then had been the armored Mongolian cavalry’s turn to tread upon the Central Plains. The wheels of history had rolled onward, the commonfolk had suffered the fires of war over and over again, and by the time the Great Ancestor of this Dynasty had obtained the realm, over a hundred years had passed. Back when the Great Ancestor had passed through Gong County, where the hostilities had just been settled, he had discovered that the once-dignified Song Emperor burial mounds had been met with devastating destruction; almost every one of their surface constructions had been wrecked, the overgrown fields a full mess of broken stone carvings, their original figures long unable to be discerned. Among them, the tombs of the Gaozong, Xiaozong, and dual Emperors of Hui and Qin of Northern Song had been wantonly unearthed and damaged by the former Yuan Dynasty’s implicit compliance. There had been desolation that had stuck out for as far as could see, a tragedy no eyes could have endured. Purportedly, several Song Emperors had even had their bones dug up and burned, with innumerable treasures offered up to Yuan Emperor Kublai Khan to be used as ornaments in monasteries. In response to this, the Great Ancestor had ordered these excavated and plundered empty imperial tombs to be filled in once more, as well as repaired. Commoners had been prohibited from gathering resources there. He had also commanded the local government to arrange for defending citizen families for it, and waive taxes for them as seen fit — only that had held the trend of tomb raiding in check. However, this was an old matter from back at Ming’s founding. Since the imperial tombs were still present, there would always be thieves that would risk it for the sake of getting exorbitantly wealthy overnight. Even the tombs of Qin, whose exact locations were unknown, gave people ideas, to say nothing of the tombs of Song, whose locations were well-defined. However, what needed particular explanation was that the imperial tombs of Northern Song were a bit different from Dynasties prior. Prior to Tang, many tombs took on the style of not erecting monuments, instead being buried deep, the palaces placed underground. The most archetypal one was the tomb of the First Qin Emperor. Following the Han Dynasty, mausoleums had gradually come into fashion, because mountains were as tombs, and chiseling into one was considered hiding it. This style had officially manifested as a system in the Tang Dynasty, where its Emperors had pretty much all carved out their own mausoleums in the hidden depths of the mountains. In one aspect, it had looked rather impressive, and in another, it could lower the amount of grave robbers honoring them with their presence to the greatest extent. (Peoples’ wills were inexhaustible, so that latter function was basically null, of course.) Coming to Northern Song, they hadn’t done mountain mausoleums like the Tang Emperors on account of consideration to feng shui and geomancy; instead, they had picked out the hills
4 opposite Mount Song, which were up against the waters of the Luo in the North while also not being far from the Yellow River. Adding on to that, all the tombs of the first seven Emperors from before Song moved South were all located there, and not too far away from each other — for those with ill intent, robbing them was awfully convenient. Hence, despite there being defenders nearby, the Song tombs would still sporadically get plundered. Sans Yuan, past Dynasties that had obtained the realm had paid particular attention to defending the tombs of previous Emperors, and the present one was no exception. The Court plainly banned grave robbing, but its repeated prohibitions hadn’t stopped it, nor had its full scope ever been surveyed. For that reason, local authorities would arrest anyone after discovering them there, which prevented things from getting to an unmanageable plight. Recently, however, in Gong County where Song tombs were, something very odd and shocking had occurred. It was said that starting from a year ago, in the middle of every night, nearby commonfolk would hear bizarre sounds coming from the Eternal Deep and Eternal Shine tombs. At first, they had believed that it was just the wind, but when they had listened in close, it seemed to be the sound of sobs. Eternal Deep was the tomb of Song’s Yingzong Emperor, Zhao Shu, while Eternal Shine was that of Song’s Renzong Emperor, Zhao Zhen. Zhao Shu had been Zhao Zhen’s successor, but not his son by blood; since Zhao Zhen’s sons had all died by that time, Zhao Shu had to be chosen out of the imperial clan. None of that was important, though. The real question was: how could there be weeping in an Emperor’s tomb in the middle of the night? Song’s Emperors had all been dead for years, no filial descendants of theirs to be had for a long time. Even if there were still some, why would they choose to run out here in the middle of the night to mourn the dead? It had been utterly bizarre. The citizens of neighboring villages were responsible for moonlighting as tomb guards, so after hearing that wailing for several nights in a row, several villagers had gone to Eternal Deep to check things out. They had never come back. The village chief had then realized that something was wrong. While he had mobilized other villagers to go look for the missing people, he had also made a report to Gong County’s authorities, who had then been dispatched to search around, only to not find the missing people. The imperial tombs had been built on the shores of Luo; the authorities had guessed that these few might have accidentally fallen in when walking at night. With this conclusion drawn, the matter had been left up in the air. For a long time following this, that sobbing had not echoed out again, the village appearing to return to peacefulness. Aside from the few families whose relatives had died, everyone had gradually forgotten about the event. However, just half a year ago, that terrifying sobbing had showed up again, and even louder than before, vaguely paired with the sound of thunder. The village chief had dared not be too careless, so he had quickly reported to the authorities again. On account of last time, Gong County’s Magistrate had felt that the chief was making a big deal out of nothing; even though he hadn’t approved, since this involved imperial tombs, he’d had a few county bailiffs go see what was up in the village.