In the Wu Dynasty, in early May of the ninth year of the Jianshuo era, summer had just begun to turn hot, and urgent dispatches from the Ministry of War raced along every major road across the land of Jiangnan.
In the capital, Lin’an, merchants came and went, boats passed to and fro, all as ceaselessly busy as ever. The comings and goings of scholars, the gatherings of wandering swordsmen, all added their own brushstrokes of ink to burnish this picture of the Wu Dynasty’s prosperity.
Ten years, set against the span of a single human life, is a real and lengthy distance. It’s enough to let a boy grow into a man, a young man turn mature, a mature adult step into old age, and the elderly set down their lingering thoughts and walk toward the end of life.
Joy settles into the memory of such time and grows even more beautiful; fear, too, grows unreal as the years slip by. Over these ten years, Southern Wu’s transformation from newborn state to thriving realm had unfolded before everyone’s eyes — a prosperity both visible and tangible, ample proof of the new dynasty’s diligent governance and flourishing vitality.
Owing to the burdens of the past and the pressures of the present, scholars found themselves able to express their fervent indignation, producing writing all the more stirring and impassioned. Wandering swordsmen were held in far greater esteem than before; what they did and thought was no longer merely the crude brawling and back-alley skirmishes of the wilderness fighters. Even the girls of the pleasure houses found it easier, in this relatively peaceful “age of chaos,” to encounter men who could truly move, even intoxicate, their hearts.
For everyone, this had become the best of times.
The court remained as busy as ever; officials could, at the very least, pursue their ambitions with relative ease within this new political landscape. And lately, things had grown even busier still.
That extraordinary piece of news — that Zongfu and Zongbi “might possibly” move south — had already stirred up a storm within the Wu court. Information about this storm remained tightly sealed off from top to bottom, yet those well-connected enough could already sense a vague hint of it. The movements of many powerful households always managed to send ripples outward from within. These ripples weren’t necessarily negative — after several days of fermenting, within Lin’an’s well-informed upper social circles, the possibility of war had already begun taking shape.
Everyone who heard it grew stirred and impassioned.
With the passage of long years, nourished by scenes of prosperity, people’s memories of conditions under the former Jinghan dynasty over a decade ago, and even of the recent “combing the mountains, searching the seas,” had already taken on an entirely different cast in their minds. Southern Wu’s diligent governance had given people great confidence — on one hand, the belief that if the sky fell, someone taller would hold it up; on the other hand, even the young dandies of Lin’an mostly believed that, should the Jurchen ever come again, the chastened Wu Dynasty, having learned bitter lessons, now had the power to strike back. This, too, was the fruit of the Wu Dynasty’s own propaganda efforts over recent years.
Since striking back was now believed possible, the question people considered was what opportunities the power shifts of such a war might bring — opportunities in power, opportunities in wealth. And even those genuinely worried about the Wu Dynasty suffering another setback mostly discussed how they themselves might contribute their own strength, turning back the raging tide, propping up the crumbling edifice.
Whether such a change was, on balance, a good thing or a bad one wasn’t easy to judge. But at the upper levels of the Wu court, the arrival of this news naturally could not be met with such careless abandon. After extensive discussion and analysis, handling the whole affair had, if anything, grown all the more difficult.
Qin Hui, as Military Affairs Commissioner, now found himself at the very center of this storm.
Since the Wu Dynasty had become Southern Wu, and after the Jurchen’s manhunt of “combing the mountains, searching the seas,” Qin Hui had passed through several turns of fortune within Wu officialdom, and now stood as one of the handful of great officials at the very peak of power. Compared to the current Left Chancellor Lü Yihao and Right Chancellor Zhang Jun, Qin Hui was, on the court stage, more the leading figure of the pragmatic faction — during the Jinghan era, he had served in the Censorate, renowned for his unbending integrity and his skill at stabilizing the overall situation. After the Jianshuo dynasty had settled, Qin Hui had, one after another, carried out several measures using firm, decisive methods to stabilize tensions between northern and southern residents, offending no small number of people in the process, though genuinely acting always with the larger picture in mind.
