On the high ground, Tang Pidi watched as the Army of Heaven’s Mandate’s fleet began to gradually restore order. The chaos and congestion created by the ramming logs that had come crashing down from upstream had been cleared, and the larger ships were now pushing forward.
Tang Pidi had been waiting for the large ships.
The truth was, the ramming logs had not dealt a particularly devastating blow to the fleet. The Ning Army had no means of sending ramming logs downstream in an endless stream, so any talk of their lethal effect was stretching the point. The logs’ primary purpose was to sow disorder among the enemy ships, clog the river, and slow the arrival of follow-up reinforcements.
But even that was not an end in itself — the real goal was to force the enemy into pushing their large ships forward ahead of schedule.
Those large ships would inevitably be carrying massive siege equipment and high-powered bed crossbows, and since the enemy had suspended their fierce assault rather than pressing forward, they clearly intended to use their weapons to tip the scales back in their favor.
“Send word to Zhuo Qinglin,” Tang Pidi said, his voice calm and flat. “When he sees the signal fireworks, he advances.”
“Yes, sir!”
A messenger immediately acknowledged the order, mounted his horse, and galloped off toward the rear formation.
Out on the river hawk warship, Yang Xuanji raised his spyglass and studied the Ning Army’s defensive position carefully. Behind the Ning Army’s formation, he could make out what appeared to be a wooden wall. A faint sense of foreboding stirred in his chest.
When he had observed from across the river the day before, no wooden wall had been visible in the Ning Army’s position — yet overnight, one had appeared. Was this the Ning Army trying to intimidate them?
He had no way of knowing that those wooden walls were simply there to absorb the impact of the catapult stones.
“Order the large ships to reach the bank faster.”
Yang Xuanji turned and issued the command.
Not long after, the ships carrying the bulk of the siege equipment began drawing toward the bank. These were the largest vessels that could be found among the fishing boats gathered for the campaign — barely adequate, but serviceable.
Just as the lead ships were nearly at the shore, a series of signal fireworks burst upward from the high ground of the Ning Army’s position, blooming and exploding in the sky.
“Watch out!”
Voices immediately rose from the Heaven’s Mandate Army side. Signal fireworks lit off by the Ning Army for no apparent reason could only mean trouble.
Everyone moved faster. Men were already jumping into the river, grabbing the ropes thrown from the ships, hauling with all their strength to pull the vessels toward the bank.
“What is that?”
Someone looked up at the Ning Army’s side of the river. Dark specks had appeared in the sky, and no one could make sense of them.
“Run!”
A soldier on one of the large ships, seeing what was falling toward them, let out a desperate scream — and leapt off the ship.
BOOM!
A massive boulder struck the bow dead-on, and the entire prow shattered to fragments.
A stone that heavy, falling from that height — the deck could not absorb it. The stern of the ship lurched upward with the impact.
A second massive boulder struck amidships, punching a gaping hole straight through the hull. Water poured in from the rupture in an instant.
On the river hawk warship, Yang Xuanji witnessed this with wide, terror-stricken eyes, and a profane exclamation of utter disbelief burst from his lips.
But what in the world was it?
How could the Ning Army make a stone that enormous fly through the air?
At this moment in the war on the central plains, catapults were making their first true combat appearance in the open field. No weapon of such power had ever been deployed before.
In an era still so steeped in superstition, the sight of enormous boulders hurtling out of the sky — what kind of terror must that have stirred?
Even the well-trained Dachu府兵, watching this unfold, felt their legs go weak beneath them.
They could not imagine any explanation. Why were these falling stones striking only their side? Could it truly be that the Ning Army had a deity fighting alongside them?
Under the tremendous power of the catapults, the large ships drawing toward the northern bank were sunk one by one. The psychological pressure this placed on the Heaven’s Mandate Army was enormous beyond measure.
Yet Tang Pidi, too, could not help a certain helpless feeling. If these catapults could be used freely and at will, why would he have waited until now?
The truth was that due to imperfections in the manufacturing process, the catapults that Li Chi and his people had designed had an absurdly high self-destruction rate.
Some catapults would break down before they could even launch a single stone — throwing arm snapping, or windlass mechanism seizing up, or damage of one variety or another that could not be prevented.
Even when a catapult was lucky enough to function, after continuously launching a few stones in succession, it would buckle under the accumulated strain.
