Kuoke Diyelan could see that this was becoming a catastrophe, and he could not afford to waste a single moment. From the look of the battlefield, he was less than half a day behind Tang Pidi — if he moved now, he could intercept Tang Pidi before he reached the next position, pin down his rear guard, and then converge his forces for a full encirclement. Even from this losing position, there might still be a way to claw back victory.
If he could trap Tang Pidi’s forces as well, he could reclaim the time Tang Pidi had stolen. Then he could annihilate every Ning army unit in the northern steppes, and Kuoke Diyelan would still have grounds to petition the Great Khan for a commendation.
If he failed to catch up — if Tang Pidi relieved the encircled Ning forces and slipped away — Kuoke Diyelan could already imagine the scale of the Great Khan’s fury. The twenty thousand Black Wu elite of the southern expedition were gone; if Tang Pidi now freed the trapped Ning armies as well, Kuoke Diyelan feared he would lose not only his post as Supreme Marshal but his title as Prince.
So Kuoke Diyelan ordered the full army to give chase at once, and simultaneously dispatched riders to recall the Black Wu forces besieging Blood Floating Tower’s camp. The ten thousand Ning soldiers trapped in that camp no longer mattered — killing them all would change nothing.
The next Black Wu encampment was dangerously close: only sixty or seventy li away. The Ning army had already half a day’s head start; by his estimate they would be arriving there soon.
He pushed his hundred-thousand-plus men forward at maximum speed, hoping only to arrive while Tang Pidi was still in the early stages of his attack.
After about thirty li of pursuit, the forward cavalry suddenly wheeled back to report: roughly four or five li ahead, a massive battle was underway.
Kuoke Diyelan spurred to a vantage point and took his field telescope. In the distance, a melee of enormous scale raged — tens of thousands of soldiers at minimum, all tangled together.
His immediate read: the Black Wu forces encircling the next Ning unit must have received a call for help and sent out a detachment, which had run straight into the Ning army on the road.
Kuoke Diyelan gave the order immediately, and his troops charged forward with a roar.
He had to be fast. Tang Pidi had over a hundred thousand men plus the Ning soldiers he had already freed — even though the exact number was unknown, the total almost certainly exceeded the Black Wu detachment, since that force had been committed to a siege and could not have sent everything.
He thought this timing almost providential: he had ridden hard, fearing Tang Pidi might outrun him — and here Tang Pidi had been stopped.
His over a hundred thousand Black Wu soldiers plunged into the battle. And then — he had walked into another trap.
Both sides locked in that melee were Ning armies.
Tang Pidi watched from a distance. The moment he saw the Black Wu troops come up from the south, he had a horn signal blown.
Kuoke Diyelan’s men had barely entered the fray when something felt wrong. They pushed forward, and the two sides that had been fighting suddenly began to peel apart to either flank.
By the time they reached the center, they could see it: the soldiers in Black Wu uniforms were all Ning men.
By then, there was no retreating.
The battle raged through noon and into dark, and from dark through to dawn. Kuoke Diyelan, shielded by his personal guard, fought his way through the chaos and finally broke out of the encirclement — but when he looked back, his army had been scattered. Only a few thousand men had made it out with him.
Before he could draw breath, a vast mass of Ning soldiers appeared behind him, sweeping across the land like a tidal wave. It was the Ning army that had been assaulting Yuwai Ridge, now arriving from the rear — black armor like storm clouds, red banners rolling wide. The sight of it sent Kuoke Diyelan wheeling his horse and fleeing.
As he ran, he kept asking himself: how could the Ning army, a force less than a third the size of Black Wu’s, somehow seem to grow larger at every turn, pressing everywhere, overwhelming at every point?
The fresh Ning reinforcements that closed in from behind — over a hundred thousand strong — finally shattered the last of Kuoke Diyelan’s position. His column was simply consumed.
After a full day and night of fighting, nearly a hundred thousand Black Wu soldiers lay dead — seventy or eighty thousand of them. Another ten or twenty thousand had simply been swallowed into the chaos of the night battle and were never accounted for.
There were no wounded, because the Supreme General had issued the order: take no prisoners.
The Ning army itself was by now nearly at the limit of its endurance — they had been fighting and marching without pause for days. But victory was within reach, and the Supreme General was still at the front, so the soldiers gritted their teeth and followed.
After breaking Kuoke Diyelan’s hundred-thousand-strong force, Tang Pidi drove the Ning army northward without pause.
In truth, this battle had been fought with a savagery unprecedented even for the Ning army.
Tantai Yajing’s sixty thousand men had been tasked, as part of the original plan, to attempt a breakout to the north if possible — to try to link up with the other Ning forces. He bore the responsibility of fighting his way out of encirclement and still supporting his surrounded comrades.
But precisely because his numbers appeared strongest, the Black Wu forces had redirected even more troops to seal him in.
After over ten days of fighting, more than forty thousand of his sixty thousand Ning soldiers — veterans who had fought their way back and forth across the Central Plains — had died.
Tang Pidi had brought over a hundred thousand men from the south, and with the additional hundred thousand who arrived later, plus the remnants of Tantai Yajing’s force, the combined strength reached close to three hundred thousand.
From this point on, Tang Pidi had the numerical advantage to take the offensive.
This was what Kuoke Diyelan could never understand: how had Tang Pidi’s numbers seemed to grow larger the longer the battle went on?
What it means to be a true commander — Tang Pidi had demonstrated it in full.
The Ning army drove northward with unstoppable momentum, and freed another encircled Ning unit. This force had set out with fifty thousand men; after ten-plus days of fighting, fewer than twenty thousand remained, and nearly half of the survivors were wounded.
