Chapter 9 What a Transmigrator Ought to Do

Xue Mu turned to Yue Xiaochan. "Didn't you say everything besides power is a side branch and a twig? Then how is this music so refined?"

Yue Xiaochan answered lazily, "Because sound is part of the martial Dao too, and our sect happens to be very good at it. What you're listening to actually has a bit of our sect's seduction arts folded into it—just the outermost skin—which is why it hits you right in the soul. Take the technique out and the level is nothing special."

"Uh..." Xue Mu finally got it. Anything useful to the martial Dao—clothing, song, performance—was part of deploying the seduction arts, so it got developed to a high standard. The things useless to the martial Dao, calligraphy and painting and poetry and the rest, were just hobbies people dabbled in, so they stayed crude.

And this wasn't only true of the Star Moon Sect. It was true of the whole world.

Yue Xiaochan pointed at her own nose. "If you're really interested in music, this young lady is a first-rate master, ranked against the whole world. And here you go traipsing off to hear a songgirl sing. Your head's growing weeds."

You've never once shown me... how about a little flute-playing in the bamboo grove sometime? Xue Mu couldn't be bothered trading barbs with a kid, so he laid it out plain. "Next to the music, that lyric just now was unbearable. What kind of line is 'My lord has long been away, your handmaid's heart frets in a panic'? Could it be any more half-witted? However good the tune is, it sings away every last bit of the mood! Do the customers really buy that?"

"How literate do you think the customers are? Even if the girls sing something flowery and heartrending, what's the point if the customer can't follow it?" Yue Xiaochan looked at him strangely. "Most things in the world run on the same principle. Like when you write a martial arts manual—that's for passing down your own lineage, so the plainer and easier to understand, the better. Unless you're out to trap somebody on purpose, why write it all fog and clouds and make them train wrong? That only cuts off your own lineage and severs your own Dao, doesn't it?"

So you're saying Huang Shang was an idiot? Daoist jargon tripping people up, fine, you can put that down to Mei Chaofeng being uneducated. But writing the general principles in Sanskrit—what was the man thinking... Xue Mu realized Yue Xiaochan had just brainwashed him with a single sentence, and he honestly had begun to wonder whether Huang Shang was a bit of a fool...

It took him quite a while to snap out of it. He twitched the corner of his mouth.

"What you're saying... The capital looks prosperous enough to me. People here can't be that illiterate, can they? They can't even follow a song?"

"It's nothing to do with the capital. It's mostly the big sects and great clans who care about reading and writing—their lineages run deep, after all."

Yue Xiaochan thought about it.

"Ordinary folk do know the basic characters. The bookshops sell foundational cultivation methods; you have to be able to read those. And what if one day you get dogshit lucky and land some inheritance? If you couldn't read it you'd die of spite. Anyway, that's about how it is—nobody cares about flowery stuff. I remember a year, some fellow somewhere sent the emperor a congratulatory address in fancy parallel prose, and the imperial brush came back: 'Nothing but horseshit.' The whole world laughed about it for ages. Don't you go learning from him."

"So besides manuals, what other books do you have?"

"Do tales of the jianghu count? The history of the founding of the dynasty?"

"Fine. Barely."

Xue Mu suddenly suspected this world's literacy rate might be outrageously high. Everyone needed manuals, after all, so their reading comprehension was probably none too shabby—certainly not the crowd of illiterates he had assumed. It was just that they treated writing purely as a prerequisite and a vehicle for martial training, and valued it only for its practical use.

It had never grown into literature; ornate prose struck them as completely pointless. In an atmosphere like this, literature had to be the most neglected subject of all. Poetry and song were basically still at the folk-tune stage, and popular novels and the like probably hadn't even gotten started.

The world was getting more and more interesting to Xue Mu... Their textual pragmatism actually had a lot to be said for it, but the people here seemed never to have noticed that playing with words could produce effects no weaker than the seduction arts—and that words had a terrifying power to spread and to wash brains, something the other methods could hardly match. What Xue Mu cared about wasn't literature. In the field he knew, the thing that came to mind was called propaganda.

They had a hundred schools contending over the Dao, and not one of them had dug up the propaganda value of the written word. This sect in particular, sitting on song, dance, and seduction arts, never thought to use that edge for operations and promotion, for superstars and endorsements. They treated it as nothing more than an auxiliary discipline of the martial Dao.

No—that wasn't right. They did have a superstar, and the superstar was Xue Qingqiu. If anyone came seeking the sect by reputation, or was willing to learn something of the Star Moon Sect's Dao, Xue Qingqiu's power to draw them in accounted for at least ninety-nine percent of it. Was that why they kept clawing their way up the martial Dao so single-mindedly?

Same as before: all roads lead to the same place. Only in this world everyone was bone-headedly convinced that strength alone was the foundation of everything. Not wrong at bottom, but far too rigid.

Xue Mu even thought that with the Star Moon Sect's foundation, if he were put in charge of running the place, there were simply too many moves he could make to count—and who knew, within a few years he might turn this world upside down.

Drag the whole world into a rhythm I'm good at, then beat them with my wealth of experience—maybe that's what a transmigrator is really supposed to do?

Xue Mu looked down at the hall below. There were few customers in the main room. One man was hugging a wine-companion girl with one arm while tracing out martial moves with the other, and the girl would even reach out a slender hand and trade a few bam-bam-bam exchanges with him, all to the lilting strains of strings and flutes. The scene was so ridiculous that Xue Mu burst out laughing.

What an interesting world. More and more I want a piece of it.

Just then Meng Lan came in carrying a wooden tray with a few small dishes and a pot of wine. Yue Xiaochan looked at her with a half smile. "Why is the food being carried by you in person? Don't tell me you've taken a fancy to our Young Master Xue?"

Meng Lan smiled with her lips pressed together. "With the Young Sect Mistress here, of course I couldn't let those clumsy-handed servants spoil your elegant mood."

Xue Mu tasted the food. Pretty good. Apparently the appetites of the belly, being such a basic thing, developed fast anywhere in the world...

The wine was better still... Silky and soft as it went down, a mellow fragrance going straight to his lungs. The proof wasn't high, but an archaic charm seeped out quietly, and though he was plainly sitting in an elegant room, Xue Mu felt for a moment as if he were in a mountain ravine with a clear spring running through it—a very xuanhuan sort of effect.

This world had a xuanhuan color to it after all. Some things simply couldn't be judged by ordinary rules.

Over on the other side, Yue Xiaochan seemed to be in low spirits. She poked at the dishes a couple of times with her chopsticks and set them down. "Master went to the Six Doors. I don't know how it's going."

Meng Lan smiled. "With the Sect Master handling it personally, there's nothing in this world that can't be done."

Yue Xiaochan shot her a glance. "Everyone knows Xiahou Di's brain doesn't work right. Pretty words like that don't mean anything, Senior Sister."

Meng Lan seemed a little embarrassed, and lowered her head without a word.

Yue Xiaochan went on, "When we were little, I remember you weren't the sort to butter people up, Senior Sister—that's what I used to call you. Otherwise you'd probably have been taken into the inner sect back then... You're very different this time..."

Meng Lan stayed silent.

At this point even Xue Mu, head down and lost in otherworldly food, glanced up at her. Compared with the way she'd been so impatient to flirt earlier, at this moment Meng Lan really did look like a completely different person, so silent that it startled him. That Meng Lan whose whole body breathed seduction seemed nothing more than a startling glimpse of a swan in some dream.

Everyone in this sect really does have a thousand faces. Does "star moon" mean fickle?