Li Kun crouched beneath a tree, staring with deep concern at Li Wu, who was alone inside the government office laughing to himself with a foolish grin.

He had held himself back for half the day, but could bear it no longer. He tossed down the branch in his hand and stood up.

“Big Brother laughing… laughing all day… did Big Brother go silly?” he muttered as he shuffled and grumbled.

“Diao’er is worried, must go check… come along Third Brother, ask the doctor to give Big Brother a needle.” Li Kun mumbled to himself.

“Go ahead if you want Big Brother to beat you.” Li Que said without even lifting his head.

He sat in the sunlight, brow furrowed tightly, mending a cloth boot that had torn through in three places over the past three days.

Hearing this, Li Kun remembered Big Brother’s fists and hesitated, his feet coming to an uncertain stop.

“But if Big Brother has gone silly, what will we do… who will cook food for us downstairs…”

“He hasn’t gone silly. Sleep it off and he’ll be fine.” Li Que bit through the cotton thread and held the mended boot up to examine it in the sunlight. No matter how he looked at it, he wasn’t satisfied. “Big Brother’s mending still looks better.”

“Then… then let Big Brother mend it.”

“Big Brother is busy.” Li Que said.

Li Kun looked with confusion at Li Wu through the window not far away, unable to understand what his big brother could possibly be busy with while grinning to himself like that.

The rosy glow of dusk filtered through the simple, unadorned rooms of the government office, painting a band of rose-colored light in the air.

Li Wu sat with nothing to do, staring at the evening clouds, and once again couldn’t help but break into a grin.

Shen Blockhead had said she was proud of him.

She was unlike any other princess — clearly born of golden branches and jade leaves, of the most noble imperial bloodline, yet she had never once been condescending or arrogant.

In her innocent and guileless eyes, all living creatures under heaven were equal, high and low alike. Whether facing Diao’er with his limited mind or a destitute old woman in tattered clothes, she treated them all with warmth and patience.

The hardships and trials she had suffered after wandering among the common people had not diminished her purity. On the contrary, like a gemstone refined by fire, they had only made her shine with a more dazzling brilliance.

She was the pearl he had found in the gravel.

His pride.

And today, she had said she was proud of him.

“No matter how this campaign against the bandits turns out — whether you go on to wear gold and purple, or live out your days as a man of the fields and mountains… I am proud of you.”

The corners of Li Wu’s mouth shot up with a force that not even eight oxen could have hauled back.

It was just a bandit suppression campaign.

What was so hard about it?

He himself had been a scav — pfft, a forager. The tricks that foragers used were more familiar to him than to anyone. If nothing else, he would fight fire with fire, pit a forager against foragers. He was absolutely going to take down that wretched Jinzhu Stronghold and make Shen Zhuxi look at him in a whole new light.

Li Wu picked up the bandit suppression strategy that Blockhead had stayed up all night to write and began reading it with complete concentration.

Likely out of consideration for his level of education, the strategy had been written in plain, straightforward language, using mostly two-character words and common idioms. Reading through it from start to finish, Li Wu had almost no trouble recognizing any of the characters.

Looking at this strategy written and tailored just for him, Li Wu once again couldn’t help curling the corners of his mouth.

No matter how much Shen Blockhead argued otherwise, she was clearly head over heels for him.

Li Wu called out with a powerful voice: “Bring me the map of Jinzhu Stronghold! I want to get a good look at what makes this pack of golden pigs think they’re so impressive!”

Li Que, who had been mending his cloth boot in the last of the evening light with great self-sufficiency, jolted to attention and reflexively cried out: “Coming!”

“Hold this for me!”

Li Que flung the boot and the needle and thread at Li Kun, who was sitting nearby, and sprinted toward the office.

Li Kun had been bent over the ground, building obstacles for a colony of ants that was relocating. Out of nowhere, a cloth boot dropped on his head, knocking him with a yelp. By the time he was glaring up with wide, furious eyes, Li Que had already darted into the office.

“Big Brother, here is the map of Jinzhu Stronghold.”

Li Que retrieved a hand-drawn map from the bookshelf and spread it out on the desk before Li Wu.

