No one could have anticipated it. A great general of the Black Wu Empire — renowned warrior, twenty years of unbroken victory on the field, a hero whom the Black Wu Khagan had personally praised as the Empire’s Tiger — dead in a fashion so inexplicable it defied belief.

Heaven alone knew how that arrow had come.

Kuo Ye Baobao had seen the Ning army pour fire oil down the wall, watched the fire force his troops back in disorder, and worried the front ranks would panic and collide with the rear, breaking the formation entirely. He had ridden forward from the back to steady the line. The horn call — that was his order, blown by the signal men at his side.

A general riding up to hold the line when it faltered was as ordinary as anything on a battlefield. Yet the iron arrow had arrived the instant he showed himself, punching straight through his neck. And the arrow-fletching, sharp-edged as a blade, tore the wound wider as it passed — the throat left with a hole like something scooped out. No one could have saved him from that. Even if the Moon Goddess of the Black Wu Empire had descended in person and looked at the wound, she would have clicked her tongue and shaken her head.

Nothing to be done. Nothing at all.

And so this proud and formidable general of the Black Wu Empire was carried off by his own men as they fled in disarray.

He had led his army south to assault the border fortress dreaming of being the first man to break through into the central plains — surely the Khagan would grant him a marquisate for that. Instead, what arrived was a different kind of throat-sealing: an arrow through it.

With the general dead, the Black Wu army had no one to command them. They could only pull back temporarily and dispatch riders through the night toward Fish-Tail Ridge to report.

And at this very moment, whatever pressure the Ning garrison at the border fortress was enduring, the defenders of Fish-Tail Ridge were enduring its mirror image.

Two hundred thousand Black Wu troops had been battering the border fortress. Tang Pidi’s army had been battering Fish-Tail Ridge. Only because the Black Wu forces holding Fish-Tail Ridge were among Kuo Ke Di Yelan’s finest troops did the ridge hold at all against Tang Pidi’s assault.

Both sides were racing for time — the most precious thing on this battlefield.

The Black Wu were racing to hold Fish-Tail Ridge long enough for their other armies elsewhere to finish encircling and destroying the Ning forces. Kuo Ke Di Yelan had calculated: with a million soldiers, the twenty-odd thousand Ning troops caught in the encirclement would be swallowed within seven days. Even accounting for Ning’s fighting spirit, ten days at most.

His order to the garrison at Fish-Tail Ridge was simple: hold for ten days, whatever the cost. Pin Tang Pidi’s force here. Buy time for the Black Wu encirclement to close.

After those twenty-odd thousand Ning soldiers were consumed, the Black Wu million would converge and finish Tang Pidi’s army in turn.

This battle was meant to destroy every elite soldier Ning possessed in a single engagement. The Ning forces that had come to the northern wastes were the hardened veterans of Li Chi’s conquest — the most seasoned, most ferocious, most enduring soldiers in the empire. Annihilate them, and what would the central plains have left to resist a Black Wu southern drive?

What Kuo Ke Di Yelan had not anticipated was how savagely Tang Pidi’s Ning troops would fight.

It was a defensive battle. The Black Wu held the high ground. Fish-Tail Ridge was not some towering, treacherous peak, but it was elevated, and elevation meant the defenders looked down at their attackers. Yet after three days and three nights of this, the casualties on both sides were running close to even.

This made no sense. Or rather, it made a very particular kind of sense — the kind so maddening it defied ordinary description.

Kuo Ke Di Yelan racked his memory for every battle he knew of, every engagement worth recording in Black Wu history, and found nothing like this. Not just in their ability to fight — their will to fight was ferocious beyond all precedent.

Before this campaign south, Kuo Ke Di Yelan had pictured the people of the central plains as small and slight, inherently disadvantaged against Black Wu soldiers in raw physical terms. Yet what he had seen over three days was not people — it was a pack of wolves and tigers, fighting with a savagery and a disregard for their own lives that went beyond anything he had words for.

A defensive battle, and casualties running even with the attackers. Think about what that means.

If the armies had been equal in size, if Tang Pidi had a million soldiers of his own — Kuo Ke Di Yelan did not let that thought finish itself. The chill was already spreading across his back.

Unbidden, he thought of the letter Yuan Zhen had risked everything to smuggle back to the Black Wu Empire.

The Ning state, Yuan Zhen had concluded, would become the most fearsome enemy the Black Wu Empire had ever faced. If it were not strangled at its birth, there would never again come an opportunity to bully Ning as they had bullied Chu.

In that letter, Yuan Zhen had described Li Chi as a figure without precedent in a thousand years of the central plains’ history — and without equal today.

Because even before the empire called Ning had come into existence, Li Chi had already methodically removed every one of the vulnerabilities that empire might have been born with.

