PFC 015 Those who record the cracks often perish earlier than those who create them.
015 Those who record the cracks often perish earlier than those who create them.
Zhen Xiaosi first heard of Yueyang Tower not in Zhang Shuo's poem, but on the three-inch-long scar on his left arm.
In the autumn of the eighteenth year of the Kaiyuan era, Zhang Yue, appointed Right Feathered Forest General and acting Governor of Youzhou, encountered Khitan cavalry on his way to his post. At that time, he was only in his early forties, an age when he was "ambitious enough to abandon his pen for a noble title," and he led more than ten personal guards in a counterattack against the enemy lines. The scar on his face was left from that encounter. After the battle, he reorganized border affairs in Yingzhou and stayed in the villa of the Zhen family, a prominent local clan.
Zhen Xiaosi was fourteen years old that year. She was an orphan from a collateral branch of the Zhen clan. She was chosen to assist in handling documents for the tributary state because she was fluent in Tibetan. She remembered that when Zhang Yue changed the medicine for her wounds, he didn't even frown, but he sighed deeply while looking at a document on the table entitled "Request to Restore the Old System of the Prefectural Army".
"The general is afraid of pain?" She was transcribing a memorial for him, her pen still twirling.
Zhang Shuo shook his head, pointing to a line in the memorial: "What I'm afraid of is this—'Now that many of the garrison soldiers are recruited from the barbarians, I fear they will become a problem in the future.' If I submit this, how many people will I offend?"
She looked up at him. This man, known for his literary talent and romantic flair, now had a youthful stubbornness in his eyes: "But if we don't speak up, who will take responsibility if the border town becomes too powerful in ten years?"
That was the first time Zhen Xiaosi touched the cracks in the era. What she saw was not just the worries of a general, but also the futile attempt of an idealist to use his pen to mend the rifts in the foundation of the empire.
Love often begins with gazing at the same crack.
Three months later, Zhang Yue was summoned back to the capital. On the eve of his departure, he went to Zhen Xiaosi's small courtyard where she was organizing documents. The moonlight was as bright as silk, and he suddenly asked, "Do you know about Dongting Lake?"
She shook her head. Yingzhou was nothing but grasslands and sandstorms.
“That lake stretches for eight hundred miles, and the Yueyang Tower by its shore is on the verge of collapse.” Zhang said, gazing southward with a distant look in his eyes. “I have already requested to be transferred to the position of Prefect of Yuezhou. If His Majesty grants my request, I will rebuild that tower—not for climbing it and composing poems, but to build a ‘Border Affairs Pavilion’ on it, where maps of the nine border regions of the Tang Dynasty, the customs of the various barbarian tribes, and the strengths and weaknesses of the military garrisons will all be drawn, so that everyone who passes by can see how vast and fragile this empire is.”
He turned to her, his gaze intense: "Would you like to come with me? To take care of those books and documents for me."
Zhen Xiaosi's fingertips, stained with ink, were rubbed repeatedly on her sleeve. The fourteen-year-old girl didn't understand love, but she understood the meaning of being recognized and appreciated. Finally, she shook her head: "I'm from Yingzhou. I haven't even seen the cracks in Youyan yet, how dare I look at the world?"
Zhang laughed, a laugh that contained both admiration and regret. He unfastened the jade pendant from his waist—not the precious Lantian jade, but a grayish-white bone pendant engraved with a Khitan wolf totem.
“This was given to me by a Khitan boy before he died during that battle,” he said. “He spoke fluent Mandarin and said he wanted to go to Chang’an to see the peonies. Keep this jade pendant. If one day you want to see all the cracks clearly, wear it and come to Yueyang Tower to find me.”
What he gave her was not a token of love, but a promise: a promise that there were others in this world who, like her, were searching for cracks beneath the brocade of prosperity.
For the next ten years, Zhen Xiaosi never saw Zhang Shuo again, but she always lived in his shadow.
She heard that he had indeed rebuilt Yueyang Tower and inscribed the line "The mist rises from the Yunmeng Marsh, the waves shake Yueyang City" on it; she heard that he insisted on opening the "Border Affairs Pavilion" in the tower to collect maps from all directions; she also heard that he had submitted several memorials requesting "to divide the barbarian tribes to weaken their power and to relocate surrendered households to reform their customs"—the very strategy that Zhang Jiuling later reiterated and which Li Linfu criticized as "delaying".
