It was the end of August, the tail end of autumn, and the weather was gradually turning cold. The trees shedding their leaves had turned yellow in great swaths, and in the boundless, hazy autumn wind, the mountains and rivers had changed color.

The rivers and mountains of the Wu Dynasty were indeed changing color as well.

These were years that produced heroes and men of valor in great numbers. Along both banks of the Yellow River, countless court armies and Wu Dynasty righteous armies threw themselves one after another into the fight against the Jurchen invasion — Zong Ze, the Red Turban Army, the Eight Character Army, the Five Horse Mountain righteous army, the Great Brightness Sect… one person after another, one force after another, heroes and men of chivalry, all making their own resistance and sacrifice in this chaotic tide.

After Zongfu and Zongbi’s great army breached Yingtian, that ancient city was slaughtered until it resembled a ghost city. Not long after Zong Ze passed away, Bian Liang fell once again, and the righteous armies north and south of the Yellow River lost unified command, each choosing their own way to resist. Throughout the Central Plains, though resisters kept emerging, the territory under Jurchen rule kept expanding all the same.

More and more commoners chose to flee south. Along the main routes running from north to south, every major city gradually became overcrowded. This tide of refugees was not the same thing as the famines that occasionally broke out in winter — the sheer number of people, the scale of it, was beyond description. When one or two cities could not absorb them, people simply continued southward. The regions of Jiangnan, long at peace, finally began to clearly feel the shadow of war bearing down and the tremors of a world in upheaval.

Yangzhou, at this time, served as the temporary seat of Emperor Jianshuo, Zhou Yong. As the saying goes, one goes down to Yangzhou amid misty blossoms in the third month — and indeed, Yangzhou at this time was the most prosperous place in all of Jiangnan, where illustrious families gathered and wealthy merchants converged, and brothels and pleasure houses were everywhere. The only regret was that Yangzhou belonged to Jiangnan in culture but not in geography — it actually still lay on the north bank of the Yangtze.

When Zhou Yong left Yingtian, he originally intended to cross the river back to Jiangning. However, those around him strongly objected, saying that for the emperor to have left Yingtian was one thing, but if he crossed the Yangtze as well, morale would certainly collapse entirely. Though Zhou Yong scoffed at this, he ultimately could not overcome their objections and settled instead at Yangzhou, situated right on the north bank of the Yangtze.

This place, though not the familiar Jiangning he knew, was not unacceptable to Zhou Yong either. In Jiangning he had been an idle prince who did as he pleased; once he ascended the throne and went to Yingtian, the emperor’s seat had bored him to death — every day toying with new consorts in the rear palace, and still having to endure protests from the people of the city, to the point that he ordered the execution of Chen Dong and Ouyang Che for stirring up public sentiment. After coming to Yangzhou, no one dared say much of anything anymore, and he could indulge himself fully each day in this city’s flourishing pleasure quarters.

By the end of August, Zhou Yong, who had been raised to the throne, spent his days seeking pleasure in the temporary palace, even having minor officials outside the palace present commoner women as tribute, enjoying himself thoroughly. As for state affairs, he mostly handed them over to Huang Qianshan, Wang Boyan, Qin Hui, and others at court who had rendered service in supporting his enthronement, calling this “governing through non-action” in fine style. On this day, Jun Wu came storming into the palace, anxious and shouting, demanding to return to Jiangning, his eyes red as he chased off the group of women around Zhou Yong. Zhou Yong, rather helpless, dismissed everyone else and pulled his son aside to pour out his troubles.

“You want to go back to Jiangning — of course I know that, Father wants nothing more than to go back to Jiangning himself. But back then we crossed the river, and now to go back is no easy matter. You’re the Crown Prince now, and I’m the Emperor. Come, help your father think of a way to persuade those ministers…”

“Father, you just want to go back to avoid the war!” Jun Wu’s eyes were red, glaring at his father before him in his yellow robe. “I want to go back to continue my research into natural science! Yingtian wasn’t held, and all my things are in Jiangning! I was about to finish my hot air balloon! The realm is in peril now, I don’t have time to wait! And you, Father — you, you… you only know how to drink and make merry every day. Do you even know what things have become like out there?”

