The blade’s edge cut through ice and snow; all around, a vast expanse of pale, colorless white. The sky had only just begun to lighten, the wind and snow before them still surging, swirling wildly.

With a wet thud, mixed in among the countless sounds of the surrounding chaos, the reek of blood and thick, viscous fluid struck him full in the face; beside him, someone thrust forward with a long spear, and behind him, a comrade’s arrow flew loose, the bowstring humming with the release. Mao Yishan stared wide-eyed at the sight of blood spraying from the tall, burly northeastern man in front of him — from beneath his ribs to his chest, thick blood had just come gushing out, spraying across his face, some of it even spraying into his mouth, still hot.

Xia Village.

The battle had been underway for half an hour now. Mao Yishan, a low-ranking soldier, had, for the first time in his life, just killed an enemy.

It had already been years since he first joined the army. Enlisting, drawing a soldier’s pay, currying favor with his superiors, occasionally training — over these past few years, with the Wu dynasty not exactly at peace, he had been deployed a few times, but had never once had the occasion to actually kill anyone. Then the Jurchen came, sweeping him up into the ranks of battle, running, fleeing amid nights of fire and blood; he had seen comrades cut down beside him, seen rivers of blood flow across the ground — but he himself had never once killed a man.

That was fine, though — he was, after all, just a man drawing his pay and rations. On the battlefield, a sea of humanity; off the battlefield, likewise a sea of humanity — no one paid him any mind, no one expected anything of him. Whether he managed to kill anyone or not, when the time came to rout and flee, he would flee along with everyone else; and if he himself were killed, no doubt no one would give it a second thought either.

It was only after arriving here at Xia Village that, for some reason he couldn’t quite explain, everyone — all of them scattered, defeated soldiers, huddling together for warmth and comfort — began telling him this story and that, about formidable men, generals, heroes, and the like. He kept eating his rations, kept training alongside everyone else, without expecting much of anything at first — but gradually, he found himself thinking, vaguely, that after training this long, it would be nice if he could actually manage to kill a couple of enemies himself.

At first, he had actually considered leaving this place — the village was far too remote, and besides, they seemed intent on going head-to-head with the Jurchen directly. But in the end, he had stayed, mainly because there was always something to do here, every single day. After eating, he’d go train; after training, he’d go clear snow; in the evenings, everyone would gather together and talk, sometimes laughing, sometimes bringing people close to tears. Little by little, he had gotten to know a handful of the people around him. Anywhere else, after a defeat like this, all he could have done was find some superior officer he didn’t know, seek out a few fellow townsmen with a similar accent, and crowd in together whenever supplies were being handed out. On idle days, all anyone could do was huddle in their tents for warmth; no one in the army would ever really pay him any attention, and after a defeat of this scale, there probably wouldn’t even be any more training to speak of.

By comparison, he actually preferred the atmosphere here at Xia Village — at the very least, he knew what he was supposed to do next. In fact, because he had worked so diligently clearing snow, a few of the higher-ranking officers had even remarked on him once: “This fellow’s a hard worker, got some real strength in him.” That was what his superior had said. And then several other, even higher-ranking officers had nodded along in agreement, and one of the younger ones among them had reached out and patted him on the shoulder. “Don’t wear yourself out too much, brother.”

How could he possibly wear himself out too much…

And then he heard that those formidable men had gone out to fight the Jurchen — and afterward, word came that they had actually won. When those men returned, that scholar, the most formidable person in all of Xia Village, had gotten up and given his speech; Mao Yishan felt he hadn’t understood most of it, but he knew the time to kill was coming. His hands had trembled through half the night — there was a certain anticipation in him, and yet he also had no idea whether he’d actually manage to kill one or two enemies himself — it would be nice if he came out of it without getting hurt, at least. By the next morning, the Loyal Volunteer Army had launched their assault. He was positioned somewhere in the middle of the front line, waiting behind a wooden shelter, with the archers stationed a little further back still.

