Early summer of the twentieth year of Tianlong, in Yizhou, heavy rain fell.

Seventeen-year-old Shen Qingwu knelt in the rain, dressed in the coarse, patched uniform common to ordinary soldiers.

Throughout the camp, officers and soldiers came and went, some stealing glances at her as they passed.

She was the first person in the Yizhou army to be discovered disguising herself as a man to enlist. Once found out, the commanding general had ordered her expelled—but she refused to leave. Even after three days kneeling here without pause, she showed not the slightest sign of backing down.

Such iron will naturally drew a certain respect. But how could any military camp possibly keep a woman in its ranks?

The rain fell hard, footsteps passing back and forth in fragments Shen Qingwu could barely make out.

To others, three days spent kneeling in punishment might seem a light enough ordeal, but only she knew the true cost of it. She stayed not out of any great love for this camp, but simply because, once again, she had nowhere else to go.

By this point in her life, martial skill was the only thing Shen Qingwu had to her name. The Shen family had served in the military for generations, so when she’d left the Shen household, the army was the only place she could think to go.

The Shen family oversaw the great northwestern Longyou army. Shen Qingwu didn’t want to go there.

Bianjing had the Imperial Guard, and Zhang Xingjian, with his connections there, had even offered to arrange her a position within it. Shen Qingwu refused to accept that kind of “repayment” from him.

Her heart remained lost and uncertain, but her stubbornness ran bone-deep. She didn’t know what she wanted—but she knew, with absolute certainty, what she didn’t want.

And so she’d come to Yizhou instead, to an army where no one knew her, scraping by as an anonymous low-ranking soldier. It wasn’t a good life, nor a terrible one, but at least it gave her somewhere to exist. The commanding general wanted her gone; she tried to resist.

Through lowered eyes, through the curtain of rain, Shen Qingwu saw a pair of mud-splattered military boots stop in front of her.

The rain fell hard. Slowly, she lifted her head and saw a young man standing before her, dressed in a wide-brimmed rain hat and oiled cloak, studying her for a long moment. Behind him stood several men dressed as officers, holding umbrellas, standing in silence.

Shen Qingwu studied the man. In the shadow of his hat, his features were somewhat delicate, his bearing gentle and composed, the corners of his eyes tilted slightly upward, his gaze dark and clear…

It reminded her of Zhang Xingjian.

She’d once thought looks like Zhang Xingjian’s were one of a kind. Apparently, the world had no shortage of handsome men after all.

Zhang Xingjian was nothing, in comparison.

The man studied her for a long moment with a complicated expression. “You’re the one who refuses to leave, the one insisting on enlisting?”

Shen Qingwu said nothing.

She found it tiresome. She was already kneeling here—what more was there to ask?

Her silence drew a sharp rebuke from an officer standing behind the man: “Insolence! The Commander asked you a question—how dare you not respond?”

The Commander!

Realization dawned on Shen Qingwu—so this was the supreme commander of the Yizhou army, the very man who wanted her expelled?

After a moment’s thought, Shen Qingwu lowered her head, pressed both hands flat to the ground, and kowtowed with a resounding thud, startling everyone present. “Commander, please don’t send me away. I’m willing to give my head, spill my blood, for the Commander’s sake!”

After a strange, prolonged silence, Shen Qingwu heard a low chuckle.

The Commander bent down and helped her up, his voice mild and pleasant. “You mean lay down your life and shed your blood, I take it? What’s your name?”

Shen Qingwu looked up, and seeing his eyes, found herself thinking once more of another man’s smiling eyes. Something in her chest caught, briefly, and her expression cooled.

She said nothing. The man introduced himself instead. “I’m Bo Rong.”

Bo Rong—supreme commander of the Yizhou army.

Two days later, Shen Qingwu found Bo Rong waiting for her before a towering mountain cliff, as arranged.

With the rain stopped and away from the camp, Bo Rong wore a half-worn, pale ochre Daoist-style robe, carrying himself with an effortless, unhurried grace. Shen Qingwu, at this point, had no idea what a “scholar-general” even was, nor had she encountered many refined young men in her life—she simply thought this man, elegant and gentle, seemed less like a warrior and more like the scholarly type, closer to Zhang Xingjian’s sort.

Bo Rong studied her expression.

