Since ancient times, there has been little real difference in the physical strength or raw quality of human bodies. What truly distinguishes one person from another is, first, spirit, and second… one’s people.
The light of heaven blazed bright, the plain stretched out without end, warhorses galloped on.
What is meant by “one’s people” is this: a people bound together by shared rules, fusing the strength of millions into a single force. It is this fusion that gives humankind, as a species, its true and formidable power—an individual’s strength, taken alone, is negligible and hard to speak of; only the might of a people, of a nation, can mark the true difference in strength between oneself and another. When the collective strength of millions bound together is great, it shows that they have adapted well to the rules of the world and of nature—they are a superior people. When the collective strength of millions bound together is weak, it shows that these millions are an inferior people, destined to be culled by the world and by nature.
On the thirtieth of the sixth month, in the second year of Jingping, this afternoon on the Dongzhi Plateau, Chen Dongye, galloping on horseback, found himself recalling something Ning Yi had once said back at the Little Cang River.
The greater part of a person’s strength does not reside in the individual body.
Heavy armor bound his body like a fortress; the warhorse’s charge, weighed down by that armor, moved slower than usual. Ahead lay the extended battle line of the Western Xia army, cavalry obstacles already thrown out, arrows rising into the sky. Ahead of the heavy cavalry, no more than three hundred-odd blade-and-shield men were already charging straight into the rain of arrows, shields raised, working to clear a path through the obstacles. Fifteen hundred heavy cavalry, spread out across the field, launched their charge against the Western Xia formation.
For Chen Dongye and the others, it was only in this very moment that they truly came to understand the meaning of those words: a person’s strength does not reside in the individual body.
Years ago, he had joined the army for pay and rations, drifting aimlessly through the ranks of the Wu Dynasty military, moving from one posting to another. The world was vast, but the life within it had always felt small; everyone lived this way, and yet perhaps no one was entirely without ambition. Within the army, martial prowess was prized above all else, and there were plenty of men skilled in combat, brimming with confidence, ready to challenge anyone who crossed them. A single wrong word could bring blades out in an instant, and the officers, watching their soldiers’ fiery tempers, encouraged such rivalries, believing this was how a formidable fighting force was forged.
Everyone padded the payroll with phantom soldiers, from top to bottom, everyone getting their share. Officers handed out the surplus pay each month, and the bonds of brotherhood ran deep and visible among the men. None of this seemed particularly wrong at the time—everywhere, everyone, lived this way; it was simply what people did, and no one was truly all that much more capable than anyone else.
Then the Jurchen came, and tens of thousands were driven to rout by a mere few tens of thousands, blood flowing like rivers beneath their blades. Even the most formidable fighters in the army found their skills utterly useless against them. Later still, at Xia Village, and through the rebellion that followed, many people still remained puzzled as to where the real difference lay. Chen Dongye, a member of the Huayan Society, had occasionally heard Ning Yi hold forth on such matters back at the Little Cang River, and while he’d taken much of it to heart, he had never truly felt it in any deep sense.
Not until this campaign—taking Yanzhou against all reasonable expectation, then swallowing the Iron Kite whole in a single battle, and now, in this very moment, as a force of mere thousands launched its true assault against a hundred-thousand-strong host—did he, mounted on his warhorse, finally feel it with absolute, undeniable clarity: the gap between one person and another can be immense.
That difference in strength wasn’t a matter of one or two times over. Between one person and another, the gap could truly widen to ten times, even a hundred times over.
The fighting ahead had already begun, waves of blood rising and falling; over a thousand heavy cavalry, grouped in units of ten, launched their charge along a battle line stretching several hundred zhang, falling like rain into the sprawling enemy formation of twelve thousand men.
When the iron cavalry crashed headlong into the resisting ranks, the sound that rose was dull, muffled, and terrible to hear. The charging warhorses, moving at high speed, lost their balance in the impact; Chen Dongye, jolted by the massive shock, was thrown forward. A forest of spears struck against his iron armor; gritting his teeth, eyes still open, he thrust his own spear forward into a Western Xia soldier, the spearhead tearing through soft armor and cloth, driving into flesh, then pulling free, wrenching bone and body apart with a wet, tearing sound, blood spraying into the air. In that instant, the world dissolved into chaos, an endless blur of collision and crimson filling his vision, his own body crashing down amid the impact with a heavy thud.
Cavalry surged past him on either side; before long, a man clad in steel armor climbed up from among the flesh and corpses and drew his long blade. Elsewhere across this battlefield, the iron cavalry continued falling like rain into the enemy ranks.
