The autumn wind turned bitter and grim, war drums thundering like rain, and amid the raging inferno, the night air seemed, for a brief moment, almost to solidify. The thunder of Jurchen hooves shook the earth, rolling forward like an angry tide, crushing everything in its path. The air itself seemed to bite at the skin, and even one’s vision seemed to warp faintly at the edges.

In the moment before contact, there came a brief, silent vacuum, as though time itself had paused.

In the Black Banner Army’s rear formation, Bao Ashi braced his spear shaft, mouth open wide, unconsciously letting out a breath. His scalp prickled, his eyelids twitching uncontrollably, his ears deaf to everything around him. Ahead, the Jurchen beasts were coming.

This was not the first time he had seen the Jurchens. Before joining the Black Banner Army, he hadn’t been a native of the northwest at all. Bao Ashi had once been a man of Taiyuan; when Qin Shaohe held Taiyuan, Bao Ashi’s whole family had lived there. He had once climbed the city walls to fight; when Taiyuan finally fell, he fled with his family—his wife and children survived by sheer luck, but his elderly mother died amid the chaos of war along the road. He had once witnessed the Jurchens sacking a city, and because of that, he understood all too well just how fierce and merciless they truly were.

The Jurchens fought primarily as cavalry, typically withdrawing once their harassment failed to achieve its purpose. But once the Jurchen cavalry truly committed to a charge, it became a fight to the death—when the moment demanded it, they did not fear dying. Bao Ashi, now a soldier himself, understood all too well just how terrifying a force like this truly was.

Two or three iron-barrel cannon shells flew from the rear, landing among the charging cavalry, bursts of explosion rising briefly—but the momentum of seven thousand cavalry was simply too vast; it was like a few pebbles kicking up droplets in a great crashing wave—the whole, overwhelming mass remained unchanged.

In Bao Ashi’s heart, fear churned. Facing this imminent impact, he was afraid of dying—yet the men around him, one after another, did not move. Don’t retreat, he told himself unconsciously.

The hoofbeats drew closer and closer, the sound returning to him. Don’t retreat, don’t retreat, he kept telling himself. Then, the trembling around him gradually turned into a roar—one voice, then a chorus of voices, the formation of two thousand men transforming into a single vast wall of bristling steel. Bao Ashi felt his eyes go bloodshot, and he opened his mouth and screamed.

“AAAAAAAAAH—”

A hysterical howl, cutting through everything.

Behind the great shield, Nian Yongchang was screaming too.

He was an old veteran of the Wurui Battalion, having followed Qin Shaoqian in blocking the Jurchen advance south once before, tasting defeat, fighting the Grievance Army, fleeing for his life more than once. He was a man who sold his life for his wages, without family, without much of his own opinion on things. He had once drifted through life in a daze, and once the Jurchens came sweeping through, the people around him had begun dying in great numbers, all at once.

He had witnessed death in every form—comrades falling beside him, slaughtered and hunted by the Jurchens, and he had seen the deaths of countless civilians too, some of which had genuinely grieved him, though there had been nothing to be done. It wasn’t until after the defeat of Western Xia that Mr. Ning had organized several matchmaking gatherings in places like Yan Prefecture, and through the matchmaking of Mr. Ning and his people, a poor, hard-up family had taken a liking to his strength and honest nature, and actually married their daughter to him. On his wedding day, he had been utterly dazed, not knowing what to do with his hands and feet.

As a man who had sold his life for wages, it wasn’t as though he’d never been with a woman before—there had always been plenty of rough brothels near the army camps, and for men living hand to mouth, once the wages came in, if it wasn’t spent on food and drink, it was usually spent on women. Nian Yongchang hadn’t gone often, but he was no innocent either. Still, he had never once imagined that one day he might actually have a family of his own.

The year they married, he was thirty, and the woman eighteen. Her family, though poor, was honest and upright. She wasn’t especially beautiful, but she was sturdy and hardworking, capable not only of housework but of every task in the fields as well. Most importantly of all, the woman depended on him.

