The rain poured in torrents. The relentless downpour hammered the muddy ground without pause. Countless hooves thundered along a narrow, winding mountain road, throwing up sheet after sheet of dirty water. To the right of the road, the roar of a river rolled down the slope from above — a powerful, surging waterway charging ahead and across the path before them.
Bai Rongling sat rigidly in the saddle, glancing back over his shoulder at frequent intervals, as though something unseen and monstrous were giving chase.
Suddenly, from within the rain and mist, came the sound of hoofbeats other than their own. Bai Rongling’s expression changed. Before he could react, large numbers of riders in black armor burst from the forest on all sides. Like a dark stream, they split into three currents and closed in around them — front, rear, and flanks alike.
Bai Rongling immediately reined his horse to a halt, his mount rearing up with a long, loud whinny before its hooves crashed back to the ground. He gripped his reins tightly; the inside of his hands was soaked, though whether with sweat or rain he could not say.
“Who are you?! How dare you block my path — do you know who I am?!” Bai Rongling snarled with as much force as he could muster, though his bravado was more appearance than substance.
His voice rang out into the dense curtain of rain. The black-armored riders stared at him with blank faces. Their cold, hard expressions — washed by the downpour — looked like blades running with blood: icy and full of killing intent.
They said nothing. Bai Rongling did not at first understand what they were waiting for.
Then he heard it — the rumble of carriage wheels grinding over the mud, drawing closer from a distance. Only then did he understand, and his body tensed involuntarily, straight as a bowstring.
Bai Rongling kept his lips pressed shut and his eyes fixed, watching as the carriage gradually materialized from the curtain of rain. He worked with reason alone to hold down the fear rising inside him.
After what seemed a long time — though it was in truth only a brief moment — the carriage came to a slow halt amid the black-armored riders who had parted to let it through.
Yan Hui, seated at the front, turned and pushed open the carriage door. A gust of wind carrying fine rain swept past, and the curtain inside the carriage lifted.
The man inside set down the book scroll in his hand, and raised a face that was fine-featured but disturbingly still — and watched, in silence, the rain-drenched and bedraggled Bai Rongling.
“You… how did you…” Bai Rongling went pale and could barely form words.
“I thought it over again and again, and decided that coming in person to receive my brother-in-law would be a far more sincere gesture,” Fu Xuanmiao said quietly.
His voice was somewhat faint against the pounding rain, but he seemed not to mind, and made no effort to raise it. Bai Rongling had to strain his ears and concentrate with full attention just to hear him clearly.
“Brother-in-law is headed to Yangzhou, I take it?” he said. “What a coincidence — I am headed there as well. Shall we travel together?”
“Don’t try to claim kinship with me!” The memory of the humiliation and anguish of being coerced into a false confession flared up in Bai Rongling, and his fury rose sharply. “I have no brother-in-law who is a beast hiding behind a human face! You harm the innocent, seize by force, nearly drove my cousin and the one she loves apart — you are nothing but a hypocrite and a villain in disguise! No wonder my cousin wants nothing to do with you!”
Fu Xuanmiao’s expression remained composed. The five fingers holding the book scroll, however, had gone white at the knuckles.
For a long stretch of time, there was nothing in the world but the sound of the crashing rain.
Fu Xuanmiao smoothed out the crease in the book scroll and set it on the small table, weighing down the curling edge with a teacup. His manner was calm, his movements unhurried — as though he were sitting in a familiar study, not beneath a killing autumn rain in a mountain forest.
“…To have evaded capture for more than a month — that surpassed my expectations,” he said. “Though I am uncertain how you managed to assemble this ragtag band from wherever—”
Fu Xuanmiao’s dismissive gaze swept slowly over the light cavalry behind Bai Rongling — a force roughly equal in number to his own, but conspicuously inferior in equipment, clearly scraped together from miscellaneous sources.
“Still, you have no choice but to surrender.”
“That remains to be seen—”
A free, soaring voice rang out from the forest.
“Who’s there?!” Yan Hui snapped to attention, his long blade drawn and leveled toward the direction of the sound.
