Behind the Ning army’s main camp, there was also a mountain — but it stood roughly thirty *li* from Meishan, too far away to be of any use. Had the two mountains been close enough, catapults placed on their summits could have bombarded the Shu army’s positions directly.

But the world offers no such perfect arrangements, and not every blessing of Heaven falls on Li Chi’s side.

Well — it had been raining for seven days now.

*Not every* blessing of Heaven falls on Li Chi’s side. Just most of them.

The ground where the Ning army was camped was open and relatively elevated, yet even so, the camp had turned into a quagmire. The soldiers on patrol picked their way through it visibly struggling — one foot sinking deep, the next barely skimming the surface — and more than a few had already fallen.

That is just how rain works in Shu. You never know when it will start, and you never know when it will stop.

Yet despite such conditions, the Ning army from top to bottom seemed to have remarkably few complaints. Because by comparison, the men on Meishan were suffering far worse.

Everything depends on what you compare yourself to. If you feel your own situation is bad, compare it to your enemy’s — and your heart lifts at once.

At the highest point of the Ning camp, Li Chi had ordered a rain shelter built, and for four consecutive days he had stood there observing the enemy’s movements on Meishan opposite. He hadn’t come during the first three days of rain because he hadn’t expected the downpour to last so long. Having grown up in the north, in Jizhou, he was used to rains that spent themselves in a day or two. The first time he experienced a northern rainstorm that lasted three days or more, he had felt disheveled, impatient — and yet somehow quietly grateful.

Yu Jiuling was standing at Li Chi’s side when he suddenly grinned and asked, “Chief, you called this rain down yourself, didn’t you.”

Li Chi said, “If I had that ability, I’d have used it long ago.”

Yu Jiuling said, “That’s what the preparation time was for.”

Li Chi glanced at him sidelong and went back to observing.

“Eleven months of preparation just to conjure seven days of rain — tell that to anyone and they’ll stare at you blankly, then ask: so you just *waited* for it?”

Yu Jiuling gave a little chuckle.

Li Chi said, “I genuinely did not expect a single rain to fall this thoroughly. You don’t get rains like this in the north.”

Fang Biehan smiled and said, “My lord, a rain like this is rare even in Shu… During the rainy season it’s common for a light drizzle to go on ten days or half a month, but seven straight days of rain this heavy — I haven’t seen that many times either.”

Yu Jiuling immediately said, “You see? That proves it was prayed for.”

“Prayed for… not so bad.”

Li Chi murmured the words to himself. Not one person present — neither Yu Jiuling nor Fang Biehan nor anyone else — could quite make out what he meant by them.

Over on Meishan, the defenders had dug ring after ring of trenches across the mountain’s face to construct their dense fortifications. In ordinary conditions, breaching a defense like that would have been nearly impossible. Meishan had been transformed into a colossal mountain fortress, its face carved into layer upon layer of terraced earthworks like a great stepped citadel.

But that was precisely why the vegetation on the mountainside had been stripped on a massive scale. The trench-digging alone had not merely cut away the grass — it had torn out every root.

Setting aside for the moment whether the earthworks might be washed out by such rain and trigger a landslide: the trenches were already brimming with water. How could soldiers possibly hold their positions inside them?

If three more days of this kept up, Li Chi reckoned, the Shu army soldiers inside the Meishan camp would probably break. And if *they* didn’t break first, the trenches and earthworks surely would.

Yu Jiuling sat inside the shelter swinging his legs. He looked perfectly at ease, but somewhere underneath that ease was a faint, restless itch.

“I actually hate rain,” he said.

“When I was a waiter at a tavern as a boy, I already didn’t like it. Every time it rained, the customers stayed away and the place went quiet. I can’t stand quiet.”

He still looked just as easy and relaxed, but the words themselves were growing heavier.

“When there aren’t many people around, you can’t help but fall into your own thoughts. And once you start thinking, all the happy things and the unhappy things come tumbling out together.”

Yu Jiuling looked over at Li Chi. “Do *you* like rain, Chief?”

Li Chi answered, “You know the place where my master and I used to live didn’t exactly encourage us to like it.”

He laughed a little as he said it.

Yu Jiuling only then remembered — his own loneliness in the rain now seemed a touch self-indulgent by comparison. Because Li Chi and his master had spent most of their years wandering the roads, and more often than not they slept in haystacks. Every rain, large or small, was enough to drive that old man and that small boy huddling together for warmth, cracking a few jokes to make the cold feel a little less like cold — or rather, a little less like something that could wound you.

After saying those words, Li Chi smiled again and continued: “But my master and I — back in those days — we both thought rain was better than no rain.”

Yu Jiuling asked, “Why?”

“Because the common people needed it.”

The answer was as simple as ever, and somewhere in that simplicity lived a feeling one had to think about slowly before it could be understood.

Across most of the north, irrigation channels were nowhere near sufficient to water the crops. Whether an ordinary farmer brought in a decent harvest depended, nine times out of ten, on the mercy of the sky.

Some of the things Li Chi and his master had lived through — when he looked back on them now — still made him laugh out loud. Even when those memories were genuinely wretched.

That year, a great drought had gripped Jizhou. Two years running without a drop of rain, and the entire north had gone as dry and parched as a corn cake left over a fire all day and night. When Changmei Daoren led little Diudiu into Fangcheng County, they were stopped by a crowd of disaster-stricken villagers.

The people had no options left. When they saw a Daoist, they clutched at him as the last straw they could reach. So they pooled what little they had as payment and asked Changmei Daoren to pray for rain.

