The food would certainly not go to waste. Among Li Chi’s people, there had never been any precedent for waste. Li Chi had said more than once that wasting food and deserting the battlefield were the same offense.

So if the Shu soldiers on Meishan didn’t come down, the food would simply be carried back. The buns would just taste a little worse than they had fresh from the pot.

That afternoon, the Ning army set up iron cauldron after iron cauldron in the open ground and began to stew vegetables. The smell of the cooking drifted swiftly upward to Meishan on the breeze.

By Yu Jiuling’s reckoning, this olfactory assault did more damage than a volley of ten thousand arrows.

The defenders on Meishan had not eaten a warm meal for an entire year. The feeling that produced — those who hadn’t lived it would be hard-pressed to imagine.

A full year of reaching for a handful of dry rations and pushing them into their mouths whenever it was time to eat. Because there were no trees or vegetation left on the mountain, cooking hot food was an utter impossibility. And even if there had been, Pei Jinglun could never have allowed fires for cooking, given the risk of setting the mountain ablaze.

As time went on and grain supplies had to be rationed, even the dry rations couldn’t be doled out to the point of fullness. To feel a little more like they’d eaten something, most soldiers soaked their dry rations in spring water.

That stuff — there was no way to describe how bad it tasted.

The smell of the food floated and drifted like a spell the Ning army had cast over the Shu army, a merciless torment on their spirits.

Li Chi was squatting beside one of the iron cauldrons, tending the fire. After several days of heavy rain, finding dry firewood hadn’t been easy. Most of the wood was wet, but once a fire was going it wasn’t too much trouble — just a lot of smoke.

And it was this smoke that made even the teeth of the Shu soldiers on Meishan itch with envy.

The smell of wood smoke and cooking — that had become an extravagance they could only dream of.

The pot Li Chi was tending would be the evening meal for their small group.

But just as it seemed to be nearly done, the generals began showing up one by one, each with a bowl in hand, everyone wanting a taste of food cooked by Li Chi himself.

Gao Xining stood to one side, also seething — because she had the feeling there wouldn’t be any left for her…

“Big sister.”

Yu Jiuling lowered his voice: “They’re eating ours — let’s go eat theirs.”

Gao Xining shook her head firmly. “No.”

Yu Jiuling: “But there’s not enough here either.”

Gao Xining said, “Eat ours first, grab what you can. Then go eat in their group after, eat as much as possible — that way you won’t feel too ripped off.”

Yu Jiuling gave a big thumbs up. “The Chief is stingy to that degree, and you, Big Sister, deserve a lot of the credit — excellent instruction.”

Gao Xining: “…”

Meanwhile, far from Shu, over in Jizhou, the fighting was drawing close to its end as well.

Han Feibao, who had fled northwest, had acted on his own judgment and attacked a border pass, hoping to link up with the Tiehu cavalry from the steppe. They fell into the Ning army’s trap — the Ning army feigned weakness and surrendered the pass to Han Feibao on purpose.

After passing through the gates, Han Feibao learned that the Tiehu tribe had long since been defeated and scattered, with few even managing to flee. Terrified, he dared not linger a moment, and led all his forces in a breakout to the northeast.

By now he had no choice but to follow Yuan Zhen’s counsel and move toward Yanzhou.

But Tang Pidi’s Ning army was waiting in ambush across his line of retreat. In the battle that followed, Han Feibao suffered more casualties and lost more officers.

Even so, his luck held in a quite remarkable fashion — despite being hunted and cornered at every turn, he managed to avoid complete annihilation.

He was still leading tens of thousands of men in a continued breakout toward the northeast of Jizhou, plundering grain and supplies as they went, scraping together just barely enough to keep from starving.

Because Jizhou had been prepared well in advance, every city and town had closed its gates and held firm. With Tang Pidi’s pursuit pressing close behind him, Han Feibao couldn’t afford the time to besiege a city. So he could only take what could be grabbed from villages along the way — and one piece of luck he did have was that his flight northeast through Jizhou happened to coincide with the autumn harvest.

But this life of being hunted and harried gave Han Feibao and all his men an overwhelming sense of humiliation.

Not that this humiliation was unfamiliar. When they had been in Jingzhou, they had also been chased and cut down by Tang Pidi’s armies.

The most critical pass standing between Han Feibao’s army and escape to Yanzhou was Longtou Pass — beyond it lay Yanzhou, and beyond that, the boundless snowfields.

Now less than a hundred *li* from Longtou Pass, Han Feibao’s forces had to stop and regroup.

They had no winter clothing.

The soldiers had wrapped themselves in all manner of strange things. Some had torn apart their quilts and wrapped the cotton around themselves as makeshift coats. Some had bound dry grass around their legs — not knowing whether it would help, just thinking that anything was better than nothing as they faced Jizhou’s cold.

The Yongzhou army had some fifty thousand men remaining, but that wasn’t their whole number — there were also the civilians they had conscripted by force, around ten thousand people. When they had set out from Shu, they had been a sweeping, surging force of hundreds of thousands. Now they looked even worse than the starving refugees who had taken up arms in the very beginning — equally ragged, equally gaunt, and unlike those refugees, they were still being hunted, which made them worse off still.