The pragmatic faction of the day was, more often than not, the faction favoring peace negotiations. Ever since the Jurchen manhunt, Qin Hui had understood full well the gap in military strength between his own side and the Jin, and had always shown extreme restraint regarding the tensions between the two sides — in the past couple of years he had even proposed grand policies and strategies along the lines of “Southerners return south, Northerners return north.” His proposals held no room for sentiment, but they were extremely realistic. Because Crown Prince Jun Wu was a passionate advocate of war, Qin Hui had never been given the position of chancellor — but precisely because of this, his standing had grown all the more detached from ordinary factional politics.
The Emperor Zhou Yong doted on his son, to be sure, but on another level, at a purely rational level, he instinctively relied on Qin Hui, generally believing that if things ever spiraled entirely out of control, a man like Qin Hui was precisely the one who could still salvage the situation. With news of a possible Jurchen advance south, the high-level meetings of the Wu court could hardly do without a great official like Qin Hui — though this time, before he could even pour cold water on the proceedings, the mood throughout the whole court had already turned uniformly grave on its own.
Over these past several years, the Wu Dynasty had trained new troops and forged weapons; against Liu Yu, there was at least some confidence — but against the Jurchen, virtually everyone at court with any sense hoped this was simply false news, since similar rumors had, in fact, circulated every single year in the past. This year, however, was different.
Wuqimai’s collapse, and Zongfu and Zongbi’s ambition to seize Jiangnan as a means of intimidating Zonghan — for the martially inclined Jurchen, this was indeed an entirely plausible scenario. Under the assumption that the news was true, most everyone showed a certain hesitation in considering how to respond. On one hand, a two-pronged strategy of negotiation coupled with sowing discord among the enemy won broad favor; on the other hand, when it came to the choice of actually going to war, there was, more or less, a great deal of shrinking back and confusion.
The underlying situation wasn’t complicated at all. Ever since the Wu Dynasty lost the entirety of the Central Plains in its confrontation with the Jurchen years earlier, and the Jianshuo dynasty was consolidated afterward, the standing of the Wu Dynasty’s military had risen substantially. This rise was not something the civil officials welcomed; it was simply a fact that emerged from the ongoing dynamic struggle for power. On one hand, chaos in various regions gave military commanders greater authority; on the other, both among ordinary people and within officialdom, calls in favor of military men had grown steadily louder — during this period, even Crown Prince Jun Wu himself had, privately, consistently championed the army’s cause, restraining the power of the court to a considerable degree.
The struggle between civil and military factions was not entirely a matter of self-interest, either. In the domains of great commanders favored by the crown prince, men like Yue Fei and Han Shizhong, the military’s power reached to the very sky — recruitment, taxation, even the dismissal of certain officials, could all be decided by a single word from them. The generals secured their fighting strength through such excessive means, but the power of civil officials became harder and harder to exercise; whenever a national law needed to be implemented, they found themselves facing military forces underneath them that flatly refused to comply, or even actively worked against them. In the old Wu Dynasty, such a state of affairs would have been unimaginable — and in the present-day Wu Dynasty, it was hardly necessarily a good thing either.
In officialdom, there was rarely such a thing as getting it exactly right — more often than not, correcting one excess simply produced another. Just as with the overall effort against the Black Banner Army, where civil officials throughout the court tried to seal off the Huaxia Army’s power in the southwest, various units of the Wu Dynasty’s own army were secretly buying firearms from the Huaxia Army all the while. Over the past couple of years, owing to the activities in the southwest of scholars like Long Qifei and Li Xiannong, these trade dealings that helped the Huaxia Army climb out of its mire had repeatedly been reported to the court — and just as repeatedly, nothing ever came of it. Such matters were a constant source of frustration to everyone involved.