“How could I not know? I want to personally lead the army into battle — Jun Wu, what do you think of that?” Zhou Yong’s gaze turned serious; his plump body, clad in a dragon robe, narrowed his eyes and for a moment seemed to carry a hint of majesty — but the next instant, that majesty collapsed. “But the truth is, we can’t win! Jun Wu, you say your father only knows how to avoid battle — I’m not avoiding it, if I took men out there I’d be captured on the spot! You know what those greasy soldiers are like, what those ministers are like — do you think your father doesn’t know? But compared to them, does your father understand warfare? Does he understand playing their twisted games?”

“…”

“Your father — back in Jiangning I once smashed a man’s skull with a hammer, smashed it until it was a horrifying sight, and I never wanted to smash a second one. I don’t understand court affairs, I don’t get involved, precisely so that one day, if things fall into chaos, I can still pick up that hammer and smash their heads open! Jun Wu, you’ve been clever since you were small, you can outplay them, so you go and do it — your father will back you up, your imperial sister will help you too. You… you understand how to do it, don’t you?”

Jun Wu, eyes red, said nothing. Zhou Yong patted his shoulder and pulled him to sit by the lake at the side of the garden. The emperor, plump as he was, sitting down looked like a bear, his hands hanging limp.

“Your father, since childhood, was just meant to be an idle prince. The tutors at school taught me, the family expected of me, nothing more than a prince who knew how to eat, drink, and be merry. Then suddenly one day, they said I should be emperor — can one do that well just like that? I… I’m unwilling to get involved in things, so I let them do it, let you, Jun Wu, do it. What other way is there?”

He spread his hands. “What the realm has come to, I know. The Jurchens are so formidable, no one can stop them — if they can’t be stopped, the Wu Dynasty is finished. Jun Wu, with them attacking like this, your father… is also very afraid. If you want your father to go to the front, your father doesn’t understand how to lead troops — if the two armies clash and all these ministers flee, your father won’t even know when to run. Your father thinks, since we can’t hold them back anyway, I can only keep retreating south, and when they chase, I’ll go further south still. Our Wu Dynasty is weak now, but after two hundred years of foundation, who knows — maybe a hero really will emerge someday… there ought to be one.”

Jun Wu lowered his head. “Outside, it’s already overcrowded with refugees. Every day I hand out relief grain, and seeing them makes my heart ache. The Jurchens have already taken the whole Yellow River line. If we can’t defeat them, sooner or later they’ll come here too.”

“Mm.” Zhou Yong nodded.

“I feel anxious in my heart. Now I understand what kind of feeling Grandfather Qin and the others must have had back at Bian Liang…”

“Mm…” Zhou Yong nodded again. “That teacher of yours — for the sake of this very thing, he even killed Zhou Zhe…”

“He…”

“Ah, your father just thinks — your father may not make a good emperor either. Will there come a day when someone like that comes and kills your father too?” Zhou Yong patted his son’s shoulder again. “Jun Wu, if you ever meet someone like that, you should win him over and put him to use first. You’ve been clever since you were young, and so has your sister. I once thought, what use is it for you two to be clever, if in the end you’d just live out the fate of idle princes anyway — I even thought about deliberately keeping you a bit foolish, but later I thought better of it and just let the two of you, brother and sister, go your own way. All these years your father hasn’t managed you, but perhaps in the future you can be a good emperor. That’s what I thought too, when I took the throne.”

Father and son had never talked much over the years, and hearing Zhou Yong pour his heart out like this, Jun Wu’s anger drained away. After a moment, Zhou Yong asked, “How is Hanwei’s illness?”

Jun Wu shook his head. “Still no better.” His principal wife was named Li Hanwei, daughter of a prominent Jiangning family — beautiful, well-read and sensible. After their marriage the two had gotten along respectfully. But the journey with Jun Wu up to the capital, then the hurried return to Yangzhou, had left the woman fallen ill, and she still had not recovered. Much of Jun Wu’s distress these days stemmed from this as well.

