Returning to his room at the inn, You Hongzhuo excitedly reported what he had learned to Master Zhao, who was sipping tea and reading. But it was clear that the two elders already knew all of this. Master Zhao merely listened with a smile, nodding slightly. You Hongzhuo could not help but ask, “Then… are the two of you also going to Zezhou for the sake of that righteous man, Wang Shitong?”
The man only smiled and shook his head. “Matters of the martial world’s righteous gatherings and such — my wife and I don’t get involved in those. Passing through Zezhou, we might as well take a look at the excitement, though. Since you’re so interested, you’re welcome to go have a look yourself along the way — only, the Great Brightness Sect’s branch hall is in Zezhou, and its master is that very Tan Zheng. If your fourth brother really did betray your sworn siblings, he might well show up there too, so you’ll need to be careful.”
“Mm.” You Hongzhuo calmed himself somewhat and nodded. After a moment, though, his thoughts churned again. “The Black Banner Army struck terror across the realm just a few years ago — they alone could stand against the Jin dogs without defeat. If they were to appear again in Zezhou, that truly would be a great event…”
“The three-year war at Little Cangriver drained the vitality of the Central Plains — how could the Huaxia Army have escaped unscathed? Two years ago the Demon of the Heart died in battle, and the Black Banner withdrew south; the remnants afterward put down roots somewhere along the border between Tibet, Sichuan, and Dali. If you’re interested, you could travel that way someday and take a look.” Master Zhao said this while turning a page in his book. “As for Wang Shitong — whether he’s truly a Black Banner remnant is hard to say. Even if he is, the chaos of the Central Plains is beyond mending; the Black Banner, having managed to preserve what little strength it has left, surely wouldn’t expose itself over a matter like this.”
“…Why not?” You Hongzhuo asked, hesitating.
“What good would exposure do them? The Wu Dynasty has retreated to Jiangnan; this so-called Great Qi in the Central Plains is nothing but an empty shell — the Jurchens will inevitably come south again sooner or later. Two years ago, the Black Banner was defeated, and its remnants have been hiding in a corner of the southwest; the Wu Dynasty, Tibet, and Dali have all been too wary to touch it for now, and no one knows how much strength it still has left. But… once it comes out, it will surely be a decisive strike aimed at the Jin state — the strength it has preserved in the Central Plains would only prove useful at that point. At this stage, forget about a few forces lying low — even if the Black Banner grew strong enough to take the Central Plains, it would only mean bearing the brunt of the coming great war first…”
Master Zhao paused at this point and shook his head. “These things aren’t certain, either — we’ll just have to see when the time comes… Go on now, practice your blade, and get some rest early.”
Only then did You Hongzhuo take his leave, returning to his own room, his gaze still somewhat distracted. The inn was fairly large, though already rather run-down; voices drifted from both upstairs and down, the air close and stifling. You Hongzhuo sat for a while, practiced a little in his room, but found his mind unable to settle for the rest of the evening.
In truth, what had struck him so suddenly was not really Master Zhao’s words about the Black Banner Army, but the simple statement, “the Jurchens will inevitably come south again sooner or later.”
There were many things he was still too young to have given much thought to before. After his family had been destroyed, he had killed that group of monks and stepped out into the wider world, still able to look upon this martial realm with fresh, curious eyes, imagining himself one day becoming a great and chivalrous hero, admired throughout the martial world. Later, hunted and starving, he naturally hadn’t dwelt on such thoughts either. But these past few days of travel, and today, hearing what Master Zhao had said, had suddenly left him with a strange, hollow feeling.
Once the Jurchens came south again in full force, a new campaign of conquest would naturally rise up in response.
—And all of this, everything before him now, would one day cease to exist.
He was a practitioner of martial arts, not one to shy away from fighting, killing, even death. In the past, seeing people dead by the roadside, withered fields, beggars, even facing near-starvation himself, he had felt little in the way of deep emotion over it. That was simply how the world was — nothing remarkable about it. And yet, thinking now that all these things before him would one day cease to exist too, he suddenly felt that things were, in truth, already quite tragic.
