Dazed and half-conscious, with no sense of day or night.

Drifting in and out of sleep, occasionally he glimpsed fragments of things—a dim sky, someone’s face, a jolting road now and then, rain falling, shifting scenery swaying past.

His mind, for the time being, was no longer fit for thought, and even the sensations of discomfort barely registered. Every so often, fragmentary images would surface—memories from his previous life, and fragmented childhood memories belonging to Ning Liheng of this life, all rising up in turn. His body seemed to drift through a formless haze, letting the memories come and go as they pleased.

All the things he had once done—the scheming, the calculating, the endless maneuvering against others that had consumed so much of his life—the wars of that earlier era had not carried much in the way of visible smoke and fire, but beneath the surface, the same bloodshed had run just as deep. In the course of dragging so many people and so many people’s interests along with him, there remained, at his own hands, all manner of debts owed in human lives—people he had killed one by one, families he had destroyed one by one, some knowingly, some not.

Decision after decision, negotiation after negotiation, each one setting countless situations into motion, each with its own cause or consequence, its hard-won successes or failures. Amid these scenes, grown so familiar to him they felt almost like breathing itself, there were also small fragments mixed in.

That not-quite-familiar, antique-flavored era—a courtyard in summer under heavy rain, a garden at dusk hung with lanterns, a little bridge and flowing water amid the farmland’s checkered fields, a woman in plain white robes calmly playing the guqin, turning to face him from the far side of the bridge with a graceful smile—his wife, proud as a rose at their first meeting yet ultimately resigned to her fate, their time together afterward, the night talk in the small pavilion, her strength through illness and weakness, standing behind the pavilion holding a torch, looking at him with a startled expression, and then setting the pavilion ablaze…

Those images, fine and fragmentary, flickered through only occasionally, in the gaps between everything else. In moments of slightly clearer consciousness, other fragments, too, would seep faintly through from the outside world, struggling to reach him.

“Master Ning, we won… we won…”

“Husband…”

“Young master, young master… the young master’s fallen…”

“Hurry, go, go, go…”

“Master Ning, they don’t dare come after us anymore…”

“Master Ning, they want to capture you…”

“Young master…”

“Young master, young master…”

“Young master, young master, young master…”

Those voices seemed to call out again and again without ever wanting to stop, and he could not make out their meaning, only sensing, in his slightly clearer moments, that a great deal of time had passed, that a great distance had been traveled.

At some point, he woke from sleep…

…

Time shifts back to the evening of the eleventh of the seventh month.

Grey clouds, black earth, driving wind and rain.

The view draws close along the horizon line, at the Shiqiao crossing, where the river water was washing away the last traces of blood. The ground was littered with broken weapons and fallen banners; corpses lay soaking in the water, one after another. As lightning cut across the sky, it traced out a long, dark, unbroken silhouette along the grass by the riverbank—nearby, nothing but still, unmoving bodies. Only far in the distance did figures approach, several men on horseback at the front, all clad in black.

An Xifu. The Black Plume Guard.

The black-clad men spread out across this grassland, now like nothing so much as a slaughterhouse, searching for whatever clues could be found, before gathering together again in the rain a while later.

The column advanced slowly forward through the corpses, until, at one point, the men at the front came to a stop. Not far ahead lay more scattered bodies, though these were somewhat better equipped than the rest, one of them clad in armor, surrounded by the others. This body’s head had been severed entirely; several swords and spears remained lodged in the corpse, driven in through the gaps in the armor. By now, the blood had likely drained entirely from the body.

Under ordinary circumstances, this kind of purely vengeful frenzy would be rare on a battlefield, but the scene before them was more than enough to show the fervor with which this man had been surrounded and hacked down. This commander may well have possessed considerable skill of his own, and yet, under these circumstances, he had still been cut down by a frenzied mob of soldiers closing in on him from every side, his head taken as a trophy.

The black-clad commander on horseback glanced over, then turned his head away.

