The Laws of the World

Qingxi County has an old statute dating back seventy-three years: Every month, the village head must deliver three dou of grain to every elderly person living alone. The statute has long gone unenforced. And yet, in all those seventy-three years, hardly any elderly person in Qingxi County has actually starved to death. At first, the clerk Gu Heng thought it was just a coincidence. Until he discovered that an official scale, used to enforce fair weighing for nearly a century, always returned to the correct weight, no matter how anyone tampered with it. A household register that had been publicly maintained for years would slowly restore its ink after someone secretly altered it. At last, Gu Heng understood: The laws of this world are not written on paper alone. When a system is acknowledged, upheld, and relied upon by enough people over a long enough time, it gradually becomes part of reality itself. The same is true of good systems. And of bad ones. The rules of a county can change a county. The laws of a province can shape a province. The statutes of a nation can mold a dynasty. And this dynasty has stood for eight hundred years. When Gu Heng first looked up at the imperial city, a thought suddenly struck him: If a statute in a small county can change reality after just seventy-three years, then what have the ancestral laws enforced for eight hundred years become by now? And if one day, someone could truly rewrite the laws of the entire realm, what would they be changing: the system, or the world itself?