Which meant Ning, once established, would not suffer what Chu had suffered. Chu, for all its outward strength at its founding, for all the ferocity of its army, had nonetheless been shaped from its very first day by the great families operating behind the scenes. Even Chu’s founding emperor, for all his brilliance and vision, could never fully act on his own judgment.

But Li Chi had no such constraint. Even if he had not cleared the ground beforehand, he would not have been the kind of emperor who hedged and hesitated and let others pull his strings. The result was a rare and formidable stability: for at least thirty years, no person and no faction could deflect Li Chi from the path he chose.

Given thirty years, given Li Chi’s ability, the rise of a central plains empire was unstoppable.

That was why Yuan Zhen had been so certain: fail to crush Ning at its founding, and even Black Wu — powerful as it was — would never again have the chance to ride south unopposed.

If Kuo Ke Di Yelan had held any trace of contempt for the people of the central plains at the start of this campaign, it was utterly gone now. Three days of Ning troops storming his position had taught him, concretely and viscerally, what it meant to feel one’s own heart stuttering with dread. He had never, in all his years of warfare, imagined that he would be the one driven to that feeling — not at the head of ten thousand Black Wu soldiers standing in defense.

And yet here he was. Before these three days, every last one of his ten thousand men would have scoffed at the idea. They had sufficient provisions, sufficient weapons and equipment. What was there to fear?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

“Your Highness.”

A Black Wu general came quickly to Kuo Ke Di Yelan’s side and bowed. “Your Highness, the Ning army has withdrawn.”

“I can see that. I’m not blind.” His mood was foul, and it showed in every word.

He glanced at the sky. Still black as ink, but he knew — dawn was close.

The Ning troops had not pulled back because they were frightened. They were waiting for daylight too.

I wonder how Kuo Ye Baobao is faring over there… Kuo Ke Di Yelan murmured to himself, his eyes carrying a look of expectation — hoping the attack on the border fortress would bring good news before long.

Once the fortress fell, once the Ning Emperor was dead or captured, this battle was won entirely.

Elsewhere at that same moment, at the Black Wu’s southern campaign headquarters:

Xu Suqing edged carefully out from the tree line at the foot of the hill and peeked at the camp. Torches burned throughout it, and patrol squads moved at regular intervals.

Something was wrong, though. The number of tents was off. Far too few.

Which meant the bulk of the Black Wu force had already left this camp. If they had all moved to the Blood Floating Bandit settlement, there would have been no reason to take so many tents — the distance between the two was not great.

Because something felt wrong, Xu Suqing decided to go inside and look around. After watching for some time, he had identified the patrol pattern: one squad had just passed, and the next would not appear for about a quarter-hour.

In that window he slipped in from the side of the camp. The earthen walls meant nothing to someone of his ability.

He moved through the camp quietly, trying to determine where he needed to go. He was there to kill Kuo Ke Di Yelan.

His reasoning: a Black Wu prince of Kuo Ke Di Yelan’s standing would not casually take personal command on the battlefield. And to find Kuo Ke Di Yelan, he needed to find the largest tent.

The reasoning was sound. But the Black Wu camp was immense — built to hold a million soldiers and their connecting encampments. Finding Kuo Ke Di Yelan in here was less like searching for a needle in a haystack and more like searching for a needle in a lake.

He kept moving, kept searching. His skills were extraordinary, and with the camp so nearly empty, no one noticed him pass.

The further he went, the more certain he became: Kuo Ke Di Yelan was not here today. The patrol squads were likely the entirety of the garrison — moving continuously to give the impression of more soldiers than there were.

With the camp this hollow, the patrols alone probably accounted for half the remaining troops.

He pressed on until dawn was already beginning to lift the dark at the edges of the sky. Then, at last, he found it — the largest tent in camp, by his estimation.

By this point Xu Suqing had no real expectations. Kuo Ke Di Yelan was clearly not here. But since he’d come this far, he might as well go inside and see if there was anything worth finding.

He circled around to the rear of the tent and peered from the back corner — a dozen or so Black Wu soldiers stood guard in front. Ceremonial, he judged.

He pulled back, noted that there was a rear window, and decided to enter from there.

But at the very moment he was about to go through, he went rigid.

Something flashed through his eyes — a quick, raw flash of horror.

He moved back slowly, stepped into the open, and walked around toward the front of the tent.

The dozen guards heard him, turned, and began shouting. Xu Suqing kept walking, steady and unhurried, as though he had lost his mind.

In the open ground in front of the large tent, a pole had been driven into the earth — roughly as thick as a man’s forearm.

Mounted on top of the pole was a human head.

The sky had begun to lighten. The face on that head was turned toward Xu Suqing.

The face of Xiao Ting.

—