Wáng Cóng’ér : "The Ghost General" (Prologue : "The Martyr's Frequency") 4/30/26
Chapter 1- Release #1 (Approx 2785 Word Count)
-2026-
-( . )- Special thanks to those within the circle -( . )-
Carol Elizabeth, Gary Setzler, Sarah Elizabeth, Emma Leigh, Samantha Lihon,Brayden Gary, Sarah Elizabeth, Ian Alexander
Gurleen, Liz, Jose, Luz, Darren, Ashley, Ricky and Robert, Muay Thai Lou, Shaista, Julai and The Waca.
In Honor and Memory of :
Madam Wáng Cóng’ér
Warlord
Wife of Qi
The Circus Girl
The street rat
The Myth, her legend and my best, funnest historical recount, of the woman that was attempted to be removed from history. My personal historic hero: Wáng Cóng’ér
Wáng Cóng’ér
“The Ghost General”
[PROLOGUE : “The Martyr’s Frequency”]
1776
“Year of the Fire-Monkey”
Philadelphia, PA, British Colony of the Americas
Kashgar, Xinjiang Province, China.
Release #1
Prologue
The humidity in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776 was a physical weight, a pressurized chamber of unwashed wool and stagnant expectations.
Inside the Pennsylvania State House, the air smelled of iron-gall ink coveted with
the frantic, rhythmic scratching of goose quill.
Benjamin Franklin sat with a spine that refused to acknowledge the gravity of
the room, his eyes fixed on the parchment that would either birth a nation or sign his
death warrant.
He was the archetype of the citizen-philosopher, a man of cold stoke logic; A man who understood that a citizen’s dignity was a debt the British Crown had long since defaulted on and defiled upon...
Ten thousand miles to the east, the sky over the northwest frontier of Xinjiang leaned until it broke.
A monsoon of bruised violet and high-frequency blue electricity tore across the Taklamakan, screaming with an ozone heavy breath that vibrated the marrow of the earth.
In a hovel built of mud and the spirits of better days, Sanya lay twisted in the straw.
Her eyes closed, clouded with the milky film of starvation and a budding holy-madness; Tracking the bolts of lightning as if they were scriptures being written by the hand of a vengeful god.
She was just a shadow of a woman, a Mary Magdalene of the dust, carrying a pregnancy that had begun in the shadows of a grain-shed violation and had grown into a prophecy that whispered to her in the night.
As the first signatures began to bloom in Philadelphia- men of property claiming stake in the future- The silhouette of Benjamin Franklin hovered over the parchment.
This man was now a legend of the west, as Franklin’s hand steadied the page, a jagged strobe-light flash of memory tore through Sanya’s mind.
She felt the cold mud walls of the grain shed against her back again. She could feel the weight of the Qing’s violation pressing the air from her lungs.
And this?
This was the rebuttal.
The assault was the spark that lit the furnace of her womb. She had been infringed upon by the empire, and in that violation, a counter-claim was about to be born.
“The King!” Sanya hissed through teeth stained with the bile of hunger and malnutrition. “I bring the King to break the scales!”.
As the quill in Philadelphia moved to the next line, a bound apparition seemed to rise from the Xinjiang mire. Blueish-purple heavy cast tones lighting the midnight sky through its torrent of summer rain.
It screamed like the Thracian slave who in seventy-three bc, turned the shackles of Rome into a kinetic currency within the Gladiator’s Colosseum. A man who during the Third Servile war systematically defeated a larger, more highly trained Roman legion with an army combined of escaped slaves, women, and children.
The child in Sanya’s womb was being forged in the absolute zero of the world’s social hierarchy. This child was being born into the gutters and silt of the Qing Dynasty.
A slave to a system that didn’t yet realize its credit was running out.
Wang Cong’er: Release #1 Prologue
The Pulse of the Low-City
The thunder rumbled again, a deep resounding, tectonic groan that could only mirror the latent marches of Khan.
A man who conquered the lands with a million fast-moving riders and nearly a century of slaughter. A legacy that spanned twelve-million square miles and a lifetime of constant conquest.
