All right, Tan Jize really was a lawless bastard. In his previous life, that impeccably dressed, mild-mannered civil servant had personally planned and organized plenty of dirty work. And in this life... Yu Lian had never doubted that, if he hadn't taken part in the War God Festival, Tan would have been capable of breaking people out of prison.
Even so, when he heard that Tan had already sneaked back into Imperial territory, Yu Lian couldn't help thinking this turn of events was a little too absurd. He remembered Tan telling him that he was working on some kind of social investigation.
...So staging an uprising in the heart of the Empire was part of the investigation?
All he could say was, as expected of you, Old Tan! But this wasn't courage so much as reckless folly—and that really wasn't like him.
Yu Lian was genuinely beginning to worry about him. In Yu Lian's mind, Tan Jize was a comrade to whom he could entrust any major responsibility. Mr. Qi was nearly seventy, after all. Even in this era, that was far from young. If Yu Lian ever died, Tan was the only one qualified to handle everything he left behind.
There were plenty of comrades standing in the same trenches with him now. The Pioneer Party and the Lionheart Society each had thousands of members, and he had no shortage of close friends willing to die fighting by his side.
And yet Yu Lian remained convinced that, deep down, Teacher Yang was truly an anarchist disguised as a practitioner of magic, with a touch of Zhuangzi-style escapism and naivety. His senior, along with their friends from the 830th class, were all pure soldiers. Even people like Michiel and Rozes, who were skilled at military and political affairs, were no