What Nian Yongchang loved most was her smile.

Before setting out this time, the woman was already pregnant. Before he left for the front, she had wept, and he had sat in the room with nothing he could do—there was nothing more to say. He had once thought of telling his wife about what he’d witnessed as a soldier, the deaths he had seen—the women disemboweled during the Jurchen slaughters, the infants left to starve to death after their mothers had died. He had felt genuine sorrow over these things once, but the sorrow he felt now, remembering them in this moment, was entirely different.

In the end, he never told her.

He was an old veteran, having witnessed too much death, too many battles, and he had never found this moment of life-and-death struggle strange or unfamiliar. His screaming now was only to keep his blood up in this most dangerous of moments—and in this instant alone, what rose in his mind was his wife’s smiling face.

He wanted to live.

He wanted to go home.

The iron cavalry surged forward like a tide—

…

To the south, the battlefield outside Yan Prefecture.

Luo Ye struck down one final resisting enemy with a forceful blow, blood and smoke thick all around him. He glanced at the Zhong family army’s forces ahead and the great masses of surrendering troops, then turned his gaze northward.

Attacking Yan Zhenguo’s forces had been the easier task on his side. Out there, in the distance, the clash with the Jurchens was about to begin…

…

The raging tide was crashing and spreading.

Boom—

The sound of high-speed cavalry slamming into shields and spear-forest, heard up close, was terrifying and strange, like some vast hill collapsing, crashing down again and again onto human bodies. Individual screams cut off abruptly amid the roiling wave of sound, replaced by an astonishing crushing momentum—flesh and blood turned to pulp in places, warhorses’ bones shattering on impact, human bodies flung into the air, shields warping and splintering, iron rods braced against the ground plowing up stone and earth as they began to slide.

The collision between two thousand men and seven thousand cavalry was, in that instant, a scene of astonishing, terrible violence—the horses in the front rank were literally killed on impact, while those behind kept surging forward, and the screaming finally erupted across the whole line. In places, gaps were forced open. Amid such a crushing onslaught, the new recruit Jiang Huo bore the brunt of it directly—amid the hysterical screaming, an overwhelming, world-shattering pressure slammed into him from the front, his body struck by the shattered remains of a shield and sent flying backward involuntarily, and then the crushing weight of a warhorse’s body pinned him down. With a heavy thud, he was pressed beneath the horse, and in that moment, he could no longer think, could no longer move, the immense force continuing to grind down from above; at the very bottom of that crushing weight, his body twisted, limbs shattering, organs ruptured. What flashed through his mind, in that final instant, was his mother’s face, back at Xiaocang River.

The bodies of horses and men piled up in heaps at several breach points, thick blood spraying everywhere, wounded horses shrieking and kicking wildly. Some Jurchen riders, thrown from the pile, scrambled up trying to hack their way free, only to be run through by a forest of spears moments later, turned into human pincushions. The Jurchens kept surging forward, and behind them, the Black Banner Army soldiers pressed forward with all their strength, pushing back!

Life, sometimes long, sometimes brief. Further north on the slope, Wanyan Loushi led two thousand cavalry, charging straight into the Black Banner Army’s front formation. Countless lives that should have stretched on for years reached their end in this single, fleeting instant.

Countless threads were severed.

Wanyan Loushi charged at the very front, breaking through a gap in the Black Banner Army’s formation alongside his personal guard, cutting down men with fierce abandon. He was not only a brilliant tactician but one of the most fearsomely brave commanders in the entire Jurchen army—in earlier years, when Jurchen forces had been few, he had often charged at the very front lines himself. Two years earlier, when he led the assault on Puzhou, and the Wu Dynasty defenders held the city firm, he had scaled the walls using a shielded siege ladder, fighting savagely atop the ramparts alongside just three personal guards, ultimately gaining a foothold on the wall and breaking the city.

His personal leadership at the front line spoke to how seriously he took this battle.

