In the eighth month, the weather in Lin’an had begun to turn cool, though the heated, tense atmosphere in the city never seemed to cool down at all.

The clamor to defend the nation, revive the Wu Dynasty, and swear to march north never once let up. Students of the Imperial Academy took to the streets several times a month to give speeches; in the city’s taverns and teahouses, storytellers spun tales of bloody, tragic heroism; even the singing girls of the pleasure houses now mostly performed patriotic verse. Thanks to this atmosphere, the once-heated conflict between north and south had gradually softened, replaced by a shared sense of common enmity toward the enemy. Setting down the pen to take up arms had become something of a fashion among scholars, and there were wealthy merchants and gentry who donated family fortunes to the cause of resisting the invaders, becoming celebrated stories for a time.

After the seventh month, this heated atmosphere continued to rise, as time pressed forward with an air of mounting dread. Over the past month, at the Crown Prince’s urging, several Wu armies had already arrived at the front, preparing for a life-or-death confrontation with the Jurchens. Then came word that the armies of Zongfu and Zongbi had begun their march, followed soon after by news that the fighting in the southwest and along the Yellow River had, at last, begun in earnest.

At the arrival of these long-anticipated events, Qin Hui felt nothing like excitement — only an unbearable weight pressing down on his shoulders. Compared to his vigorous efforts of half a year, even a few months earlier, everything now felt as though it had spun entirely out of his control.

As the current Director of the Bureau of Military Affairs, Qin Hui nominally held the highest military authority in southern Wu. Yet under the pressure of the Zhou imperial house and the “great cause” of resisting the Jin, there was only so much he could actually do. A few months earlier, seizing on the fury and fear stirred up after the Black Banner Army captured Liu Yu and shifted the blame onto the Wu Dynasty, Qin Hui had thrown everything into a plan he had been quietly preparing for years: exhaust every effort to crush the Black Banner first, then use the blade sharpened against the Black Banner to fend off the Jurchens. If things went well, perhaps a path to survival could be carved out.

Emperor Zhou Yong of the Jianshuo era, thoroughly frightened by the Black Banner’s actions, had once agreed to this plan, and Princess Imperial Zhou Pei had for a time stood behind him on it. But before long, the whole plan encountered obstruction in its execution. The lobbying of certain armies with private ties to the Black Banner was not, in itself, the main obstacle — it was Zhou Yong’s sudden wavering that left Qin Hui feeling utterly powerless. In the end, the order that the hundred-thousand-strong Wuxiang Army be forced to attack the southwest alone left Qin Hui stunned; during this period he had mobilized nearly the full strength of the court, yet in the end Zhou Yong’s hesitant, evasive attitude still left his plan crippled.

The Black Banner Army had withstood the repeated assaults of a million-strong force in the northwest, even crushing the massive puppet-Qi army into a rout. What good would a hundred thousand men do? If they could not commit everything, better not to act at all!

He puzzled over Zhou Yong’s change of heart — though Zhou Yong had always been an indecisive man by nature — and at first suspected Crown Prince Jun Wu had been secretly lobbying behind the scenes. Only later did he discover that the true source lay with the Princess Imperial’s residence. Zhou Pei, who had once been furious with the Black Banner beyond measure, in the end offered her father a chillingly detached piece of advice.

“…Ning Yi once killed the Late Emperor, Zhou Zhe, at Bianliang, and later captured Liu Yu inside his own palace. If we truly disregard the Jin threat and throw everything we have into destroying him, and Ning Yi, cornered, decides to gamble everything — what then becomes of Your Majesty’s own safety?”

With three sides locked in contention, the strategy of destroying the Black Banner first and then resisting the Jurchens had always been highly controversial. Whatever else might be said of it, what truly swayed Zhou Yong was likely this very argument from the Princess Imperial: push Ning Yi too hard, and was the palace in Lin’an really safe? And given Zhou Yong’s timid, cautious nature, he took this warning deeply to heart. On one hand he no longer dared push the Black Banner to the brink; on the other, he still wished to sever the private ties between the various armies and the Black Banner. In the end, the entire strategy fell onto the shoulders of Lu Qiaoshan and his Wuxiang Army.

The plan concerning the Black Banner had, in truth, translated into a tightening of discipline across many armies, and had indeed been carried out to some degree. Qin Hui had followed through with orders to overhaul discipline army by army — though this amounted to little more than a token gesture. For months, Qin Hui had kept trying to add fuel to the war in the southwest — proposing, for instance, that two more armies be redeployed, adding at least three hundred thousand more men, in hopes of pinning down the Black Banner for good. But Crown Prince Jun Wu, invoking the great cause of resisting the Jin, pushed hard for northern defense instead, refusing to allow excessive internal attrition in the southwest. By the end of the seventh month, when word came that the southwest campaign had formally begun, Qin Hui knew the chance had already slipped away.