“A woman is like clothing — you needn’t grieve so much over it.”

The emperor waved his hand and offered these words of comfort, which were nonetheless thoroughly callous.

After this exchange, Jun Wu found he had nothing more to say to his father. He left the palace, and on returning to his residence found a group of monks and shamans burning incense and chanting away in a frenzied racket. Thinking of his wife, thin as a skeleton, Jun Wu grew even more troubled, and ordered his carriage out again. Passing through the still-bustling, elegant streets of Yangzhou, with the autumn wind blowing and passersby hurrying along, he reached the city wall, where he began to see refugees.

Climbing the city tower, he found the ground outside packed densely with refugees. The setting sun made the city and its rivers and mountains look magnificent, yet Jun Wu’s heart only grew heavier.

In these recent days he had seen more and more. If, when his father first took the throne, he had still been full of ambition and spirit, many of those notions had now been shattered. Just as his father had said, he understood clearly what those ministers and armies were really like. And yet, even if he himself took charge, there was no guarantee he could do better than they had.

He was, after all, still a young man who had only just laid eyes on this vast world. If he were a bit more foolish, perhaps he could have charged ahead giving orders with youthful bravado; it was precisely because he understood enough to see clearly that he realized how tangled and complicated the web of relations truly was, once one actually took the reins. He could support generals like Yue Fei in training troops, but to go a step further would mean touching the entire vast system — and doing one thing right might well mean botching three or four others. Even as Crown Prince, he dared not act recklessly.

Years ago, Grandfather Qin and his teacher, back in Bian Liang, had perhaps faced exactly this kind of situation. This seemingly peaceful city was already teetering on the edge of collapse. Heaven was about to fall and earth to crumble; this land was like his wife lying in bed, skin and bones, powerless to hold back the collapse of the sky, watching calamity approach. Standing atop that city wall, he suddenly found tears falling.

Not long after, the Jurchens breached Xuzhou, the last line of defense on the way to Yangzhou, and came crushing forward toward Yangzhou.

At that time, they still did not know that, to the northwest, the confrontation between the Huaxia Army and the Jurchen Western Route Army was still raging fiercely.

Fan Hongji rode his horse along the rugged mountain road. Though travel-worn, the envoy’s official robes on his body were not yet too disheveled.

Since the war between the Huaxia Army and the Jurchens had begun, this was the last time he would represent the Jin state as an envoy to Little Cangriver.

Though the war had already started, humility from the strong was no disgrace. Of course, on the other hand, it also meant that the Huaxia Army’s actions had indeed proven astonishingly formidable.

Time rewound to the night of August 25th. The Huaxia Black Banner Army and the Jurchen elite cavalry personally led by Wanyan Loushi had clashed head-on. Under the frontal charge of tens of thousands of Jurchen cavalry, an equal number of Black Banner infantry were swallowed up — yet they were not broken outright. Large sections of the formation held firm even under the intense head-on collision; part of the defensive formation was forced open, but a moment later, the Black Banner soldiers, amid shouting and slaughter, began drawing back toward their comrades, reforming solid defensive formations by battalion and company.

When the cannon fire began to sound in succession, the defensive formation even began to push forward, actively cutting and squeezing the Jurchen cavalry’s advancing routes. And the Jurchens — or rather, Wanyan Loushi — showed their battlefield acumen at this moment: three cavalry detachments, hugging close to the Black Banner Army’s ranks and using them as cover, charged straight at the Black Banner’s central formation, which held the cannons. The central formation, under Qin Shaoqian’s command, formed up and put up a stubborn resistance; a weak point was once breached by the Jurchen cavalry but was ultimately patched up again.

Having failed to break through in one strike, the Jurchen cavalry quickly pulled back and disengaged from the battlefield. Under Wanyan Loushi’s command, the eastern side of the battlefield saw fighting escalate to an extreme pitch, like two enormous millstones grinding against each other. Yet before the artillery could be brought to bear here, Wanyan Loushi had already twisted the charging Jurchen cavalry back into a cohesive force, and while maintaining a formidable threat of arrow fire, disengaged from the battlefield, then circled around it raining down arrows, forcing Han Jing back before charging toward the northern side of Yanzhou.

