On the twenty-first of the second month, in the fourteenth year of Jinghan, spring rain fell over Qi County, south of Taiyuan.
The sky hung black and heavy, as though it might collapse at any moment.
The rain lashed down against him, a cold that cut to the bone.
The horse ran on in a blind, desperate flight. Chen Yanshu’s vision swam, and then, with a crash, he tumbled from the saddle. He rolled several times before staggering back to his feet, swaying, caked from head to foot in mud.
Several of his personal guards rushed over in alarm; one dismounted and moved to steady him, calling out to him—but what met their eyes was Chen Yanshu’s blank, vacant stare, his lips parting and closing faintly.
“…Lord Chen, Lord Chen, what’s wrong, are you all right…”
The calls seemed to come from very far away, then drift off into the distance again.
Two hours earlier, the Wusheng Army had launched an assault against Shuliesu’s forces.
Ever since the defeat outside Bianliang, when the several hundred thousand troops had scattered and later been regrouped, Chen Yanshu’s Wusheng Army had cobbled together just over fifty thousand men—still, among the various forces, the largest in number.
On this march north, Chen Yanshu had not only been appealing to the rear for reinforcements, but had also, in the court’s name, been rallying the local militias and righteous armies along the way. When Nian Han had encamped at Taiyuan, he had carried out a fair amount of pillaging and devastation along the southern approaches to the city, and later, when Zongwang’s army had passed through, it had further disrupted the defensive arrangements of these regions. Even so, the arrival of the Wusheng Army, backed by formal orders, had still drawn no small response and rallying of support. By the time Chen Yanshu finally decided to launch his assault against Shuliesu south of Taiyuan, the size of his combined force had swollen to some seventy thousand men.
But the problems within that number were serious as well.
Among the fifty thousand troops brought up from Bianliang, desertions occurred daily, forcing him to resort to harsh measures just to maintain discipline. The righteous armies gathering in from every direction, though full of fighting spirit, were a disorganized mess—mixed formations, uneven equipment. On the surface, it looked as though more men arrived every day, rallying to the cause of relieving Taiyuan, but within the ranks of the Wusheng Army itself, things had already become an unmanageable tangle.
Yet he had little choice in the matter. As the orders from the rear grew ever more insistent, on the morning of the twenty-first, he forced the army into an assault regardless.
And in the spring rain that followed, this mountain-like, seemingly immovable army disintegrated like sand dissolving in the rain.
With the Jurchen sweeping in to crush them, all he could do was flee, cutting a path through however he could. By the time he reached this point, he was truly spent, body and spirit alike.
His personal guards shook him by the arm, shouting at him. They saw that this high official, commander of an entire army, had mud smeared across half his face, his eyes wandering blankly through the air, his lips opening and closing as though muttering something.
“…It’s over… it’s over… I never should have…”
“My lord, what are you saying?! My lord, wake up… the Jurchen are still behind us—”
“…I regret it, too late now… it’s over…” He suddenly flung out his arm and let out a wild scream, startling everyone around him. Then they saw Chen Yanshu draw his sword and lunge forward. A guard tried to wrest the blade from him and nearly got cut for his trouble. Chen Yanshu staggered forward all the same, then turned the sword around, pressing the blade to his own throat as if to draw it across—but stumbling a few more steps, he instead gripped the hilt with both hands, aiming the point at his own chest. All around, the sky hung dark and heavy, rain falling steadily, and in the end, Chen Yanshu could not bring himself to drive the blade home. He collapsed to his knees, screaming hysterically, and cried out to the heavens.
“Ahh— I never should have— it’s over—”
That scream carried with it a wail that chilled the blood.
“It’s over… the Wu dynasty is finished—”
He finally drove the sword through his own chest. Blood and foam gushed out. Chen Yanshu’s eyes stared wide, and after two final, gurgling sounds, fell silent. That last cry lingered in the air like an ill omen, echoing long after.
No one ever knew what Chen Yanshu had truly meant by those final words. Not long after, several of his own guards cut off his head and surrendered it to the pursuing Jurchen forces.