By now, Li Chi himself arrived with his personally-led relief column — only thirty-odd thousand men, but they were fresh troops who had not yet exhausted their strength.
After the combined forces merged, the Ning army pushed north with everything they had, pursuing the Black Wu army relentlessly no matter the cost.
Tang Pidi had known from before the campaign began — had known clearly — that when this battle was over, the Ning army would have paid a terrible price.
But it was worth it.
If this battle ended in a great victory, it would destroy the entire Black Wu southern elite — and the next time Black Wu harbored thoughts of driving south, they would hesitate. A single victory like this could buy at least twenty years of peace.
The Great Ning had never needed northern stability more urgently. Twenty years without Black Wu incursions and the Emperor could double the empire’s strength. After that, when Black Wu dreamed of the south again, when they thought to bully the Ning the way they had once bullied Chu — that would be a fantasy.
Perhaps for the next century, or even two, Ning in terms of raw national power would still not be Black Wu’s equal. But with twenty years of foundation to build on, the Great Ning would grow stronger, steadily and surely.
Over the following days, the Ning army won victory after victory. The million-strong Black Wu force, which had split the Ning army into pieces, was itself now being split to pieces by Tang Pidi’s rolling chain of blows. Not one advantage of their million-man army was brought to bear — it was the Ning army dividing and destroying Black Wu, not the other way around.
Four days later. Blood Floating Tower’s camp.
The Black Wu forces had already withdrawn. Their million-strong army had lost at least four to five hundred thousand men — and counting the other battlefields and the frontier passes, total Ning kills exceeded seven hundred thousand.
And these were the best soldiers of Black Wu’s southern elite.
So thoroughly had the enemy been shattered that Tang Pidi’s pre-arranged position to counter Black Wu’s most fearsome heavy cavalry — the Iron Floating Towers — had never even been needed. The Black Wu soldiers no longer dared to gamble on it. Their Prince Kuoke Diyelan had disappeared; with no supreme commander, watching Ning morale at its absolute peak, how could they dare commit the Iron Floating Towers?
If even the Iron Floating Towers were destroyed, they would still face death upon returning home. Even the situation as it stood was enough to make the Great Khan order executions across the board.
One hundred and fifty thousand soldiers had marched south with an overwhelming advantage, fighting exactly the kind of open-field battle in which Black Wu excelled — and yet against a Ning force of barely fifty-odd thousand, seven hundred thousand Black Wu soldiers had been killed. Since the founding of the Black Wu Empire, no shame had ever cut this deep.
In the camp.
When Tang Pidi led the army back, Li Chi hurried forward with his generals to meet him, knowing that Tang Pidi must be utterly exhausted.
Before he had even reached the camp gate, Tang Pidi leaped from his horse, strode forward several paces, and knelt on the ground.
“Your subject Tang Pidi deserves ten thousand deaths!”
After those words, he knocked his head against the earth several times and remained kneeling.
Li Chi ran to him and tried to help him up, but Tang Pidi refused to rise.
“Your Majesty, please punish your subject. I have failed your trust, failed the trust of hundreds of thousands of soldiers. This battle was not fought well. Your subject led the army to catastrophic losses — I cannot excuse myself.”
Hearing those words, Li Chi felt his heart bleeding.
Fifty-odd thousand men, against one hundred and fifty-odd thousand of the finest, most battle-hardened soldiers in the world — a victory of this scale had never been seen in the long history of the Central Plains. Flip through the history books page by page, word by word, and nothing like it would ever be found.
And yet Tang Pidi knelt before him and refused to rise, demanding punishment at all costs…
Li Chi’s heart bled because he understood Tang Pidi all too well.
“What fault is yours? Without you, how could there have been a victory like this?”
Li Chi reached down to lift him. Tang Pidi still would not rise.
“Of the fifty-odd thousand soldiers who followed me to the northern steppes, over twenty thousand are gone. Twenty thousand, Your Majesty. This battle… your subject deserves ten thousand deaths, and there can be no pardon.”
Li Chi said, “Old Tang — are you trying to force your Emperor into error?”
Tang Pidi said, “Your Majesty, your subject did repel the Black Wu forces — but the losses were too great. This is not a great victory. It can only be called a costly victory…”
Li Chi crouched down and spoke quietly into Tang Pidi’s ear: “Don’t think I don’t know what’s in your head. The day I enfeoffed you as Grand Marshal-Prince in Jiangnan, you didn’t refuse — but I could see it from that moment onward: you’ve been thinking ever since about how to be rid of that title.”
Tang Pidi, still kneeling, said, “Your Majesty — this precedent must not be set. It is a grave taboo to enfeoff a prince of a different surname. If Your Majesty does not strip your subject of this title now, there will never be another chance.”
Li Chi said, “If you do this, do you not fear that I’ll be cursed to death for it?”
Tang Pidi said, “The society and the altars of the realm endure for a thousand generations, Your Majesty.”
Li Chi straightened and said, “Whatever you say, the battle is not yet concluded. Everything else must wait until we return to Chang’an. Your matter can be settled then.”
Tang Pidi knew that pressing too hard right now would chill the hearts of the whole army. His intent had been conveyed to His Majesty — that was enough.
So Tang Pidi dropped his voice and said, “Your Majesty — you should pull me up.”
Li Chi took a deep breath, shot Tang Pidi a fierce glare, and took his arm: “Get up, then. I’ve had food prepared for you. Come eat.”
Tang Pidi rose smoothly: “This criminal thanks Your Majesty.”
Li Chi leaned in close and spoke low into Tang Pidi’s ear: “You forced my hand today — I’ll find a way to pay you back for it. You just wait.”
Tang Pidi bowed his head: “Your subject… dares not wait.”
—