When he woke, muffled noise drifted in faintly from outside, morning light seeping through the window lattice—it was already dawn.

Ning Yi sat up and rubbed his forehead. Xiao Chan, wearing only her undergarment, sat up beside him as well, rubbing her eyes and reaching to put her clothes on. Ning Yi patted her shoulder. “It’s fine, go back to sleep.”

Even so, Xiao Chan climbed out of bed after nodding, saying softly, “I’m not sleepy anyway…” and went to fetch water for Ning Yi, tending to him as he brushed his teeth and washed his face, and so on.

It had been roughly two hours or so since last night’s great battle over the birthday tribute had ended. Outside, the noise continued—mostly the cleanup, with the hunt for those who had slipped away still ongoing, soldiers fanning out across the hillsides. To them, this counted as a great victory, but Ning Yi’s own mood was clearly not particularly high.

“Does the young master seem unhappy?”

“These fellows’ whole profession is killing people—if it were up to me, I’d have fired the lot of them by now… send them home to fend for themselves. Two, three thousand men surrounding two hundred-odd, and some still got away…”

He grumbled a bit under his breath, though in truth he was well aware that the current outcome wasn’t bad at all. Having finished washing up, he went out the door, and across the way, peeking out from a cabin door, someone was already there, not quite done getting ready for the morning—it was Yuan Jin’er, her hair a little mussed, poking her head out. “We won?”

“We won.” Ning Yi walked over. Jin’er smiled and nodded; once Ning Yi had walked off, she wrinkled her nose. “Tch, we won and he’s still got a face like that.” Then she went back to report to Yun Zhu.

Stepping out and down from the ship, he could already see the state of things at the dock—soldiers coming and going everywhere, a number of prisoner carts already prepared, and the recovered birthday tribute being loaded back onto the ship. Amid a great racket of gongs, drums, and firecrackers, Ning Yi’s face was somewhat displeased—he was the one who’d been woken up by the noise, after all—and he pulled over a member of the Secret Investigation Bureau. “What are you all doing? People are still sleeping on several of these ships. It’s disturbing everyone… go tell them to stop, quickly.”

“Understood, Master Ning. We’ll keep it low-key—I’ll go tell them right away.”

“Uh…”

Ning Yi scratched his head, a little helpless. Before long, Wenren Bu’er, Chen Jingui, Qi Xinyong, and the others came over from that direction. “For someone who pulled off something this big, Liheng can still sleep in—truly the bearing of a great general.”

Ning Yi cupped his hands in greeting, then fixed his eyes on Wenren Bu’er. “Thinking it over, I’ve decided yesterday’s whole mess was your fault—you were far too harsh with your words.” The moment he said this, everyone around laughed, clearly in full agreement.

…

In truth, the preparations for that pre-dawn battle had been far from thorough—but then, if every battle required full preparation, there would never be any fighting at all. Drawing on all three sources of influence, the Xuzhou military had mobilized a force of two to three thousand men, intending to use an overwhelming numerical advantage to surround and capture the Liangshan men entirely—a ratio that already met the standard of ten to one.

But considering that the Liangshan men were all skilled fighters with sharp instincts, in order to avoid spooking them and letting too many slip away, the entire encirclement had been drawn extremely wide to begin with. Officers familiar with the local terrain led the way, first sealing off the necessary routes from far off, then closing in silently, step by step, trying to link the ring together as completely as possible—but by the time the two hundred men discovered them, the great encirclement still had certain gaps and weak points.

Letting the surrounding soldiers allow Yan Qing straight through was also precisely to draw out the time before battle began as long as possible; had they meant to shoot him down the moment they saw him, it would surely have caused a commotion, and the two hundred-odd men inside would have immediately taken action. That was why they let him in to talk first, and only then pushed the line forward—and Ning Yi and the others going out to put on that show of clapping may well have been meant, in part, to leave the others dumbfounded, applying psychological pressure to push the start of the battle back as late as possible.

It was during that sparse round of clapping that the last to speak had been Wenren Bu’er, who at the time had drawled, seemingly bored, “Everyone come and look, someone here got hold of the birthday tribute.” That single line carried considerable sting—Ning Yi and the others all turned to look at him, praising how well put it was, and then, on the other side, someone finally snapped. The burly man carrying the heavy spear let out a furious roar, and the battle began right then. For that, Ning Yi and the others had teased Wenren Bu’er afterward: “You went too far.” “If it were me, I couldn’t have held back either.” “Just couldn’t stand it…”

Of course, in truth, it might also have been that the other side, seeing the urgency of the situation, had no wish to let more time slip away. The moment they began cutting the reins and tearing the outer frames off the carts to use as shields, the battlefield first erupted into a hail of arrows like locusts. Ning Yi, in truth, knew nothing of military strategy—he had never taken part in a proper battle like this before, and could make little sense of the tactics at play, even after having once turned the tables single-handedly during his flight through Hangzhou; there, too, he had only ever manipulated human nature and rallied morale. It was only once Chen Jingui and the others pointed out that the enemy had chosen the best possible direction, that there was indeed a talented commander among them, that he began to roughly grasp how things were unfolding.