This child, this Cóng’ér was being born to eventually command a footprint of liberated soil-not through the inheritance of a horde, but through the sheer will and violent campaign straight through that of the Qianlong Emperor’s soul.
In Philadelphia, the ink was wet.
In Xinjiang, the blood was boiling.
The rebalancing had begun.
The west was signing for Equality, but the east was birthing the rebellion that would finally enforce the price.
They say, that every myth carries at least an ounce of truth, and the darkest of those myths were building in the mud and misery of those Xinjiang mires.
Rumors to the west of the demon within the Wallachian territories, a landscape forested with the impaled bodies and infested with what monsters.
The souls of the Romanian lands screamed of a man of horrendous atrocities who’d developed a mind into psychological and spiritual terror in warfare well beyond that of his own fourteenth century.
Cóng’ér would indeed see the need to become the monster of necessity and understand that in order to protect the unable, one often had to be willing to be the executioner. The idealism that a peasant’s life was a debt that could not be defaulted upon without that of a terrible, terrible price.
The scratching of the pens in Philadelphia reached a frantic dry intensity, a sound that scribed the scuttling beetles in the Xinjiang straw beneath Sanya.
As the delegates in the west wrestled with the legal definition of a free man.
Sanya’s world narrowed to the jagged rhythm of her own contractions.
These harder pushes were becoming more like individualized biological events.
Somewhere right along this very same era of the seventeenth century, history would paint a Frenchman as a master of the map. A highly complex man who saw Europe as a mathematical equation to be solved with artillery.
Here in 1776- that frequency was being channeled into a three-pound infant about to be born into the muck of the Taklamakan.
While Napoleon, the man of immense education, commanding one of the world’s most powerful militaries would eventually lose his throne of gold he fought so valiantly to sit upon.
Cóng’ér was being born with an unparalleled knowledge of geometrically implied physics and this child.
This Cóng’ér was being forged to dismantle the very idea of an Imperial seat.
From this moment of birth, absorbing the absolute necessities of survival- learning that even the smallest movements, if timed to the exact moment of an enemy’s weakness could cripple an army or an Empire.
Sanya’s eyes rolled back, their Magdalene madness flaring into a white-hot vision.
She could see them!
She could see the delegates in Philadelphia quite clearly indeed!
Their powdered wigs looking like ridiculous frozen clouds atop their heads in the summer heat. She saw the way they balanced the rights of man against the rights of property, creating a loophole that would swallow millions.
“They are leaving the back door open!” Sanya moaned, her voice a low melodic rasp that made Old Ma, the midwife shiver.
“They sign for the Master! But they forget the servant! They’ve signed for the house! but they have forgotten the dust!”
Old Ma, pressed a gnarled, filth-streaked hand against Sanya’s sweating brow. “You’re talking to ghosts’ girl! Focus on the breath! The child is turned, and he’s coming with his fists closed!”
“He, he is Not— Sanya gasped, her heart stuttering against her ribs.
Wang Cong’er: Release #1 Prologue
The Pulse of the Low-City
History would whisper of an Onna-musha, an eleventh century female samurai who rode into the hell fires of the Genpi wars.
A warrior whose medieval combat skills were so absolute it not only defied the statistics of her gender; It commended the utmost respect of the Japanese Imperial Court, Military Shogunate and the Minamoto no Yoshinaka clan- in turn establishing the unification of Japan and the baseline foundation of its Bushido code. In the Heike Monogatan, this samurai was described as a warrior worth a thousand.
Historical contrast snapped the narrative line into a sharp jagged edge somewhere around four BC - one would remember a safety-valve of the system.
A woman who disguised herself wearing the mask of a man for twelve war-torn years to save her father who could not fight for himself, only to return to her domesticated life and a woman’s place after defending the honor of her Emperor.
As the west sought to build a transparent republic, Sanya could feel the invisibility of her baby’s future.
Cóng’ér would not hide behind a mask nor would Cóng’ér stand on a hill with a flag.