This was merely a single round of slaughter, yet the danger and ferocity of the clash, the intensity of the fighting, was staggering enough to leave people gasping. In this brief span of time, the Black Banner Army displayed formation coordination of the very highest caliber, while the Jurchen side displayed Wanyan Loushi’s extraordinarily sharp battlefield sense and his mastery of cavalry — just as things threatened to bog down, he swiftly gathered his forces, suppressing the Black Banner Army on one side while ordering the whole army to withdraw from the sticking zone amid the charge. The Black Banner Army’s artillery formation, in dealing with these seemingly loose but single-minded cavalry, could not even inflict large-scale casualties — at least, far fewer than those from the direct clashes.

What truly affected the Jurchen cavalry was, first of all, naturally the frontal clashes, and secondly the crossbows mass-equipped through assembly-line support within the army; once the Black Banner Army held its formation and opened fire on the cavalry with crossbows at close range, the results were certainly enough to make Wanyan Loushi wince.

And after this brief, intense collision, the Jurchen cavalry, which had originally postured as though they would annihilate the Black Banner Army in a single battle, showed not the slightest inclination to linger, charging straight for Yanzhou city instead. At this time, northwest of Yanzhou, the infantry and baggage troops that Wanyan Loushi had arranged to withdraw earlier had already begun exploiting the chaos to assault the city.

Not long after, the army led by Hongti also arrived, throwing five thousand men into the battlefield to cut off the retreat of the Jurchen infantry. When Wanyan Loushi’s cavalry arrived, they clashed with Hongti’s army to cover the infantry’s escape, while Han Jing’s cavalry pursued closely behind. Before long, the main Huaxia Army force caught up as well and joined with Hongti’s troops.

With the infantry now joined to them, the Jurchen elite cavalry could not withdraw quickly, while the Huaxia Army’s pursuit did not slacken even a step. That night, a chase and running battle lasting most of the night unfolded. Over more than thirty li of rugged terrain, both sides pushed through forced marches, chasing and fleeing. The Jurchen cavalry units kept peeling off, using their speed to harass the Huaxia Army, while the Huaxia Army’s formation efficiency was staggering — cavalry breaking out repeatedly, trying by any means to drag the Jurchen cavalry or infantry into a grinding melee.

Marching and fighting through such a night, both sides suffered mishaps. Wanyan Loushi’s command of troops was unpredictable, occasionally sending several cavalry units to tear at the Black Banner Army’s ranks from a distance, inflicting casualties bit by bit — but the Black Banner Army’s aggressive pressing, combined with its infantry-cavalry coordination, likewise left the Jurchen side scrambling at times, and several small-scale skirmishes each left the Jurchens with a dozen or even dozens of corpses behind.

After chasing each other for most of the night like this, both sides were utterly exhausted, and set up fortifications to rest at a place two or three li from Huangguo Ridge, northwest of Yanzhou. By the next morning, before they had even properly slept, the Black Banner Army had already pushed its artillery formation forward again; as the Jurchens formed up, the Black Banner Army’s ranks had once more advanced. Wanyan Loushi directed the main force to circle around, and then fought another engagement with a large cavalry force.

Over the following two days, the two sides continued to shift and grind against each other, clashes unceasing — one side possessing astonishing discipline and coordination, the other possessing a sharp mastery of the battlefield and command skill honed almost to perfection. The two forces collided madly across this land, like a great hammer against an iron anvil, each ferociously determined to swallow the other whole.

Facing what was practically the number one army under heaven, led by the number one general under heaven, the Black Banner Army’s response was fierce beyond anything anyone had expected.

Recalling his several previous missions to Little Cangriver, Fan Hongji had never once imagined this would happen — after all, this was Wanyan Loushi.

Just as he was about to reach Little Cangriver, rain began to fall, pattering down from the sky…