Of all the Ning generals who had marched on the northern campaign, save for Xiahou Zhuo, who remained behind to hold the frontier passes, every one of them was already out here on the northern steppes.
One might say that against this world’s most formidable enemy, only such a lineup would do — though from the results of this battle, perhaps Black Wu didn’t quite merit the description after all.
A million soldiers besieging two hundred thousand Ning troops for more than half a month, and still failing to finish them. Kuoke Diyelan himself had said, as he retreated, that this was the most stinging humiliation since the founding of the Black Wu Empire — and he was absolutely right.
Ever since Guiyue and the eight great clans had united the peoples of Black Wu and crushed the seemingly invincible cavalry of the great Meng Empire, Black Wu had inherited Meng’s legacy of invincibility. That they had never conquered the Central Plains was not for want of the strength to do it — the Central Plains simply hadn’t been theirs to take. In the early period there had been the natural barrier of White Mountain, and later Chu had poured enormous resources into the Yan Mountain frontier passes — that was what had held Black Wu at bay for centuries.
Viewed from another angle: if the Central Plains had not had a single unified and powerful nation like Chu, but instead had fragmented into several or even dozens of petty kingdoms — how could they ever have held back Black Wu?
Now, a new empire had risen — newer, stronger, more unified and more cohesive.
The Great Ning.
Whether Black Wu could still impose its will as before depended entirely on what direction the Great Ning would take over the coming decades.
Kuoke Diyelan was no fool, and the million-plus Black Wu soldiers who had marched south were no weak fighters. They had simply come at the wrong moment, against the wrong enemy — a group of generals of terrifying caliber, and hundreds of thousands of Ning soldiers just as terrifying. Not one or two individuals who seemed unusually strong — a whole group of them, all that strong.
Consider the battle from yet another angle: if it had not been Tang Pidi in command but instead Xiahou Zhuo, or Shen Shanhu, or Tantai Yajing — perhaps none of them would have attacked with Old Tang’s reckless ferocity. But would that have made it easy for Black Wu to smash through the frontier passes and enter the Central Plains?
In this moment, Li Chi felt at peace — genuinely, finally at peace.
This battle had been fought with savagery unlike anything before it. But this battle would buy the Central Plains decades of stability and safety. Countless soldiers had died, but their sacrifice would win a more secure future for many more people of the Central Plains.
Standing before the wooden tower of Blood Floating Tower’s stronghold, Gao Zhen studied it for a long while, then turned to Li Chi: “Your Majesty — should we burn it?”
Li Chi shook his head: “Why burn it? Tear it apart. Salvage the materials and haul them to White Mountain — everything will be useful.”
Gao Zhen paused, inwardly reflecting that he was clearly not a very clever man… nor, it now appeared, a very economical one.
“Oh, there is one more thing…”
Gao Zhen suddenly remembered something and told Li Chi about the underground passage his men had discovered beneath the camp. This piqued Li Chi’s curiosity at once.
He wanted to know where this passage led, because the Blood Floating Tower bandits had been able to torch the Black Wu main camp with such surprising ease — that alone suggested the passage must come out somewhere behind the Black Wu encampment. Otherwise Black Wu would never have failed to stop them.
The Black Wu people of the northern steppe feared Blood Floating Tower, but only because those local tribes couldn’t fight — Blood Floating Tower’s fearsome reputation had done the rest. Would Black Wu itself have been frightened by a band of horse raiders?
It could hardly be that a few thousand bandits had appeared outside a Black Wu encampment and the Black Wu soldiers had simply fled in a panic and let their camp be burned.
“Go and find out.”
Li Chi looked at Gao Zhen: “Bring some men to clear the collapsed section — if this passage reaches all the way to White Mountain…”
He looked at Tang Pidi. Tang Pidi said, “If it reaches White Mountain, that might be as good as inheriting a fortress.”
Li Chi smiled; the others smiled with him.
They went down through the entrance on the ground floor of the wooden tower, lit torches, and made their way forward.
The terrain of these northern steppes was truly extraordinary. Who could have imagined there was an underground river flowing beneath this wasteland?
Water was more precious here than a gold mine. The scattered tribes who scraped a living out here could go a whole year without any real opportunity to bathe — that would hardly be an exaggeration.
Blood Floating Tower had probably chosen this site for the small oasis above — but when they discovered an underground river beneath it, this wooden tower had risen from the ground. Controlling the water source was tantamount to controlling the region. It was less about concealment than about monopoly.
Coming down into it, Li Chi found that the underground river’s current was not especially fast, and its volume was not large. In the wider stretches it reached three or four zhang across; in the narrowest spots, barely a zhang.
How many years of erosion, how many years of layered deposit, had it taken to produce this subterranean wonder?
Yu Jiuling had originally been sent back to the passes to fetch the wine, but when he heard there was an underground river to explore, nothing could make him leave. Li Chi could never hold out against Yu Jiuling’s wheedling, so he relented and dispatched someone else to the passes for the ceremonial wine.
Yu Jiuling walked along with a furrowed brow, looking up, then down, thoroughly puzzled.
“Above us right now — that’s the northern steppes, right? Isn’t it all sand up there? How is the sand not falling down on our heads?”
He looked to Li Chi.
Li Chi said, “In the future, please don’t ask questions like that in public — they remind everyone that your Emperor doesn’t know the answer either.”
Yu Jiuling: “Your Majesty could just make something up — I wouldn’t understand it anyway.”
“Make something up?”