The Loyal Volunteer Army came charging in; ahead lay the wooden outer wall on the eastern side of Xia Village, stretching over a hundred zhang in length. The sound of shouting and killing surged and boiled over, and the reek of blood came drifting into his nose. Without his quite noticing when, the sky had already brightened, and his commanding officer, saber in hand, called out, “Let’s go!” He picked up his blade and stepped out from behind the wooden shelter, the wind and snow parting before him.

He and the soldiers beside him charged toward the wooden wall ahead at full speed, the smell of blood growing ever thicker; figures flickered atop the wall, his own commanding officer charging ahead of them all, seeming to cut down an enemy amid the swirling wind and snow. Just as he was about to charge forward himself, the soldier who had been fighting fiercely atop the camp wall ahead suddenly toppled off, having taken an arrow. Mao Yishan caught him as he came down, helping him off, and the man beside him had already charged up in his place.

That man had taken an arrow to the shoulder while leaning out to strike down an enemy; Mao Yishan’s mind was somewhat in a daze, but he quickly hoisted the man up onto his back and ran with him at full speed. By the time he made it back and charged up onto the wall again, all he managed to do was cut through a grappling hook someone had thrown up, and once more found himself going a long while without encountering the enemy directly. Just as a certain discouragement began creeping into his heart, someone suddenly vaulted over the wall, charging straight at him. Still crouched behind the camp wall, Mao Yishan instinctively swung his blade, and blood sprayed across his head and face; he blinked in mild shock, and only then realized — he had just killed someone.

The smell of blood was, in truth, already something he had long since grown accustomed to — it was only the fact of having killed an enemy with his own hands that left him momentarily dazed. But in the very next instant, his body was already surging forward again, swinging his blade once more — only this time, the strike cut through empty air, as two long spears thrust forward instead, one piercing through the man’s neck, the other driving into his chest, sending the man’s body flying backward, suspended in midair for a moment.

Snow-mist swirled and spun in front of his nose; all around, figures crossed and clashed, tangled together. At the spot where someone had just vaulted over the wall a moment before, a crude ladder now stood propped against the outer wall, and a Liaodong man came charging in with a roar. Mao Yishan felt, in that instant, as though the whole world around him had come alive; his mind spun with the memory of that earlier crushing defeat, of his fellow soldiers cut down and killed, their bodies lying in pools of blood, some with their organs spilling out from their bellies, some still alive, men in their thirties and forties crying out, “Help! Mercy!…” He had not dared stop then, had only run for his life, his urine soaking through his own trousers…

He charged forward with everything he had, and swung his blade in a diagonal arc from upper-left to lower-right, aimed straight at the head of the Liaodong soldier before him. With a heavy clang, the man blocked it with his own blade; Mao Yishan, still shouting wordlessly, swung a second strike down from upper-right — another clang — and he felt the muscles of his hand go numb from the impact. The man, without a sound, fell over dead; Mao Yishan drew back behind the wall, understanding, in that instant, that his second strike had split the man’s skull wide open.

“Hahaha… hahaha…” He crouched there, letting out low, guttural sounds through his teeth, and then grabbed a rough, jagged stone from behind the low parapet and hurled it out with a twist of his body. The soldier climbing the ladder ducked his body low and dodged it; the stone crashed instead into the thigh of another man running below, sending his body lurching; that man drew his bow and fired an arrow this way. Mao Yishan quickly ducked back, the arrow whistling past overhead through the sky. Barely recovering from that startle, he grabbed another stone, ready to throw again, when the soldier on the ladder, already climbing up several rungs and about to surge forward, took an arrow straight through the neck.

The man who had fired the arrow ran past Mao Yishan. “Well done!”

Mao Yishan shouted back at the top of his lungs: “K-Killed well!”

Someone on the battlefield called out in echo: “Leave every last one of them here—”

Several zhang beyond the wooden wall, a brutal melee was in full swing — a handful of vanguard soldiers from the Loyal Volunteer Army had already broken through and charged in. But they were quickly cut off from the men behind them by the surging Wu dynasty soldiers; the enemy men, shouting furiously, fought back with everything they had, one of them having had a hand cut clean off, blood spraying wildly. The men closing in around them on this side were equally fierce, blood covering them from head to toe, locked in combat with these Loyal Volunteer soldiers desperately trying to fight their way back through the breach, shouting all the while, “You’re not going back once you’re here! Your daddy’ll make you hurt—”

Outside the wooden wall, the soldiers of the Loyal Volunteer Army came surging forward like a tide.