Large numbers of archers — wearing straw rain capes and wide-brimmed hats as disguise over their armor — held their bows at full draw and, shielded by leather-armored foot soldiers behind them, slipped silently out of the forest under the cover of the rain’s noise. At their head was Li Wu, striding through the cold rain with ease, rainwater streaming off the brim of his hat and cape, then running down the column of his sun-darkened neck.
Autumn rain. Cold mountain. Iron soldiers. The air thick with killing intent.
Everything in the surroundings spoke only of hostility and death — and yet Li Wu moved through it all maintaining his air of sharp energy, burning brilliant as a sunrise in the bleak desolation.
A powerful surge of killing intent broke through Fu Xuanmiao’s manufactured calm and churned violently in the dark depths of his eyes.
He looked at Li Wu, then looked at Bai Rongling — who, the moment Li Wu appeared, had dropped his gaze and was staring at his own hands and feet with ostentatious innocence. Fu Xuanmiao said:
“…You used him as bait to lure me out?”
“You flatter me, you really do.” Li Wu laughed without restraint and called over to Fu Xuanmiao, “I’m a man of little learning — I don’t know anything about schemes. Not like Lord Fu, who has one stratagem layered upon another — it’s enough to make a man’s head spin. On the subject of that… the former Military Commissioner of Zhenchuan, Li Qia, whose body was so waterlogged no one could find it — he would have the most to say about it.”
Fu Xuanmiao did not take the bait.
“Since Bai Rongling went to so much trouble to escape capture,” Fu Xuanmiao said, turning his gaze to Bai Rongling, who stood not far from Li Wu’s side, “why would you let him come back to take the risk? It would seem that this brother-in-law you’ve chosen, for the sake of killing me, had no particular regard for your life either.”
“When it’s a foregone conclusion, how can you call it a risk?” Li Wu said. “For dealing with you — I wouldn’t even call this a risk.”
“Is that so?” Fu Xuanmiao’s gaze grew progressively colder. “You believe you can walk away from this unscathed, relying on this handful of troops?”
“That’s hard to say,” Li Wu replied with a nonchalant grin. “How do you know I only brought a few hundred soldiers to meet you?”
“You traveled all the way from Yangzhou, and secrecy was essential — you could not have brought too many.” Fu Xuanmiao’s lips curved slightly. “A small force has flexibility, but lacks fighting power. That is precisely why you needed Bai Rongling as bait — to go to all this trouble to draw me out of camp.”
“To advance in secret, the force you brought with you cannot exceed five thousand. And the closer you drew to us, the smaller the number you could keep at your side without being detected — close enough to the imperial carriage to avoid discovery, to successfully lay an ambush—” Fu Xuanmiao fixed his gaze on Li Wu’s eyes and said slowly, “At this moment, the number of troops you can actually deploy is certainly no more than five hundred.”
Li Wu fiddled with a strand of straw on his rain cape — smoothing it, pressing it, and finding that neither gentle nor firm touch would make it lie flat. He gave up trying and simply grabbed the wayward strand and yanked it free with blunt force.
He put the bit of straw in his mouth and held it between his teeth, eyes rising to meet Fu Xuanmiao’s sharp, cold gaze, and said with languid ease:
“The reasoning is sound enough… but ask yourself honestly — if you were me, would you dare walk into an enemy encampment with only five hundred men?”
Fu Xuanmiao looked at him without speaking.
Li Wu grinned provokingly, the strand of straw rising and falling between his lips.
“If you don’t believe me, try me.”
The Fu family soldiers glanced uneasily between their own numbers — clearly greater than the leather-armored troops across from them — and the man in the carriage who had not yet given any order. They already half-believed Li Wu’s words.
Who would come to throw their lives away with a mere few hundred soldiers?
Setting aside the question of whether their numbers were comparable — ask any man under heaven: who would have the audacity to challenge the foremost young lord of the age in a situation where both sides were evenly matched?
The foremost young lord — who had remained undefeated in battle even when outnumbered many times over by rebel soldiers!