This period had not been without its achievements for the court. Leveraging the rupture with the southwest and the tightening of discipline across the armies had strengthened the authority of the central government, while the Crown Prince and the Princess Imperial, using the looming threat of the Jurchens, worked hard to ease the once-sharp tensions between north and south — with considerable success, at least across the Jiangnan region. Princess Imperial Zhou Pei and Crown Prince Jun Wu had done everything in their power to strengthen the Wu Dynasty from within; toward this end, Qin Hui himself had gone back and forth with Zhou Pei many times, though with little progress.

This, too, was part of the clash of ideas born from over ten years of war, humiliation, and reflection between Wu and the Jurchens. The Wu Dynasty had long prized a culture of literary refinement, of scheming and expedience. After more than ten years of taking blows, more and more people had come to believe that only genuine strength from within could save them — people who placed their hopes in the miracles that unyielding resolve alone could achieve, preferring to rely as little as possible on outside forces until the very last moment.

Crown Prince Jun Wu, young and full of vigor, held this view most strongly of all. Compared to excessive reliance on external scheming, he placed far greater value on internal unity, on the strength that could be drawn from northerners and southerners standing together beneath the Wu banner — and it was for this reason that he found the strategy of striking the Black Banner before the Jurchens most distasteful of all. Princess Imperial Zhou Pei, at first, had understood the practical realities clearly enough. She was never a committed advocate of north-south unity; more often, she was the one left to clean up her brother’s messes, and generally coordinated more easily with those who understood the realities on the ground. But after the affair with Liu Yu, she too seemed to have shifted in this direction.

Though striking the Black Banner first and then facing the Jurchens could be seen as a kind of burning-the-boats resolve, Zhou Pei had begun, almost unconsciously, to resist the idea of such a gamble when their own strength was still insufficient. In several discussions, Qin Hui came to realize that while she, too, hated the Black Banner in the southwest, what she hated even more was the weakness and disunity within the Wu Dynasty itself — and so the southwest strategy, in her hands, had been reduced to little more than disciplinary pressure on the armies, while the pressure from the Jurchens was redirected entirely toward healing the internal rift between north and south. In earlier times, Qin Hui might well have nodded along with her on this.

But now, there was no more time left.

Over these past months, half of Qin Hui’s hair had turned white, and his whole body had grown suddenly thin. Part of it was the weight of worry on his mind; the other part was that court politics, too, had been anything but calm. Once the southwest strategy had been dragged into an unworkable, half-formed shape, impeachments against Qin Hui’s faction began appearing one after another in court, with all manner of interpretations offered for his southwestern strategy. Qin Hui, for all the standing he held in Zhou Yong’s eyes, still could not compare to the likes of Cai Jing or Tong Guan in their prime. When word came that the Wuxiang Army had entered Liangshan, he wrote a memorial admitting fault and requesting to resign his post.

Zhou Yong refused to accept it, rejecting it outright. As a father, he naturally trusted and supported his ambitious son in all matters; but as an emperor, he also placed great trust in Qin Hui’s steady, dependable character — with his son fighting at the front, he needed someone reliable holding down the rear. And so Qin Hui’s petition, no sooner submitted, was met with a harsh scolding from Zhou Yong and sent back rejected.

Qin Hui then submitted a second resignation. Whatever changes had come to the southwest strategy since, it had, after all, originated with him, and now, with Lu Qiaoshan’s defeat seeming inevitable and the situation in the southwest deteriorating by the day, he knew the responsibility would fall on him regardless. Zhou Yong, furious at his defeatist words in open court, privately comforted him at length all the same — for even as this second resignation letter was submitted, news had arrived from the southwest. On the twenty-sixth, Lu Qiaoshan’s main force had met a fierce counterstrike from several tens of thousands of Black Banner troops at Xiufeng Pass in Liangshan. Chen Yuguang’s force of over thirty thousand had been shattered in a single blow, the routed troops scattering into the mountains. Afterward Lu Qiaoshan’s own main body of seventy thousand had been struck and cut apart by the Black Banner Army; Lu Qiaoshan had taken up defensive positions across several mountains, dragging the war into a stalemate.