In any siege where the possibility of a swift, clever victory has been ruled out, the general strategy was almost always the same: an overwhelming, sustained assault meant to break through the enemy’s defensive limits. The morale and resolve of the Loyal Volunteer soldiers were, by no means, weak; by this point in the fighting, with the sky now fully bright, Zhang Linghui and Liu Shunren had already gotten a fairly clear read on the weak points of this stretch of wall, and were beginning their real, all-out assault. Since the wall itself was not especially high, it was hardly uncommon for enemy soldiers to throw caution to the wind, scrambling up and over regardless of the risk. But Xia Village had never placed its full hope in this single-story-high wall to begin with — behind it, the current line of defense was, in fact, astonishingly thick. Several small teams, particularly strong in combat skill, would sometimes deliberately loosen the defense for a moment, purely to let the enemy through, only to seal the gap once they were inside and finish them off.

Mao Yishan lay in wait behind the wooden wall; as one of the Loyal Volunteer men came charging up, he stood and struck downward with his blade against the man’s thigh. As the man’s body began toppling forward, over the wooden wall into their side, he swung another blade strike as he fell; Mao Yishan ducked his head back instinctively, and with a whooshing sound, the blade’s edge swept past just above his head. The image of that man whose skull he had just split flashed through his mind, and for a moment, he thought he too had just been struck across the head. The Loyal Volunteer soldier, both legs already hacked nearly two-thirds through, screamed in agony atop the wall, rolling about while swinging his blade wildly in every direction.

Mao Yishan felt blood everywhere across his head; he wanted to charge forward, but the enemy’s desperate, flailing saber strikes forced him back a step. He grabbed a wooden club instead, and struck the man’s head and body again and again, several blows in quick succession, until the man stopped moving entirely, blood soaking everything around them. A comrade rushed over, exchanging a blow with another Loyal Volunteer soldier just behind him, before collapsing at his feet, chest soaked entirely red with blood. Mao Yishan turned back around and traded another strike with that same Loyal Volunteer soldier; his wooden club had the advantage this time, catching and lodging the man’s steel blade in place. But this particular Loyal Volunteer soldier was a powerfully built man, and with a sudden, savage kick, struck Mao Yishan square in the chest, sending him flying backward. Mao Yishan, unable to draw breath, clawed desperately at the ground beside him as the man’s blade came slashing toward him.

Just then, on the inner side of the wall, someone else came charging forward at tremendous speed, pushed off from the inner wall with one foot, and leapt high into the air; the figure came down, striking a blow across the waist of the Loyal Volunteer man, and Mao Yishan saw blood and viscera come pouring out in a rush.

The man who had saved him climbed up onto the platform behind the inner wall, and immediately fell into combat with more Loyal Volunteer soldiers still pouring in. Mao Yishan, by now, felt blood covering both his hands and his body from head to toe; he grabbed the blade lying on the ground — the one belonging to the Loyal Volunteer soldier whose legs he had cut and then beaten to death — and struggled back to his feet, about to say something, when the comrade who had been holding off the enemy nearby took an arrow to the shoulder, and then a second arrow right after that. Mao Yishan shouted and rushed over, taking his place.

In this moment, he felt, for the first time in his entire life, truly on a battlefield — for the first time, he wanted so badly to win, wanted so badly to kill the enemy.

Ahead, the Loyal Volunteer soldiers swarmed forward like a hive of bees; behind, an officer who had noticed this weak point was already bringing his own men rushing over to reinforce it. He sensed the comrades surging in beside him, sensed the fierce, savage enemy charging toward him from ahead, and abruptly dodged an incoming arrow — the motion was almost entirely instinctive, and yet he had somehow, genuinely, avoided the exact direction the arrow had come flying from; and even in dodging, he had not retreated fully behind the parapet, but kept himself alert to whatever was happening ahead at all times.

