It was early in the fourth month. On the mountain pass outside Small Azure River, the dam that had been under construction since before winter had now taken shape. Built against the mountainside from wood and stone, standing twenty-four chi high (roughly seven meters by later measures), it was now undergoing the test of the flood season’s rising waters.
In this mountain region’s brief flood season, the spillway beside the dam was now discharging water with a dangerous, startling force, the roar of the rushing torrent deafening; the road into the mountains wound its way up alongside this riverbed.
Passing through the mountain pass, the waters of Small Azure River beyond had suddenly expanded because of the dam, a perilous stretch of blue-green water spreading forward; the narrow dam connected to this reservoir sometimes seemed almost frightening, making one worry it might collapse with a roar at any moment. Of course, since the outlet opened outward, even a collapse wouldn’t be too disastrous — at worst, it would turn the river valley and mountain ravine outside into one giant bathhouse.
Entering the mountain pass with the chattering Hou Yuanyong, and exchanging greetings with the soldiers standing guard here, what appeared ahead was a hundred-meter-long road winding around the mountainside — muddy now from the recent rainy season. On one side of the road were cave dwellings, interspersed here and there with wooden-framed, earthen huts where the guard troops lived. Further ahead lay the settlement area where Small Azure River’s residents now gathered.
The appearance of the reservoir had raised the water level of Small Azure River considerably, encroaching on much of the land at the front of the valley, though the effect gradually lessened further back. Cave dwellings, closely packed houses, and tents clustered together in this area; seen from a distance, though the various dwellings still looked crude, the layout of the settlement was remarkably orderly. Zhuo Xiaofeng had taken part in laying out the grid lines for this area back at the start; the houses might be built in haste, but every building plot had been marked out in strict, square lines — this had been Ning Yi’s firm requirement.
Even if a proper structure couldn’t be built yet and people had to make do with a tent, the edge of that tent was absolutely not allowed to spill outside the marked lines.
After all, though it was called a residential settlement, the true majority at Small Azure River were still soldiers. During the hardest days of winter, when more people had come in from outside the mountains, some had once complained that this was overly fussy nonsense. But they’d soon been put down and driven out of the valley. At the time, in the depths of winter’s cold, the former Wurui Camp soldiers still had to work every day, and inevitably some grew lax in spirit and nearly joined in the complaints as well — after which a mass rectification assembly involving tens of thousands of people had been held in the valley.
The Jurchens were at the height of their power, the Western Xia were out there seizing cities and territory — the plight of the refugees who’d come in was living proof of that. They were civilians who’d lost their homes. You are soldiers — do you still want this patch of ground beneath your feet in the future?
For a soldier, every rule followed today would one day, on the battlefield, save the lives of several of his comrades!
After that assembly, the army’s leadership had also imposed strict regulations on the daily use of coal briquettes and charcoal fires. By the time the cold eased somewhat and the dam was completed, wooden huts had gradually replaced the tents, but not a single wall was ever allowed to extend past the originally marked boundaries.
At this point, the process of wooden huts replacing tents wasn’t yet complete; the entire settlement was still essentially laid out with houses of various sizes surrounding a central plaza. Though the lines had been drawn neatly, the scene itself was chaotic, the roads thick with mud. This was simply something the people of Small Azure River had no time to attend to for now — from the previous autumn through to this early summer, construction of every kind at Small Azure River had barely paused for a moment; even in the depths of winter, various preparations had continued without letup.
Building houses to keep out the cold, carving out cave dwellings, constructing the dam — and once spring arrived, the main work shifted to breaking new ground and planting wheat and other crops. Now, with summer approaching, the outline of the settlement in the valley had gradually taken shape. Wheat fields ran along the river, stretching for several hundred mu on both sides of the valley; a suspension bridge connected the two riverbanks; further out, the outlines of grazing areas for warhorses and other livestock had gradually been marked off as well, and several watchtowers atop the mountain peaks had already been completed. But measured against the living needs of the more than ten thousand people in the valley, the truly essential work still fell far short of what was needed.
As they walked on, the boy named Hou Yuanyong chattered away to Zhuo Xiaofeng about all the changes in the valley, the road bustling with voices, men pushing handcarts or carrying earth and stone on shoulder poles passing by every so often. In the less than a month he’d been away, quite a few places in the valley already looked vastly different to Zhuo Xiaofeng. Over the past six months, Small Azure River had been changing almost every single day, and especially since the dam had taken shape, the pace of change had grown even more dramatic.
