The old couple lay at their door, throats slashed. Sobbing, Liu Yun knelt beside his parents. Hsi launched himself at the nearest horseman, yelling, “You’ll die for this!”

The Manchu soldier laughed and drew his sword. Aghast, Liu Yun hurried to his brother’s rescue. “No!” he shouted, pulling Hsi out of the blade’s path.

The soldier rode off with the family silver chest. Hsi struggled in Liu Yun’s restraining grip. “We must avenge our parents’ death!” he cried. “We must save our lands.”

“Don’t be foolish, younger brother. There are too many of them, and we have no weapons. We must flee!”

Liu Yun dragged the reluctant Hsi to the village to seek shelter—only to discover that the Ming army had arrived. In the marketplace, commanders drafted local men to help fight the invaders. Hsi broke away from Liu Yun, pushed his way to the head of the line of conscripts, and enlisted.

“Good-bye, elder brother,” he called from astride the horse the army had given him. His eyes, filled with dreams of glory, shone brighter than the blade of his new sword. “We’ll meet again when the war is over.” Then he galloped after his new comrades, leaving Liu Yun standing alone with tears in his eyes and a raw emptiness in his soul.

Now Abbot Liu Yun completed another round of the I Ching ritual. He drew a line on the paper, above the first. Through the old pain burned a fresh anger. Hsi’s death had taught him what their parents’ had not: the consuming desire for vengeance, which no amount of prayer or meditation could banish. He wanted to kill everyone connected with the massacre of Hsi’s rebel band on Taiwan. Though his Confucian beliefs forbade him to punish the Chinese government, he hated himself for submitting to Manchu rule and not defending Hsi. His impotent anger, seeking an external target, had focused on the Dutch, who had slaughtered Hsi and the other rebels to gain trade privileges with China; on Jan Spaen, the ruthless adventurer who had tortured Hsi to death.

As Liu Yun counted and arranged the sticks, he hoped he’d managed to conceal his emotions from the shōgun’s sōsakan. Surely he had, after a lifetime spent perfecting the art of negotiation and manipulation …