This battle outside Taiyuan, fought in the spring rain, was both catastrophic and strangely muted. Hundreds of li away, in Bianliang, no one yet knew the fate of the Wusheng Army that had marched north to relieve the siege. Over these past days, the political situation in the capital had swung wildly back and forth, shifting with the intensity of a raging fire.
The court still had not decided to send further reinforcements to Taiyuan. Though the Wusheng Army had already been dispatched north, the outcome of the fighting outside Bianliang was plain for all to see. Ordinary commoners may not have grasped the full picture, but among scholars and officials alike, there was no shortage of daily debate. Taiyuan had not yet fallen, and so this debate only grew more heated by the day.
Amid all this discussion, the scholars’ daily petitions continued as well—some calling for troops to be sent, others demanding that the nation rouse itself, reform the military system, and purge treacherous officials. Behind these voices, there was no telling how many hidden hands were at work, and among them, some increasingly extreme demands were quietly fermenting. One of the most outspoken figures of popular opinion, the Imperial Academy student Chen Dong, was petitioning outside the palace, calling for the execution of the court’s so-called “Seven Tigers.”
These “Seven Tigers” were: Cai Jing, Liang Shicheng, Li Yan, Zhu Mian, Wang Fu, Tong Guan, and Qin Siyuan.
“In the troubles of today, Cai Jing brought corruption and chaos at the front, while Liang Shicheng schemed in the shadows behind him. Li Yan sowed enmity in the northwest, Zhu Mian sowed enmity in the southeast, and Wang Fu, Tong Guan, and Qin Siyuan sowed enmity with Liao and Jin alike, opening rifts along the frontier. These seven tigers should be executed, their heads sent out to the four corners of the realm, to answer to all under heaven!”
Such was, roughly, the substance of this “Seven Tigers” accusation.
Qin Siyuan was, in effect, a new addition to this list of so-called traitorous officials. Ever since assisting Li Gang, most of what Qin Siyuan had carried out involved harsh, uncompromising policies, and he had genuinely offended no small number of people along the way. In the defense of Bianliang, the court’s call for every household to contribute manpower, the levying of labor door to door—all of this had been carried out under the direction of the Right Chancellor’s household, and in the course of it, a fair number of incidents involving abuse of power had come to light, including cases of minor officials, wielding the authority to conscript men for the front, taking advantage of that power to violate the wives and daughters of those they conscripted. After the defenders of the city had given their lives, Qin Siyuan had ordered all the bodies burned, which had also stirred no small controversy. And later, during the negotiations with the Jurchen, the handover of grain and medicinal herbs had likewise all been carried out under the Right Chancellor’s household’s direction.
In the past, Qin Siyuan’s reputation among the common people had, at best, been that of a harsh, unyielding official. In this recent period of deliberate cultivation, even with Bamboo Records working to defend his name, negative sentiment toward him had grown loud and widespread all the same—much of it owing to the simple fact that ordinary people generally find more satisfaction in cursing someone than praising them, and all the more so given that Qin Siyuan had, in fact, done a fair number of things that ran against popular sentiment.
Among the three heroes of Bianliang’s defense—Li Gang, Zhong Shidao, and Qin Siyuan—if people were determined to single out a villain among them, Qin Siyuan was, without question, the most fitting candidate.
Tracing the threads back, the forces working behind the scenes to stir up this sentiment were varied and numerous, and closely tied to the day-by-day shifts in the court’s political situation. A few days earlier, Qin Siyuan had already cited illness in seeking to step down, but alongside that, memorials attacking and impeaching him had steadily multiplied. At first, these were the vague, unfounded sort—claims, for instance, that Qin Siyuan had been supplying the Jurchen with grain and provisions, stoking public outrage—which was, frankly, asking for trouble. Qin Siyuan had merely been carrying out orders; hadn’t the command come from above in the first place? After the first few accusers were thrown into prison, however, the memorials that followed grew increasingly substantive.
