In the third month, in Tianhui, the capital of the Jin state, the warmth of the season had arrived right on schedule.

It was an ordinary day.

As the carriage procession passed by the fields along the road, it slowed briefly. The man inside the great central carriage lifted the curtain and looked out at the green countryside; along the roadside, across the land, farmers knelt.

The man inside let the curtain fall again. “Move on, move on.”

The procession and its guard continued forward.

The column stretched out, dragon banners fluttering in the wind. Seated within the carriage, returning to the palace, was none other than Wanyan Wuqimai, Emperor of the Jin state. He was fifty-nine this year, dressed in sable, his frame as massive as an old bear, his gaze somewhat dulled and heavy. Once a man who had led charges into the thick of battle, whose two arms could draw a bow like wind and thunder, he had grown old now. The wounds he had taken on the battlefield in his younger years had been troubling him these past two years, and this Jurchen emperor—known since his enthronement for governing with steadiness and benevolence—now had occasional fits of temper, and occasional bouts of nostalgia for the past.

“I remember, when we first settled here in Tianhui, there weren’t so many fields, and the palace wasn’t much to speak of. Out front you’d see people living out back, keeping pigs, horses, chickens and ducks besides. I used to go out and look around without all this fuss of carts and horsemen, and no one made a habit of dropping to their knees at the mere sight of me, going on about guarding against assassins. I’ve killed more men than I can count—what would I have to fear from an assassin?”

The old man rambled on. Inside the carriage, Wanyan Zongfu nodded in agreement. “Still, as the nation grows greater, in time it must acquire a certain dignity and formality, or else it becomes difficult to govern.”

“Look at that Wu Dynasty emperor—he has his formalities too, and formality doesn’t fill a rice bowl.” Wuqimai said this, then let a faint smile cross his lips. “Don’t mind me. I’m simply too idle these days. I’d half welcome an assassin, if only for something to do with my hands.”

“Uncle’s skill with arms hasn’t dulled in the least—your nephew saw as much at the training grounds only yesterday,” Zongfu said.

“Drawing a bow at the training grounds is one thing—the target doesn’t strike back. These old skills of mine have gone to waste, in the end. These days my whole body aches. I’m old.”

Among Aguda’s sons, the eldest had died earliest; the second, Zongwang, had once been a man of dazzling, extraordinary talent, but he too had died some years ago from an old wound, after years of campaigning north and south. Now the third son, Zongfu, and the fourth, Zongbi, led the way. Zongfu’s temperament was gentle and forgiving, and Wuqimai favored him somewhat for it. As they chatted, the carriage entered the city, and Wuqimai lifted the curtain again to gaze out for a while. This bustling city outside, this whole stretch of land, was something he had spent twelve years of effort building up. Had he not become emperor, these twelve years, he would have spent charging headlong into battle, seizing city after city, full of spirit.

“Nian Han’s grown old too,” Wuqimai said after a while, having watched the scenery pass.

Zongfu lowered his head. “Both uncles are still hale and hearty—they’ve at least another twenty years of vigor left in them. By then our Jin state will have unified all under heaven, and both uncles can finally settle down and enjoy their rest.”

“That’s the kind of thing you young ones say… A man has to accept that he’s getting old.” Wuqimai waved a hand. “The Han have a saying—the clay pot that goes too often to the well will break there in the end, and the general is bound to die on the battlefield someday. Even if he’s lucky enough not to die, half his life has been spent there regardless. I don’t regret a lifetime spent in the saddle. But looking at sixty now, and Nian Han only five years younger than me—if he suddenly went one day, it wouldn’t be strange at all. Nephew, the world is really no more than a handful of mountain strongholds, when you get down to it.”

Zongfu listened respectfully. Wuqimai leaned back against his seat, lost in memory. “When we first rose up alongside your father, it was nothing more than those few mountain strongholds—close enough that you could hear the neighbor’s dog bark, hauling timber and water, fishing, hunting—that was all there was to it, and that was all there was of us. This whole realm… we conquered it, and there’s hardly anyone left of us who did it. Every year I go see Bird-Slave”—Nian Han’s childhood nickname—”once, and he’s still got that foul temper of his… His temper is foul, yes, but he won’t stand in the way of you young ones. Don’t worry on that account, and tell Old Four not to worry either.”