The map showed only the most basic terrain, and the closer it got to the stronghold’s main headquarters, the sketchier it became. Li Wu stared at the rough, crude drawing and bent his head in hard thought, not lifting his eyes even as he said:

“Have the evening meal brought here. You two don’t need to wait for me to eat.”

Li Que agreed and left the office, quietly easing the door shut behind him.

He turned around to find Li Kun standing right behind him.

“Is Big Brother’s head better?” he asked with genuine concern.

“Better, better. Go somewhere else and play — Big Brother’s busy with important matters, be careful or you’ll disturb him and he’ll scold you.” Li Que said in a hushed voice.

Li Kun gave a half-understanding nod and trotted off elsewhere to bother the ants.

Li Wu sat alone in the office, bent over in deep thought. Taking down one bandit was manageable — but how was he supposed to take down three hundred of them?

He had only a hundred and twenty soldiers under his command, and many of them were so full of flab that they looked less like soldiers and more like cooks with their ladles. Expecting them to go up the mountain and take on three opponents each was about as realistic as hoping the bandits of Jinzhu Stronghold would accidentally eat a pot of poisonous mushrooms and do themselves in.

Without noticing, the glow of dusk faded away.

Moonlight as clear and cool as water filtered through the window screen, washing over the smooth, gleaming brick floor. The night breeze carried the distant song of insects, like wisps of smoke dissolving into the mild spring night.

Li Wu’s shadow fell across the desk, obscuring one of the markings on the map. Only then did he realize how deep into the night it had grown.

Half a day of hard thinking, and he still had not come up with any decent plan.

If it were truly this easy to solve, Wang Wenzhong would never have handed him this task in the first place.

That damn Wang Wenzhong — if he couldn’t stand him, he should’ve just said so directly. One moment he was rewarding him with the rank of Centurion, the next he was dumping a thorny problem in his lap.

A hundred soldiers whose bark was worse than their bite — how was he supposed to deal with over three hundred seasoned forager-bandits?

Even with himself, the king of kings among foragers, it still wasn’t enough!

Li Wu was a mess of frustration. He threw his head back and let himself fall against the chair’s backrest.

Fine, fine. No matter how many tricks there were, wasn’t it always the same? Bandits came, and Diao’er hacked them down. Officials came, and Que’er blocked them. And he would seize whatever opportunity arose — fight if he could fight, run if he couldn’t.

What was that thing Shen Blockhead said?

When soldiers come, a general holds them off; when floods come, sandbags hold them back. And when fire comes, what do you do with…

Li Wu went still. He snapped bolt upright in his chair.

Water? Fire?

He began frantically rifling through the thick stack of bandit suppression strategies on the desk.

He remembered seeing something like it… where had it been…

Finally, he stopped at a page bearing only a few hundred characters.

“By a stroke of chance, I once heard a man of great learning and keen strategic mind speak of the bandit crisis in the twenty-fourth year of the Tianyan reign. The military commander tasked with suppression at the time was General Zhao of Zhaowu, and it cost him over twenty thousand men to take down Lushan Bandit Stronghold, which held only three thousand. At the time, the court officials all agreed it had been no easy feat. But this man believed that General Zhao had taken the long road and missed the point — that in order to claim credit for pacifying the fierce bandits through pardon, he had purchased a superficially glorious but devastating victory by sacrificing the lives of his own soldiers.”

“Had it been him, he would have borrowed a favorable east wind and eliminated the Lushan bandit threat once and for all.”

In a flash of lightning brilliance, a beam of clarity cut through the murky chaos of Li Wu’s mind.

He threw himself over the desk and studied the spread-out map with intense focus.

Time slipped past unnoticed. The moonlight seeping through the window shifted from deep to pale, and a sharp, resonant crow shattered the silence at the boundary between night and day.

Li Que had drilled all day and was sleeping the deep sleep of exhaustion. Even Li Kun’s thunderous snoring from beside him couldn’t make his eyelids so much as flutter.

He was sleeping soundly when the two-man room assigned to him and Li Kun was suddenly kicked open.

A figure burst in with dynamic energy, and began slapping him from foot to head in quick succession.