“My lord.”

Yuan Zhen was standing at a high point, looking northeast through a spyglass.

“The scouts report we are now less than a hundred *li* from Longtou Pass.”

He had a soldier bring over the maps. The Yongzhou army had very detailed maps of every province in the Central Plains — a legacy of the Shanhe Seal, and of the intelligence network the Yongzhou army had built up afterward. Jizhou’s maps in particular were exceptionally thorough, because the Shanhe Seal had once stationed many agents there, and later, to keep watch on Li Chi, more had been sent in.

“Here is the terrain of Longtou Pass.” Yuan Zhen spread the map and pointed to its location.

“Longtou Pass is solid and high. Attacking into Jizhou from the Yanzhou side would be almost impossibly difficult — but our situation is different. We are breaking out from inside the pass, so it should be considerably easier.”

He looked at Han Feibao: “Current assessment suggests the garrison inside Longtou Pass will not be large, because the main Ning army forces have already been redeployed to the south — especially here in Jizhou, where the largest redeployments have occurred, since they believed the north to be temporarily free of conflict.”

Han Feibao said, “Your meaning is that we cannot afford further delay. We must move swiftly and decisively.”

Yuan Zhen nodded. “When Shen Shanhu led the Yanzhou army south, she took nearly all of Yanzhou’s Ning garrison with her. Yanzhou’s forces must be hollow now.”

“If we can break through Longtou Pass, we must not hesitate for a single moment. We must continue pressing further northeast.”

Yuan Zhen said, “Only by opening the route to the Bohai Kingdom can we be said to have stabilized ourselves.”

Hearing these words, Han Feibao was reminded again of Yuan Zhen’s Black Barbarian identity.

Even now he could not quite rid himself of his revulsion at that identity — and yet he found himself with no other choice.

The dream of contending for the Central Plains had become the fantasy of a madman. The only way left to preserve even a remnant of his strength was to break into Yanzhou.

And once in Yanzhou, without the support of the Bohai Kingdom, there was little real possibility of establishing a footing. The people of Yanzhou had never been afraid of fighting — they were fierce in their customs. The idea that fifty or sixty thousand ragged, defeated soldiers could overawe the Yanzhou people was something even Han Feibao himself didn’t believe.

“My lord.”

Yuan Zhen said, “It is only by leaving Longtou Pass that I can arrange for someone to go to the Black Barbarian Empire to request aid. The lockdown in Jizhou is too tight — there is no way out from here.”

Han Feibao let out a heavy sigh, then said in a low, flat voice: “Do as you see fit.”

Yuan Zhen said, “Very well. My lord, please give the order — no more rest. The column must push through to Longtou Pass in a single stretch.”

Han Feibao said, “But we have been marching for more than ten days without a single breath. If we march again, the soldiers will have no strength left to attack when they reach the pass.”

Yuan Zhen said, one word at a time: “And yet the man surnamed Tang will not give my lord the time.”

Han Feibao froze, then sighed again, and nodded. “I’ll defer to you.”

The order to continue marching went out, riders galloping through the column shouting the command. Soldiers sitting on the ground, lying on the ground, one by one began to curse under their breath.

More than a few of them were thinking: just turn around and fight it out with Tang Pidi’s Ning army. Die on the field and be done with it.

This life was more unbearable than facing death.

If Han Feibao had known that at this very moment, Pei Qi’s life in Shu was equally wretched, he might not even have been able to manage a laugh. Back when he had outmaneuvered Pei Qi so cleverly, he had laughed very happily indeed.

Less than two hundred *li* behind the Shu forces.

Tang Pidi dismounted from his horse, stretched his body out, and felt wonderfully clear and loose. Up here on the northern frontier, the mountains were high and the sky was wide. Looking out into the distance had a way of making one’s thoughts grow remarkably lucid.

General Cheng Wujie came over and handed Tang Pidi a water flask. “Grand General — shall we make camp and rest?”

Tang Pidi calculated the distance, then nodded. “Let the soldiers sleep properly tonight. We press on again at first light tomorrow.”

Cheng Wujie said, “By my reckoning we’re not far from catching up with that bastard Han Feibao.”

Tang Pidi said, “It’s precisely because we’re not far that we need to let the men rest properly.”

He turned and ordered: “From today onward — depart at sunrise, stop at sunset. Everyone sleeps soundly at night.”

Cheng Wujie understood: the Grand General wanted to meet those broken remnants of an army in the best possible condition.

Though Cheng Wujie privately thought it hardly necessary, given how wretched Han Feibao’s side must be — the Grand General’s orders were never to be questioned.

He went to pass the order, then found a sheltered spot and lay down.

Tang Pidi climbed the high slope and raised his spyglass to look northeast.

“I’ve come all the way to Yanzhou, after all.”

Tang Pidi murmured to himself. “If I just finish off Han Feibao and turn back like that, I can’t help feeling it’s a bit of a waste.”

Down below, Cheng Wujie, who was already lying down, heard this, and let out a helpless laugh.

*The Grand General’s gotten ideas,* he thought. *The people of the Bohai Kingdom had better start praying for themselves while they still can.*

—