“Yes,” said Zongfu.

“There was good reason for leaving Nian Han out there to begin with—we never had many men to spare… And then there’s Wushi”—Wanyan Xiyin—”I know Old Four is afraid of him. Well, say what you like, the man is still your uncle. What is there to fear? Wushi is a gift fallen from the heavens; his brilliance is something to be learned from. If he strikes at Old Four, it’s because Old Four was in the wrong. You think he goes around striking at everyone? Learn even a fraction of what he knows and it will be enough to hold what we’ve built… You young people, these past years, you’ve picked up too many bad habits…”

Wuqimai rambled on, shaking his head and sighing, in the way of every aging man lamenting that the young were not living up to their promise. Zongfu listened, nodding now and then to show he had taken the lesson to heart. All the way back to the palace, Wuqimai went on this way, until at last he had to turn to the day’s memorials, and sent Zongfu off. Once Zongfu returned to his residence, Zongbi came to see him. Zongbi was thirty-seven this year, counted among the most fiery and radical of the younger Jurchen generation. Some years before, during the campaign to search the mountains and scour the seas, while Zongfu had held the eastern army in place, Zongbi had served as vanguard, and much of the wholesale slaughter, the sweeping raids, and the razing of cities south of the Yangtze had been his doing. Even now, the notorious name “Fourth Prince Jin Wushu” still carried a certain grim weight in the south.

Zongfu related to him everything their uncle had said.

Wushu had been headstrong and self-willed since childhood, and his face darkened as he listened. “Uncle’s simply getting old. Twelve years resting easy, and where’s all that battlefield ferocity gone? His head’s gone soft, too. Can this sprawling empire really be compared to that mountain village we started in? Even if he wants it to be the same, can the men who follow behind us really be the same? He misses the good old days too much. Nian Han changed long ago!”

“Fourth Brother, don’t talk nonsense.”

“When have I ever talked nonsense, Third Brother? Don’t think I’m stirring up trouble just because I want to be emperor myself. Between the eastern and western courts, a great war is bound to come!” Having said this, he seemed to feel he’d gone a bit too far, and cupped his hands in apology. “Of course, with His Majesty still with us, that day is a long way off yet. Still, we can’t afford not to plan ahead.”

Zongfu said, “This time at the hunting grounds, Fourth Uncle could still draw a strong bow and wield blade and spear well enough. He’s had some aches and pains lately, but nothing serious, it seems.”

The two brothers talked for a while longer, discussing strategies for reclaiming the Central Plains. By afternoon, the palace’s inner guard had suddenly tightened, and astonishing news began to spread.

…

A few days later, in Datong, the Western Capital, along a bustling street, at the “Little Jiangnan” restaurant, Tang Minjie, dressed in a servant’s blue uniform with a cloth wrapped around his head, hurried about the lively second-floor hall carrying a teapot.

“Little Jiangnan” served as both restaurant and teahouse, and was a rather famous establishment within the walls of Datong. The décor was lavish; word had it the proprietor had ties to the upper echelons of Jurchen society. The ground floor was affordable for common folk, while the second floor catered to a wealthier clientele, kept a good number of women in the back, and was a place where Jurchen nobles were known to spend fortunes without a second thought. At this moment the sound of storytelling and singing rose steadily from the second floor—tales of martial heroes and legends carried up from the Central Plains remained popular even here in the north. Tang Minjie was seeing to some nearby guests when he noticed two well-dressed merchant travelers arrive, and hurried over to attend to them.

The two took a private room facing the street, and Tang Minjie followed them in, describing the various dishes on offer, while one of the men closed the door.

“Back so soon, how—”

Tang Minjie, standing by the table, kept up an attentive show of wiping it down with a hot towel while speaking under his breath. The man seated at the table was Lu Mingfang, who currently oversaw affairs in the northern territories.