The situation in the southwest had taken a sharp turn for the worse by the fourth day after entering the mountains, and Qin Hui’s early foresight now helped restore a good deal of his standing. That day, many colleagues came to offer him comfort and urge him to stay on. Some even said that Lu Qiaoshan was clever and skilled in war, and though caught off guard by the Black Banner’s surprise assault, he had at last steadied his lines — if the strategy were adjusted in time, the situation in Liangshan might yet turn around. Qin Hui only shook his head and sighed.

After seeing his colleagues off, his old wife, Madam Wang, came to comfort him. Qin Hui sighed. “Ten-odd years ago, the former Right Chancellor, Lord Siyuan, must have felt something much like what I feel now. The world so rarely goes as one wishes — however earnest one’s devotion, how can it ever withstand the shifting whims of those above?”

Madam Wang was silent a moment. “The clansmen and children are all out there too, my lord. If you’re going to step down, you should let them know.”

“Step down? Easier said than done. Eighty-one years of the past, three thousand li from home, alone with my bones scattered across the horizon, gazing back at my homeland, tears falling…” Qin Hui laughed and shook his head — the lines he recited were the death poem of that once-mighty statesman of old, Cai Jing. “Five times summoned to the golden hall to serve as chancellor, ten times honored with the imperial edicts — looking back on those glory days now feels no more than idle talk… no more than idle talk indeed, wife. Cai Yuanzhang held the highest place at court for decades, one man beneath the throne and above ten thousand others — and in the end, he was starved to death, slowly, in the flesh.”

When the Jurchens marched south the second time, Cai Jing had been demoted and sent south, and though he had stood at the very peak of the court for decades, when the Wu Dynasty collapsed, the blame fell largely upon him. At eighty years old, Cai Jing traveled south with nothing, unable even to buy rice with what money he had left, and in the end starved to death at Chongjiao Temple in Tanzhou. For ten-odd years since, the outside world had claimed that his many misdeeds had turned the common people against him, so that even with money he could not buy food — proof, they said, of the people’s righteous indignation. But in truth, did the common people really possess such discerning eyes?

In their day, Cai Jing and Tong Guan had stood together at the center of court, and most of the factional strife at court had involved the two of them. Qin Hui, however steady his own path, had never been quite so conspicuous a figure. But now, he himself had become the head of a faction — his clansmen, his students, the officials at court all depended on him for their livelihood. If he truly stepped down now, there was no telling how many of them would end up walking the same road as Cai Jing.

“But, wife, there’s no need to worry.” After a moment of silence, Qin Hui waved his hand. “At least not this time. His Majesty feels he owes me something. This time, in the southwest matter, I pulled the fuel out from under the fire in time and managed to stabilize the situation — I won’t end up following in Cai Jing’s footsteps. But responsibility still has to be borne. And bearing it, this time, is for His Majesty’s sake — taking the loss now is really gaining something in the long run. As for those people outside — no need to pay them any mind. This old man accepts the blame, and lets them have their little scolding. As for the affairs of the world…”

He paused. “…they’ve all been ruined by a bunch of reckless young fools who don’t know their place!”

That night, the lights of Lin’an burned bright, the undercurrents stirring beneath the glittering surface remaining ambiguous and obscure.

In the southwest, at Small Liangshan, on the sixth day since the fighting began, the sound of explosions rang out through the mountain gullies after nightfall. In the distance, along the foothills, the Wuxiang Army’s camps stood layered one behind another; torches burned sparsely along the perimeter, and the sentries with their crossbows crouched behind the wooden barricades, silent, not daring to make a sound.

The forest opposite the camp lay in pitch darkness. At some point, a faint voice emerged from within. “Limpy, how’s it looking?”

“Don’t rush, I see a big one…” The young man up in the tree had before him a long firearm, nearly as tall as a man, and was surveying the distant camp through a telescope. This was Yuwen Feidu, who had followed Ning Yi and now walked with a limp. After his leg was injured, he had thrown himself into practicing archery, and later, once firearm technology had advanced, was among a group in the Chinese Army selected by Ning Yi to train with the new guns.

At the research bureau in the three southwestern counties, though firearms could already be manufactured, the demands on steel quality remained high, and machining and rifling technology were still in their infancy. At this stage, Ning Yi had pooled the Chinese Army’s entire research capacity to produce a small number of long-range firearms paired with telescopic sights. Though the performance of each individual weapon still varied, and even the specially made bullets differed slightly from one another, affecting accuracy — even at long range, where precision remained poor — a gifted marksman like Yuwen Feidu could still, in many situations, turn this into a real strategic advantage.

