Jiechi

The ruler is the central object in Shen Tang’s improvised tutoring of Zhou Jin, transforming a nominal educational arrangement into a struggle over conduct and authority. In her hands, it is not merely a classroom aid: it becomes the concrete means by which she answers arrogance, interrupts evasion, and makes Zhou Jin acknowledge the rules of the lesson.

Definition and Setting

The object appears when Shen Tang agrees to visit Zhou Jin at her own convenience for a month after Elder Sister Liang asks her to tutor him in moral character and teach him how to behave as a decent person. Shen Tang accepts the arrangement without being intimidated by the difficulty. Her approach is severe and deliberately practical: she invokes the principle that children who are not disciplined will not learn proper conduct, then applies that principle to an adult who is already stubbornly set in his ways. The ruler therefore enters the narrative as the physical emblem of a disciplinary method rather than as a neutral school supply.

Its presence is also tied to Shen Tang’s unusual confidence in confronting social rank. Zhou Jin is the Second Young Master of the Zhou family, and he initially assumes that family wealth makes formal education unnecessary. Shen Tang counters this attitude by producing both the ruler and a first-grade textbook. The pairing is pointed: the textbook represents the elementary instruction he has neglected, while the ruler represents the authority she intends to exercise over him despite his money and status.

Use in the Tutoring Arrangement

The first lesson takes place in the study room, where Shen Tang sits in the main seat and Zhou Jin sits beside her. When he plays on his phone during class, the ruler comes down with a sharp slap against his hand. Zhou Jin is startled that she is genuinely willing to hit him, but Shen Tang immediately establishes the rule that phones are forbidden during class time. The object gives that rule an instant consequence; it is not left as a polite request that he can ignore.

The ruler becomes more forceful when Zhou Jin attempts to dismiss the entire teacher-student arrangement. He tells Shen Tang that he has had enough and orders her to leave. Shen Tang responds by shaking the ruler and treating his failure to listen as another punishable offense. When he protests, she continues to apply it for disrespect toward the teacher and for sleeping during class. The repeated blows convert his verbal resistance into visible obedience, while his increasingly urgent pleas show that he has finally understood the seriousness of the arrangement.

The object’s effectiveness depends on its immediacy. Shen Tang does not need to argue at length about Zhou Jin’s privilege, his poor schooling, or his contempt for the lessons. The ruler lets her translate each breach—using the phone, refusing instruction, showing disrespect, and sleeping—into a direct response. In this setting, discipline is presented as a sequence of clearly marked violations and consequences, with the ruler serving as the mechanism that links them.

Authority and Conflict

The ruler reverses the expected hierarchy between the wealthy student and the outsider hired to teach him. Zhou Jin assumes that his family’s money protects him from the authority of teachers, but the ruler makes his social position irrelevant inside the study room. Shen Tang does not seek permission from him to enforce the lesson; she treats his conduct as evidence that punishment is required. Her authority is therefore enacted through the object before it is accepted through persuasion.

The conflict is also comic because Zhou Jin’s disbelief repeatedly gives way to fear. He asks whether Shen Tang is serious, protests when she strikes him, and eventually chooses an option obediently when she offers him a choice. His astonishment at her relationship with Elder Sister Liang further exposes how unprepared he is for the arrangement: he expects family privilege to organize every interaction, whereas Shen Tang brings an uncompromising teacher’s discipline into the household.

The ruler thus functions as a counterweight to the forms of power that usually surround Zhou Jin. Wealth, family position, and the expectation that an employee will retreat all fail to remove it from the scene. Shen Tang’s method is not subtle, but its bluntness is precisely what defeats his assumption that he can simply drive her away.

Consequences and Narrative Significance

By the end of the confrontation, Zhou Jin is no longer treating Shen Tang’s month-long stay as an empty performance. He sits back down and asks whether she will really leave after the month is over, a question that reveals both his continued resistance and his recognition that she now controls the terms of the lessons. The ruler has made the temporary arrangement materially real: its duration, rules, and punishments can no longer be dismissed as a formality.

The object also condenses a recurring pattern in Shen Tang’s conduct. Elsewhere, she is expected to manage her body, public expression, reputation, and professional behavior under contracts, household rules, closed-set regulations, and online scrutiny. Here, however, she occupies the disciplinary position herself. She uses a familiar tool of correction to impose order on someone who believes that money exempts him from ordinary standards. The reversal gives the ruler significance beyond the individual lesson: it marks Shen Tang’s willingness to answer imposed authority with a discipline of her own.

At the same time, the ruler does not create a gentle educational relationship. It establishes obedience through fear and physical consequence, and the narrative openly frames that harshness as Shen Tang’s chosen answer to an adult who refuses to change. Its importance lies in that contradiction. The object is elementary and almost absurdly ordinary, yet it enables Shen Tang to confront Zhou Jin’s privilege directly, turn moral instruction into action, and force a reluctant student to remain in the classroom.