The ink on the pages had bled a little, and water stains had blurred several words, but the crucial information remained.
Yi Yang held the battered excerpt from the directory up to the light by the window, squinting as he worked through it word by word.
The account was short, barely three pages in all, but the farther Yi Yang read, the tighter his fingers clenched around the corner of the book.
The story had taken place roughly three hundred years ago.
Yunlin County had been even more rotten back then than it was now.
At least the Heaven Patrol Office now provided a backbone for the public face of things. However greedily the Martial Arts Halls and great families fed, they still had to observe a few rules out in the open.
Three hundred years ago, even that scrap of a fig leaf had been absent. The great families and Martial Arts Halls held an ironclad monopoly over martial arts manuals. Even the introductory stance exercises for blood qi first stage were locked behind high walls. Common people who wanted to practice martial arts either sold themselves to a Martial Arts Hall as servants in exchange for an incomplete set of stance instructions, or spent three generations' savings sending their children to kowtow and seek a master—and even then, they might not learn anything genuine.
As for the plight of martial artists at the bottom, the book put it this way: "Among the common-born children of this county, many possess strong sinews and sound bones, yet not a single art is available for them to learn. They are reduced to laborers for life, dying without ever glimpsing the gateway to the martial path."
Reading this passage, Yi Yang let out a faint scoff.
Three hundred years. How many county