“Something’s happened in Tianhui,” Lu Mingfang said with a smile.

“What’s happened?”

“Wuqimai’s had a stroke.”

“Dead?”

“Paralyzed.”

“Right you are, sir, if you’ll just wait a moment…”

Tang Minjie called this out loudly and turned to leave. After a while he came back carrying hot tea and appetizer pastries. “How bad is it?”

“Not fatal for now, but bad enough to send the Jurchens into a proper panic.” Tang Minjie poured the tea, and Lu Mingfang lifted the cup to his lips. “How are things on your end?”

“There’s a thread or two, but nothing clear yet. With something like this happening, though, it looks like we’ll have to push forward regardless.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Zonghan and Aguda’s younger sons mean to seize power.”

“Internal strife sounds like good news to us.”

“Internal strife can be measured in troop strength—or in accomplishments.”

The low conversation paused for a moment, all three falling silent. Then Lu Mingfang nodded. “After the business with Tian Hu, the Teacher’s come out of seclusion, and Zonghan has nearly finished preparing to reclaim the Central Plains, with Zongfu and the others already falling in line. Given all this, it looks like—”

“The Teacher mentioned the Mongols before—that alone should give Zonghan some pause,” said the man across the table.

“Even if they’re wary of our own Chinese Army, how wary can they really be?”

“I’ll speed up the work on the Great Manufactory,” Tang Minjie said quietly.

“Don’t push too hard.”

“Right you are!”

As the three spoke, out on the street a procession of carriages passed, loud shouts rising up ahead, pedestrians clearing to either side—had this been in the Central Plains, pedestrians would be required to kneel whenever a Jin official passed in procession, but within the Jin state’s own territory no such custom applied. This was Zonghan’s procession going by. Seeing the soldiers gathered thick around it, the three fell silent. Tang Minjie draped the towel over his shoulder and turned to leave with an obliging smile—but he had only half-turned when, from the rooftop diagonally across the street, a figure took a few running steps and leapt out into the open air.

The slanting light of the spring sun fell dazzling across the scene. That figure only flashed at the edge of one’s vision—abrupt, yet utterly resolute—and in that sunlight, raised a staff heavy as a thousand pounds.

Then it dropped—

A great crash rang out, followed by screams, the whinnying of horses, chaos. Tang Minjie, Lu Mingfang, and the third man all froze for an instant.

The pedestrians on the street reacted, and the noise from below rose into an uproar…

…

As the ninth year of the Wujian era, the twelfth year of Tianhui, deepened into spring, the land of the Central Plains was struggling in an awkward and miserable quagmire.

The Great Qi regime, propped up by the Jurchens, was now little more than a patchwork of scattered strongholds and warlord fiefdoms, and every faction’s days were hard and anxious.

To speak fairly, the easiest years for the Great Qi court—the nominal rulers of the Central Plains—had perhaps been those first few years right after their initial surrender to the Jurchens. In that time, Liu Yu and his circle played the part of pure villains without complication: plundering, pillaging, conscripting soldiers, digging up graves, squeezing the people dry. Even after the three years of defeat at Xiaocang River that followed, at least they still had the Jurchens’ protection over their heads, and those in power could still enjoy themselves.

Had this been that other history, the one that had once belonged to the Song dynasty, Liu Yu and his circle would have lived out their days exactly this way—attaching themselves to the Jin state, wholeheartedly suppressing rebellion, hunting down the loyal and righteous, sending troops south to attack, then weeping and pleading north for reinforcements… But ever since the great battle at Xiaocang River had ended, everything had grown complicated.

The problem of spies left behind after the Chinese Army’s fierce resistance there gave countless people endless headaches. On the surface, the hunt and purge of the Chinese Army’s remnants continued in full force, but beneath the surface, everyone moved with a caution known only to themselves—like a man who alone knows whether the water he drinks is warm or cold. Liu Yu in particular suffered from it: one night after the Black Banner forces withdrew, a remnant of that army had broken into his very bedchamber and beaten him half to death. Ever since, his nerves had never recovered; he often startled awake from sleep in a cold sweat each night, and by day would sometimes fly into fits of madness before his own ministers.