Changmei Daoren was deeply troubled. Nobody knew better than he did that he possessed absolutely no such power. But he also knew what these people needed most in that moment was some comfort, even if it was brief.

So he steeled himself and opened a ritual altar. Little Diudiu stood to one side, repeating the same words over and over: *If my master fails to bring rain, please, good neighbors, do not curse him.*

But nobody was listening. Nobody cared what he said. They all stared fixedly at Changmei Daoren going through the motions on that makeshift platform.

Not wanting to discourage the crowd too early, Changmei Daoren kept walking and turning and murmuring his incantations on the altar.

From morning until dark. By nightfall, the onlookers had run out of patience. Some retrieved the things they’d brought as payment, cursing as they left. Others picked up clods of dirt and hurled them at Changmei Daoren on the platform, and little Diudiu scrambled up with all his strength and spread his arms to shield his master with his own body.

He kept shouting, his voice already scraped raw to almost nothing.

*You can’t do this — my master is still trying. How can you blame him? He didn’t come to pray for rain on his own — YOU asked him to come!*

But words like that from a child of a few years carried no weight at all. Even if Changmei Daoren had said them himself, they would have carried no weight.

Changmei Daoren stubbornly kept walking and turning and murmuring, and little Diudiu stubbornly stood before him to block everything he could — even, if he could have managed it, to block away the stares of the crowd.

By nightfall everyone had gone, taking back with them everything they’d brought — the dried provisions, the eggs, all of it.

Master and disciple, who had neither rested nor eaten nor drunk anything for an entire day, finally stopped.

They sat side by side on the platform. Changmei Daoren let out a long breath, then smiled and said, “I thought I could trick Old Heaven into it.”

Little Diudiu smiled too — not bitterly.

He said, “Master, you tried your best. You tried a lot harder than we usually do when we’re running a con.”

Changmei Daoren laughed at that, and it was a little less bitter than it might have been — perhaps entirely because of those words. *I tried to do good, and I gave it everything I had.* So what was there to be upset about?

Changmei Daoren said, “What I was thinking was — Old Heaven looks down, sees someone performing a ritual, sees that he’s devout and serious, gets fooled into thinking he’s a proper Daoist, and sends down a bit of rain…”

Little Diudiu said, “Heaven’s not easy to trick. Next time we won’t try.”

Changmei Daoren asked, “Are you hungry?”

Little Diudiu rubbed his stomach. “It’s… fine, I suppose.”

Changmei Daoren pulled him up. “Let’s go find something to eat.”

Little Diudiu made a face. “Master, give it up. In this town, we’re not going to find anything to eat anymore. What I say is — let’s find a decent haystack, the two of us sleep ourselves a great long sleep, set off for the next town first thing in the morning, and if we find someone gullible enough with a bit of money to spare, we’ll have a meal.”

Changmei Daoren made a sound of agreement and pointed to a haystack in the distance. “That one looks good to me. By orientation, it has the White Tiger in front and the Black Tortoise behind — a night of sound sleep is guaranteed.”

Little Diudiu said, “Is that what the White Tiger and Black Tortoise told you to tell me?”

Changmei Daoren laughed out loud and moved to pick Diudiu up, but Diudiu shook his head. “No need. Come to think of it, we’ve both gone two days without eating. If you carry me, you waste the energy, and then you’ll need to eat more once we find food — that’s not efficient. I’ll walk myself.”

Changmei Daoren paused. His eyes grew faintly wet.

Then he saw Diudiu stretch out his hand toward him, and in a small but resolute voice say: “But you have to hold my hand. I’m still a little kid — that’s what all the fathers do when they walk with their children.”

Changmei Daoren took Diudiu’s hand, and the two of them walked toward the haystack with the White Tiger and the Black Tortoise.

“Master, is grass edible?”

“It is.”

“Master — if grass is edible, then since we’re sleeping in a haystack, we’re basically sleeping in a pile of food. We could eat our fill.”

“Foolish disciple — this is all dry hay. If you’re going to eat grass, why not go find some fresh? I was never very fond of dry things; I prefer something with a bit of liquid.”

“Foolish master — it’s been two years without rain. Where would fresh grass come from?”

“Hmm… I suppose you have a point.”

Changmei Daoren hollowed out a space in the haystack and told little Diudiu to crawl inside, where it was more sheltered from the wind. The master had been so long without food that he had little strength left, and he could only just manage to dig a space big enough for Diudiu.

Then he lay down on the outside, pulled some dry hay over himself as a cover.

“Sleep. Tomorrow morning we’ll go find something to eat.”

“Master, why does dry hay taste bitter too?”

“You actually ate some?”

“Because I’m actually hungry.”

At that very moment, a great wind suddenly rose, and on its heels came banks of black cloud rolling in.

Moments later, rain came crashing down.

Master and disciple curled up inside the haystack — but what good was a haystack? In no time both of them were soaked through.

Changmei Daoren kept pulling off layers of his own clothing to drape over Diudiu, murmuring to himself that at least this way he could finally get a bath.

Diudiu reached a timid hand out from the haystack, caught a palmful of water, and drank it.

“Master, I don’t like this.”

“Don’t like what?”

“I don’t like the common people having to live at the mercy of the sky.”

Changmei Daoren was silent for a long while. He didn’t answer Diudiu’s words. Instead he said to himself, “By rights, now that the rain’s come, Heaven ought to send us a bit of food too.”

Diudiu laughed softly, then patted the now thoroughly sodden haystack. “It’s got liquid in it now. Not so bad.”

Master said “mm,” plucked a blade of hay and put it in his mouth. “Mm. Not so bad.”

—