She was strikingly different from ordinary young ladies—dressed carelessly in a patched martial robe, her tied-back hair still flecked with bits of straw she hadn’t bothered to clean out, a split at the corner of her mouth left untreated. She seemed to adapt to the camp’s rough, precarious existence more easily than most.

And yet this young woman needn’t have lived this way at all. She had a pair of bright, sharp, strikingly beautiful eyes, and even without those eyes, if she ever properly washed and groomed herself, she would be a true beauty.

Perhaps, though, among the countless ordinary young women of this world, there was always someone who stood apart from the rest.

Bo Rong sighed softly. Shen Qingwu’s expression remained unreadable.

Bo Rong said, “In truth, I probably shouldn’t keep you here.”

She said nothing.

Bo Rong continued, “Your temperament is far too stubborn and headstrong. You rely on brute force when trouble comes, without thinking things through.”

Still, she said nothing. Since childhood, she’d grown thoroughly used to others’ criticism of her.

Bo Rong said, “Refusing to adapt, refusing to bend—that kind of nature will cost you dearly, again and again.”

The cold wind brushed against the young woman’s icy cheeks; her eyes, frost-like, showed no reaction at all.

Bo Rong reached out and rested a hand lightly on her shoulder. He said nothing for a long while, and Shen Qingwu looked up at him, puzzled.

Against the light, his eyes, as he looked at her, carried a certain haze—whether from the mountain mist or some inward distraction of his own, she couldn’t tell.

He seemed, through her, to be thinking of something else, lost in some memory, distant and absorbed. That complexity of feeling was enough to stir something even in Shen Qingwu.

She lost herself for a long moment under his gaze, then stepped forward and said, “Commander.”

Bo Rong looked up.

Shen Qingwu asked, “Am I really so lacking?”

Bo Rong looked faintly startled.

Shen Qingwu lowered her head, hand clenched into a fist, an unwilling frustration churning within her. When she raised her eyes again, they were sharp and clear, cold and unflinching, utterly unafraid:

“There’s nothing I can do right, nothing I don’t ruin, nothing that satisfies anyone. Is that why no one ever chooses me?

“If that’s all you came here to tell me today, you don’t need to repeat it. I know exactly what I am. If the camp won’t keep me, I won’t make trouble for any of you.”

Fire blazed in Shen Qingwu’s eyes, fierce enough to consume everything in its path. That relentless, burning fire made something in Bo Rong’s chest tighten. By the time he reacted, she had already turned and taken two steps away.

He called out to stop her: “To punish without first teaching is cruelty.”

Shen Qingwu said, indignant, “I don’t understand what that means.”

Bo Rong let out something between a laugh and a sigh. “You’ve barely read a single book in your life, have you?”

Shen Qingwu’s face turned cold, and she made to leave again. This time, Bo Rong caught her by the shoulder. “What I mean is—if no one has ever taught you anything, then no one has the right to blame you for not knowing it. You may not seem likeable at first glance, but to me, stubbornness isn’t a flaw in you—it’s a strength.

“You’ve made your way to the attention of a commander like me through sheer force alone, with no strategy behind it at all—that in itself is remarkable.

“You have a great many strengths in you. They’re simply scattered, unrefined. With the right guidance, the right person to shape them, you could become a far better version of yourself.”

Shen Qingwu’s eyes, brilliant yet cold, studied him now in quiet incomprehension.

That look of hers moved something in Bo Rong.

He sighed. “Good girl—has no one ever once praised you, in your whole life? I won’t ask further. A young woman enlisting in the army must have countless reasons she can’t easily put into words. If you’re willing, you may stay under my command, and I will teach you everything I know. Will you accept?”

Shen Qingwu was silent for a long while.

She found it strange. “Teach me?”

Bo Rong, seeming to drift back into some memory of his own, spoke even more gently. “Yes. I’ll teach you to read, teach you strategy, teach you self-discipline, teach you… everything you ought to learn. Your talent is remarkable. It shouldn’t go to waste.”

Shen Qingwu, on impulse, asked, “And if I use everything you teach me to do something terrible?”

Bo Rong, caught off guard, asked, “What terrible thing would you want to do?”

Shen Qingwu thought about it for a long while.

She said, “I don’t know. Maybe… pluck down the moon.”