The violent collision continued unabated. In places the line had been broken through, but the press of Black Banner soldiers behind held firm like solid rock. Spearmen and hammer-wielders pushed forward, men screaming as they fought and killed. Amid the crowd, Chen Libo staggered to his feet, dazed, blood in his mouth and nose, his left hand reaching for the hilt of his blade in his right—only to find he had no strength left in it. He turned his head and saw a large swelling on his forearm—his bone was broken. He shook his head; the men around him were still fighting, so he drew a breath and raised his blade regardless.

“Shields to the front! Rally to me—”

His men closed in, forming a new line. On the battlefield, the Jurchens continued their assault; the Black Banner formations, small, held like scattered rocky outcroppings, while the cavalry formation, vast, surged like an ocean tide—along the front line of collision, the flanks had already begun spreading outward, pushing toward the center; before long, they would engulf the entire battlefield.

They were waiting for this army to break.

This was a raw, unadorned clash of life against life—whoever gave ground first would receive nothing but death in full.

In countless battles past, few had ever managed to hold firm through such an equal, brutal collision—not the Liao, not the men of Wu. So-called elite troops might hold out a little longer, but this time, too, would likely prove no great exception.

The spreading cavalry had already surged toward the center formation at tremendous speed, the hillside trembling beneath them—they wanted that sky-lantern, they wanted everything before their eyes. Qin Shaoqian drew his long sword: “Follow me, charge—”

On the flank of the battlefield, Han Jing led his cavalry into the fray, two thousand horsemen crashing headlong into the tide of another cavalry force.

The slaughter spread across everything before them, but at least in this moment, the Black Banner Army, resisting amid this tide, remained utterly unmoved.

“Hold the line—”

“Come on, you Jurchen scum—”

“We won’t retreat! We won’t retreat—”

“AAAAAAAAAH—”

Cries of resolve, of fury, of grief, all burning together into one, war hammers crashing down again and again upon iron shields, exploding beneath the night sky.

On the flank of Yan Prefecture, Zhong Lie, who had just been gathering his forces, suddenly turned his head—signal flares had shot urgently into the sky from that direction, alarm bells suddenly ringing out.

“The Jurchens are attacking the city—”

Even as he threw everything into his fiercest assault against the Black Banner Army, this Jurchen war god, Wanyan Loushi, had, at the very same moment, moved his general against Yan Prefecture as well.

…

In the Xiaocang River valley, the starry sky hung clear as a great river above. Ning Yi sat on a tree stump in the courtyard, gazing at the sight beneath that starlit sky. Yun Zhu walked over and sat down beside him; she could tell there was unrest in his heart.

Yun Zhu took his hand.

“The war has begun,” Ning Yi said quietly.

“Mm.” Yun Zhu nodded gently.

…

At that very same moment, several miles from the Yan Prefecture battlefield, deep among the mountain ridges, another army was pressing forward at forced-march speed. This force numbered around five thousand, its black banners nearly blending into the darkness of the night. Its commander was a woman, clad in a black cloak, her face covered by a bronze mask carved with fangs—a fearsome sight to behold.

Led by Lu Hongti, the last remaining fighting force Qingmu Stronghold could muster was cutting across to strike at the Jurchen army’s rear. Along the way, they encountered countless routed troops fleeing from Yan Prefecture; one still-organized unit nearly ran headlong into them, then scattered and fled like a pack of wild dogs.

In the midst of that flight, Yan Zhenguo tumbled from his horse; before his guards could reach him to help him up, he had already scrambled to his feet on his own, stumbling backward while looking back toward the direction that army had vanished into: “The Black Banner Army—it’s the Black Banner Army again…”

An advisor hurried up beside him. “They’re heading toward Yan Prefecture as well. If they run into Wanyan Loushi, they’ll have little chance of surviving…”

“…Right. Right.” Yan Zhenguo blinked, nodding almost unconsciously. That night, the Black Banner Army had gone utterly mad—for one fleeting moment, he had almost felt as though the Black Banner Army meant to swallow the entire Jurchen western army whole…