Turning these thoughts over, he found himself practicing his blade with ever greater intensity that night, thinking that if greater chaos were to come again in the future, it would simply mean more death, nothing more. By the second day, in the pale light before dawn, he rose early again and practiced his blade technique dozens of times over in the inn’s courtyard.
That day, after breakfast, the three of them set out once more on the road to Zezhou. The summer heat was fierce, and the long-neglected official road made for poor going; low grasses and stunted trees surrounded them, low ravines crisscrossing the land, and the occasional village they passed looked desolate and decayed — the ordinary atmosphere of an age of chaos. There were more travelers on the road than the day before, clearly heading to Zezhou as well, among them quite a few armed men of the martial world, and some with special yellow cloth sashes tied at their waists — the mark of the Great Brightness Sect’s lay disciples and protectors.
Around midday, they saw a procession of carriages and soldiers advancing grandly along the road.
The escort numbered some three to five hundred soldiers, guarding the carriages of several Jurchen dignitaries; wherever they passed, travelers were forced to kneel and bow their heads. You Hongzhuo and the other two rested on a hillside near the post road, watching this scene from a distance. As the procession passed, the curtain of the carriage at the center of the column was blown open by the wind, and a girl in fine, ornate clothing could be glimpsed peering out from inside — though a Jurchen, she looked, in fact, not particularly fierce or forbidding at all.
“If I were down there right now, I could probably strike suddenly and cut off her dog’s head with a single blow…”
With the impetuousness of youth, You Hongzhuo, seeing the way everyone along the procession’s path was forced to kneel, felt his indignation flare. Just as this thought crossed his mind, someone suddenly leapt up from the crowd, launching a sleeve-arrow toward the woman in the carriage. The man rose so abruptly that many had no time to react — but in the next instant, a mounted soldier beside the carriage threw himself bodily forward, shielding it with his own body against the sleeve-arrow. The soldier fell from his horse; those around him, realizing what had happened, rushed toward the assassin.
Having missed with his first sleeve-arrow, the assassin used the cover of the surrounding crowd to make his escape. The guarding soldiers charged forward, and in an instant chaos erupted all around — the kneeling commoners blocked the soldiers’ path, and were trampled and crushed in the ensuing bloodshed. The assassin bolted toward the hillside; behind him, a great many soldiers drew their bows and fired. Arrows flew in two successive volleys, striking down several bystanders in the process; the assassin himself took two arrows in the back and fell dead among the rocks and rubble on the slope.
This sudden assassination attempt shifted the mood along the post road entirely; the surrounding travelers could not help but tremble with fear. Soldiers ran about, cutting off the assassin’s head, while searching the surrounding men of the martial world for accomplices. The soldier who had thrown himself in front of the arrow to protect the Jurchens, however, had not died; once a quick check confirmed he would be fine, the soldiers around him broke into cheers.
This unit of soldiers, notably, were all Han Chinese.
That day’s journey held only this one small incident. The three of them were not caught up in it, and by around three in the afternoon, ahead along the winding official road, an earthen-yellow ancient city surrounded by rivers came into view — Zezhou had been reached.
Zezhou was a strategic crossroads in the Taihang and Heshuo region of the Central Plains, a formidable stronghold in the south of Jibei, surrounded by water on all sides, its walls sturdy and strong. Ever since Tian Hu had taken it, he had governed it with great care, and it now served as the frontier stronghold of the Tiger King’s domain. In recent days, with Wang Shitong having been escorted here, Tian Hu’s forces and the surrounding men of the martial world had all been converging on the area; Zezhou city had accordingly reinforced its defenses and heightened its vigilance, giving the atmosphere outside the city walls a rather lively, bustling air.