I don’t care if I die, I’m dragging every last one of you down with me…

At that moment, Mao Yishan felt the air around him suddenly shift with a whoosh.

Some two zhang away, within a section of the camp wall higher than the one he stood on, fire and a shockwave of pressure suddenly burst outward. The camp wall shuddered from the impact, and Mao Yishan even saw the falling snowflakes scatter, momentarily frozen in shape mid-air; amid this vast expanse of wind and snow, a clear, distinct trace shot outward toward the distance with a sharp whistling sound. A moment later, a series of thunderous explosions began erupting, one after another, across the snowy field far off in the distance. That was precisely where the Loyal Volunteer Army’s forces were charging forward in their densest concentration — in that same instant, dozens of these streaking traces formed across the falling snow, nearly merging into a single continuous line, and the raging explosions swallowed the crowd of men whole.

BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM—

Snowflakes, shockwaves, shields, human bodies, black smoke, white mist, red spraying blood — in that single instant, all of it rose together, swirling within the barrier thrown up by that explosion; everyone on the battlefield froze, stunned, for a moment.

And then, an ancient, resonant horn call rang out.

The side gate of the camp swung open, just like that.

Heavy cavalry, clad in black armor, draped in flowing cloaks, appeared before the eyes of the Loyal Volunteer Army. And behind Mao Yishan and the others, shield-bearers and archers came surging forward in droves.

The fighting paused for only the briefest instant, and then continued once more.

Before long, a second round of explosions rang out.

The roar and searing heat of the elm-wood cannons scorched back and forth, sweeping across the entire battlefield…

…

When that explosion had first burst forth so abruptly, both Zhang Linghui and Liu Shunren found themselves momentarily stunned.

From the very moment they had decided to launch this all-out assault on the camp, they had already prepared themselves for a genuinely hard-fought battle. The enemy, using their four thousand-plus elite troops as a core framework to hold together a camp of twenty thousand men, clearly had the real strength to defend it to the death. But so long as those fifteen or sixteen thousand weaker troops proved unable to hold their own, and the death toll among them began to climb, that alone might, in turn, end up undermining the morale of even the four thousand elite troops themselves.

Breaking through was not impossible — but it would come at a cost.

That, in itself, hardly troubled them. Even though they had played a rather less than honorable role in the battle at the Chaobai River, they were, after all, men who had clawed their way up from among the starving refugees of Liaodong. Their unwillingness to fight the Jurchen head-on did not mean they were like the Wu dynasty’s own officials, believing that anything could be accomplished without cost. When truly backed into a corner, they both possessed the awareness, and the capability, to face that reality head-on.

The Ever-Victorious Army had already betrayed twice — there could be no third betrayal now. Under these circumstances, using whatever strength remained at their disposal to earn merit before Wanyan Zongwang, and to secure a place for themselves within the future court of the Jin, was the only way forward left to them. Once they had come to terms with this, there was little else left to say.

And so they had launched their assault in the most orthodox manner possible.

This initial wave of attack was, typically, meant to test the true mettle of one’s opponent — first a feint, then simply piling on with overwhelming numbers; for a truly skilled commander, it would not take long to gauge exactly how resilient the enemy really was. And so, for the first half hour or so, they had still held back somewhat; after that, they had begun a more targeted, high-intensity assault.

The entire outer wall of the valley at Xia Village, wrapping around from the banks of the Yellow River, stretched for several hundred zhang; though it had taken two months to build, managing to raise a defensive barrier over a zhang high was already no small achievement. Naturally, the wooden wall varied in height from place to place, and in most areas, sharpened wooden stakes extended outward to obstruct any attacker’s approach — but naturally, some sections were stronger, some weaker, some easier to attack, some harder.

An hour into the assault, Zhang Linghui and Liu Shunren had already gained a fairly clear picture of the defenses, and launched their most intense assault yet against a stretch of the eastern wooden wall. By now, over eight hundred men had already gathered beneath this section of wall — vanguard fighters at the front, archers mixed in among them to suppress the defenders atop the wall, and behind them, more men charging forward, shields raised, in a steady, unbroken stream.