Things like certain expedient measures Qin Siyuan had taken while serving as Right Chancellor, or how he had once quietly bent the rules regarding the Wuchi Battalion’s pay, or how he had moved against so-and-so behind the scenes. Zhou Zhe stood firmly behind Qin Siyuan, throwing these accusers into prison one after another, until their numbers grew so great that he finally stopped, switching instead to reprimands. At the same time, he treated Qin Siyuan’s claim of illness as merely a tactful gesture to avoid suspicion, declaring: “I trust the Right Chancellor absolutely. The Right Chancellor need not worry—I will personally restore his good name!” And once again he rejected Qin Siyuan’s resignation.
Following this, Qin Hui took the lead in submitting a memorial arguing that, although the Right Chancellor was undoubtedly innocent and selfless, given the sheer number of accusations against him, precedent called for a joint review by the Three Judicial Offices to clear his name properly. Zhou Zhe rejected this too. “The Jurchen have only just left, and the Right Chancellor is a hero who defended this city. I have yet to reward his merit, and now you want to do this to him? Would that not make it seem as though I discard the bow once the birds are shot, boil the hound once the hare is caught? I trust the Right Chancellor without reservation. Let this matter never be raised again!”
These open developments could not conceal the rumblings of thunder brewing beneath the surface. On Ning Yi’s end, merchants connected to Bamboo Records had already begun coming by to inquire, to test the waters, and all manner of rumors were quietly circulating everywhere. Ever since handing over the material he’d compiled to Qin Siyuan, Ning Yi’s attention had shifted back to Bamboo Records itself, where he was now making a great many internal adjustments. Just as he had told Hongti, if the Right Chancellor fell from power, Bamboo Records and the intelligence bureau would need to be severed from each other immediately, cutting their losses to survive—otherwise, once official forces moved in to take over, everything he had built would inevitably end up serving someone else’s interests.
The core of Bamboo Records, which he had spent so long cultivating, was something he certainly intended to keep.
Of course, the time for such a split had not yet come. The factions at court had already taken on an aggressive, threatening posture, but Qin Siyuan’s retreat and silence might well be a deliberate strategy of its own—perhaps, after the Emperor pressed for a while and found that this side genuinely offered no resistance, he might come to believe that Qin Siyuan truly harbored no selfish ambitions. On another front, the old man had also confined Qin Shaoqian to the household, forbidding him from exerting any further control over the Wuchi Battalion, simply waiting for the Emperor to appoint someone else to take over—there was, after all, nothing else to be done.
Meanwhile, as Taiyuan was truly being consumed by fire, the young Qin, blinded in one eye, paced anxiously in the courtyard day after day, practicing his boxing forms relentlessly until his hands were bloodied. He was no longer young, and he understood full well what was happening—and it was precisely because he understood that the torment in his heart ran all the deeper. One day, Ning Yi went to see him, and found Qin Shaoqian speaking with his hands still bloodied, making no move to bandage them. He spoke calmly enough at first, chatting with Ning Yi for a while, but then Ning Yi saw him fall silent, his hands clenching into fists, his jaw working with a sharp, grinding sound.
“Liheng, Taiyuan is still fighting!” He looked up at Ning Yi, his eyes bloodshot red, the veins standing out on his forehead. “My elder brother is still in that city, Taiyuan is still fighting. I can’t accept this, I can’t…”
Ning Yi fell silent for a moment, then forced out a single line: “I’ve already sent men to save him.”
Qin Shaoqian gritted his teeth, his whole body trembling, and it was a long while before he finally settled.
Having left the Chancellor’s residence, there was, on the surface, little left for him to do beyond maintaining ties with various merchants and prominent households. These past few days, a relative had come to visit—Song Yongping.