The checkpoint at the city gate, crowded with soldiers on guard, proved rather troublesome to pass through, and it took the three of them some time before they finally managed to enter the city. Given its strategic importance and long history, the buildings within the city walls all showed signs of considerable age; the marketplace was dirty and worn, yet crowded with people. What stood out most at present, however, were the soldiers who had shed their armor but not their military attire, wandering the city streets in groups of three or five, loud and boisterous.
The three of them found an inn in the city to stay at, and after making a few inquiries, You Hongzhuo finally learned the full picture of what had happened — and found himself somewhat taken aback.
— The rebel Wang Shitong and his followers had been escorted to Zezhou just the day before, scheduled for execution in six days. The general in charge of escorting the rebel here was Sun Qi, a senior commander under the Tiger King, who had brought his own army of fifty thousand, together with the twenty thousand troops already garrisoned here, and both forces were now stationed in and around Zezhou.
By now, Zezhou alone already had seventy thousand of the Tiger King’s troops gathered there. Though most of these soldiers were quartered in camps outside the city, having just won a great victory over the “Hungry Ghosts,” military discipline had grown rather lax, and every day large numbers of soldiers poured into the city, whether to visit brothels, drink, or cause trouble. This only added further to the current bustle of Zezhou.
And yet, with seventy thousand troops garrisoned here, what real disturbance could either the gathered men of the martial world, or that rumored Black Banner remnant, possibly manage to stir up in this place?
As the sun set, casting its light over the plain, weathered earthen buildings of the small inn within Zezhou, You Hongzhuo, newly arrived, felt a touch of bewilderment. Upstairs, the Zhao couple of the Twin Fiends of the Black Wind pushed open their window, gazing out at this ancient, weathered city bathed in the quiet crimson glow of the setting sun.
The bustle within the city walls represented a rare moment of prosperity as well — a rare, peaceful instant.
…
All things have their causes and consequences; the birth and death of any one event must always come accompanied by the stirring of some other trigger. If there were some supreme being in this world, then in its eyes, this world might appear as countless threads in motion — appearing, developing, colliding, branching, twisting, dissolving, continuing on and on through time…
In the eighth year of Jianshuo of the Wu Dynasty, the sixth year of Great Qi, the Central Plains was a land in chaos, having lost most of its order. Upon this land, the rise and fall of factions, the successes and failures of ambitious men, the gathering and scattering of crowds — however bizarre or abrupt — no longer struck anyone as remarkable.
Because the gathering and scattering had become so arbitrary, even great events came to seem commonplace. Of course, perhaps only those actually caught up in each such gathering and scattering could feel the suffocating weight and the bone-deep pain of it all.
Weisheng, in the Central Plains, had by now become a place of major importance in the region.
Because Prince Jin, Tian Hu, had made it his capital.
Prince Jin, more commonly known as the Tiger King, had originally been a hunter by trade, who had risen in rebellion while the Wu Dynasty still flourished, carving out territory to rule as his own. To be fair, his schemes were never especially deep; throughout his rise, whether in rebelling, seizing land, or proclaiming himself king, he had never seemed particularly clever. And yet, as the years passed — more than a decade now — the rebels and warlords of his generation had all exited the stage of history one by one, while this Tiger King, seizing the opportunity presented by the Jurchen invasion, relying on his own clumsy maneuvering and patient endurance, had built himself a vast domain, its foundations growing ever deeper.
Over these more than ten years, though nominally still a subject under Liu Yu’s Great Qi, the leaders of the many powers across the Central Plains understood well enough that, in terms of sheer strength, the forces under the Tiger King’s command had long since far surpassed those of the Great Qi court, which existed in name only. In the years since Great Qi’s founding, he had occupied a vast stretch of territory north of the Yellow River, quietly developing it, and amid the chaos gripping the realm, had maintained the most peaceful region north of the Yellow River — arguably even north of the Yangtze. In terms of sheer accumulated foundation, he now stood as the deepest-rooted “great and noble house,” surpassing even Liu Yu, whose state had existed for a mere six years, and certainly surpassing the many other powers that had risen even more recently.