In the twenty-fourth year of the Kaiyuan era, Zhang Yue died in office in Yuezhou. When the news reached Yingzhou, Zhen Xiaosi was translating a Xi tribe alliance document. She paused, then continued dipping her brush in ink until a tear fell on the four characters "never betray each other," blurring the character "yong" into a dark cloud.
She was twenty-four years old that year and decided to go to Chang'an.
Before leaving, she visited the valley where Zhang Shuo had been attacked years ago. As the autumn wind howled, she suddenly understood the profound meaning behind his construction of Yueyang Tower—it was not the elegance of a scholar, but the attempt of a politician from a frontier general to build a beacon in the heart of the empire: so that all those who were intoxicated by the illusion of a prosperous era could look up and see the true face of the frontier.
Unfortunately, those who can see the lighthouse often don't want to see what it illuminates.
Late at night in the third year of the Tianbao era, after Zhen Xiaosi broke down in tears in the archives of the Honglu Temple, she inexplicably found a copy of her privately kept "Preface to the Yueyang Tower Border Pavilion Picture Album".
That was Zhang Shuo's manuscript, the handwriting vigorous and powerful like a spear:
"...Now, the nine border towns harbor over 100,000 barbarian soldiers, living in clan-based communities, provided with land and armor. This is not a barrier, but rather a smoldering fire beneath piled-up fuel. In the past, when Emperor Taizong pacified the Turks, he divided their people into six prefectures, scattering them north and south of the Yellow River, and they were assimilated within ten years. Today's border generals are doing the opposite. Why? They are eager for immediate gains and forget long-term considerations, greedy for the reward of heads and neglecting the peace of a hundred years..."
She stroked the words as if stroking the scars on his arm.
Then she turned to the end of the preface and found a line of small print that she had never noticed before. The ink was relatively fresh, suggesting it had been added later:
“Xiao Si, a woman from the Zhen family of Yingzhou, once said: ‘The cracks in Youyan are not yet cleared, how can we view the world?’ Now the cracks in Youyan are getting deeper and deeper, and I am getting old. If I see this article in the future, I will know that Yueyang Tower is not a viewing platform, but a beacon tower for watching the beacon fires. On the third pillar of the southeast pillar of the tower, there is a hidden compartment where my unfulfilled aspirations are kept.”
Zhen Xiaosi's hands began to tremble.
Three days later, she requested a transfer to the south under the pretext of "verifying the list of tribute students from Yuezhou." This was the first time in her seven years at the Court of State Ceremonial that she had voluntarily requested a transfer.
Yueyang Tower was higher than she had imagined. Upon reaching the top, the vast expanse of Dongting Lake stretched out before her, yet she headed straight for the southeast pillar. Sure enough, the third pillar had a hidden compartment—not a sophisticated mechanism, but simply a loose wooden plank. Inside were no gold or jewels, only a stack of yellowed manuscripts and, at the very top, a familiar gray-white bone pendant.
The letter is a copy of private letters Zhang Shuo wrote to various old friends in his later years, and its contents are astonishing:
One letter was addressed to Wang Zhongsi, the military governor of Shuofang, advising him "not to covet the empty fame of Yeluohe, but to disperse the barbarian troops to strengthen the border"; another was addressed to An Lushan, the military commissioner of Pinglu, who bluntly stated, "General, gathering barbarian tribes into your private army is not the way of a subject"; and there was even a letter of remonstrance to Li Linfu, which bitterly argued that "gathering barbarians and raising them is not as good as transforming them and using them."
The last letter was unsigned and written in illegible handwriting, seemingly a final message:
"...The current emperor is tired of hearing about border affairs and is only interested in the 'Rainbow Skirt and Feathered Robe'. I submitted seven memorials on the relocation of Hu households, but they were all kept in the palace and not issued. In the past, this building was built so that people of the world could see the real situation on the frontier. Now that the building is completed, people only appreciate the scenery. How sad! The crack has been opened, and there are few who can mend the sky. If Zhenniang can see this book, she should continue my will—not to mend the sky, but to let future generations know how the sky was cracked."
