It was deep autumn, and the temperature in Small Liangshan remained pleasant. Up the mountain and down, the colors of yellow earth and green foliage mingled, showing little sign yet of decay. Crowds now flooded in, covering the mountains and filling the valleys.

The vast Guangwu Army, one hundred thousand strong, blotted out everything within sight. In the ravines, on the mountainsides, along the foothills, the marching columns stretched for over ten li in parallel lines. Scouts responsible for liaison and route-planning, together with warriors sent by the Mangshan Yi tribes, moved through the rugged terrain, coordinating between the many columns and adjusting the pace of one detachment after another.

Because of the rugged terrain of Liangshan, once the hundred thousand troops entered the mountains, it was impossible to maintain a single unified formation. To ensure safety, Lu Qiaoshan carefully planned the advance, dividing the Wuxiang Army into six divisions, slowing their pace, and coordinating their movements. Each day, with the help of scouts from the Mangshan tribes, the next day’s route and objectives were carefully worked out in advance. And while the infantry and cavalry cleared the way, the archers, crossbowmen, and artillery followed close behind, to avoid any gap forming in the battle line at any point, striving to advance in the most cautious posture possible toward the northeast of Jishan County, where the engagement would take place.

Though the pace was slow and the posture conservative, as the hundred thousand troops advanced, their banners sweeping across Liangshan like a great tide, it gave enormous confidence to the Mangshan warriors who had come to meet them. The dignity of the Wu Dynasty as the ruling power was no empty reputation — and the situation in Liangshan, ever since the death of the Hengqing tribe’s barbarian king Shimeng, finally seemed to be turning a corner once more.

Langge and Lianniang of the Mangshan tribe, together with Lu Qiaoshan’s side, immediately sent envoys to persuade the other Yi tribes. All of this took place within the first day or two — because right after, the Chinese Army, which had rested and recovered in Liangshan for years, and which had kept to a defensive posture even as the Mangshan tribe caused repeated trouble, completed its mobilization the very day after Ning Yi returned to Heden, and moved to strike at the Wuxiang Army.

Over the past several years, the population of the three counties of Heden had grown to nearly two hundred thousand, including close to sixty thousand troops. Excluding the elite units dispatched to Xuzhou and the garrisons defending the three counties, this time they mobilized a total of twenty-four thousand three hundred troops, roughly a quarter of whom were veterans of the northwest campaigns.

Around the hour of Si on the twenty-sixth of the seventh month, an unbroken line of black banners came into view of the Wuxiang Army. An hour later, hot-air balloons rose into the sky, and the battle began.

The Black Banner attacked. The Wuxiang Army defended.

…

Boom! Boom! Boom!

Steady drumbeats rose from the hillsides, figures spreading before and behind, forming ranks in the mountain passes of Liangshan, one group after another, stretching almost to the far horizon.

On the mountain stood a small Chinese Army outpost, established years earlier to protect the trade routes, permanently garrisoned by a single platoon. Now, with this outpost as its center, the attacking force arrived in successive waves, gathering into formation along the foothills, slopes, and ravines, groups of a hundred or several hundred men to a formation, some iron cannon already set up on the hilltops.

Mao Yishan stood in an inconspicuous patch of scrubland partway up the slope, giving instructions to the men behind him. Having grown up at Wuzhui Camp, this soldier, now in his thirties, had a steady gaze and a build like an iron tower, his hands rough-skinned, his palms thick with calluses — marks left by both training and the slashing of real combat.

Having risen through the ranks as a shield-and-blade infantryman, he still carried a heavy shield and a steel blade to this day. Seven or eight years earlier, in the great battle at Xuanjia Hollow in the northwest, he, along with Luo Ye, Hou Wu, Qu Qing, and Zhuo Yongqing, had faced the once-invincible Jurchen “war god” Wanyan Loushi head-on — and killed him, earning great merit. Of the five who survived that battle, all had gone through years of bloody fighting at Xiaocang River, and now each held a position in the Chinese Army. Mao Yishan, being solid and fierce by nature but lacking any particular gift for leadership, had risen more slowly through the ranks. By now he commanded a reinforced battalion in the First Regiment of the Chinese Army’s Fifth Division, four hundred men in total, half of them veterans, the rest new recruits — though many of the “new” recruits, too, were remnants of the Western Army who had been tempered in the brutal conditions of the northwest.