Had there been no unexpected twist, Zhang and Liu would likely have kept up this assault for a full day, cleanly and decisively breaking through this section of the defense. Given everything they understood about the Wu dynasty’s armies, this hardly seemed like an excessive expectation. And in kind, the enemy’s own defense had likewise proven remarkably steadfast — unlike the desperate, tragic, life-for-life exchanges seen at other fallen Wu dynasty defensive lines, what they now faced before them was, in truth, a genuine clash between two forces of comparable strength.

Zhang Linghui and Liu Shunren both understood that the enemy had already committed their elite troops to this fight, and hoped only that, once they had fully tested the limits of the enemy’s true strength, they could quickly force them to their absolute breaking point. And just as the fighting had reached this stage, with Liu Shunren already considering launching a large-scale assault against another section of the defenses, everything suddenly changed.

“Firearms…”

“Wu dynasty firearms?”

In the brief instant it took for this realization to sink in, before any further confusion could even take shape, they heard the sound of a horn carried through the wind and snow, the very air trembling with it, an ominous foreboding rising to the surface — that sense that had been quietly building since the very start of the battle, that feeling as though they were not, in fact, fighting against the men of the Wu dynasty at all, was growing clearer, more intense by the moment.

“Signal the cavalry to move in support—”

“No! Pull everyone back! Retreat, now—”

The very instant they laid eyes on the black-armored heavy cavalry, the two commanders, almost simultaneously, issued two entirely different orders—

…

Ever since the Jurchen had pushed south, the routing and flight of Wu dynasty armies before the Jurchen host had already become the norm — this unbroken chain of battles had, almost without exception, followed this same pattern; even in the face of the Ever-Victorious Army, those able to hold their ground and resist had been vanishingly few. It was against this backdrop that, an hour into the fighting at Xia Village, the elm-wood cannons had begun their devastating strikes, cutting a line straight through the enemy — and immediately after, following the suggestion of the young officer named Yue Pengju, the heavy cavalry had launched their charge.

In the course of building Xia Village’s defenses, a stretch of woodland out beyond the outer wall had already been cleared flat; essentially, the ground within a single arrow’s range had been cleared entirely, and within that space, roughly half the ground had been left studded with wooden stakes, while the remaining, somewhat narrower half of open ground was the only stretch genuinely suited for a warhorse to charge across.

Elm-wood cannons, fired from different directions, had carved out a strike zone roughly a zhang or so wide and over ten zhang long, directly in the path of the Loyal Volunteer Army’s advancing charge. Given the limited power of each individual cannon shell, the men caught within that zone were, of course, not all killed outright — in fact, all told, the total casualties likely did not exceed fifty or sixty men. And yet, once the cannon fire ceased, blood, flesh, black ash, and white mist all mingled together; the wounded, missing limbs, their bodies smeared and mangled with blood, screamed in a frenzy of agony — and the moment this scene came into view, nearly every attacker charging through that section of ground found himself involuntarily coming to a halt.

To the side, over a hundred heavy cavalry came thundering down the slope, and in that slightly lower stretch of ground, before the wooden wall facing the nearly eight hundred elite Loyal Volunteer troops, a forest of shields was already rising into position.

Some mid-level officers of the Loyal Volunteer Army began ordering their men to charge forward, hoping to hold back the heavy cavalry. But the sound of another explosion rang out again, directly along their charging path, and by the time the order to retreat finally reached them from the main camp, it was already somewhat too late — the heavy cavalry was already blocking their way back.

A portion of the men at the very rear still tried to flee back the way they had come — a few of them did manage to escape — but soon after, the heavy cavalry closed off their retreat entirely like an impenetrable wall, forming two ranks, wielding their guan blades, and began advancing forward like some great meat-grinding machine, pressing steadily toward the camp wall.

The slaughter had begun.

The Loyal Volunteer cavalry did not dare approach; amid explosions like that, several horses that had drawn too close had already panicked and bolted. Arrows fired from long range meant nothing against heavy cavalry — worse, they risked striking their own men instead.