Bo Rong let out a breath of relief and laughed, ruffling her hair. “All right. Now, will you tell me your name?”

Rarely for her, Shen Qingwu actually used the mind Bo Rong claimed she never bothered to use. She didn’t want anyone connecting her to the Shen family, didn’t want to take even the smallest advantage from that name.

And yet, every drop of blood in her body had come from the Shen family. If not Shen Qingwu, then what should she call herself?

On the terraced platform, amid the sparse, wind-worn trees, the cold mountain wind brushed against Shen Qingwu’s snow-pale cheek: “Call me ‘A’Wu.'”

The “Wu” meaning “nothing”—as in, “a life that is nothing.”

Not the “Wu” of parasol trees.

And so, in the official records, the name Shen Qingwu registered under was “Wu Shi.”

Through a mistaken retelling, some began calling her “General Wu” instead, and she let it pass without correction.

Bo Rong turned out to be an excellent teacher—perhaps even better suited to teaching than to commanding. He kept Shen Qingwu close by his side, teaching her, in exhaustive detail, everything he believed she ought to learn.

Over her years in the army, Shen Qingwu did more than fight; she learned to read and write, studied strategy, learned to think.

At first, others in the camp resented how much attention Commander Bo lavished on a woman. But once Shen Qingwu began leading troops into battle herself, and eventually earned the title “General Who Pacifies the West” through her own skill, bolstered by Bo Rong’s support, the soldiers stopped questioning her competence.

Still, the camp was never short of rumors. Many officers privately believed Commander Bo harbored feelings for Shen Qingwu.

Bo Rong had never married, had no known lover, and Shen Qingwu was such a singularly unusual young woman that it seemed the only explanation for the near-indulgent way he treated her.

Otherwise, how else to explain the whole pattern of Bo Rong’s behavior toward her?

The rumors were many and varied. At first Bo Rong worried they might trouble Shen Qingwu, but observing her, he found she paid the gossip no mind whatsoever, and so he stopped worrying about it.

This life of hers in the army continued for two or three years. Then, in the winter of the twenty-second year of Tianlong, a brutal battle broke out between Yizhou and the Western Di, and after their victory, the imperial court summoned Commander Bo to the capital to report on the campaign.

Bo Rong never went to Bianjing, always finding some excuse or another to avoid it. Since it was generally taboo for a supreme commander to enter the capital in the first place, the court usually didn’t press the matter. But this time, since the battle marked the first major clash between the two sides since their peace negotiations, the court insisted firmly that he come.

Bo Rong still refused to go.

Instead, he recommended someone to go in his place—General Wu, the “General Who Pacifies the West.”

The court agreed.

On New Year’s Eve, in the winter of the twenty-second year of Tianlong, heavy snow fell as Shen Qingwu returned, with a handful of surviving soldiers, to the long-unvisited city of Bianjing.

Gold and jade ornaments, festival stages, holiday crowds—under the festival lights, the night markets along the Nine Bridges Gate bustled as lively as ever, the sound of firecrackers and fireworks carrying far on the wind.

Standing in the snow, Shen Qingwu looked up at this ancient city, snow falling across the sky, the lanterns bright as day.

She had never once missed Bianjing, but she wasn’t afraid to return to it either.

The warhorses breathed heavily, steam rising from their nostrils, as a young officer leapt down from his mount. “General.”

Shen Qingwu turned.

The young officer, handsome and carefree, grinned. “The Commander told me to stay by your side—why have you stopped?”

He craned his neck. “I heard there’s a Moon Worship ceremony in the palace tonight for New Year’s Eve. Apparently some young master from the Zhang family—the Zhang family’s ‘moon,’ they call him—is presiding over it. I’ve never seen a Moon Worship ceremony before…”

Shen Qingwu said, slowly, “Zhang Yuelu.”

The young officer blinked, then nodded. “General knows him?”

A faint, cool trace of a smile rose in Shen Qingwu’s eyes as a snowflake landed on her lashes, dark as a crow’s feather. She walked past the young officer, leaving behind only a light, offhand remark:

“He’s my cousin’s betrothed.”

The young officer’s face lit up with understanding. “Ah, relatives, then! Wonderful—someone to look out for us…”

The smile in Shen Qingwu’s eyes deepened—

She had never once feared returning to Bianjing.