“Don’t go firing off shots recklessly.” Crouched beneath the tree, laying mines in the hidden spot, his partner Xiao Hei murmured, “If you ask me, this gun of yours, using it now is a bit of a waste — every time, you only take out a small fry or two, and not even reliably, and you’re just tipping them off. If you took this thing north and used it to put a bullet through Wanyan Zonghan, now that would really be something.”

“Look far ahead and think of the future… The teacher said fighting drives technological progress. Right now, this thing only hits one shot in three at a hundred paces, and each barrel doesn’t even last that long — this is exactly the place to get some practice in, and when I go back, I can think about how to improve it. Heh, someday I’ll be able to hit whoever I want within three hundred paces — everyone will be calling me daddy. Got one.”

No sooner had Yuwen Feidu finished speaking than he pulled the trigger. In the night, a flash of fire suddenly bloomed, the branches trembling as Yuwen Feidu, cradling the long barrel, scrambled down the tree like a monkey. Across the way, the camp erupted into commotion. Beneath the tree, Xiao Hei hissed under his breath, “Damn it, damn it — I told you to be careful. Did you even confirm it was one of the big shots?”

“Looked like it — I’ve been waiting all night for this.”

“Did you hit him?”

“Not sure, didn’t get a clear look. Let’s move, let’s move.”

“This way, this way — you want to get yourself blown up, Limpy?”

“You’ve got a black heart to match your name, planting mines everywhere without a care — you’ll get what’s coming to you one day.”

The two of them traded insults back and forth as they scrambled away along the dark hillside in a rush. They had not gone far when, from the spot where they had been hiding, a sudden boom rang out, light blossoming in the trees — likely a scout from the enemy camp who had crept up and tripped one of the mines Xiao Hei had left behind. The two exchanged a grin and headed on toward the Chinese Army camp on the far side of the mountain.

On the second day of the eighth month, the sixth day of fighting at Small Liangshan, the battle continued — though what looked like a stalemate was, in truth, the Chinese Army’s own restraint, aimed at limiting its own losses. Aside from the ferocious splitting and swallowing of the Wuxiang Army’s forces on the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh, once Lu Qiaoshan pulled his forces back and shifted to an all-around defense, the Chinese Army’s offensive had grown measured and methodical.

This restraint meant the Chinese Army, each day, used its superior numbers to take one hilltop position after another, harassing at night, laying mines along mountain paths, but no longer launching any large-scale frontal assaults.

Over the past ten or twenty years, both the Wu Dynasty and the Liao state had been sliding toward twilight, their strength banked low like embers. Ever since the battle at Chuhe Fort, where Wanyan Aguda had crushed a hundred thousand Liao troops with only thirty-seven hundred men, and later at Huburda Ridge, where twenty thousand pursued and slaughtered seven hundred thousand, this myth of victory against overwhelming odds had never really stopped. In the Jurchens’ first southern campaign, a few tens of thousands of troops had crushed a million-strong loyalist army beneath the walls of Bianliang; in the second, they breached Bianliang itself; in the third, they pushed all the way to the south of the Yangtze, seizing Zhou Yong and combing the hills and searching the seas, routing every Wu army along the way. And the Black Banner, too, had once crushed the massed millions of the Great Qi at Xiaocang River, seemingly with ease. Using superior numbers to defeat the many with the few seemed almost to have become the rule of the age.

But it had to be admitted that once a soldier’s quality rose past a certain threshold, once a rout on the battlefield could be corrected in time rather than spiraling into total collapse, war no longer resolved itself so easily in a single decisive stroke. In recent years the Wuxiang Army had undergone rigorous reorganization, with extremely strict military discipline, and after the setback of the first day, Lu Qiaoshan had swiftly changed strategy, ordering the army to continuously fortify its defenses, with each unit supporting the others in both attack and defense, until at last the intensity of the Chinese Army’s assault began to slacken. By this point, Chen Yuguang’s routed force of thirty thousand had scattered, leaving Lu Qiaoshan’s main body reduced to just sixty thousand.

Over the following days, the Chinese Army, having identified the weak points in the Wuxiang Army’s defenses, took a camp of several thousand men almost every day, while Lu Qiaoshan worked hard to strengthen his defenses and gather up the scattered, defeated troops, managing thereby to steady the situation somewhat. Yet Lu Qiaoshan understood well enough that the Chinese Army’s restraint from a full-scale assault did not mean they lacked the strength for one — they were simply, methodically, grinding down the Wuxiang Army’s will to fight, minimizing resistance as they went. Having spent years training his troops in the southwest, Lu Qiaoshan believed he had done everything in his power; the Wuxiang Army of today was utterly transformed from the ragtag force it had once been — and it was for this reason that he had felt some confidence in leading them into Liangshan in the first place.