So Tang Pidi could only use these catapults against the enemy’s large ships — to stop the siege equipment and high-powered bed crossbows from landing. Once the Heaven’s Mandate Army’s equipment was ashore, their sheer numbers would overwhelm the Ning Army’s position.
Because Yang Xuanji was the one who truly lacked for nothing — not money, not equipment.
Li Chi scraped and pinched every coin himself. Yang Xuanji had countless people falling over themselves to fund him. Wealth flowed to Yang Xuanji like water with no end in sight, and on top of that, the forces he had consolidated were mostly Dachu府兵 — already equipped to a standard far exceeding ordinary rebel armies.
Take the Right Command Guard that had just assaulted the Ning Army — that single guard corps alone had been outfitted with over a hundred bed crossbows.
For Tang Pidi, therefore, destroying the enemy’s heavy weapons was the most effective way to keep the enemy pinned on the river.
CRACK.
Somewhere in the rear, a catapult’s throwing arm snapped, nearly crushing the men beneath. The crew scattered.
After about half an hour of sustained fire, more than a third of the dozens of catapults had already destroyed themselves.
With quality like that, it was completely out of the question to equip the Ning Army’s combat forces with catapults on any meaningful scale.
Cumbersome. Enormous. Nearly impossible to transport. With a self-destruction rate this high — never mind maintenance, just moving them was a challenge.
Yet in that less-than-half-an-hour of bombardment, almost every large ship drawing toward the northern bank had been struck.
One damaged warship after another sank. In the deeper stretches of water, the ships had vanished completely; in the shallows, jutting prows could still be seen above the surface.
Xun Youjiu was among the Heaven’s Mandate Army troops who had already come ashore. He watched the stones from the sky batter the fleet into complete disarray. His terror and shock were as boundless as anyone else’s.
Even he, in that moment, could not help but feel a tremor of helplessness.
While in Yuzhou, he had heard no shortage of tales claiming that Prince Ning was a True Human Emperor. He had not believed a word of it.
To manufacture renown and win over the hearts of the people — nothing was more common than that. Throughout history, men who had built great names for themselves were beyond counting. Li Chi calling himself the Human Emperor Reborn was not even particularly outlandish — the founding emperor of Dachu, in his day, had manufactured a reputation far more extravagant than Li Chi’s story of being a human emperor in a past life.
In those days, to build his prestige and reputation, the advisors of Dachu’s founding emperor had put it about that he was the Heavenly Emperor himself descended to earth — that he had looked down on the suffering of humanity, taken pity on the people, and personally incarnated in the mortal world to end the chaos and deliver the afflicted.
Could Xun Youjiu, with his learning, have swallowed a story like that?
But this time, Xun Youjiu was beginning to believe.
If these were not meteors raining from heaven — then what were they?
In an instant, a shadow fell over the entire Heaven’s Mandate Army, seeping swiftly into every heart.
Against human force, there is still something that can be done. Against the will of heaven, what force can avail?
Superstition, it turned out, had its uses.
In that moment, the Heaven’s Mandate Army no longer dared press forward. They could only hold their position, assembling their forces on the stretch of riverbank they already occupied.
Small mercy: those meteors from heaven did not fall again. Had they come a few more times, the army’s morale might have shattered outright.
Tang Pidi felt much the same way.
He stood on the high ground, and with a note of genuine regret, murmured to himself: “I am not a greedy man. What I am asking for is not unreasonable. Three thousand catapults would just about do it.”
Had Li Chi heard those words, he might well have spat blood.
Li Chi was at that very moment on the road.
The grain and supplies募集 from the Anyang side had arrived, and Li Chi was personally leading troops to escort them to the front lines.
Tang Pidi had said something precisely correct: for a Prince of Ning, if Li Chi took men to cause havoc behind enemy lines, the effect would not compare to the impact of him personally escorting grain and supplies into the Ning Army’s main camp.
Prince Ning personally escorting the provisions — for the Ning Army’s soldiers, that was an absolute and powerful boost to morale.
Still lying in that hay-cart, Li Chi stared up at the white clouds drifting overhead, while his mind turned over what should come after this battle.
This was the hardest battle the Ning Army had faced since marching south. It was a trial, a crisis for the Ning Army — if even Yang Xuanji, with his nearly one million troops and his formidable strength, could not stop the Ning Army, then Li Chi would have no choice but to wonder whether he truly was a man chosen by heaven.