This brother-in-law, born into an official family, had earlier passed the provincial examination and, with Ning Yi’s help, had since been assigned as magistrate of a fairly decent county. When the Jurchen swept south, a Jurchen cavalry unit had once raided the county where he was stationed. Song Yongping, having carefully surveyed the surrounding terrain beforehand, had shown a young man’s fearless daring and managed to use the local topography to repel the Jurchen, killing several dozen of them and even seizing some warhorses in the process. When merit was being tallied after the initial lull in fighting, with the Right Chancellor’s faction holding real power at the time, he had been credited, almost incidentally, with a significant achievement. Ning Yi, of course, had known nothing about this at the time. Now Song Yongping had come to the capital for a promotion, only to discover upon entering the city that the political climate here was turbulent, storm clouds gathering.
Song Yongping had, by this point, grown somewhat more mature. Though he had already heard some unfavorable rumors, he still made his way to Bamboo Records to call on Ning Yi, and ended up staying there.
He himself did not have a particularly deep understanding of the overall situation, and over these past few days, spent more time talking with Su Wenfang than with Ning Yi. In the past, Song Yongping had been the golden child of the Song family, considered far more clever than a good-for-nothing like Su Wenfang of the Su family by comparison. But meeting him again this time, he found that this cousin of his by marriage had grown remarkably mature and composed—to the point where even Song Yongping himself, now a county magistrate, found him somewhat hard to read. Whenever he asked how serious the situation might be, or brought up ways to navigate it politically, Su Wenfang would simply offer a modest, mild smile.
“It could turn out big, or it could turn out small… My brother-in-law will surely find a way.”
“There’s not much use in us worrying about it.”
Su Wenfang kept saying things like this, and it left Song Yongping increasingly anxious. He too was an ambitious, spirited young scholar, ultimately aiming to become someone at court like a chancellor or an imperial tutor—he felt that, young as he was, he might well be able to think of some way to help. After days of quiet mulling, at the end of the second month, over a meal with Ning Yi and Su Wenfang, he finally began probing more directly into the details of the matter.
“As the saying goes, one mind alone falls short, but two minds together see further. I grew up in an official household, and from an early age was steeped in such matters, so I do understand something of the workings of the court. Coming here and hearing of what’s unfolding, I confess I’m genuinely worried. I don’t know how serious things have become, but I hope, brother-in-law, you won’t hold back in telling me. Though I have little talent to speak of, my father still has some connections at court. I may not be able to intervene in matters at the chancellor’s level, but if there’s a way for your affairs to be extricated…”
Given his earnest concern, Ning Yi found it hard to refuse him outright. He nodded, thought it over, and gave him a general account of what could be shared, answering the questions Song Yongping raised along the way. He genuinely wanted to set Song Yongping’s mind at ease, though of course he couldn’t tell him the full scope of the situation—matters like the power struggle between the Emperor and the Chancellor, or the involvement of Cai Jing and Tong Guan, and so on. They had barely spoken for a little while when a sudden commotion erupted from the front of Bamboo Records. The three of them rose and headed outside, and soon someone came to report that trouble had broken out up ahead.
“Who is it?”
“Some hooligans—it looks like the Grand Marshal’s household is stirring things up behind the scenes.”
The Bamboo Records members who had remained in the capital had, by now, been through enough to handle themselves competently. By the time they came to report, they had already sorted out the situation. Ning Yi and Su Wenfang exchanged a glance, then went out through the side door. Once out on the road, they saw that the tavern in front of Bamboo Records had already erupted into a brawl, things being smashed and thrown about.
Song Yongping’s brow furrowed deeply. “For the Grand Marshal’s household to stir up trouble so openly—they’re not even bothering to hide it anymore. Has it really come to this?”
Ning Yi glanced around, and then, in a room in the building across the street, spotted the figure of Gao Mu’en.
“Sir, what should we do?” the Bamboo Records member asked.
“Best not to meet force with force,” Song Yongping said from the side, lowering his voice. “Grand Marshal Gao holds the post of Palace Front Commander—confronting him head-on in Bianliang would only play right into his hands. Since he’s the one who sent these thugs, we might as well simply report it to the authorities.”
The Bamboo Records worker waited for Ning Yi’s decision. Ning Yi nodded. “Let them smash away. No need to report it, though—just let them be.”