For now, no one had yet discovered anything unusual about this particular battalion. Or perhaps, to the eyes of the Wuxiang Army soldiers covering the mountainside, every Black Banner unit before them seemed equally mysterious and terrifying.

“…I’ll say it again. Once the first shot fires, the fighting starts. Our objective is the northern ridge of Xiufeng, over there. No need to rush — we hold back a step, follow that ravine along the side to dodge the blasts. Once you’re past that ravine, dig up whatever strength you’ve got left and push forward. Never mind the shells on the way — if you get hit, that’s just bad luck. First and Second Companies push the assault, Third Company carries ammunition and digs trenches, Fourth Company holds the perimeter secure. In the end the whole Fifth Division will converge on Xiufeng — nothing to be afraid of—”

Spreading out his broad, plate-like hand, Mao Yishan slowly repeated the steps of the coming battle — less giving orders than reviewing the plan for himself as much as for the men. As he finished speaking, the Second Company commander spoke up. “Boss, who’s afraid here? Anyone scared, speak up now.” He turned and laughed. “Let’s hear it.”

The drumbeats from the mountain were heavy and slow. Someone behind them tapped a steel blade against an iron shield. “What a joke — there’s not even that many of them over there.”

“Sounds like there’s a hundred thousand.”

“Ha, that’s a lot, all right.”

The men chuckled among themselves at this, sharing a knowing laugh, and Mao Yishan grinned too, then raised his hand. “All right, enough joking. Remember your orders! Four years now we’ve been killing Jurchens in the north, and these people hiding out in the south think we’re pushovers. Xiaocang River is gone, the northwest turned to a wasteland, my brothers, your kin, left behind there… It’s time… time to show them what a sea of corpses and blood really looks like—”

That last line came from the very depths of his throat, and by the time he finished, his eyes had gone faintly red at the rims. He turned to look at the Wuxiang Army’s formation across the way.

The three-year war at Xiaocang River was long past now, and could be spoken of with a certain grandeur in hindsight — but only those who had lived through it could understand how brutal it truly had been, the elite Jurchen assault, the endless waves of bloody fighting against a million-strong army.

The skirmishes and guerrilla fighting through the mountains, the desperate holding of Xiaocang River, the later breaching of the dikes, the bloody breakout, the successive great battles of the northwest — what Mao Yishan remembered most clearly were the comrades who had fallen beside him, one after another, the blood and the half-mad screaming on the battlefield. He could no longer count how many times he had led charges, his blade notched from use, his palms split open, covered head to toe in blood, exhausted to the point of collapsing among the corpses — and how many times he had had to claw his way out of a pile of rotting bodies, only to stumble, by pure luck, back to the main Chinese Army force.

He closed his eyes and opened them again, and what flooded past was the hellish scent of blood and gunsmoke. Behind him, after a burst of unified shouting, a wall of fighting spirit had already risen like a forest.

A hot-air balloon rose into the sky. Mao Yishan’s hand swung at his side, and he drew his steel blade.

“Let’s go,” he said.

Noon had come.

The Black Banner surged down the hillsides, across the valleys, and soon arrows and cannon-fire crossed in the air. The Black Banner launched its assault on the Wuxiang Army, striking simultaneously along the front lines at Changqing Gorge, Great King Mountain, and Xiufeng Pass.

At this point the Chinese Army force exposed on the front lines numbered fewer than ten thousand. But for the Wuxiang Army, experiencing the Chinese Army’s assault for the first time, even an offensive of this scale brought immense pressure. The first hot-air balloon rose from the southwest and, carried by the wind toward Lu Qiaoshan’s own command position, dropped explosive charges along the way. Part of the Chinese Army even launched a formal assault directly toward Lu Qiaoshan’s position. The exchange of cannon fire scattered the tightly packed infantry formations the Wuxiang Army had been trained to hold, and the terrain of Liangshan denied their infantry the composure of open-field formations. It was only now that the Wuxiang Army soldiers discovered, to their astonishment, that the Chinese Army’s veterans were not, in fact, afraid of the howling cannon fire. Shells danced and exploded through the rugged mountains, yet against troops spread out across such broad terrain, the cannons’ power, for all their apparent ferocity, proved fairly limited.