After a long silence, something shifted in Fu Xuanmiao’s expression.
“You are stalling for time?” he asked.
Now it was Li Wu’s turn to say nothing. He kept his customary smile in place, unbothered by the cold wind and untroubled by the heavy rain, his eyes bright and alive.
“…You did not draw me out here to destroy me outright,” Fu Xuanmiao said.
“The foremost young lord really does think of everything,” Li Wu called out loudly. “I came all this way — isn’t it simply to rid the world of a great evil? This Great Yan needs its loyal ministers, and you’ve been playing the role for quite long enough — let me take a turn.”
“And the first act of this great loyal minister,” Li Wu said with a grin, “is to rescue the Yan Emperor through superior wit!”
BOOM.
A blinding bolt of lightning tore the black sky above the encampment apart, and a deafening crack of thunder followed.
The rain showed no sign of letting up, as though it meant to fall until the end of time.
A night-patrol soldier cursed the weather under his breath and swept a perfunctory glance around the dark surroundings, then moved off into the rain and disappeared.
A shadow slipped out from behind a stack of wooden crates — none other than Niuwang, who had tonight the weighty task of infiltrating the Yan Emperor’s encampment and carrying out the rescue. To avoid detection, he had knocked a patrolling soldier unconscious and exchanged his uniform for their standard-issue armor.
Thanks to the heavy rain, no one had noticed their infiltration. Everything had gone smoothly — the only thing out of place was the strikingly conspicuous main tent. Inside, the lights blazed brilliantly. Outside, there was not a single guard.
Not a single guard outside the tent of the ruler of a nation?
Drawing on the experience of countless dramatic stories he had read, Niuwang knew that when something seemed this wrong, there was certain to be a trap inside. Something was not right!
But dramatic stories were dramatic stories, and reality was reality. The things that happened in stories happened in real life only rarely. If he applied lessons from stories to reality here, and put himself in danger — that would be a small matter. But if he thereby ruined Li Wu’s plan, that would be something far greater.
Niuwang crouched in the rain, uncertain whether to wait and observe a while longer, or to seize this brief gap between patrols and charge into the main tent to rescue the prisoner. There was only one chance. He could not afford more hesitation. Niuwang gritted his teeth, lowered his head, and sprinted — and in one swift movement he was inside the blazing main tent.
“Your Maj—”
As though someone had seized him by the throat, Niuwang’s eyes went wide, and the word choked off before it was fully out of his mouth.
He stood in the brilliantly lit main tent, staring in blank stupefaction, a cold sweat breaking out down his back.
The tent inside was in complete disarray. The gauze cabinet had toppled. Shards of porcelain were scattered across the floor. On the warm fur rug, there were sparse and scattered dark stains of blood. A fine jeweled sash lay abandoned at the foot of the sandalwood bed.
Shen Suzhang lay slumped beside the tea table, his robes fallen open and in disarray. His eyes — red-veined throughout — were wide open, staring up at the unexpected intruder with a gaze full of resentment and defiance. At the corner of his mouth and behind his ear, there were dried traces of black blood. Not far away lay the evidence of his having retched.
Born in the central palace, raised in the Zichen Hall, destined from birth for a station of incomparable nobility — the Emperor of Great Yan died in a remote and desolate outpost, in a cold wind and bitter rain. There was no one to close his eyes for him. What accompanied him was only boundless bleakness, and the indifference of the world.
Niuwang stood there in a daze, unaware that his silhouette was casting a shadow on the tent wall.
“Who is inside the tent?!”
A sharp shout rang out, accompanied by the heavy sound of many armored footsteps.
Niuwang snapped back to himself with a jolt, and bolted out of the main tent.
“There’s an intruder — catch him!”
The sleeping Yan army encampment came awake. Lantern after lantern lit up across the camp, one by one.
The rain continued.
Roughly ten or more miles away, the river ran faster still.
The standoff between the two forces was broken by the man inside the carriage.
Fu Xuanmiao looked at Li Wu, standing before him, and the faintest of smiles rose to his face.
“A pity…”
He said quietly:
“You came too late.”