“Stop sleeping! Wake up — I’ve figured out how to deal with that pack of golden pigs!”

Li Que was still in a daze when he was yanked up into a sitting position.

Bleary-eyed and half-asleep, he looked at the person before him, who was already fully dressed: “Big Brother… what’s… where are you going?”

“It’s not where I’m going — it’s where we’re going.” Li Wu said, then turned and delivered a slap to the soundly sleeping Li Kun. “Get up, there’s work to do!”

Li Kun lay in bed like a dead hog, completely motionless.

“Get up, there’s pig offal to eat!” Li Wu announced.

“What?” Li Kun reflexively jackknifed upright, eyes still crusted with sleep, and began sniffing the air and looking left and right. “Where? Where? Where’s the pig offal?”

“Get up and get to work! Once we’re done, there’ll be pig offal for you!” Li Wu landed another slap on Li Kun, rousing him completely from his search for pig offal that did not exist.

“What does Big Brother need me to do?” Li Que rubbed his eyes and climbed out of bed.

“Go find someone reliable and buy two hundred catties of fierce-fire oil —”

Li Que’s drowsiness vanished entirely. His expression turned serious. “Two hundred catties of fierce-fire oil?”

“That’s right, it has to be fierce-fire oil.” Li Wu said. “This cannot get out.”

“Big Brother, the cost of fierce-fire oil is no small sum —”

“Put it through a private ledger for now and get Wang Wenzhong to cough it back up later.”

Seeing that his mind was made up, Li Que dropped the matter and moved on. “What else does Big Brother need?”

Li Wu checked that no one was around, then laid out his plan in full detail. Li Kun naturally couldn’t make heads or tails of what was being plotted and kept nodding off where he sat, but the brighter Li Que’s eyes grew with every word, and the moment Li Wu finished, he couldn’t help exclaiming:

“This plan is brilliant!”

As soon as Li Que said it, something seemed to occur to him, and a troubled look crossed his face. “Big Brother’s strategy is excellent, but how do we guarantee that a west wind will appear exactly when we put the plan into action?”

“Fortune favors the bold — if it comes, it comes; if not, there’s no forcing it —”

Li Que was just about to agree when Li Wu’s tone shifted abruptly.

“That said, we should still put our best effort into making it happen.”

“What does Big Brother have in mind?”

“Wait until the time comes — then you’ll know.”

Three days later, only the final day of the deadline given by the Xuzhou Prefect remained.

The sky had not yet begun to lighten, but the moon had already slipped behind a layer of clouds.

That shifting moment between darkness and light — precisely the hour when those keeping night watch were at their most slack.

The chief and subordinate leaders of Jinzhu Stronghold were still fast asleep, arms around their beloved concubines. The lookout posted in the watchtower was yawning widely. No one could have imagined that beneath the surface calm, a crisis had already begun to take shape.

At the foot of Jinzhu Mountain, a group of stealthy figures crouched in the blind spot of the watchtower. Out of the darkness, two shadowy silhouettes slipped out from inside the mountain and made their way back in secret to the blind spot of Jinzhu Stronghold’s lookout.

“How did it go on your end?” Li Wu asked in a suppressed voice.

He crouched in the shadow of an earthen slope, a branch thick with leaves propped on each shoulder as camouflage.

Li Que before him was dressed the same way.

He had stuck two branches into his hair like hairpins, and with every word he spoke, the leaves trembled and bobbed on top of his head.

“No problems — everything is ready.” Li Que said. “Six ignition points, all doused in fierce-fire oil.”

A large figure covered from head to toe in branches crouched on the ground and shuffled with difficulty into the blind spot of the watchtower.

“Everyone’s here, Big Brother…”

“All ready?” Li Wu asked.

Li Kun nodded. “All ready…”

“Good. Everything is in place — all we need now is the west wind!”

Li Wu pinched up a clump of soil and rubbed it slowly between two fingers. The dry earth crumbled into dust and fell from his hands in a fine shower.

“Big Brother, what are you doing?” Li Que asked.

