First came a faint tremor in the air.

Across the withered grass of the open field beside a stand of low trees, grains of soil trembled faintly amid the grass, and then the sound gradually grew louder—the light patter of hooves slowly swelling into a swift, thunderous roar. All at once, warhorses came charging out from beside the low woods!

One rider, ten riders, a hundred riders… the galloping cavalry surged toward the open field like a crashing flood. The riders were tall and rugged, dressed in the loose robes of the north, wearing fox-tail caps—Jin cavalry come down from the north. Even at full gallop, the riders on horseback deftly drew their bows and nocked arrows.

The view swept across the ground ahead: over five hundred Wu Dynasty soldiers had already formed a tight formation, rows of spears thrusting forward like a forest at the front of the line. The officer Tang Weiguang watched the charging Jurchen elite cavalry, clenched his fist, raised it high, and shouted loudly: “Don’t panic! Hold the formation! Stay tight! Ready your bows—”

“—Loose!”

An arrow’s flight away.

A rain of arrows shot up into the sky, crossing paths midair, falling in different directions.

The cavalry, several hundred strong, wheeled in mid-gallop, carving a great arc through the thundering charge. Arrows rained down with a rattling patter—some struck shields, some buried themselves in the dirt, and a small number drew blood.

Tang Weiguang pushed aside the shield-bearing guard beside him, staring wide-eyed at the Jurchen cavalry as the thundering flood carved an arc ahead, sweeping toward the flank.

“Ready your bows! Pass my order! Turn the formation to face west—don’t break ranks! As long as we hold together, they can’t touch us—”

The formation of spears and shield-and-sword troops ahead turned to face the Jurchen cavalry once more.

“Advance—”

The forest of spears moved slowly forward. Ahead, the flood of Jurchen cavalry surged in again, curving into an arc before their eyes.

Almost at the very moment the Jurchen cavalry loosed their arrows, Tang Weiguang swung his hand down sharply.

“Loose—”

Another rain of arrows crossed paths and fell sparsely; on the Jurchen side too, some riders tumbled from their horses.

“Nothing to fear—take aim and hold! Advance!”

The infantry line pressed forward slowly behind its forest of spears, archers drawing their bows once more. The Jurchen cavalry pulled back to a distance, then wheeled around and charged again, launching a third volley. This time, after the exchange, the Jurchen cavalry split down the middle into two groups, crossing paths briefly before circling around to flank from different directions. The infantry formation shifted again as well, spreading out while drawing tighter toward the center. Both sides exchanged another volley. After the four hundred-odd Jurchen cavalry regrouped, they circled briefly, then, unwillingly, rode off toward the distance.

Ahead lay the bodies of several Jurchen soldiers and wounded horses, too numerous to be collected in time.

Tang Weiguang clenched his fists, watching that direction, his palms sweating faintly, trembling. He was still confirming whether the Jurchens had truly withdrawn. The exchanges just now hadn’t cost either side heavily, and the responses and formation changes had seemed simple enough—but he knew in his heart that with even the slightest misstep, his five hundred-odd men would have collapsed in an instant, cut down on the open field like a flock of sheep by the Jurchens.

“My lord, we won,” someone beside him said joyfully. “We drove the Jin dogs off!”

“Er…” Tang Weiguang blinked, instinctively about to object, but then he nodded instead. “Get people to collect the spoils, bandage the wounded.”

He walked toward the soldiers ahead. “You see that? We drove the Jin dogs off! There’s nothing to fear from them! As long as we follow the drill manual, these Jin dogs don’t dare clash with us head-on! We train so hard every day—what’s there to be afraid of—”

Someone immediately shouted loudly, “My lord, we weren’t afraid!”

“That’s right, they’re nothing but uncivilized Jurchen barbarians—let one come, we’ll cut him down a pair at a time—”

Laughter broke out, and Tang Weiguang laughed along. “Good! That’s the spirit! When we get back, I’ll put you all up for commendation!”

Cheers rose throughout the ranks.

Afterward, scouts went to track the departed Jurchen cavalry’s movements, while the soldiers dragged away the bodies of the fallen Jurchens and horses left on the field.