The midwife threw a handful of dried herbs into a small iron brazier, the smoke rising into thick green and red coils. She watched Sanya’s throat closely where there was a visible and frantic beat- a drumbeat!
In Philadelphia, a delegate stood to argue for the Protection of Commerce.
Sanya’s fingers clawed into the dirt floor, digging deep until her nails bled into that Xinjiang clay. She was signing her own name into the earth beneath her, a counter signature to that of the parchment in the far west.
“The King!” She sneered, her vision blurring as the first cold breath of the monsoon blew through the cracks in the hovel walls. “The King is coming to Collect!”
The candle flames in the Pennsylvania State House flickered, caught in a draft that seemed to originate from thousands of miles away.
As the ink settled into the preamble of the parchment.
A spiritual resonance flared in the Xinjiang mud.
Sanya was no longer just a woman in labor, she was a conduit for the justice of every violated soul in the province, perhaps even the world.
Her voice rose into an arithmetic hum, high frequency chant that mimicked the scratching of the quills so far to the west. That preacher fire madness of a woman gone mad in the desert.
A frantic holy rant of a woman who knew she was a martyr before she was even a name.
“The fire doesn’t just burn!” Sanya hissed, her eyes wide and fixed on the thatched ceiling. “It cleanses the land! It clears the debts!”.
In Philadelphia, the debate had shifted to the Consent of the Governed.
But in this hovel, the only consent was the brutal unyielding demand, a spiritualized mandate of justice in the frequency of blood and steel.
Cóng’ér was being born with the mandate of the order- not to serve any agenda, politicians, nor even any gods; Cong’ was being born to serve against the very nature of the unjust. To eventually learn to move through the empire as wiry as smoke, equalizing the collectors and the governors from within the shadows.
When the insubordination and cruelties of the times became most volatile.
Cóng’ér would pick up Joan’s stake and in the form of dual sabers and turn them into the pulpit of blood and steel to displace an oppressing empire.
Cóng’ér would be the greatest rise of the White Lotus Sect, and quite arguably the world’s truest demigodesses of compassion.
“Equality.” Sanya choked out, her fingers catching a partial piece of rotted floor board in the mud, snapping it in her grasp.
In Philadelphia, the parchment was held up to the light, the ink gleaming like fresh blood. In Xinjiang the child’s head appeared, crowned not in gold but in the sweat and dust of the frontier.
“The King,” Old Ma whispered, her hands shaking as she prepared to catch the future. “The King is coming through fire!”
The final flourish of quills in Philadelphia was a collective exhale that seemed to drain the room of its tension.
Sanya’s body arched one final time, a bow-string drawn beyond its structural limit.
The tension in the hovel had reached a pitch that made the midwife’s ears bleed.
It was a zero-sum transfer of life; Sanya was liquidating her own existence to prove the initial capital for this child.
Wang Cong’er: Release #1 Prologue
The Pulse of the Low-City
In the State House, John Hancock leaned over the table.
He didn’t just sign; He made a statement.
His signature was large, arrogant and filled with the kinetic energy of a man who knew he was a fixed asset of history.
At that exact millisecond his pen completed the grand, sweeping curve of the “k”, the child was thrust out into the cold Xinjiang air.
There was no cry.
Not at all.
The midwife, Old Ma, caught the infant in her gnarled filthy hands.
The child was slick with the indigo-tinted blood of the frontier. Her skin the color of a storm cloud.
Old Ma held the silent newborn up to the flickering green and red light of the brazier, looking for signs of the King Sanya had promised.
“The King,” Ma whispered, her voice trembling. “The King is a girl.”
At that moment the storm outside Xinjiang reached a crescendo that shattered the remaining ceramic bowls in the tiny hovel between the buildings Sanya lay in.
The air turned a deep ionizing blue, a sovereign indigo.
And in that final moment of peak agony another frequency of the hum among the magic and mythical manifested in streaking lightning tearing its way across the Taklamakan sky.
A violent display of ozone and electricity.
At that moment, Sanya’s heart gave its final erratic shutter.