Yet Li Chi also knew: on the battlefield, you could not simply trust everything to luck.
No matter how good the luck — could you really just casually lob a couple of stones at the Heaven’s Mandate Army and have Yang Xuanji’s men take them for meteors from the sky?
Thinking of this, Li Chi suddenly remembered a story mentioned in Master Li’s book.
A story about someone called a “traveler through time” and about a “Child of Heaven’s Mandate.” Li Chi didn’t know what a “traveler through time” was, and truthfully didn’t know what a “Child of Heaven’s Mandate” was either, but the story had been interesting enough.
In the story, the fellow surnamed Liu had luck so extraordinarily good it didn’t just overflow — it burst through the ceiling and kept going.
The one surnamed Liu had only a mere few tens of thousands of men, and they were an exhausted army at that. Facing the million-strong force sent by the one surnamed Wang, he had been completely out of options.
And then, out of nowhere, meteors rained down from the sky — and that million-strong army was wiped out completely.
The most astonishing part was that those stones seemed to have eyes: not a single one landed on the side of the one surnamed Liu.
If you turned this into a story and had a storyteller perform it at a teahouse, every person in the audience would assume it was a myth, a fantasy tale — something no human being could have been involved in. This wasn’t something that happened to people.
Li Chi had happened to recall this, just to relax his mind on the road. Very quickly, he turned his thoughts back to planning his next moves.
And at that same moment, in a small town somewhere in the western regions, the climate had already grown so hot that it was difficult to stay outside for long.
This small town was not very far from the border passes of the central plains — perhaps three or four hundred li from Liangzhou.
In this small town, someone had opened a tiny tavern, and not long after it opened, business was so booming it beggared description.
Because here, there was one completely unique drink: the bubble wine. How to describe the taste? The people of the western regions probably had no equivalent for the word “slop water,” but the smell of this bubble wine was not far from it — and yet drinking it was genuinely addictive.
Inside this tiny tavern, the atmosphere was lively beyond all reason.
A crowd of big-bearded men from the western regions raised their cups in unison, then poured the bubble wine down their throats in great gulping swallows, and then all at the same time tilted their heads back — *belch* —
And then burst into roaring laughter. No one could say what they found so funny, but joy could be that simple.
Behind the bar counter, the proprietor was polishing a wine cup with a clean white cloth. He wore a style of top garment no one there had ever seen before, snow-white. He was tall and slender, his posture unhurried and elegant — and above all, handsome. Which was why, at the side of the counter, five or six young women of the western regions with bright red lips sat leaning against it, not blinking, staring at him.
The proprietor glanced at them sideways, muttering something under his breath.
“What are ‘autumn waves’ anyway? Autumn waves, I know — autumn waves are autumn spinach… autumn spinach is boring…”
He glanced again at those fiery western region young women, and murmured to himself: “Summer waves are more interesting.”
“Proprietor,” one of the girls said, her face full of adoration. “The story you were telling last time — you didn’t finish it. You said that fellow surnamed Liu and the one surnamed Wang — what happened to them?”
The Chinese they spoke was quite broken, but they had been working very hard at learning it to get the proprietor’s attention.
Master Li then replied in perfectly fluent western-region dialect: “The one surnamed Wang was captured. The one surnamed Liu became emperor. That fellow surnamed Liu had extraordinary luck at every turn — his best luck of all was that after he became emperor, his entire inner palace was somehow perfectly harmonious. One woman would be empress for a few years and then yield the position to another, and there was never any quarrel over royal favor. Everything was warm and peaceful. One woman would say, ‘Oh, my son really isn’t suited to be Crown Prince, let yours have the position.’ And the other would say, ‘How can that be right, my son is nowhere near as capable as yours.'”
He added quietly to himself: “Try making a palace intrigue drama out of that. You couldn’t fill even a single episode.”
The western region young women, hearing all this, felt certain the proprietor was giving them a hint.
The one among them with the most impressive summer waves batted her eyes at the proprietor: “We could all be very harmonious with each other, around you.”
Master Li gave a shudder, and thought to himself: lucky for me I am an old veteran, or I’d be genuinely afraid of you little demons.
Another girl asked dreamily: “Proprietor — that story about the meteor shower from heaven — was it real?”
Master Li paused, then went back to polishing his wine cup.
He said nothing — but in his heart, he thought to himself… even if it was real… I still think that was a damn Katyusha.
—