Within a radius of a hundred li around Bianliang, massive armies had already converged from every direction—the core force numbered as many as one hundred seventy thousand men, gathered mainly around Lankao and Qi County, facing off against the Jin troops. Meanwhile, the total garrison force within Bianliang itself numbered between seventy and ninety thousand. On top of this, several tens of thousands more soldiers were scattered around the outskirts of Kaifeng Prefecture, tasked with defending local areas, evacuating the population, and pressuring the Jurchen grain-foraging parties to squeeze their room to maneuver.

Units of five hundred, a thousand, two thousand men were scattered across every corner of this region. Every day, clashes broke out everywhere as Jurchen foraging parties encountered them and fought. Report after report kept coming in, all showing just how intense the friction had grown before the great battle…

…

“…On average, over two hundred clashes a day, at least twenty or more of them. Eighty percent of the reports on our side are victories—I feel like the Jurchens are about to surrender.”

Yellow leaves drifted down as a small convoy made its way forward along a forest road. Ning Yi rode on horseback, brow furrowed, speaking in a low voice. Beside him rode Su Wending of the Su family—the once-callow young man now carried a certain steadiness in his face.

“With the great battle imminent, I imagine the army wants to raise morale a bit.”

“The problem is, these things don’t actually mean much,” Ning Yi said. “And you’re being too naive. The great battle’s imminent… but many people actually have no real confidence. Not the top brass of the military—Tong Guan, Gao Qiu, none of them have the nerve for it. Chancellor Li doesn’t either… well, perhaps I shouldn’t say Chancellor Li doesn’t, but the pressure on him this time is enormous. The capital has over eighty thousand troops, but they won’t send out a single soldier. And out here, if this nearly two-hundred-thousand-strong army actually engaged Wanyan Zongwang in open battle, no one’s confident they could win. What everyone’s really waiting for is negotiation.”

“Of course, there’s not much we can do about all that,” Ning Yi said, not continuing on the broader picture, sighing instead. “What’s been giving me a headache lately is how to counter their cavalry. Aside from pitting another cavalry force against the Jurchens’ hooked cavalry, there’s really no good way to deal with it.”

Su Wending thought it over. “Doesn’t the army say that if the infantry formation holds well, it’s not unbeatable?”

“That’s just something nice to say,” Ning Yi shook his head. “The Jurchens’ numbers here are fewer than ours, and since the main battle hasn’t started yet, they don’t want to clash head-on—they’re all just testing with circular formations. If you can handle it, they leave; if you can’t, they exploit the gap—but if you try to chase them, there’s no way you’ll ever catch them. So all these victory reports now are false, meaningless.”

“The Jurchens are afraid to clash head-on—is there any way to force them into it?” Su Wending asked.

“Never mind how to force them—even if we really did clash head-on, that would be suicide. If they really charged with cavalry, there’d be some casualties in the front ranks, but once the infantry formation gets broken through, it naturally falls into disorder. Given the current fighting strength of the Wu Dynasty’s army, what follows would just be a slaughter. When that happens, the real battle reports will mostly be crushing defeats—right now it’s only because the Jurchens don’t even want to pay that small a price yet.”

As they spoke, someone suddenly came riding hard from ahead—a skilled operative recruited by the Bamboo Chronicle, currently serving as a scout up front. He spoke a few words in a low voice, and Ning Yi’s expression shifted slightly…

…

Beyond the woods lay a smooth hillside, and below the slope, a brutal chase and slaughter was drawing to its close. Scattered soldiers were being run down by cavalry charging up from behind, their heads cut off with long blades, great swaths of brutal carnage spreading along both sides of the road.

This was a Wu Dynasty unit that had been scattered in the chaos. Some of the routed men had fled into a small village up ahead, but the village’s inhabitants had already evacuated. Some of the cavalry charged in, and before long, set fire to the village.