At first, every faction had responded to these Chinese Army infiltrators with fierce, sweeping purges from top to bottom. In time, though, all of them settled into silence and concealment, each hoping simply to close their eyes and let the world be at peace. Then, two years on, Tian Hu—the most powerful among them—set about trying to pull out this thorn that had lodged itself in everyone’s hearts, and the counterstrike that followed left every last one of them chilled to the bone.

Tian Hu’s whole domain changed banners in the space of a single night.

The great overlord who had held the territory north of the Yellow River for over a decade was simply, silently, put to death.

Liu Yu reportedly went mad on the spot when he heard, said to have run through his bedchamber in the dead of night, sword in hand, screaming and hacking wildly, fleeing from shadows. Of course, few could say with any certainty whether such rumors were true.

Through more than a decade of war, even as heaven and earth seemed to have turned upside down, life still had to go on. People in rags gradually grew used to years of misery; without oxen, they took up the plow themselves and kept on farming. But this year, across the land of the Central Plains, one faction after another found itself caught in an unsettling bind.

In this world, if measured purely by strength, the ones who truly commanded the realm were of course the Jurchens of today—the rising Jin state, undefeated in a hundred battles, looking down on everything beneath it. On the far end from the Jurchens seemed to sit the Wu Dynasty, clinging to a fading, flickering life. And yet, ever since Tian Hu’s regime had collapsed the year before, more and more word had begun trickling out from that rugged, near-impassable stretch of mountains in the southwest—and the most terrifying piece of it all was this: that Mr. Ning was still alive.

No one confirmed any of this openly, and yet the whispered word beneath the surface grew steadily more unmistakable. The Chinese Army had played dead, dutifully and quietly, for two full years; but by the time this spring of the ninth Wujian year came around, in hindsight, even that stillness seemed to have taken on a weight of dark, heavy malice. In the second month, at a Great Qi court assembly in Bianliang, one official had tried to lighten the mood, laughing that he’d known all along the man was only feigning death—and the response he got was an awkward, uncomfortable silence, one that seemed to reveal, all on its own, just how heavy this piece of news truly sat, and how everyone truly felt about it.

Ten years before, when this man had struck down his own emperor in a fit of rage, people could still tell themselves he was reckless, undisciplined. When he crouched low in the mountains around Xiaocang River, people could still tell themselves he was nothing more than a dog that had lost its home. When he defeated the Western Xia, people could tell themselves it was a stroke of daring luck, nothing more. But then came the three years at Xiaocang River, the wailing of over a million soldiers, and the deaths of two great Jurchen generals besides—and though people’s hearts trembled at it, they could still console themselves: at least they had crippled him… at least, by now, Ning Yi must surely be dead.

And afterward, when he seemed to be clinging to a bare, precarious existence in the mountains of the southwest, forced to sell off cannons—his one core commodity—just to survive, that too had stirred a kind of sympathy in people: a hero, in the end, brought low, born into the wrong age.

But now—Ning Yi was not dead. Every scrap of news, past and present, emerging from those unenlightened southwestern mountains seemed like the twitching, questing feelers of some dreadful, monstrous beast wreathed in conspiracy. Everywhere it passed, it left mud and mire in its wake, and with every twitch of those feelers, drops of black, malice-laden sludge fell, one by one.

At the very least, no one in the Central Plains could afford to look down on this force any longer. However few they might be—no more than a few hundred thousand men, all told—their long history of daring, deadly, decisive, and ferocious action, backed by an unbroken record of victories, had proven them a force capable of standing toe to toe with the Jurchens themselves.

What greater moves might yet come, no one could say. But now, Ning Yi had quietly reemerged, and what he faced was the overwhelming momentum of a Jin state bent on ruling all under heaven. Once the Jin state marched south—and march south it certainly would—this reckless, unyielding army would very likely march forward to meet it head-on. And when that day came, what would become of the Central Plains factions caught in the middle…

No one could bring themselves to say it aloud.