To defeat the enemy, the army had to be given autonomy, free from civil officials interfering at every turn — yet whenever the army was given that autonomy, it invariably overstepped its bounds. Finding a balance in this ongoing struggle was a long process, but on the whole, how to rein in the army precisely without damaging its fighting strength remained a great, unresolved lesson for the Wu court. And once full-scale war broke out, all the restraint and effort that so many officials had put into this over these past years would simply come to nothing.
The court discussed and quarreled in chaos and gloom for several days, at first clinging to the hope that the news might be mistaken and trying to keep it sealed off. Only under the sustained pressure applied by the Princess Imperial’s residence and Zhang Jun and others did they finally dispatch messengers, ordering military commanders throughout the realm to prepare, and calling representatives to the capital to discuss the situation and possible countermeasures. Before these messengers had even reached the halfway point, a terrifying piece of news came surging up from the north, spreading southward — a rising storm like a chain of enormous explosions, thundering across a thousand miles, and crashing right in front of everyone!
… Turning the clock back several days: in Bian Liang, once the capital of the Wu Dynasty and now the capital of the Great Qi, the weather hung dark and oppressive.
That great chaos struck suddenly, without warning.
When the upheaval began, Liu Yu was in his private study receiving several ministers; the moment he heard the clash of weapons, his heart had already begun sinking.
In the nightmares of these past few years, he might well have seen something like this scene before. Liu Yu sat rigidly behind his desk, trembling slightly, and as the Imperial Guard commander Xue Guangcheng strode in with sword in hand, the courtyard outside had already become a scene of slaughter.
“You… you, you…” “Your Majesty, someone had an appointment with you.” The doors of the study slammed shut with a bang, and the figure grinned wide, stepping forward. “I’ve come to fetch you.”
Just as with the dark shadow he had glimpsed that night three years before — Xue Guangcheng was tall and imposing. Liu Yu drew his longsword, but the man was already upon him, swinging a great hand down with a rushing whoosh.
Ever since Liu Yu had been threatened by a Black Banner agent within the palace, wherever he went there were always five hundred to a thousand elite Jurchen troops stationed, rotating guard duty with the Han army. But now, the entire imperial palace had already fallen into all-out slaughter.
Tie Tianying, who had already been in Bian Liang for several days, found himself caught up in this great chaos. Smoke signals of rebellion rose over a city that no longer bore any trace of its former splendor; word from every direction was in complete confusion. Some said part of the Imperial Guard had joined the mutiny; others said many ministers were already attempting to defect back, to break free of the Jurchen’s shadow.
After several years under Jurchen rule, and despite the terror of their suppression, the land of the Central Plains still held no small number of proud, unyielding hearts. This great upheaval set off a chain reaction: some threw open the city gates and stirred up the residents of Bian Liang to flee for Southern Wu; others threw themselves into the slaughter directly. Ali Gua, the great Jurchen general holding Bian Liang, soon broke camp and marched into the city, by which point several ministers of the Great Qi had already fled far away with their families in tow.
Emperor Liu Yu himself had also been abducted and taken out of the city.
Ali Gua’s elite troops set off in pursuit at once.
Pursuit and flight, chaos and killing. A great many people had no idea what had actually happened — whether it was some faction rising in rebellion, or whether the southern force known as the Black Banner had finally struck at Liu Yu. Tie Tianying, however, soon realized the truth: years of the Black Banner’s quiet work embedded within the Great Qi court had all been unleashed in a single night.
The whole incident unfolded violently and swiftly, so much so that it became impossible to tell who had been deceived, who incited, and who deliberately misled. A flood of false information further clouded the Jurchen’s first response, and the Black Banner’s elite seized Liu Yu and fled south out of the city. Ali Gua flew into a fury and led his elite troops in relentless pursuit; the entire chase went on for several days, spreading across a thousand miles of land stretching from Bian Liang toward the southwest.
Four days later, Ali Gua’s pursuing forces returned. They had surrounded and killed roughly a dozen Black Banner members, who had died horrific deaths — reportedly all dismembered — and since Ali Gua had brought back no one alive, it was assumed that all of them had already been dead before being caught. Liu Yu, meanwhile, had vanished entirely.