Outside, along the road, some cavalrymen scavenged what little of value the corpses carried, but they moved quickly, tossing aside the meager, unappetizing rations the soldiers had carried. It seemed these cavalrymen had other business to attend to—once regrouped, they rode back the way they’d come. In the afternoon sunlight, one Jurchen rider cheered as he tossed a severed head into the air.

The cavalry rode off into the distance. After a while, Ning Yi, along with Qi Xinhan and a few other guards, emerged at the edge of the woods. He knew he’d stumbled upon one of that twenty percent that didn’t make it into the victory reports.

They came down from the grassy slope, checking for any survivors, and finally found a dying soldier in the grass by the roadside. After listening to what the man managed to say, Ning Yi froze for a moment, then turned his gaze toward the direction the Jurchen cavalry had ridden off in.

But there was nothing he could do about it now…

The Jurchen cavalry rode back several li, where a group of them had surrounded a migrating column of over a thousand civilians. By now, they had nearly finished forcing the civilians to hand over their bundles, valuables, grain, and other belongings. What they’d surrendered had piled up into a small mound in front of the ranks…

…

Tian Ashan felt his hands and feet go cold, his whole body trembling. He thought he might be about to die.

His wife clutched his hand beside him, weeping softly the whole time, not daring to make a sound for fear of drawing the Jurchens’ attention, so she just kept trembling and trembling.

As the Jurchens drove them to hand over their valuables and grain, they went and threw their bundles and whatever gold and silver they carried onto that mound. Then he heard one of the Jurchens say something. He froze for a moment, and the man repeated it. He understood clearly enough—the man was speaking in Chinese: “Take off your clothes!”

“Wh-what…”

“Take off your clothes—who knows if you’re hiding something on you. And you, all of you, take off your clothes!”

One of the Jurchens exclaimed as if realizing something. “That’s right! That’s right!”

Then came a burst of raucous laughter.

Tian Ashan stood frozen, shaking his head instinctively. The next moment, the impatient Jurchen came over, yanked his wife aside, and tore her clothes open with a ripping sound. “Take off your clothes!”

The woman let out a shriek and screamed wildly. Tian Ashan instinctively swung his arm out. “What are you doing, don’t you dare—” A Jurchen officer nearby, his face dark with menace, had already walked over. In a flash, he swung his blade, then kicked Tian Ashan hard, sending him flying.

Tian Ashan saw his own hands fly off, blood spurting out, as the Jurchen officer’s blade drove through and out the back of his wife.

“What are you all doing! Don’t waste time.” The officer shouted in the Jurchen tongue. “Kill—”

“Yes!”

Over four hundred Jurchen riders drew their blades in unison and cut into the crowd.

…

The intense, boiling commotion lasted only a short while before the sounds gradually died away. The Jurchens gathered up their spoils, glanced at the afternoon sun, and headed back toward Moutuo Ridge. Not long after, on their way back, they encountered a Wu Dynasty unit of a thousand men. The two sides faced off briefly, and the Jurchens abandoned some of the heavier items and a few large carts, taking only the valuable, easily portable goods and grain, and fled off to the side.

Not long after, among the many intelligence reports, Ning Yi came across this particular victory report. It described how the Jurchens had brutally massacred a column of over a thousand civilians, then, after looting their belongings, had encountered a flanking unit of the Wujie Battalion; after a fierce clash, the Jurchens had fled in disgrace, and this unit had recovered a great quantity of looted goods.

Victories and defeats like this played out fiercely, every single day.

…

Taiyuan. The autumn wind blew in, cold and desolate.

Qin Shaohe, stepping out from the gate tower, coughed instinctively and pulled his coat tighter around him.

The wall was lined with soldiers standing guard, and everywhere, inside and out, were countless traces of the fighting that had gone before—dried bloodstains, scorch marks from fire, pockmarks left by stone shot. Outside the city, the Jurchen encampment stretched on and on; through the thick wooden barricades, one could see soldiers moving about within. The month-plus of siege and defense had ended several days ago now, and it seemed the Jurchens had decided to settle in for a long blockade rather than press another assault. Walking along the wall among the soldiers, Qin Shaohe suddenly felt as though heaven and earth had fallen silent all around him.