Nearly three thousand men in the encirclement, and yet at any given point, the line might not be especially thick. This time, the Liangshan men who had turned out were all true elites of the stronghold, led by men of Lu Junyi’s caliber, and though now fully surrounded, reduced to a desperate, cornered force, when they suddenly chose to break out, the Xuzhou soldiers blocking their path were routed and sent reeling back again and again—even Ning Yi could see that much from a distance. In the end, a gap was torn open, and part of the group managed to escape.

To the officer commanding the troops, this already amounted to a great victory. Truth be told, the Liangshan men had suffered heavy casualties in this battle, leaving behind over a hundred bodies, with another thirty or forty scattered captures made afterward among those who had lagged behind or gotten separated. But of the seventy or eighty who broke through, the subsequent pursuit only managed to kill some twenty more, while fifty or sixty—including several of their leaders—still got away.

Even as Wenren Bu’er, Qi Xinyong, and the others went on about the difference between elite fighters and ordinary soldiers, Ning Yi still found himself rather unsatisfied with the result. After all the painstaking planning, all the resources mobilized, a ring of three thousand men had still let fifty out of two hundred-odd escape—Ning Yi felt he’d been thoroughly humiliated; he had originally hoped for nothing less than catching every last one of them.

Of course, since that was simply how things had turned out, and the professionals kept going on about how formidable these two hundred-odd Liangshan men were, there was nothing more to be done about it. After sleeping for those two hours, he’d woken to find Wenren Bu’er had already more or less finished sorting things out, and now pulled Ning Yi aside. “We caught forty-three. Four of them should be Liangshan leaders. Among them… that big fellow you mentioned was so formidable—that’s Lu Junyi.”

Ning Yi blinked in mild surprise. “The one holding the rear with the spear?” On the battlefield earlier, when the Liangshan men tore open a gap in the encirclement, a tall, sturdy man had led the rear guard, sending ordinary soldiers sprawling with every strike. Ning Yi had praised him at the time, even discussing with Qi Xinyong and the others whether the man was more formidable than Chen Fan, and had said this fellow was surely somebody with a name to him—had to be caught. In truth, Qi Xinyong and the others hadn’t quite understood what he meant by “somebody with a name,” and had simply taken it to mean a leader.

Wenren Bu’er nodded. “That’s him.”

“I said as much before… back when we were dealing with Yan Qing… didn’t think we’d actually catch him… Good, let’s go get breakfast first, then find time to decide our next move. Oh, who else did we get?”

“There’s one called Yan Shun, the Brocade-Coated Tiger—tripped and fell while running, so we grabbed him. And a couple others, some Chen Da, Zheng Tianshou…”

“Mm, catching this many loyal, righteous men is starting to make me feel like the villain of the piece…”

“What?”

“Nothing, let’s go eat breakfast…”

…

Cicadas chirped on and on. It was mid-morning, and the summer sun had already dried up the traces of last night’s downpour. Soldiers gathered around the little dock, and the large-scale manhunt that had begun the night before had, for now, come to a temporary pause.

Amid the clanking sound of iron chains, Lu Junyi, half his body still covered in blood, was brought into a room and pressed down into a seat. His tiger-like eyes glared wide, sweeping over everyone in the room. The two men guarding him were both skilled fighters. Opposite him was a writing desk, and behind it a young man sat, head lowered, writing, occasionally glancing over some documents, then looking up to meet his eyes. It was the man he had seen on the battlefield, the one called Ning Liheng.

“So this is Lu Junyi.”

He said it, but it wasn’t really a question. Lu Junyi straightened himself a little in his seat. “That I am.” The man across from him seemed not to hear it at all. The man beside him pointed. “That’s him.” Only then did the man at the desk nod, picking up a finished sheet of paper and setting it aside. Then he stood, went to the back to open a window, letting in a faint breeze, and came back to sit down again.

In an ordinary interrogation, meant to pressure or extract a confession, the setting was usually dark and oppressive. But now, with the window open, bright sunlight streamed in, and a breeze drifted through, so that Lu Junyi almost wondered if the man meant to play the gracious host courting talent. From behind the desk, Ning Yi finally spoke.

His tone was level, matter-of-fact. “It seems you already know my name. Let me explain the situation to you first. You people went to my home and killed a great many people—old folk, women, children, none of whom knew any martial arts at all. So don’t expect me to treat you as human beings. I could take a small knife right now and slice the flesh off your body piece by piece.”

Lu Junyi burst out laughing at once. “Then come and do it!”

“You don’t have to talk.” Ning Yi had been looking down at his documents the whole while, reciting from them; now he glanced up at him. “The reason you’re here is that Yan Qing is bound to come back to save you—I’d wager on it. So let me tell you what I plan to do. I’ll have your people’s legs—every bone from thigh to shin—smashed completely, then have you all strung up from the ship’s mast until every one of you is roasted to death alive in the sun. Liangshan prizes loyalty and brotherhood, and I believe you—we’ll see how many come to save you… They’ll have saved you into cripples either way, unable to take you with them, so they’ll have no choice but to die alongside you. We’ll see how your luck holds then…”

Ning Yi raised his head and looked at him coldly—this time, for a good while longer.

“I’m threatening you. You don’t have to speak, but you’re welcome to kill yourself—sever your own tendons, that sort of thing… if you know how. And even if you die, Yan Qing will still come looking for revenge against me—and if his luck runs out and I catch him, I’ll skin him alive…”