In this brief span of time, faced with this sudden, unexpected assault from Xia Village, the nearly eight hundred Loyal Volunteer soldiers positioned outside this eastern stretch of wall found themselves, in effect, trapped as though within some enclosed inner citadel. Among them were many skilled fighters and mid-to-lower-ranking officers; as the heavy cavalry bore down upon them, their highest-ranking officer present, Piao Haidu, tried to organize the men into a spear formation to resist. But it proved meaningless — from atop the camp wall behind them, archers, holding the higher ground, rained down arrows mercilessly upon the crowd below. Before long, he too took an arrow to the back and died.

More of the men chose their own individual ways of responding, dazed and helpless in the face of what was happening. Some still tried to press forward with an assault upward against the wall, but with the reinforced defenses now arrayed above them, breaking through the wall of shields, spears, and blades in any short span of time remained nothing short of a fool’s dream.

Those who tried to flee to either side found themselves under fire from even more archers; some of the Loyal Volunteer soldiers attempted to surrender, only to be crushed beneath the advancing heavy cavalry moments later.

This sudden, unexpected turn of events shook everyone present to their core; the Loyal Volunteer soldiers stationed in other directions, upon receiving the order to retreat, fled at once — in truth, even in the midst of such an intense engagement, the number of soldiers actually killed by arrow fire during the charge itself had never been especially high. Most of the men who had charged up to this wooden wall would, had they not gone on to engage in close combat atop it, have largely survived. But during this stretch of time, as everything around had grown eerily quiet, only within this single low-lying depression did the boiling chaos continue on, unrelenting, for quite some time longer.

For a soldier, that was the most wretched outcome imaginable — unable to go up, unable to come down, unable to flee, unable to surrender.

The Loyal Volunteer soldiers were slaughtered, nearly to the last man.

From a distance, Zhang Linghui and Liu Shunren watched all of this unfold — there was, in truth, nothing else they could do but watch; even had they committed ten thousand men, they still would not have been able to keep hold of this heavy cavalry force — it charged in, struck, and withdrew again in an instant, while all they could do was watch their own losses mount ever higher. The entire Ever-Victorious Army watched this spectacle unfold as well. By the time the final scream faded into the wind and snow, that low-lying stretch of ground and the snowy slope beyond lay scattered with shattered corpses, a river of blood flowing across it. Then, the heavy cavalry dismounted; atop the camp wall, the shields were lowered, and a long row of archers still kept their bows trained on the bodies below, guarding against anyone who might be feigning death.

“Damn it, damn their whole rotten bloodline!” Zhang Linghui clenched his fists, the veins bulging on the backs of his hands as he watched all of this unfold, his fists trembling. “Just who in the hell are these people…”

Before this, they had already had extensive dealings with the Wu dynasty — they knew all too well the ugly, shameful conduct of its officials, the rot and decay running through its military. It was precisely for this reason that they had abandoned the Wu dynasty in the first place and surrendered to the Jurchen instead. When, in all their time within the Wu dynasty, had they ever seen anyone capable of accomplishing something like this…

“Cut off their heads, and throw them back!” Atop the wooden wall, Yue Fei, who had been in command of this sortie, gave the order, killing intent radiating from him in every direction. “And after that, let them come attack us walking over the heads of their own men!”

Toward the enemy, he had never once harbored the slightest trace of mercy.

The heavy cavalry cut off the heads of the fallen, and hurled them one by one toward the direction of the Loyal Volunteer Army; the severed heads arced through the air, one after another, landing scattered across the snowy field.

Farther off, atop a distant mountain ridge, someone watched all of this unfold — watched the men of the Loyal Volunteer Army slaughtered like pigs and dogs, watched those severed heads thrown out one after another — his entire body trembling.

…It really was this simple.

“Time to eat!” Atop one of the watchtowers within the valley, Ning Yi clapped his hands together, saying just this.

This was the opening act of the Battle of Xia Village.

Before long, the entire valley erupted into a fever of excitement over this first victory…

Zhang and Liu, meanwhile, temporarily withdrew their troops, working at their fastest pace to construct simple siege equipment that could be used against the camp. And at the same time, scouts were already cutting through the snowy plain, carrying word of the outcome of this battle to Guo Yaoshi…

…and to Wanyan Zongwang as well.