At the second quarter of the hour of Shen, on the southern flank of the Dongzhi Plateau battlefield, Qin Shaoqian led over three thousand men in an assault against the twelve-thousand-strong Western Xia force commanded by the general Mozang Yiqing. As a battle-hardened veteran of Western Xia, Mozang Yiqing’s forces put up a stubborn resistance from the very first moment of contact.
At the same time, another Black Banner detachment, having crossed onto the Dongzhi Plateau from the north, was now cutting southwest along the ancient plain, seeming to trace a wide arc that would eventually bring it together with the cavalry force to the south. By this moment, the entire battlefield had erupted into large-scale motion.
…
The warning fireworks flared with ever-increasing frequency; messenger scouts whipped their mounts furiously, racing across the open plain. Late summer edging into early autumn, with a light breeze stirring, the sky held an ancient, clear hue; time still hovered within the bounds of “afternoon,” yet across the Dongzhi Plateau, wave after wave of tense, grim intensity had already settled over everything.
The twenty-five-thousand-strong force forming Western Xia king Li Qianshun’s own central formation had already come to a halt on the plateau, and the reports arriving in rapid succession were washing over the minds of Li Qianshun, Asha Ganbu, and the rest—shaking, even, their most fundamental assumptions about the world.
From the hour of Shen onward, the Black Banner Army’s offensive moves signaled that this battle had now erupted in full. Before this, as the hundred-thousand-strong army advanced, the Western Xia high command had held to two possible assessments regarding this enemy force encamped at the edge of the Dongzhi Plateau: first, that this army might flee; second, that its true fighting strength would not, in fact, prove to be absurdly high.
And now, as the battle reports kept pouring in one after another, both of these expectations were being swiftly stripped away and washed clean!
Following the engagement and rout of Weiming Shu’s force at Yellow Stone Gully in the north, the primarily infantry Black Banner detachment that had climbed onto the plain was still pressing diagonally forward. Duluo Wei, leading five thousand bubo, pursued close behind, trying to cut off their line of retreat, while Yeli Feng’s force of over ten thousand had also begun pushing west. At this moment, a total of six forces now moved in a ring around the twenty-five-thousand-strong Western Xia main formation: the five infantry columns under Yeli Feng, Mozang Yiqing, Miewo Mai, Li Liangfu, and Weiming Rongke, together with the four-thousand-strong light cavalry under Yucang Ma—these more than sixty thousand men formed a protective shield around Li Qianshun. Around the hour of Shen, Mozang Yiqing’s main force, together with the light cavalry roaming the southern route, had already spotted the approach of the three thousand-odd Black Banner infantry and cavalry. When the four-thousand-strong light cavalry force decided to circle around and harass them, the enemy struck back with those devastatingly powerful explosive weapons, while this force of just over three thousand simultaneously launched its own assault against Mozang Yiqing’s force of over ten thousand men.
The heavy cavalry tore through the open plain!
At the hour of You, on the southwestern battlefield of the Western Xia main formation, a force of ten thousand men collapsed and fled in rout. The Black Banner Army’s heavy cavalry and infantry shattered this ten-thousand-strong force; the general Mozang Yiqing, leading his personal guard in a desperate stand, was cut down beneath the Black Banner Army’s blades. Yucang Ma’s four thousand light cavalry, dodging the enemy’s heavy cavalry, covered the retreat of the routed mass, fighting and falling back as they went.
This was not a triumph of strategy or clever scheming. Over nearly two years’ time—through the collapse at Bian Liang, the forging of their edge at Xia Village, the tempering at the Little Cang River, and now the final polish of this campaign—the Black Banner Army that had emerged from the Little Cang River was no longer a force driven only by raw blood and instinct, capable of unleashing astonishing power only under crushing pressure. The true edge of the blade now rested firmly in this army’s grip, and in this moment, it had become the ferocious, unstoppable force now surging across the battlefield.
“They chose to attack now precisely because they feared us setting up camp!” Facing the outright collapse of two of his forces, Asha Ganbu within the central formation had already grasped the reasoning. “Seven thousand-odd men, attacking in two columns—even with the gods themselves protecting them, they’ll still have to break through several engagements in succession. Heavy cavalry charges can only be launched once or twice a day at most, and many of their mounts aren’t even proper Iron Kite warhorses. However this plays out, they’ve already fallen into our encirclement—prolonged fighting is bound to exhaust them. But to be safe, I recommend we immediately fortify our position—set up cavalry obstacles, dig trenches, ready the catapult and crossbow troops, and let them come to us while we wait in comfort!”
