Her head buzzed with a dull ringing.

Her vision swam in and out of focus.

The evening wind blew through the ravine, moaning like something from the underworld. She sat on a small ledge partway down the gorge, a waterfall cascading past beside her. The setting sun slanted through the gap in the cliffs, its dying red light mingling with the blood on the corpse nearby.

In the fading sunlight, she groped for thin branches from the plants around her, and with great difficulty used her dagger to cut them, then tore strips of cloth from the body beside her.

“Hah…”

Every motion drained what little strength remained in her body, until she was trembling and gasping for breath, drenched in sweat.

“Hahahaha…”

She placed her twisted fingers against a rock, and then pressed down.

“Aaaaaaaah—”

In the sunset, her muffled scream was swallowed by the rushing waterfall.

…

She had walked into a trap.

It had started the moment word came back of the Young Ming King Chen Fangda’s death.

The rebel forces sent to develop the northwest had run into Mongol cavalry charging out of Hengshan and suffered devastating losses — which shouldn’t have happened. The rebel army, having operated in the north for years, might have been poor, but they had weathered death many times over; even caught by surprise, they shouldn’t have been routed so badly. But then chaotic reports began flooding in one after another.

The Yellow River had breached its banks. One of the main Mongol forces, having defeated the rebel army, was now racing toward Guanzhong. At the same time, news from the north hinted that the Jurchens were stirring as well, and further reports suggested that the Mongols and Jurchens — both foreign peoples — had already struck an alliance: it was the Jurchens who had secretly leaked the rebel army’s weaknesses and the true state of Jin territory’s defenses to the Mongols. Traces of Jurchen commanders had even been found among the enemy ranks.

By the end of May, in the span of just a few days, countless reports — true and false alike — had converged all at once.

Guanzhong was easy to defend and hard to attack. After the Jurchens’ second southern invasion, the region had originally fallen under Jin control, administered by Liu Yu’s puppet regime, until two years ago when the Huaxia Army crushed Zonghan in the Southwest; over the following year, the various Han factions of the Central Plains had gradually pushed the Jurchens’ Bian Liang faction out. Lou Shuwan had seized the opportunity to take control of several of Guanzhong’s key passes. But after years of Jurchen plunder and the destruction left behind when they withdrew, the eight-hundred-li fertile plain of the Qin River valley had not yet recovered, and Lou Shuwan had originally hoped to make this rich land her own private garden.

She understood, of course, the importance of Guanzhong. But on the other hand, her decade of effort had all been concentrated north of the Yellow River, and she simply didn’t have the resources to immediately pour investment into Guanzhong as well. Having weathered more than a decade of chaos and warfare, Lou Shuwan’s temperament was, in truth, a forceful one — rather than rushing to restore Guanzhong right away, she leaned toward consolidating Taiyuan first.

Only with the resolve to actually fight the Jurchens could Guanzhong ever hope to fulfill its potential. If one simply rushed to enjoy the fertile land and its secure position the moment it was won, in truth, one would never manage to hold it at all.

Of course, it was also precisely because she held Guanzhong that Lou Shuwan had gone along with letting the rebel army take over development of the northwest.

News from the northwest always took time to arrive, and the true strength of the Mongol forces was hard to judge for the moment. In theory, even if the enemy proved formidable, they were unlikely to break through well-fortified passes like Xiaoguan and Dasanguan. Still, to be safe, Yu Yulin had gone south to inspect and steady morale among the troops, while she herself remained at Weisheng, overseeing the development of the Taiyuan region.

This inspection tour to Yuci had been decided upon over a month earlier. Before she set out, someone had even submitted a memorial suggesting that, with General Yu away in the south, the Female Chancellor ought to exercise restraint and stay put, lest opportunists take advantage.

She had not cared for that kind of talk and attitude. There were, of course, complicated reasons behind this, but the most direct issue was this: her position in Jin territory was that of Female Chancellor, and whenever someone so brazenly treated her as though she were a sovereign, she instinctively recoiled from it, feeling compelled to project an image of selfless impartiality instead.

This was her weakness.

And now, in this moment, she understood that fully.