Song Yongping was momentarily taken aback, then nodded as well. “Indeed—if we did report it, they could claim there’s no smoke without fire, and that would just cause more trouble…”
He was a sharp young man, quick to grasp the point, and Ning Yi nodded approvingly. Looking over toward the tavern, he said quietly to the worker, “Go tell everyone to come out and clear away a bit, so no one gets hurt.”
Having already been pushed this far in the capital, both Song Yongping and Su Wenfang couldn’t help but feel a knot of frustration in their chests, looking over at the tavern not far off. As far as Song Yongping could tell, Ning Yi’s own feelings were probably much the same. Just then, a squad of yamen runners came hurrying down the road from the other direction, rushing straight toward the Bamboo Records building.
Song Yongping assumed this was simply the other side’s follow-up move, his brow furrowing even deeper—until he heard someone shout from over there: “Seize the troublemakers!” The troublemakers seemed to try to argue their case, only to be met with a swift beating instead. By the time some of them were being dragged out, Song Yongping realized, to his surprise, that these yamen runners were genuinely coming down on the hooligans themselves. He then saw another group rushing across the street toward the building where Gao Mu’en had been, storming up to seize him. A voice rang out from inside: “What are you doing! My father is Gao Qiu—who do you think you are—” It was, in fact, Gao Mu’en himself being taken into custody.
Song Yongping and the others watched, utterly bewildered. Down the road, a middle-aged man in a black robe came walking toward them. He first cupped his hands respectfully toward Ning Yi, then gave a similar gesture toward Song Yongping and Su Wenfang. Ning Yi returned the gesture with proper courtesy, and the man stepped closer, speaking quietly.
“This humble servant is Cai Qi, steward of the Grand Preceptor’s household. Grand Preceptor Cai invites you, sir, to come by for a talk.”
His voice was low, and Song Yongping barely caught the words. Ning Yi asked, “Now?”
The man nodded and gestured with his hand. From down the road, a carriage came rolling up. Ning Yi nodded, glanced at Song Yongping and Su Wenfang, and said, “Go ahead and eat without me. I need to step out for a while.” With that, he set off walking in that direction.
Su Wenfang’s brow furrowed, while Song Yongping, by contrast, looked rather excited, tugging at Su Wenfang’s sleeve. “Grand Preceptor Cai—it seems even the Grand Preceptor values brother-in-law’s talent. This could be the turning point. Even if there’s trouble, he might be able to navigate it from multiple angles now…”
Su Wenfang said nothing. Just then, a galloping horse rushed past them, the rider’s clothing marking him unmistakably as belonging to Bamboo Records.
The galloping horse was reined in hard right beside Ning Yi, startling everyone nearby. Then they saw the rider swing down from the saddle and hand Ning Yi a small paper tube. Ning Yi drew out the letter inside and opened it to read.
The long street remained in chaos, the hooligans still being dragged off, struggling and shouting as they went, Gao Mu’en still raising a great commotion, onlookers pointing and murmuring, a low buzz of voices—buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz…
Buzz buzz buzz buzz buzz buzz buzz buzz buzz buzz buzz buzz buzz buzz buzz buzz buzz buzz buzz buzz buzz buzz buzz buzz buzz buzz buzz buzz—
The vast light of day seemed to draw itself inward and vanish.
Ning Yi stood beside the carriage, staring at the message in his hand. It was a long while before he finally raised his head.
“…Master Ning? Master Ning?”
The middle-aged man in the black robe spoke beside him. Ning Yi slowly turned his face toward him, his gaze sweeping over the man, deep and fathomless as the abyss of the sea, as though it might swallow a person whole. In the next instant, as though speaking without thinking, he let out a single sound: “Hm?”
Then he said, “…Mm.”
He rolled up the letter and stepped into the carriage.
As he lifted the curtain, a gust of wind blew past.
An era had come to its end…
On the twenty-fifth of the second month, Taiyuan fell.