In his original imagining, even if the Wuxiang Army could not defeat the Black Banner, it would at least demonstrate to the enemy the Wu Dynasty’s resolve to reform itself after painful reflection, and inflict real difficulty on them in turn. He had never imagined that the Chinese Army’s opening blow, on the twenty-sixth of the seventh month, would be so ferocious — that Chen Yuguang’s thirty thousand troops, holding their ground with the utmost resolve, would be crushed and routed by a mere fifteen thousand Chinese Army soldiers right before Lu Qiaoshan’s own eyes. His seventy-thousand-strong main force had thrown everything into a counterattack, yet against a blocking force of fewer than ten thousand, an entire afternoon had passed, the woods across the way filled with smoke and running with blood, without gaining so much as a step past Xiufeng Pass.

This had been a true wake-up call. Everything since — the Chinese Army’s apparent restraint — was nothing more than the cold, calculated frugality that belonged to Ning Liheng alone. The hundred-thousand-strong army that had entered these mountains was, in truth, like something thrown directly into the maw of a great beast, being swallowed down step by step; now, even turning back had become almost impossible.

It was already past midnight, the lamps still burning in the command tent. Lu Qiaoshan, a bandage wrapped around his forehead, wrote furiously by lamplight, recording what he had learned in this war about the Chinese Army:

…The Black Banner’s iron cannon are formidable — it seems that, in past trading, the cannon sold to our side were not their best. In this battle, the cannon used by the Black Banner had a range some ten to twenty paces greater than our own. Through a determined assault by our elite troops, we managed to capture two of the enemy’s disabled cannon; I hope those in the rear can study them and restore their design…

…Their soldiers coordinate with great skill, their fighting spirit far surpassing our own — difficult to withstand. Reports suggest that those we faced this time were all veterans of their great war in the northwest. Now that iron cannon have come into use, many of our past tactics are no longer reliable; infantry can no longer easily form ranks in the open, and soldiers unable to coordinate smoothly may well find themselves shut out of future battles entirely…

…There is also the matter of the so-called “sudden-fire guns” used by Black Banner soldiers on the battlefield — appearing and vanishing without warning, impossible to guard against. According to reports from several of our men, they are believed to have only a handful of these weapons, yet capable of striking at a range of a hundred paces; this cannot be overlooked…

…From what I have observed, the application of natural science to the battlefield has proven to have an almost supernatural effect. Future battles will likely see more and more such novel developments appear, and whoever masters their underlying principles first will seize the decisive advantage. We, for our part, must study these principles thoroughly and strive to catch up…

Insects hummed in the night air; the torches burned on, giving off a steady, faint crackling sound. Lu Qiaoshan, who had not rested in days, looked pale, yet his gaze as he wrote never wavered, striving to preserve and pass on the lessons of the Wuxiang Army’s crushing defeat, to warn others who might come after. Before long, a soldier came to report that Langge, the Mangshan chief, had been brought back wounded: this formidable warrior, while leading scouts on a mission to hunt down Black Banner scouts, had triggered a mine and been badly injured. Lu Qiaoshan, hearing this, simply kept writing and paid it no further mind.

Across the tens of thousands of encampments scattered through Small Liangshan, campfires stretched on and on, glowing in the distance like the last light of a setting sun, soon to go dark within these great mountains.

At dawn, an envoy came from the Chinese Army side to the front of the Wuxiang Army’s camp, requesting to meet with Lu Qiaoshan. On hearing that a Black Banner envoy had arrived, Langge, his body wrapped in bandages, came to the main camp as well, his jaw clenched with fury.

The envoy, a man in his thirties, looked even angrier than Langge himself. “I am Su Wenyu, cousin of Su Wenfang. I’ve come this time on behalf of Master Ning, to offer you people a way out. Of course, you’re welcome to take me prisoner and torture me before sending me back — that way, when you all die later, my conscience will rest a little easier.”

As an envoy, his tone was hostile, his face full of open contempt, wearing the unmistakable look of a man who dared them to argue with him — clearly a crude attempt at intimidation in negotiation. It left Lu Qiaoshan’s face darkened for a long moment. Langge, the most hot-tempered of them all, having swallowed a bellyful of rage, finally spoke up. “You… cough, cough… go back and tell Ning Yi… cough…”

Su Wenyu glanced at him. “And who are you? Drop dead, consumptive bastard — go screw your mother!”