The sudden assault had come crashing in from the northeast corner of the camp. A coordinated attack of gunfire and explosives had ripped a brutal gash through the ranks of the Female Chancellor’s battle-hardened personal guard, and then countless more attackers surged in with a roar — a garrison stationed near Yuci had turned traitor. Lou Shuwan guessed it was Ma Ling, but the truly dangerous element was the suicide squad spearheading the charge with firearms.

Ever since the Huaxia Army had crushed the Jurchens with firearms, every army across the realm had begun training in and studying firearms. Jin territory, in particular, had received direct technology transfers from the Huaxia Army, so her own forces possessed a fair number of firearms as well. But by and large, this had only ever been supplementary training — her forces had almost no experience with high-intensity real combat, and many of the generals under her command were still, in truth, unpracticed in the actual use of firearms.

The attacking force cut a path through the camp almost as if crushing everything in its way.

Her guards fought with everything they had to protect her escape, but in the darkness, Lou Shuwan could see one explosion after another bloom in bursts of fire. Even though the guards around her showed no fear of death, the moment they clustered together, the enemy simply blew them apart, resulting in massive casualties.

They fought and retreated in turns, but the pursuit behind them clung on like a maggot burrowed into bone, refusing to let go. In the darkness of that night, Lou Shuwan thought she glimpsed Zou Xu himself charging at the front of the enemy line, though she couldn’t be sure it wasn’t simply a trick of her mind. Several li from the camp, Shi Jin led a group in a desperate fight, and she saw firearms trained and firing in concentrated volleys against the enemy.

Zou Xu.

Dai Mengwei had established the Chinese Martial Arts Assembly in Bian Liang and formed the so-called Dan Chen Guards, of which the Dan Xin Guard recruited all manner of eccentric figures from the martial world — Lou Shuwan had once mocked this to Yu Yulin, calling them “nothing but petty thieves and swindlers.” But the Gong Chen Guard, it was said, had been quietly assembled by Zou Xu over more than two years, drawn from the sharpest soldiers in the ranks. There in the darkness, even though the enemy had never announced themselves, it was this very name that flashed through Lou Shuwan’s mind.

Recently, the Yellow River had entered its flood season, making travel difficult — clearly, the enemy had been planning this for who knew how long already.

She thought of that man who was always grinning and calling her “Auntie Lou” with such familiarity.

No wonder he was Ning Yi’s disciple. Ruthless, truly ruthless.

This strike had been meant to kill.

In the flight, she fell from her horse and was injured, but kept running. It seemed nearly every direction toward reinforcements had been cut off. They changed direction several times, and the guards around her dwindled, fewer and fewer, until finally the last few carried her into these mountain woods, some peeling off in different directions to try to draw the pursuers away, while the very last guard dragged her tumbling down a rugged ravine.

In her final glimpse of him, he had strained with everything he had to wedge her into this narrow ledge halfway down the waterfall — a spot so well-hidden that she could not be seen from above or below.

…

Bit by bit, many things had become clear to her.

Judging by how this had all been orchestrated, Zou Xu’s scheme against her must trace back much further than she had imagined. It wasn’t just Ma Ling who had been persuaded to betray her — surely there were wavering hearts among the court officials too, and even the very official who had urged her not to travel north might well have been one of them.

But why?

Because she was a woman.

And she had no heir.

And she had always clung to Tian Shi’s position, always styling herself as Female Chancellor?

She had once believed her hold on power in Jin territory was utterly secure.

But now it seemed that the illusion of peace had been papered over not only by her own naivety, but by the shadow of the Black Banner as well…

Trembling, she pulled dried rations from the body of a guard beside her. The last guard who had carried her to safety had been named Bian Fu, an old subordinate and friend of Shi Jin’s from their days at Chifeng Mountain, and a rare figure of true chivalry in Jin territory. Feathered arrows jutted from his body, but the fatal wounds were almost certainly the bullet holes — several of them — through which blood still seeped, staining the dried rations red. Still, trembling, Lou Shuwan forced herself to eat the blood-soaked food.

The sun was slowly sinking away. She studied the terrain around her — though the ravine Bian Fu had brought her to was well-hidden, both the ascent and descent were extremely difficult. Jin territory was her domain, and no matter what, there would surely be more loyalists than traitors. But in this moment, she had already realized how fragile her hold truly was — the instant she vanished, it could very well collapse into fragments in short order.