“East winds bring moisture and west winds bring dryness; south winds blow warm and north winds blow cold — that’s what the old folks always say. My undergarments usually take a full day to dry, but this time they dried in just half a day. If we push a little harder, the west wind just might come.”

“How do we push?”

Li Wu brushed the soil from his hands and looked up at the two of them. “Which deity oversees the wind?”

“The Dragon King!” Li Kun immediately declared.

Li Wu knocked a firm knuckle against his head and grumbled: “So you want to summon the Dragon King to bring rain, do you? Are you a spy for Jinzhu Stronghold, here to ruin my plans?”

Li Que thought for a moment. “I’ve heard elders say that the wind deity — the one who governs the wind — should be Fei Lian, the younger martial brother of Chiyou.”

“Good. Then we’ll invoke Fei Lian to send us a west wind.” Li Wu said.

“How do we invoke him?” Li Que asked.

“In ancient times, Zhuge Liang called upon the east wind through ritual. Today, Li Wu composes a verse to summon the west wind — whether it works or not, the posture must be right.”

No altar, no banner, not even a single offering.

Li Wu reached up into the two branches swaying above his head in the wind and casually pulled one out. He pointed its tip toward the darkened sky, his expression full of confidence, and began to recite on the spot:

“Wind deity Fei Lian, hear me well — come to the rescue without delay. This duck seeks the west wind’s favor tonight — success earned, and I’ll host your banquet someday. But if you insist on turning your face — I’ll pay your temple a visit without fail. First your image I’ll smash to bits, then your shrine I’ll burn in the gale. If incense and offerings you still wish to claim — then get moving and blow from the west without delay.”

Li Que was just about to clap and cheer when Li Wu silenced him with a look.

“Save the commentary for later.”

Li Que obediently shut his mouth.

Li Wu pondered for a moment, then declared: “This poem shall be called ‘Seeking the Wind.'”

Silence fell. Not a sound stirred.

Three pairs of eyes stared fixedly at the branch in Li Wu’s hand, which had not moved an inch.

Not just wind — even the air itself seemed to have frozen in place under the weight of Li Wu’s “Seeking the Wind.”

A cup of tea’s time passed.

An incense stick’s time passed.

“It moved, it moved…” Li Kun said happily.

Li Wu dropped the branch and knocked a second firm knuckle onto his head.

“That was my hand shaking! Damn it all — once this job is done, I’m going to burn down that cursed wind deity’s temple. Where is that miserable turtle’s temple, anyway?”

“Big Brother, the wind deity’s temple is in Taizhou.” Li Que said.

Li Wu pulled out his fire-starter from inside his clothes, clenched his teeth, and said: “Blast it all — we’re going for it. First we’ll finish off these ruffians here, and once we’re done, it’s on to Taizhou to deal with the wind deity!”

“Big Brother…” Li Que stared blankly past him at the forest behind. “It really moved.”

“I’m not moving right now!” Li Wu said.

Whoosh —

The fire-starter Li Wu had drawn out suddenly flared with a flame.

A spark of realization flashed through his mind. He snapped his head up.

The bamboo groves in every direction were swaying. The grass beneath their feet was rustling and trembling. In the very instant the wind rose, the whole world seemed to come alive.

The sound of waves washing over river sand wove its way through moonlit shadows and swaying bamboo.

Ten thousand bamboo stalks sang in unison as the west wind came charging through.

The flame of the fire-starter cast its light across three faces, each entirely different in appearance.

After a prolonged silence, the expression on Li Wu’s face gradually hardened into resolve.

“All ready?”

“All ready!” both replied in unison.

Li Wu stepped back, and hurled the fire-starter in his hand toward the dark, gleaming fierce-fire oil spread before him.

Whoosh!

A fierce tongue of flame shot up from the ground!

The transparent fire spread from a single point to a single line, then at a point ten zhang away split into three lines, and at the next junction split into six, before being seized by the howling west wind and hurtling with thunderclap speed toward the vast expanse of bamboo forest surrounding Jinzhu Stronghold!

Blinding firelight burst suddenly through the darkness of Jinzhu Stronghold.

And for all those within Jinzhu Stronghold, the true night had only just begun.