The whole of Bian Liang had descended into chaos, and Tie Tianying had already quietly slipped out of this dangerous area. Recalling the entire operation carried out by the Black Banner, he couldn’t help but feel his own heart stirred. But two days later, when the next piece of news about Liu Yu arrived, his heart turned entirely to ice…
… In Lin’an, the first piece of news arrived in the small hours of the previous day, and by the time of the morning court session, everyone already knew of it.
Great chaos in Bian Liang: the false Qi emperor Liu Yu had been seized from within the palace, and the Jurchen general Ali Gua had dispatched a great army in pursuit — Liu Yu had not yet been found.
This was surely the Black Banner’s work.
Years ago, after the Battle of Xiaocang River ended, Liu Yu had celebrated lavishly — only to have someone from the Black Banner slip into the palace one night and give him a beating. Ever since, Liu Yu had jumped at his own shadow, terrified out of his wits into something close to nervous illness. This incident was said to be true, and had become a laughingstock among various factions, but it had also confirmed the rumor that the Black Banner had infiltrated agents into every faction across the Central Plains.
At this tense moment in Jin-Wu relations, the Black Banner Army’s sudden move to deal the Jin state such a sharp opening blow could not help but be counted a good thing, from the Wu court’s point of view. Everyone breathed at least some measure of relief.
The next morning, around the hour of Si, while everyone was still deliberating over the impact of the false Qi’s upheaval, that joyous news arrived.
“…The false Qi’s Liu Yu has proclaimed to the realm in his own blood-written decree… that when the Jin dogs first grew powerful, the Liu clan, left with no choice, was forced to preserve the foundations of the Wu Dynasty by feigning compliance, submitting outwardly to the Jin while trembling within… in the end preserving the greater cause of the Wu Dynasty, keeping the Central Plains in Han hands after all… and now, with the time ripe, he has risen up together with righteous men from every quarter, restoring proper allegiance and returning to our Great Wu… the Central Plains has returned to us, great joy, Your Majesty—”
In the summer light, brilliant sunshine streamed in from beyond the hall. As the messenger eunuch finished speaking, Zhou Yong, upon the dragon throne, still looked somewhat bewildered.
“Ah… returned to proper allegiance…”
In the blink of an eye, the Central Plains had returned to proper allegiance. Had the Wu Dynasty just gotten back every inch of lost territory, without losing a single foot?
Throughout the court, the faces of Lü Yihao, Qin Hui and the others had already turned deathly pale; the whole court’s breathing had grown labored, and the sunlight outside suddenly seemed to lose all its color, as though a hundred swords and a thousand blades, mountainous and oceanic in number, were surging in through the hall doors, thrusting toward every single person present.
“The Black Banner… this is a vicious scheme meant to destroy our Wu Dynasty…”
… In the Princess’s residence, upon hearing this news, Zhou Pei shattered the cup in her hand; her hands trembled, all color drained from them.
… Ever since the regicide, in the ten years that had passed, the Black Banner Army had always maintained a restrained stance toward the Wu Dynasty.
Though it had shown no mercy on the battlefield, and never shied away from ruthless measures in self-defense, beyond that, most of the Black Banner’s strategies had shown remarkably little malice toward the Wu Dynasty. As though harboring some quiet remorse for its own act of regicide, the Black Banner’s strategies, wherever the Wu Dynasty could be spared, had generally spared it; and even where it couldn’t be entirely avoided, there had always been, more or less, some verbal gesture of goodwill attached.
This time, at such a critical juncture, the Black Banner had slapped the Jurchen hard across the face. Yet no one had ever expected that, in the same motion, it would turn its blade around and drive it savagely straight into the Wu Dynasty’s own heart.
This was a blade drawn fully into the open, one steeped in the cold, merciless ferocity of a fight to the death.
On the stage of the world, there has never been room for sentiment to survive, nor any breathing space granted to the weak.
Before long, the news had spread across the entire realm. The gears of war slowly meshed into place. Beneath the surface of these rippling waters, the clash was already unfolding, fierce and unrelenting…