Over a month of repeated attacks and defenses—it was hard to imagine the sheer magnitude of pressure that represented. The wall had been breached several times, then retaken by force several times again; more than once, Qin Shaohe had thought Taiyuan was about to fall. Outside the city, Wanyan Zonghan had already made his threat plain: once Taiyuan fell, not a chicken or dog in the city would be spared. But in the end, this wall had still been held, firmly, right here.

Although after that first battle in which he’d fought on the front lines himself, Qin Shaohe had never again truly wielded a blade in combat, he had still been wounded several times up on the wall. His body had grown much thinner now, and he carried the smell of medicine about him, giving off an illusion that a puff of wind might knock him over. Yet his eyes alone had grown calmer and more resolute than before—something accumulated through the deaths of so many people who had fallen around him.

He gazed quietly into the distance, toward where the Jurchen command tent stood, and in this moment, he understood at last just where that feeling of heaven and earth falling silent truly came from.

Taiyuan had become an isolated city.

In the latter half of the siege, it was not Zonghan but his general Yinshuke who had directed the fighting against the city; Zonghan himself, leading a separate portion of the forces, had spent that half-month razing every city around Taiyuan, turning it into a lone, isolated stronghold.

But like a nail, it had pinned the Jurchen western route army in place, keeping it from advancing south with any peace of mind.

Someone approached from the side—Li Pin, likewise carrying the smell of medicine, his frame gaunt as well. Not long ago Qin Shaohe had mocked him, saying scholars were simply frail; Li Pin had indeed fallen ill from exhaustion, yet even sick, he still saw to his duties with precision. Also in poor health was Cheng Zhouhai, who had roused so many people to man the walls.

“My lord Qin, the grain has been tallied,” Li Pin said. “There’s still enough in the storehouses to feed the whole city for roughly three months. If we start rationing now, we can hold out for half a year.”

“That’s enough.” Qin Shaohe smiled. “While we were cut off from outside news, I knew several hundred thousand troops were gathering toward Bianliang. Once the siege of Bianliang is lifted, Taiyuan’s siege will naturally lift as well. The Jurchens have advanced so fast and struck so hard because they need a quick victory. In my view, they won’t outlast this winter. Heh, heh… you and I will just have to hold out here in Taiyuan, wearing down Nianhan and his men.”

“This humble servant is honored,” Li Pin said, bowing with a smile.

“You never know until you’ve fought,” Qin Shaohe said, clasping his hands behind his back and gazing up at the sky, letting out a long breath. “If not for defending this city, I myself would never have known I had it in me to fight like this—that I could actually… hold this city…”

His voice grew quieter as he spoke, and by the end, what came to his mind instead were the many people he had watched die on this wall—soldiers and civilians alike. The fighting over the past month had been so fierce that he’d often been stained with blood, often stepping over corpses as he ran, even falling into pools of blood at times. In the moment, he’d had no time to look at the dead; now, though, the memories came back to him.

This city—in the end, they had held it…

The autumn wind blew in bitter and sharp; winter was coming. Once the heavy snows sealed the mountain passes, even Jurchens who had emerged from ice and snow would find it hard to mount a siege in such weather—and by then, the situation in Taiyuan might ease considerably. Qin Shaohe felt himself relax somewhat. He knew that as long as he kept the Jurchen western route army pinned down here, it would go a long way toward easing the situation at the capital. Everyone within the city—Qin Shaohe, Li Pin, Cheng Zhouhai, and the many officers and officials alike—understood this in their hearts.

They had accomplished something truly extraordinary.

Yet, cut off from outside news, Qin Shaohe had no way of knowing that at this very moment, She Kequ and Liu Guangshi, leading a portion of the Wu Dynasty’s strongest force, the Western Army, were already locked in fierce combat with Wanyan Zonghan at Tianmen Pass. Nor did he know that, at the same time, amid the standoff around the capital, the court was deliberating over Wanyan Zongwang’s proposed terms for peace—terms that involved ceding Taiyuan and other territories.

Nor would he ever know that this brief spell of calm and ease was about to become the beginning of a long and endless hell…