If I were Zou Xu, what would I do…

Reinforcements might come, but the pursuers might just as easily not withdraw either — and worse, with every passing moment she remained missing, Zou Xu was likely out there persuading more and more factions to turn.

She couldn’t simply sit and wait for rescue.

Using the last of the daylight, she searched through the bodies for anything useful — a fire striker, a knife, gold and silver, dried rations, even a hand grenade. Uncertain of the situation, she didn’t dare light a fire. Picking up the knife, she murmured an apology and began cutting the clothes and trousers off Bian Fu’s body, trying to twist the strips of cloth into a long rope.

In the darkness, all of this proceeded with agonizing slowness. The fingers of her left hand had been crudely splinted with sticks, and the pain was almost unbearable — she wanted to cry, wanted to scream, and after working for a while she would have to stop and rest for a spell.

Night deepened gradually, and yet, strangely, the darkness around her seemed to thin. It was the start of the month, with no moon in the sky, but countless stars blanketed the earth, scattering their light evenly even into this ravine. Lou Shuwan sat there, and beside her sat the corpse of the man, stripped bare to the waist. She spoke to it: “Oh, Bat, Bat — don’t think that just because you can fly, you get to drag me to a place like this. Look what’s become of it now — that’s your karma coming back on you.”

After a moment, she added, “Well, I suppose I’m the one who wronged you more. If your spirit is watching, don’t hold it against me.”

She spoke to him a little longer, then went back to making the rope.

She had no idea how much time passed before she finally finished it — by then she was drenched in sweat from the pain, utterly spent. The night wind howled; even in summer it felt bitterly cold. She curled herself into a ball, and amid the pain, thoughts of Ning Yi drifted into her mind.

She could barely remember what he looked like anymore.

She thought: This is all your fault! All your fault! But in truth, even the old grudges from years ago, the story of Hangzhou, her dead father and brother — all of it was slowly fading, blurring beyond her grasp.

These years, her life in the Central Plains, every single day caught in the whirlpool of power, had weighed on her like a mountain. That carefree, even bored young woman she had once been back in Hangzhou — when she occasionally thought of her now, she felt like a total stranger.

Life was just one long, painful journey.

At least ever since the chaos of Hangzhou, it seemed her life had contained nothing but that one word: pain.

Just like this very moment — in the dark of night, clutching her rope, pain and cold assailing her by turns, she could do nothing but endure it.

“This is all your fault! You bastard!”

She gritted her teeth, trying to hold onto her anger. But at times, a strange peace would wash over her, and it would feel as though her father and elder brother were right beside her, saying, “That’s enough. Just stop here…” She felt the pull of that temptation, and it felt, somehow, entirely reasonable.

She wanted to stop here too.

…

The sky slowly began to lighten.

On the small ledge in the ravine, the wounded woman stirred with the coming light. With great difficulty, she checked her injuries, bound them as best she could, and tied her rope to several nearby plants that looked sturdy enough to hold.

In the sunlight, that small, fragile figure made several attempts — the fingers of her left hand causing her unbearable agony — but at last, on her final try, she carefully climbed a short way down, then lost her footing and tumbled the rest of the way down the slope.

The modest wild waterfall still roared on, pounding against the earth before settling into a calm river. The wild grass and stones of the ravine stretched quietly in the sunlight; a rabbit crept through the underbrush to drink at the stream’s edge, then, at some sudden alert, darted away.

In the grass, the woman’s body slowly rolled over. She stared up at the sun, tears streaming down her face, blood trickling from the corner of her scraped mouth.

But she said nothing.

She only moved slowly — adjusting her body, breathing slowly, feeling her way, slowly gathering her strength, slowly sitting up…

At some point, she rose to her feet and, step by painful step, began making her way along the slope toward Weisheng.

Outside Weisheng, she had no idea which soldiers could still be trusted, so she couldn’t take the main roads, couldn’t easily seek help. By her estimate, she was some sixty or seventy li from Weisheng — and accounting for the need to take a roundabout path, likely much farther than that…

She lifted her face to the sun, wondering what state Weisheng might already be in by now…