By now the sun had begun sinking toward the west. Li Qianshun’s face had darkened, and though he nodded at Asha Ganbu’s suggestion, deep down he had to admit that the outright collapse of this force of over ten thousand men had genuinely rattled him—yet aloud, he still said, “Prolonged fighting exhausts them. Seven thousand men—I’d like to see for myself whether they can even make it all the way to stand before me!”
On the southwestern battlefield of the Western Xia main formation, a fierce and brutal clash had already come to its end. The head of the Western Xia general Mozang Yiqing now hung impaled on a banner pole, corpses strewn across the entire plain around it. In the distance, the fleeing shapes of routed Western Xia soldiers could still be seen, along with the scattered traces of several thousand light cavalry still roaming the field—during the earlier fighting, the chaos of the ten-thousand-strong rout had scattered these light cavalry too widely to harass the Black Banner Army with any precision. After Mozang Yiqing’s sudden death and the collapse of the main force, they had tried circling around to loose arrows from a distance, but had been caught by several shots from the cannon and the “conscience-less gun,” the iron caltrops packed within the shells and the tremendous accompanying blasts wounding and terrifying several dozen riders; when the Black Banner Army’s own light cavalry then charged forward, the enemy was finally driven off and scattered.
“We don’t have much time left—we can’t let ourselves get tangled up with them. Reform ranks immediately!” Looking up at the darkening sky, Qin Shaoqian, mounted on his heavy warhorse, gave the order to those around him. Assembly horns sounded across the plain, and small squads made their way through the corpses and blood scattered on the ground, converging back toward the black banner. Some men swung their blades and spears in the air as they went; after such a brutal engagement, exhaustion was surely setting in for everyone, but no one let it show.
A little farther south, six horses pulled a hot-air balloon forward across the plain. Chen Xing, of the “Ink Society,” stood in the balloon’s basket, peering off into the distance through a telescope. Before long, he untied the ropes securing the balloon and increased the flame, letting it rise into the sky.
He turned and waved back at the men below.
The hot-air balloon had no way to steer; how long it could stay aloft was also uncertain, and there was no guarantee it would last until the battle’s end. Earlier launches and landings of the balloon had required a cavalry escort riding along beneath it to keep pace—but now, with Western Xia troops occupying more than ten li in every direction, this launch and eventual descent would likely have to be left entirely to fate.
At the hour of You, the first hot-air balloon rose into the sky; a second one, farther south, was also slowly lifting off the ground.
To the north, Duluo Wei’s bubo force and Yeli Feng’s main column had already converged along the way; before long, they had also linked up with Li Liangfu’s main formation, moving in from the west, merging nearly thirty thousand men into three columns that now stretched across the land like one vast, unbroken barrier. Meanwhile, two or three li away, the main force of the Black Banner Army’s Second and Third Regiments, under Pang Liu’an and Li Yi, was moving on a parallel course, cutting diagonally toward the southwest—by now, both sides had already spotted each other.
“They’ve linked their three forces together!”
Nearby, a handful of scout cavalry riding close by kept reporting on how the situation was developing. Luo Ye, leading his company at the front of the formation, ground his teeth. “Fine—all the better. One charge, and we crush the lot of them!” He pointed ahead, sketching out a gesture with his hand as he spoke to the men behind him. “See that banner in the middle? Head straight for it! Even with tens of thousands of men, how many of them can actually engage us all at once!? Crush them in one strike, scare them senseless—cut down that banner, and it won’t matter how many men they have left!”
“Too bad we still don’t know exactly where Li Qianshun’s own main formation is…” A scout riding nearby, someone Luo Ye knew well, spoke up—and just then, far off in the sky, a thread of black smoke traced a line upward: the lone hot-air balloon, rising into the air in the distance.
Following that thread of black smoke came columns of colored smoke as well, streaking off in different directions. Out on the plain, more than a few heads turned upward, catching sight of these lines against the sky. Within the Black Banner Army’s ranks, Pang Liu’an pointed toward that direction; Luo Ye raised his hand and, slowly, cut it twice through the air toward it.
Over there, the thirty-thousand-strong Western Xia army was already surging toward them.
To the south, warhorses towed the hot-air balloon slowly forward, following the direction marked out by those trailing lines in the sky, escorted on all sides by a cavalry guard. Before long, a second balloon rose into the sky as well, and just as the clouds on the horizon began to burn crimson with the fading light, a third balloon lifted off in turn…
Across the land, the surging tides of blood and fire had already begun clashing and roaring, burning now with an almost maddened fury.
A collision fierce and terrible enough to chill the blood was tearing this land apart—