Li Chi thought for a moment, cleared his throat, and said in a grave and learned voice: “From a geomantic perspective, this formation is what is known as a *chuo liu* configuration — it does not arise from natural forces alone, but from the external disruption of the terrain over time, which eventually produced this underground river…”
Yu Jiuling: “Your Majesty, you really do flatter me — you thought making it that complicated would help?”
Li Chi: “There is a simpler explanation.”
Yu Jiuling: “I implore Your Majesty to please simplify.”
Li Chi said, “Did you ever play in the sand as a child? You pile it up, then you poke a hole through the bottom with a stick, and you piss into the hole — and your piss comes out the other side of the pile.”
Yu Jiuling: “I’ve done exactly that!”
Li Chi: “So there you have it. That is a *chuo liu* configuration: you poke, it flows.”
Yu Jiuling: “…”
Chattering like this, they reached the collapsed section. In the haste of their earlier retreat and the dim underground conditions, Gao Zhen’s men hadn’t gotten a good look at what had caused it.
Now, on close inspection, they could see: what had come down was not a collapse of the earthen ceiling at all. Someone had deliberately stacked a large quantity of material here beforehand — Blood Floating Tower’s people had most likely prepared this on the day they first found the underground river.
They had used this passage as their escape route. To stop pursuers, they had pre-positioned a large store of timber and stones. When they fled, they had cut the ropes — or whatever had held it in place — and the stones had crashed down, sealing the passage.
Gao Zhen brought men to clear it, and in less than an hour the passage was open again.
They pushed on. The passage seemed even narrower than the stretch they had already walked.
Gao Zhen led from the front, his men’s crossbows unholstered and ready. No one knew whether any bandits might still be hiding in here — in a place like this, if an ambush found you, there was nowhere to dodge.
They walked for what seemed like several hours; by their reckoning it was already dark outside. And still the passage had no end in sight — looking ahead, it stretched on as if it ran to another world entirely.
At this rate, walking to the exit would take several days. Li Chi and his party gave up any thought of exploring it themselves — there were too many military matters demanding attention.
Li Chi told Gao Zhen to assign scouts with enough food to continue onward, while the main group turned back to Blood Floating Tower’s camp.
By the time they returned to the wooden tower, it was already the next day — the walk had taken so long they had rested half a night inside the passage. The moment they stepped back into the open air, Li Chi felt his mood lift and the world seem a brighter place.
If one had to live for any length of time in conditions like that, one could only imagine the misery of it.
Over the following days, little of note occurred; the soldiers needed time to rest and recover their strength.
The last battle had been too savage — every man’s energy and endurance had been pushed nearly to breaking. That kind of exhaustion could not be recovered in a day or two. And this had been a battlefield, facing the most brutal and lethal work in the world.
Though all the Ning soldiers who had come to the northern steppes were veterans who had been bloodied on countless campaigns across the Central Plains, that did not mean they came through it without consequence.
So Li Chi tasked Tantai Yajing and the other generals with something: organize the soldiers for games and diversions — football matches, polo, anything at all to help the men relax and unwind.
For this battle had been unlike any Ning army campaign before. When had the Ning army ever suffered casualties on this scale? Two hundred thousand men had died on the northern steppes; the Ning army’s main force had lost more than a third of its strength.
Several days later, the scouts who had gone to explore the underground river returned and made their report to Li Chi. They had walked for three and a half full days before emerging — and the exit was indeed beneath White Mountain, inside a grove of trees, within a narrow crack in a cliff face. The crack was barely wide enough for two or three people to pass through at a squeeze. Any narrower and horses might not have gotten through at all.
Near the exit they had found several bodies from Blood Floating Tower — how they had died, whether by internal strife or left behind from wounds, was impossible to say.
Coming out through the cliff crack and casting around in the grove, the scouts could see traces of where the bandits had stopped and camped. Following those traces out to the edge of the trees, they arrived at the remnants of the Black Wu encampment — exactly as expected.
The Black Wu forces had retreated so hastily that the camp had not been fully struck. Many of the tents were left standing; only the remaining grain and provisions had been carried off.
As the scouts had done for every journey since long before — a habit formed so long ago it had become second nature — they had sketched out a rough map of the route and the terrain.
Li Chi listened to the full report, then took the sketched maps and studied them.
“A little narrow. A few thousand horse raiders are one thing — to bring an army of tens of thousands through this would be impractical.”
He looked at Tang Pidi: “Could we have Gao Zhen take the Wolf-Ape Battalion through here and set up an ambush in position ahead of time?”
In terrain like mountain wilderness and dense forest, the Wolf-Ape Battalion fought best and showed their strength the most.
Tang Pidi nodded: “Your Majesty has thought it through well. Yes, let the Wolf-Ape Battalion go through first and prepare their positions.”
Li Chi turned to the scouts: “Could heavy equipment — heavy crossbows and the like — be brought through?”
The scout shook his head: “Your Majesty, no — they could not.”
Li Chi nodded. He looked to Gao Zhen: “Then bring plenty of rope and climbing gear, survey the terrain at the exit thoroughly, and see whether the mountain contours can be used to strike the Black Wu garrison guarding the mountain passes.”
“Yes, sir!” Gao Zhen answered and left to make preparations.
Li Chi asked Tang Pidi: “Can your Emperor come along?”
Tang Pidi said nothing — he simply looked at Li Chi.
That look alone was the answer: of course not.
“There are moments when I, too, like to be unreasonable.”
Tang Pidi said, “If Your Majesty will not listen to your subject, then your subject will have no choice but to invite Her Majesty the Empress to come.”
Li Chi: “…”
While this exchange was taking place, out on the northern steppes, two figures were making their way through the north wind, stumbling and staggering forward.
—