Even the most well-traveled person would never have seen efficiency like this.
Using manpower alone to send Kongming lanterns soaring into the sky, building a dam within days. Then damming the river — after the dam had taken shape, the landscape of Small Azure River had transformed dramatically in a short span of time. Watching human effort contend against the sheer power of nature was, to everyone who saw it, deeply shocking. With all this to point to, people had already begun saying that Master Ning’s teachings bore a striking resemblance to the ancient philosophy of the Mohists. With the Yongle Youth Corps and the Righteous Spirit Society already existing, it was hardly surprising that small groups of young officers within Small Azure River’s army — like the recently formed “Huayan Society” — kept springing up, and now a “Mo Society” as well.
Walking out of the settlement area and continuing along the road to the other side of the valley, the scene along the way remained one of figures bustling about; looking back, that muddy stretch of streets and markets seemed, too, to brim with vibrant life.
At this point, Small Azure River naturally faced enormous problems as well. Every day, in the small plaza at the center of the settlement, someone would bring news from the outside world — the crisis unfolding in the Central Plains, the situation of the Western Xia’s hundred-thousand-strong army advancing. Someone would also announce, in that same plaza, the progress of Small Azure River’s various projects — but anyone paying close attention could see that Small Azure River faced threats of total annihilation from every direction.
The threat from the Western Xia was one of them; the moment they secured their footing in the northwest, the first problem Small Azure River would face was being unable to expand in any direction. And that wasn’t even counting the question of what Small Azure River would do if the Western Xia launched a direct attack.
The food problem loomed even larger. The land-clearing work in the valley was already being pushed at maximum speed for the ten thousand people in the valley, but tools remained scarce and time was pressingly short. This spring, the farmland added along the river valley amounted to roughly a thousand mu, now planted with wheat — stretching endlessly as far as the eye could see. But in practical terms, this land was inherently poor, only recently broken; a thousand mu of well-tended land might feed a thousand people, but if those thousand were soldiers, even that would leave them undernourished.
Small Azure River currently depended on support from Green Wood Stockade, but Green Wood Stockade itself didn’t have enough farmland either — it, too, relied on outside support. And once the Jurchens’ and Western Xia’s power stabilized, even setting aside the question of being attacked outright, what this place would face was true, total annihilation.
And so, even though Small Azure River appeared full of vitality at this moment, many understood its problems clearly — the countdown never once stopped, no matter the hour. Amid the crumbling state of the world under the Jurchens, the Western Xia, and the general collapse of order everywhere, Small Azure River had to send out tendrils and put down roots — this wasn’t rowing against the current, but rowing right at the edge of a waterfall; the slightest hesitation would mean utter, irrecoverable ruin.
A great shout of “Ah—!” rang out from up ahead — the sound of soldiers training by the riverbed further along the road. Even with much of their ordinary physical training replaced by labor, every unit still held combat drills once every three days. Zhuo Xiaofeng watched the troops below drilling their spear formations, then turned the bend ahead, further beyond which lay Small Azure River’s military-political council hall, situated halfway up the mountainside. From a distance, it looked like nothing more than two simple rows of wooden buildings, yet even so, it carried a quiet, stern air of authority.
…
As spring turned to summer, in the fourth month of the second year of the Wu Dynasty’s Jingping reign, the invading Jurchens — having wrung Bianliang dry of everything worth plundering, installed Zhang Bangchang as emperor, and established the Great Chu regime — finally began marching north the more than one hundred thousand people they had taken, including the Wu Dynasty’s Emperor Jingping, the Empress Dowager, the Empress, imperial ladies, nobles and commoners, and craftsmen.
In the northwest, after reclaiming Qingjian, Yanzhou, and several other cities, the Western Xia emperor Li Qianshun began expanding further outward, pressing troops toward Qingzhou and Weizhou, reclaiming two hundred li of Hengshan. By this point, the region of the Wu Dynasty north of the Yellow River had fallen into a brief state of being essentially “ownerless” — the Jurchens, its de facto rulers, hadn’t yet managed to fully digest and administer this territory. The newly established Great Chu regime lacked any real legitimacy; Emperor Zhang Bangchang, the moment the Jurchen troops withdrew, immediately shed his yellow robe, dropped the imperial title, and refused to conduct business in the main imperial hall, behaving with careful restraint at every turn. He had no interest in managing affairs to the north, which left the local government offices north of the Yellow River in a state where anything went.