Of course, even so, there were still power struggles within Prince Jin’s court.
Over more than ten years of “nation-building,” the Tiger King’s court had weathered dozens of political struggles large and small; one rising star after another within the Tiger King’s system had fallen, and one batch of court favorites after another had risen to power only to fall from it again — this, too, was an inevitable trial that any rough-hewn regime must endure. In the fifth month of the eighth year of Jianshuo of the Wu Dynasty, the court at Weisheng had undergone yet another upheaval, with one of the Tiger King’s once-trusted veteran officials brought down. To everyone at court, this was neither a small matter nor an especially large one.
Running parallel to this had been the migration and border incursion of several hundred thousand “Hungry Ghosts” beyond the borders of Prince Jin’s territory; thus, at the end of May, the Tiger King had ordered his great army to mobilize — and by now, this matter, too, had reached its conclusion.
A complete and total victory.
As evening approached, the whole city of Weisheng appeared prosperous on the surface, yet columns of soldiers patrolled the city streets back and forth without pause, security kept extremely tight. Within the “Palace of Heaven’s Pole,” the palace the Tiger King had spent over a decade building, the guard was equally strict. The powerful minister Hu Ying made his way through the layered, winding corridors of the Palace of Heaven’s Pole, and after being announced by the guards, was received by the Tiger King, Tian Hu, seated in state within.
He had come to report on a series of the most important recent developments, among which was the progress of matters in Zezhou. The “Ghost King” Wang Shitong was the most critical piece in this whole recent series of maneuvers undertaken by Prince Jin.
“…At present, it can be confirmed that this Wang Shitong was indeed, in his time, a remnant of the Black Banner Army from Little Cangriver. As of now, there have been no clear signs of movement from any Black Banner remnants in the Zezhou area. A fair number of martial-world figures, egged on by the Great Brightness Sect, have gone there, but they pose no real threat. All other areas remain under close surveillance…”
Hu Ying reported the situation bit by bit; Tian Hu listened in silence until he finished, then rose from his seat, his powerfully built frame standing tall. He fixed Hu Ying with a cold gaze for a long moment before finally moving slowly toward the window.
“The Demon of the Heart, Ning Yi — truly a demon in men’s hearts. Lord Hu, I have spent two years preparing for this matter. Until the Black Banner is eliminated, I can make no great moves in the Central Plains. See to this matter closely — I will not treat you unkindly for it.”
“For this very matter, I too have spent two years preparing. I will spare no effort, even to the point of laying down my life, and will not fail what Your Majesty has entrusted to me!”
As Hu Ying pledged his loyalty, Tian Hu gazed out at the scenery beyond the window, his eyes fierce and cold. Two years ago, the death of the Demon of the Heart, Ning Yi, had left the whole realm stunned; yet the flood of information that followed had also left the various powers of the Central Plains caught in an impasse, as though something were stuck in their throats, unable to move forward or back. Over these past two years, though the Central Plains had largely stopped speaking of the Black Banner and Ning Yi, all the rising powers across this land had, in truth, remained uneasy — no one knew how many pieces on the Black Banner’s chessboard had already, since five years ago, been quietly infiltrating every single faction from within, without a sound.
What could be said with certainty, however, was that these rumors were not without foundation. Over these two years, whether within Liu Yu’s Great Qi court or within the Tiger King’s own court, both had, to one degree or another, uncovered or discovered traces of Black Banner remnants. As a ruler, how could one tolerate such lurking shadows, such phantom threats seen in every bent bow?
After these two years of relative peace amid chaos, Tian Hu, the Prince of Jin, who held the deepest grasp over his own power base, had finally decided to act — to pull out, once and for all, the poisoned thorn buried deep within his own flesh!
A storm was gathering. Across the whole of the Tiger King’s domain, the air had already turned bleak and forbidding—