“Yao Yi…” A low murmur rose amid the storm. He looked off toward the south. “Too fast…”

Not long after, the black-clad commander gathered his men in the rain, gave his orders, and waved a hand. This force of fewer than two hundred split into two groups, riding hard toward the south and north respectively.

Past noon that day, Lu Qiao’s forces had been the first to be scattered, becoming the first sacrifice to the frenzied soldiers of the Wude Camp. By that evening, Yao Yi had likewise been defeated, and Yao Yi himself killed. It was only then that An Xifu, leading the Black Plume Guard, finally reached the battlefield. An hour later, Xue Dounan’s forces under Fang La engaged the Wude Camp and were routed once again. By this point, the Wude Camp had become like a blade of piercing precision, driving straight north…

…

Looking back on it afterward, in the scheme that unfolded at the border of Suzhou and Huzhou on the tenth and eleventh of the seventh month, the ones truly outmaneuvered, perhaps, could not really be said to be the several forces under Fang La. In terms of strategic intent alone, whether it was dropping gold and silver along the road, using their remaining elite scouts to confuse the enemy’s perception, or spreading a great many rumors, all of it, in the end, only served to confuse the enemy for a short span of time—the goal being simply to force the five pursuing forces coming from the south to temporarily spread themselves apart.

As Ning Yi himself had said, once the enemy was given time to react, a fleeing column this large could never have hidden itself from Fang La’s investigators among the hills and waterways around Hangzhou. That this effect could be achieved, however briefly, relied not only on various calculated schemes but, most crucially, on the arrogance of Yao Yi and the others—exploiting their psychological momentum to buy a brief moment’s breathing room amid this delicate situation.

The ones who were, in the end, most thoroughly outmaneuvered were the Wude Camp soldiers of the fleeing column itself.

All at once, everyone was dragged into a position with no way back, threatened with life and death, baited with gold, silver, and power, and further stoked with humiliation and hatred, until this group of men had no possible choice left at all—and then the gap between four thousand and one thousand was driven home again and again. That speech, persuasive as it seemed at the start, had by the end become something close to outright incitement. Of course, without the pressure of men trapped in a hopeless situation, feeling they had nothing left to lose but to fight, that incitement alone would never have had much effect.

In fact, had he not already been wounded, Ning Yi might well have owed Xia Qi a proper thanks. That arrow he loosed at the time had been almost recklessly brutal, but by then, the entire army had no way back regardless, and with Tang Xiuxuan and the others’ tacit approval and support, the killing of Xia Qi and his subordinate had become, in effect, a sacrifice to rally the troops. Others might have thought Ning Yi’s act at the time nothing more than recklessness, a lucky stroke—but none of them could have matched the sheer decisiveness with which he carried it out, that air of treating everything as a foregone conclusion. In particular, that line—”Enough of your nagging! Your endless whining! Your yammering! You’re no man!”—would, in a small way, go on to determine the very course of the battle.

At this point, the Wude Camp was already little more than a broken remnant. Even with everyone’s fighting spirit stoked to its absolute limit, in that first clash with Lu Qiao’s forces, the officers’ role could hardly even be called command—the column had simply been driven forward by a combination of raw bloodlust and desperation, throwing themselves at Lu Qiao’s men with everything they had. With four thousand against one thousand, this state of mind produced a level of destructive force that was almost terrifying. Only after this overwhelming victory, having all but annihilated Lu Qiao’s army entirely, did Chen Xingdu and the others manage to begin truly establishing some real leadership over this army that had, at last, recovered its confidence.

The subsequent northward strike that killed Yao Yi, though the whole process had gone fairly smoothly, was, in terms of sheer destructive fury, somewhat less terrifying than the first battle had been. This was because, by then, they had already broken free of the most dangerous ground, and at least a small portion of the men had begun to regain some measure of clarity. And after two battles within half a day, though the soldiers were still caught up in the exhilaration of slaughter, vengeance, and vindication, the physical toll on them had already grown severe. What to do next became a matter of brief discussion among the group; at the time, someone suggested that they shouldn’t press on for a third battle, warning that it risked exhausting the army entirely—only for someone else to immediately shout back, “Enough of your nagging! Your endless whining! Your yammering! You’re no man!” Once word of this got around, anyone within the ranks harboring second thoughts about pressing on found themselves mocked into silence.

