If the Black Wu forces already had powerful catapults, then the city walls had to be protected — otherwise, once the walls were breached, Beishan Pass would fall in an instant.

But what if the enemy had already anticipated what defenses we’d use?

That was the question running through Li Chi’s mind as he hung from the city wall.

The timber logs, thicker than a man’s thigh, could certainly reduce the damage boulders did to the walls — but once those logs could be turned against them by the enemy, the danger would multiply.

He hung there thinking, his mind turning over a thousand possibilities, while the soldiers on the wall all stared at him, utterly baffled.

Nobody knew what had come over Prince Ning. He’d just stopped there in mid-air, as if he’d been suddenly turned to stone.

That Prince Ning had climbed down the wall for a gold-tipped pipe stem wasn’t quite enough to shock everyone — after all, they all knew his temperament.

But seeing Prince Ning suspended there, neither up nor down, the men began to grow worried.

Xiahou Zuo called out: “What’s going on? Get back up here — it’s dangerous.”

Li Chi came back to his senses and waved a hand, signaling for them to pull him up. The personal guards hauled on the rope, and Li Chi returned to the top of the wall, casually tucking the pipe into his own waistband as he landed.

Xiahou Zuo: “That’s mine—”

Li Chi: “I climbed down and retrieved it. How does that make it yours? Have you no shame?”

Xiahou Zuo: “I… have no shame?”

Li Chi: “Reflect on yourself. How can someone so utterly shameless exist within our Ning Army?”

Xiahou Zuo: “You’re absolutely right!”

He glanced at the pipe and made a brief, silent farewell to it in his heart.

*This is what it’s like spending time with our beloved Prince Ning — life is full of surprises at every turn. You can’t possibly expect it — even a worthless little pipe can vanish without warning.*

Then again, he thought — would someone like Prince Ning really look down on a pipe just for its tiny bit of gold?

No. Even a gold piece no bigger than a grain of rice, Prince Ning would never disdain.

“Change out all the chains on the timber.”

Li Chi looked toward Xiahou Zuo and said: “While I was hanging there just now, I was thinking — these logs can serve us, but they can also serve the enemy. We’d threaded them with chains before, which made them too secure. Switch to rope instead — no matter how thick it is, one slash of a blade will cut it through.”

Yu Jiuling, standing nearby, repeated the last line: “No matter how thick, one slash will cut it through.”

Xiahou Zuo: “Nine-mei, what does thickness have to do with you?”

Yu Jiuling: “Ptch!”

He glanced at Xiahou Zuo: “Whether it has anything to do with me — doesn’t that depend on how it’s used?”

Xiahou Zuo gave a shudder and instinctively stepped a little further from Yu Jiuling.

—

The Black Wu Empire was a dominion so vast it looked down upon the entire world. Compared to the Chu Kingdom at the height of its power, Black Wu was equivalent to at least three Chu Kingdoms combined.

True, a great portion of its territory was frigid wasteland where few could survive — but even setting that aside, it was still more than double the size of Chu.

The composition of the Black Wu Empire was equally complex. There were hundreds of tribes, great and small, and among them the most revered were the Eight Tribes of Guiyue.

The Kuokedi clan, one of the Eight Tribes of Guiyue, was the Black Wu imperial family — though it hadn’t always been so. The Kuokedi had staged a successful rebellion, overthrowing the original ruling family.

As for why Black Wu had grown so formidable — a large part of the reason traced back to the once-invincible Meng Empire.

The Meng Empire had risen on the steppe, and within three short years, their iron cavalry had swept across the Western Regions. By some accounts, the Western Regions had three hundred and sixty kingdoms at the time; after the Meng cavalry had passed through, a hundred and fifty remained.

The Meng Empire then spent five more years dismantling the Great Zhou and seizing the Central Plains. Compared to the resistance of the Western Regions, the Central Plains’ defiance had proven far more punishing to the Meng forces.

At that time, what was now Black Wu territory was still over a hundred kingdoms of varying sizes, all warring against one another and refusing to yield to any other.

After the Meng cavalry’s second triumphant campaign in the Western Regions, the commanding general took a wrong turn on the way home and wound up wandering into Black Wu territory.

The various kingdoms, assuming it was a Meng invasion force, united and assembled an army of hundreds of thousands.

The Meng general looked around and thought — *well, there’s quite a stretch of land here. Couldn’t I just ride a lap around it and call it mine?*

But he was only returning with a little over a hundred thousand men, and fighting hadn’t been his initial intent — he simply had someone note the route, intending to return home, report to the Khan-Emperor, and come back with a proper army.

Yet the allied remnants of fallen kingdoms stood in his way and provoked his anger, so he fought anyway.

Within a single month, that general had crushed more than forty small kingdoms, while dispatching messengers back to report.

When the Meng Khan-Emperor heard that a handful of minor kingdoms had dared obstruct his army, he ordered a northern campaign.

In less than three years, the Meng cavalry had plowed through that vast expanse of land that would become Black Wu.

But that rule did not last long — the territory was simply too enormous, and the Meng forces were insufficient to maintain control everywhere.

From the moment of occupation, the people there never stopped resisting. Roughly twenty to thirty years later, a resistance army led by the Eight Tribes of Guiyue fought through countless great battles and finally defeated the Meng forces.