Zhen Xiaosi stood atop Yueyang Tower, the wind from Dongting Lake whipping her sleeves and collar. She finally understood:
Did Zhang love her? Yes. But this love was never confined to personal feelings; it was a mutual affirmation between two souls who both saw the cracks in the fabric of history amidst the torrent of time. He gave her the jade pendant not to imprison her, but to give her a key—a key that could unlock not her private quarters, but the hidden compartments of this building, the deepest anxieties of this empire.
True love means that even when I'm not by your side, I will still keep my eyes open for you, so that you can see everything I'm about to miss.
She put on the bone pendant, its coolness pressed against her heart. Suddenly, she remembered that night when she was fourteen, when he asked her if she would like to come to Yueyang with him. In his eyes, besides expectation, there was something deeper—loneliness. The loneliness of someone who saw the crisis too early, in an era of peace and prosperity.
Now, this loneliness has become her legacy.
Upon returning to Chang'an, Zhen Xiaosi began to undertake an even more dangerous task: she meticulously compared the strategies in Zhang Shuo's posthumous manuscripts with An Lushan's current actions, compiling them into "Twelve Pieces of Hidden Dangers in the Border Town." Each piece of evidence pointed to an ending she had long foreseen, yet no one was willing to believe.
The last time she saw her uncle Joan of Arc, she showed him the bone pendant.
This usually humorous uncle remained silent for a long time before saying, "Zhang said that when he was in Yingzhou, he often came to our house to drink. Once, when he was drunk, he said that he had built many pavilions in his life, but only Yueyang Tower was not built for the living."
"Who was it repaired for?"
“It was built for history.” Joan of Arc was looking north, towards Fanyang. “He said that a prosperous era is like this building. It looks magnificent, but if the foundation cracks, even the tallest building will collapse. He built the building so that the cracks would remain before it collapses.”
He turned his head, his eyes filled with complex emotions: "Xiaosi, he has now entrusted this responsibility to you. But you must know—the person who records the cracks often dies earlier than the person who creates them."
Zhen Xiaosi smiled. It was Zhang Shuo's smile, clear-headed yet sorrowful.
"Uncle, do you remember when I was a child, I used to collect shards of porcelain?"
"remember."
“Now I understand, what I picked up wasn’t a shard of porcelain, but a crack.” She gripped the bone pendant tightly. “Zhang said he gave me a pair of eyes to see cracks, and I have to use these eyes to see to the bottom.”
After that day, her colleagues at the Court of State Ceremonial noticed that Zhen Xiaosi had changed. She was no longer angry about the absurdity of the accounts, nor heartbroken about the false reports of victory. She simply recorded, compared, and filed calmly, like a highly skilled doctor who no longer felt sullen or jealous of patients' reluctance to admit their illnesses, but instead meticulously recorded the deterioration process of each lesion.
Only when she was alone late at night would she open Zhang Shuo's copy of "The Yueyang Tower" and read the last sentence: "To be the first to worry about the world's troubles and the last to enjoy its pleasures—this is my ambition, an unfulfilled ambition."
Then she would softly reply, as if engaging in a conversation across twenty years of time:
"I see their sorrow, but not their joy. Now I receive your gaze and carry on your will—though there may be thousands, I will go."
Outside the window, the last snow of the third year of the Tianbao era began to fall.
Meanwhile, a thousand miles away in Fanyang, An Lushan was inspecting another batch of newly recruited Yeluhe soldiers. Warhorses neighed, swords clashed, and the light in the eyes of those Hu soldiers was neither gratitude nor hatred, but something far more terrifying—a cold, clear-headed realization that they were nothing more than pawns.
The crack image on Yueyang Tower and the sharp blade in Fanyang City resonate quietly in the dark river of history.
What Zhen Xiaosi didn't know was that Zhang Shuo had actually left a message before his death, which was engraved on a brick in the foundation of Yueyang Tower and would only appear on the day the tower collapsed:
"Those who come after will view us as we view those who came before. How sad! Therefore, I have listed the people of this time and recorded their words. Although the times and events are different, the sentiments they evoke are the same."
—This is what he said. That's all he left her.
What she had to do was to become the most composed chronicler before the complete collapse.
Even if it's about how a love story becomes an obituary, how a tall building becomes a tombstone, or how an era inevitably crumbles at its most brilliant moment.
Just like many years ago, that one-and-a-half-year-old little girl, picking up the first shard of porcelain from a pile of broken pieces...