She looked at the child she had birthed, her eyes reflecting the lightning strike. She didn’t see a daughter. She finally saw her Mary Magdalene madness fulfilled. She saw the legacy that would one day out conquer Khan, out-think Sun Tzu, and outlast the memory of every man currently shaking hands in Philadelphia.
“Cóng’ér,” An end to this life, the suffering and the misery.
The name a masculine crown placed upon a girl’s brow with her last dying breath.
Her eyes went flat and grey as her life finished its transfer. Sanya died there in the dirt at the exact moment the west’s Declaration had become law.
Two worlds, two documents, and one debt that was just beginning to accrue interest.
Old Ma wrapped the child in the threadbare indigo shawl, the fabric smelling of mothballs and ancient grief. She looked at the signature of the body- the tiny, clenched fists- and then at the signature of the soul.
This child’s eyes opened.
They were not the milky blue of a newborn, but of deep amber, they were the color of the gold John Hancock had used to fund a revolution.
In Philadelphia, the ink was dry.
In Xinjiang the audit had begun.
The hovel in Xinjiang fell into a heavy, ringing silence- the kind that follows a lightning strikes when the air itself feels scorched.
The midwife sat in the dirt, the newborn infant wrapped in the piece of Sanya’s threadbare indigo shawl. The mother’s body was already cooling, her face fixed in a mask of ecstatic, terrifying relief. Her final installment paid with that of her life.
In Philadelphia, the men in the State House were beginning to disperse, their boots clattering the wooden floorboards. They were discussing the logistics of a new world, unaware that a new rebellion was currently drawing her first breath of the dust and ozone
Old Ma didn’t offer a prayer. She offered a home. She looked at the infant
Cóng’ér’ and saw a liability. In the eyes of the Qing, this child was a ghost entry, a female born to a dead unwed mother, in a province that only valued the strength of a plow-ox or the compliance of a taxpayer.
“You’ve come into a bankrupt house, Little King,” Ma whispered, her voice like the shifting of the dunes. “Your mother gave you a name that belongs to a throne, but the only thing you own is the straw beneath you and the air you’re stealing!”.
Cóng’ér still, did not cry.
Her tiny lungs didn’t produce the frantic wail of a child seeking comfort, instead she was emitting a low rhythmic hum- a vibration that resonated with a small jade dragon pendant encrusted in gold, still clutched in Sanya’s stiffened hand. It was the first manifestation. A frequency that seemed to stabilize the flickering green and red flames of the burning brazier.
As the delegates in the west toasted to Equality.
Old Ma reached down and pried the jade dragon from Sanya’s fingers.
The gold was warm, retaining the heat of the dead woman’s last fever. Ma looked at the intricate carvings- the dragon’s eyes seemed to track her movement
“This is your only capital,” Ma muttered, slipping the cord around the child’s head.
“The empire will kill you for the gold, and the spirits will kill you for the jade. To survive, you must learn to be as invisible as a ghost.”
Benjamin Franklin walked out into the Philadelphia sun.
A man who believed that equality of men was a principle to be managed by the elite.
He was now a man, of the signed page.
The infant, lying here in the Xinjiang mud, was the living proof whereas Franklin had signed for a world where everyone had a place.
Cóng’ér was born to be the one who decided what those places were worth.
Righteousness was not a title granted by parchment.
It was a title earned by surviving the default of one’s own birth.
In Philadelphia, the ink was dry.
In Xinjiang, the first entry of one of the world’s greatest legacies was now logged in blood.
Wang Cong’er: Release #1 Prologue
The Pulse of the Low-City
Leave a comment or critique on this release below:
⌛⌛⌛
Why stop at Storytelling?
Build the connections and start understanding the math
InSerenity Literary and Artwork’s main content is always free.
⌛Drop a link on all your favorite platforms. ⌛
inserenity857@gmail.com
InSerenity Literary (ISL): Solo and Independently run.
Boston, MA 2026
Insights on independent publishing, literature, creative strategies/design, and local Boston writer & artist initiatives: writing, art, music, science, mathematics.