The Chinese Army soldiers pressing forward converged, with practiced coordination, on a single point, while at the same time their own formation had already been scattered by the few shells that reached them. Infantry were forbidden to retreat — military law demanded only advance — and the two sides’ soldiers collided head-on, the Chinese Army forcing a chaotic gap through sheer will.

In this first exchange, a small Wuxiang artillery position was overrun by Chinese Army troops, and someone set fire to the powder, triggering a tremendous explosion.

The disadvantage suffered at the very first moment of contact was, for the Wuxiang Army, still a manageable problem. What truly frightened them was, perhaps, Langge, the Mangshan chief who had been pressing Lu Qiaoshan for battle all along. The Mangshan Yi had never before witnessed the true strength of the Black Banner; even with all the trouble Langge had caused in the mountains, the Chinese Army had always shown restraint, waiting to bring the many Yi tribes together before acting against him. So when the mighty, hundred-thousand-strong Wuxiang Army heard that the Black Banner had come and abruptly shifted into a defensive posture, Langge could not help but harbor doubts.

Especially when the Black Banner Army — never more than twenty-odd thousand men in total — launched a bold assault against the Wuxiang Army, he was, for a moment, convinced the enemy had lost their minds entirely.

“This isn’t what they’re really after… prepare the crossbows, shoot those balloons out of the sky—” Lu Qiaoshan, commanding from the center, kept his composure, ordering the center forces to press forward while grinding down the Black Banner’s assault through sheer attrition, and at the same time deploying reinforced ballistae specially adapted to defend against the balloons overhead — over the years, the study of natural science, supported by the Crown Prince, had flourished in the Jiangning region, and it had not been entirely for nothing; to guard against a repeat of the balloon assassination attempt on the throne, the reinforcement of heavy crossbows for anti-air defense had produced no small results.

At a quarter past noon, the Chinese Army’s true intentions began to reveal themselves to Lu Qiaoshan.

Less than a quarter hour after the “full-scale” assault by fewer than ten thousand Chinese Army troops had begun, the true striking force of the Black Banner launched its assault against Xiufeng Pass, the front line stretching out madly, like a steel blade driving in with tremendous force.

After studying the map twice over, Lu Qiaoshan slowly began to grasp what he was looking at — a tactic that, to any onlooker, would seem reckless to the point of madness, and perhaps one that only the Black Banner Army could truly execute.

At that moment the Wuxiang Army’s hundred thousand troops were, unavoidably, divided into several groups across the Liangshan region. But to guard against being cut apart and struck down piecemeal by the Black Banner, Lu Qiaoshan and the others had specifically strengthened coordination between the various units. The hundred thousand troops now stretched from northwest to southeast; though the separated units maintained some capacity to support one another, in theory it still remained, overall, a relatively unified whole.

Xiufeng Pass was a fairly level passage connecting two smaller mountain ranges, something of a dividing line within the great army — but in the realm of “common sense,” this line meant little. It split the whole army into a rough seven-to-three ratio, and yet even so, Lu Qiaoshan’s own side held some seventy thousand men, while the other end of Xiufeng Pass still held thirty thousand. Even split off from a hundred thousand, thirty thousand men remained a fully organized army.

And yet… Lu Qiaoshan recalled Ning Yi’s attitude from a few days before.

“I’m asking you — give them a way to live…”

“…There’s a war on.”

That simple attitude had, today, turned into an equally simple assault.

“Whatever it costs… take back Xiufeng Pass! Send word at once — tell Chen Yuguang and the others to hold the line! Never mind achieving anything — just hold!”

Lu Qiaoshan issued the order. At that moment, at Xiufeng Pass, the last stretch of the northern ridge was still holding on, bitterly. And at the same time, in the mountains beyond, visible even by eye from a distance, the fighting had already begun.

Fifteen thousand Chinese Army troops, split into three columns, surged toward the more than thirty thousand men under General Chen Yuguang. Cannon fire rolled without end, explosions rising and shaking the surrounding mountains. Chen Yuguang and the other commanders immediately took up defensive positions, while at the same time Lu Qiaoshan led his own forces in the struggle to retake Xiufeng Pass, concentrating every cannon on the position. On the high ground, Chinese Army soldiers who had fought their way onto Xiufeng dug trenches and set up iron cannon amid the terrain.

The brutal struggle of attack and defense began from this moment and continued for an entire afternoon, gunsmoke and the stench of blood spreading for over ten li across the mountains of Liangshan…