It was precisely because of this that, after the Meng Empire withdrew, the Eight Tribes of Guiyue launched their unification campaign. They took over the vast territory the Meng Empire had held — territory where the Meng had already laid down a rudimentary framework of local governance.

So when the Black Wu Empire was founded, the transition was remarkably smooth. They essentially inherited the Meng governing model wholesale, and even the Black Wu ruler adopted the title of Khan-Emperor.

And thus began what the Central Plains people would know as centuries of unrelenting threat.

After the Meng armies were defeated, many Meng people who had settled in the region had no time to flee — including a large number of nobles. These people lived out the remainder of their days in misery, subjected to savage reprisals by the Black Wu. Within just one year, hundreds of thousands were killed. The tribes that managed to survive continued to live in constant terror.

For the Central Plains, a small mercy was that roughly several decades after Black Wu’s founding, the founding emperor of the Chu Kingdom overthrew Meng rule over the Central Plains.

Chu became the shield against Black Wu, and in those early days, the Chu army’s ferocity in battle earned the fear and respect of even the Black Wu.

For hundreds of years, the Black Wu had never abandoned the hope of conquering the Central Plains. Every generation of Black Wu Khan-Emperors had dreamed of becoming the greatest ruler in their empire’s history.

*Whoever seizes the Central Plains becomes the eternal emperor.*

—

Seven or eight days after Li Chi and his forces arrived at Beishan Pass, movement appeared in the Black Wu encampment.

Standing atop the walls of Beishan Pass, Li Chi peered through his spyglass and watched as convoy after convoy of wagons filed into the Black Wu camp. The number of vehicles and horses was staggering.

Even more astonishing was their sheer size. Every cart was hauled by more than a dozen horses, and the largest were pulled by over a hundred oxen.

That explained why Ye Fulie had held his forces back all this time.

Something that large, requiring over a hundred oxen to move — how slowly would it travel?

As the convoy entered the Black Wu camp, horn calls rang out from their side. Squad after squad of Black Wu soldiers began forming ranks, pressing forward in orderly formation.

“They’re moving the camp forward.”

Xiahou Zuo said, watching.

Li Chi nodded.

With siege weapons that massive, the Black Wu would naturally push their camp forward — whatever those things were, they looked absurdly large, and their range would surely be equally absurd.

“Sometimes I think I’m quite fortunate.”

Xiahou Zuo smiled and said: “I’ve lived through the period when we’ve fought Black Wu the most — which means my descendants will also be quite fortunate, because this particular era only fell to me.”

Li Chi said: “You’ll have to actually produce descendants first before you can say that.”

Xiahou Zuo: “That’s hardly a difficult matter.”

Li Chi: “Tch… who do you think you’re mocking.”

Only then did Xiahou Zuo remember — for Li Chi, that genuinely *was* a difficult matter, given the three great obstacles still standing between him and Gao Xining.

—

The Ning Army was in full battle preparation. Every soldier knew this would be the most brutal fight of their lives since first putting on their uniforms.

Everything that could be prepared had been prepared. All that remained was to wait for the Black Wu to make their move. There was nothing else — only the willingness to fight to the death.

Atop the wall, Li Chi sat cross-legged, sketching with a stick of charcoal on the ground. Xiahou Zuo sat cross-legged opposite him, watching in silence as Li Chi worked through the Black Wu’s likely lines of attack.

After a long while, Li Chi tossed the nearly-spent charcoal aside and suddenly asked Xiahou Zuo: “Shouldn’t we find someone to record what we’re doing here?”

Xiahou Zuo asked: “Why did that suddenly occur to you?”

Li Chi said: “I’m afraid that when we’re gone, those who come after will forget us.”

Xiahou Zuo said: “As long as we dare to fight, those who come after won’t forget. And truthfully — whether we stand tall and fight, or we kneel and beg for mercy, those who come after won’t forget either. The difference is: if we stand tall and fight, they’ll stand tall when they remember us. If we kneel and beg, they’ll be on their knees beneath someone else’s boots when they curse our names.”

Li Chi slowly exhaled: “Then let us make it so that those who come after never even have kneeling as an option in their hearts — let it not exist.”

The moment those words were spoken, the horn calls of the Black Wu rang out beyond the walls — the call to advance.

Li Chi rose and walked to the wall’s edge to look out. The Black Wu formations had fully assembled — perfect squares, block after block, each one over a thousand men, dense and packed, a sea of squares as far as the eye could see.

Li Chi reached out and took up his iron-core bow. He set his quiver at his feet.

“Pass the order down.”

Li Chi called out in a loud voice: “The troops will take to the walls in the order I assigned earlier. The first wave will be those who are already married with children. The second wave will be those who are yet unwed but have other brothers at home. The third wave will be only children.”

The generals began relaying the orders. The soldiers on the wall had already taken their defensive positions.

“I don’t expect those who come after to call me a great hero. I only hope that when they speak of me, they say — *that man, he didn’t flinch.*”

Li Chi gripped his bow tightly.

“But—!”

Li Chi’s voice rang out: “We are destined — every last one of us — to be great heroes, damn it all.”

“Fight!”

Xiahou Zuo thrust his fist into the air.

The Ning Army soldiers on the wall raised their right arms in unison and struck their breastplates — the heavy, rhythmic thuds rolled across the battlements, deeper and more resonant than any war drum.

The battle had come.

—