Looking back on it, had they not chosen to fight three battles in a single day, leaving An Xifu unable to bring the remaining three armies under unified command in time, the outcome of this whole engagement might well have amounted to nothing in the end. By the time the Black Plume Guard under An Xifu made contact with Shen Zhucheng to the south and linked up with Mi Quan to the north, Xue Dounan’s forces had already been defeated, leaving only two forces, together numbering under three thousand men, that he could gather. And with the now overbearing, triumphant Wude Camp splitting them apart north and south, they found it difficult to coordinate with one another at all.

By this point, the Wude Camp had, in truth, also become an exhausted force—but having just won three consecutive battles through the strategy of picking off the enemy one by one, neither An Xifu nor Liu Dabiao, who arrived shortly after, dared risk splitting their remaining two forces to attack from both sides at once—and in doing so, they lost the best opportunity they would have to defeat the Wude Camp.

An Xifu, however, was no mediocre commander. Once he confirmed Xue Dounan’s defeat, he first had Mi Quan to the north keep his distance from the Wude Camp, while having Shen Zhucheng continue south along the far side of the Shiqiao crossing. This was not meant for combat—it was meant to let Shen Zhucheng’s forces hunt directly for the stragglers left behind to the south. Because, however swiftly the Wude Camp itself had been advancing, the refugees trailing behind them could not possibly have kept pace, and would almost certainly have fallen behind south of the Shiqiao crossing. An Xifu seized on this weakness and struck hard at it.

After this, the Wude Camp turned back at full speed, and thanks to the thousand-odd bodyguards and martial escorts left behind in the camp, neither An Xifu nor Shen Zhucheng dared risk a reckless assault on the camp itself. Following this, An Xifu united his forces with those of Shen Zhucheng and Mi Quan, gathered up the scattered remnants, and sent word to Qingfeng Stronghold and Xiaoluo Town to coordinate, beginning a renewed campaign to hunt down this fleeing column. But the Wude Camp, having developed a genuine ferocity through these battles, meant that for a time, neither side could gain the upper hand in this stretch of hills south of Huzhou. Once the fleeing column gave up on further pitched battle, they began pushing north once more.

An Xifu, by now, had seized on the army’s real weakness—the need to protect the refugees they were escorting—and harried them constantly along the way, seeking out opportunities to strike. Chen Xingdu and the others, though not without command ability, ultimately lacked sufficient grounding in strategy and tactics. Ning Yi, the man they had originally counted on, had by now fallen into unconsciousness; on the rare occasions he woke along the way, he was in no state to think through much of anything. For the time being, the column could only fall back on cautious, defensive resistance. On the fifteenth of the seventh month, they finally reached Fuzhou, where they received a grand welcome fit for heroes.

Only Ning Yi, the one who had contributed the most to their survival, vanished without a trace on the night of the thirteenth, during a chaotic raid on their camp by An Xifu—having been heavily guarded by an elite unit of soldiers, he had drawn more of the attack’s focus onto himself, and in the end was swept away and lost amid the fire and the crowd that night, his fate unknown…

For a long stretch of time after that, he did not appear before any of them again. After extensive publicity and rewards had been given out to the remnants of the Wude Camp, the name Ning Liheng flickered briefly, like a fleeting blossom, filling everyone’s ears and eyes for a time—before being swiftly buried beneath the flood of battle reports and achievements that followed Tong Guan Tongdaofu’s arrival in Jiangnan, fading from most people’s memory. Only a small number of people still remembered his name, and quietly continued searching for any trace of him thereafter…