Patriotic sentiment still loyal to the Wu Dynasty remained the majority in most regions; mountain bandits and righteous militias everywhere continued to fly the banner of defending the Wu Dynasty. But among them, various factions had already begun swiftly maneuvering to secure their own futures. Beyond the deeply rooted established clans and armies, Tian Hu’s forces had also risen sharply during this period. At the same time, the various Tibetan tribal chieftains, with the Wu Dynasty’s influence now fading, had also begun stirring restlessly toward this land to the east.
At this moment, the rebel army that had only just begun to take root at Small Azure River found itself in a strange, precarious position. Looking at it in retrospect, this army, kept running through Ning Yi’s formidable capacity for organization, was in truth walking along the edge of a blade. To put it starkly, this army — having risen in rebellion after murdering the emperor — had no path forward and no way to retreat; that it could still hold together came down, broadly speaking, to three reasons.
The first was the obvious external pressure and the imminent collapse and decay of the Central Plains — helping the people of Small Azure River’s valley recognize this reality was also directly tied to the propaganda machinery Ning Yi’s people maintained internally.
The second was the result of the powerful planning and personnel management ability that had guided them all along the way — the astonishing efficiency of work happening in the valley, in a sense, fed back into the workers themselves, so that the higher the efficiency grew, the greater the sense of astonishment and accomplishment people felt in their hearts. The completion of the Small Azure River dam in particular had given people a sense of satisfaction hard to put into words, which further drove up their efficiency in everything else they did.
The third was the promotion of Ning Yi’s and his associates’ achievements and the gradually forming personal cult surrounding him. The difficulties Small Azure River faced were certainly known to everyone, but even earlier, back when Ning Yi had still been a mere adviser to the Right Chancellor’s household, he had already deftly taken on the entire grain-merchant establishment of the realm using minimal leverage. This history was something the people who’d followed from Bamboo Notes understood well. And now, with Ning Yi sending out large numbers of people to make contact with various merchants, constantly pulling strings behind the scenes, in everyone’s mind this was naturally seen as further evidence of his attempt to solve the food problem through commercial means. In this time of realm-wide chaos, accomplishing such a thing was genuinely difficult, but the Inner Demon was famed for his flawless schemes, his mastery over human hearts — even back in the Right Chancellor’s household, he’d carried the nickname “God of Wealth.” At least on the matter of commerce, most people held an almost blind confidence in him.
These interlocking factors kept Small Azure River running, each link connected to the next — any single link coming loose might well bring the whole system crashing down, yet through this whole period, the entire situation continued operating in this strange, precarious fashion. At the same time, on Ning Yi’s personal front, in early April, Yun Zhu, after ten months of pregnancy, gave birth — Ning Yi’s third child, and his first daughter. But due to a difficult labor, both mother and child fell into a state of severe weakness after the birth; the small infant ate very little day to day, often crying through the night without sleeping, so much so that many began to worry the child’s fate was troubled and she might not survive to grow up.
Meanwhile, the situation beyond the valley continued to deteriorate. With Zhuo Xiaofeng and the others’ return, the intelligence they brought back indicated that Tiger King Tian Hu, nearly a thousand li away, was now actively forming alliances, rallying a number of formerly prominent Wu Dynasty clans, and had already extended his reach into the northwest region. He, too, was attempting to maintain trade routes, even trying to establish connections through Western Xia and Tibetan territory — clearly, all of this was preparation for facing the Jurchens down the line. And judging by their methods, and the conflicts beginning to arise between the two sides, Ning Yi could almost picture the shadow of a certain woman behind Tian Hu’s operations.
Even under ideal conditions — even if the Western Xia hadn’t yet extended their reach into the northwest — the Wurui Camp would already face considerable difficulty trying to open up trade routes through this region; with countless factions now scrambling for advantage, the task had become nearly impossible. As for the Western Xia, by April, Li Qianshun had already heard the name of this regicide army, the Wurui Camp, and had dispatched an envoy demanding Small Azure River’s submission — the envoy was now making his way through the mountains toward Small Azure River, prepared to inform them of their future: submit, or be destroyed.
The Western Xia’s hundred-thousand-strong army had come to pacify the northwest, and now that Small Azure River had entered their field of view, if they refused to submit, a clash would inevitably follow.
Our story begins again here, stepping into this stretch of summer days. It would be a quiet, oppressive summer — one that, without leaning on each other for support, would be hard to get through at all…