The sky hung grey and pale as the hundred and seventy thousand troops, spread across the endless autumn scenery along the north bank of the Yellow River, presented an overwhelming, thunderous spectacle. The north wind swept the ground, bending the white grass flat; withered grass and dust stretched alongside the sprawling battle formation into the distance, and as the army maneuvered, beacon smoke had already begun to rise on the far horizon.
Though surrounded by the vastness of the great formation, the occasional shouts of soldiers around him gathered into something like the surge of a tide. Li Xizhi, mounted on his horse, watched the dust kicked up by the shifting ranks ahead, and felt his own blood begin to run hot.
Even at this final moment, he had still been trying to guess at the Black Banner’s true purpose — was this meant to intimidate and pressure him, to keep him from daring a full assault on Daming Prefecture? Or was it a feint, concealing some other objective entirely?… But now the enemy had truly come charging in, and matching it was the fact that the “Guangwu Army,” under Wang Shanyue and the others, had opened the gates of Daming Prefecture and formed ranks to charge out from the south. The enemy’s strategic intent was, in the end, so blunt and straightforward that he no longer needed to second-guess himself — but what this revealed beneath the surface still left his face cold and his mind reeling, as if he had just been slapped across the face in full view of everyone.
Fifty thousand men charging at a hundred and seventy thousand, and doing so with such resolve — this could only mean the enemy believed their combat strength to be far superior to his own, and intended, before facing off against the main Jin armies of Zongfu and Zongwang, to first sweep his own force of over a hundred thousand entirely off the battlefield.
The fury and humiliation of confronting this truth left Li Xizhi trembling from head to toe, but before long that feeling transformed into a boiling determination and killing intent. If Li Xizhi’s heart had still harbored some hesitation, some willingness to play along outwardly while biding his time, by now his mind was entirely consumed with the resolve to crush both of these forces. Held in such contempt — if he could not defeat these fifty thousand men, what right would he have left to call himself a man?
With over a hundred thousand troops spread across a battlefield spanning ten-odd li, to guard against a large-scale collapse, Li Xizhi split his army into one defensive line after another, hoping to use a dense, layered defense to absorb the Black Banner’s spearhead. Li Xizhi did not underestimate his enemy — he understood well how formidable the Black Banner’s assault could be — but however fierce their attack, they numbered only ten thousand men. Even if it meant dragging things out, he was determined to grind them down to exhaustion on this very plain.
That day was the eleventh of the eighth month, in the ninth year of the Jianshuo era. As the morning sun rose, the Chinese Army launched its assault along two fronts, beginning its effort to punch straight through Li Xizhi’s forces. At the same time, to the south, toward Daming Prefecture, the Guangwu Army split into three columns and struck Li Xizhi’s position from different directions.
As the sun climbed higher, north of Daming Prefecture, the roar of over two hundred thousand men locked in fierce combat, together with the thunder of cannon fire, seemed to bring the very sky to a boil. Arrows flew in chaotic swarms; charges and explosions occasionally cut across this deep-autumn hillside, gunsmoke drifting through the air alongside the blasts. This was the first great battle the Central Plains had seen since Xiaocang River, and cannon had by now become fairly widespread — though neither side, whatever the quality of their weapons, had yet mastered their use with real skill. On the southern front, Guangwu Army units occasionally broke through enemy lines, cutting straight into the opposing artillery positions and triggering massive explosions; at other times, units of their own broke and scattered under the enemy’s cannon fire.
The Chinese Army to the north handled the cannon fire far more capably. When the great three-year war at Xiaocang River finally ended in a southward withdrawal, some men had been deliberately left behind in the Central Plains by Ning Yi, while others had simply become separated from the main force and been unable to head south. Those who had been scattered through the Central Plains and gradually found their way back had, over time, largely gathered around the Liangshan region and joined Zhu Biao’s ranks. These soldiers had lived through some of the most brutal fighting of the war; after three years of continuous battle, they had long since grown accustomed to the rhythm of combat. As the later saying went, veterans fear rifles while new recruits fear cannon — but these men already understood the power of artillery and how to counter it. Within two hours, the Black Banner Army drove forward relentlessly, crushing several ten-thousand-strong units under Li Xizhi’s command led by Tang Dingyi, Liu Hui, and Geng Guo’an in succession, pushing their advance to within five li of Li Xizhi’s own position, around a place called Withered Grass Shop.
Riding on the momentum of their early success, the Guangwu Army’s assault to the south likewise kept advancing steadily. Li Xizhi’s defensive line, made up of his hundred and seventy thousand men, continued to shift and reorganize under his direction; here and there units broke and fled, only to be replaced by fresh troops, with the scattered soldiers regrouped and sent back in. After more than an hour of fighting, Kou Li, a commander Li Xizhi had stationed on the southern line with three thousand men, suddenly defected and turned his blade against his own side, instantly triggering the collapse of nearly ten thousand men caught in the front line. Li Xizhi’s nephew, Li Xuanwu, led the nearby troops in a desperate fight and finally managed to stabilize the situation.
Still, despite the fact that both the southern and northeastern assaults had continued advancing steadily through the first two hours, by noon that day, Li Xizhi, positioned with his central command, finally allowed himself a breath of relief — at Withered Grass Shop on the northeastern front, nearly forty thousand men had finally managed to hold the Black Banner’s advance in place, and though the fighting to the south remained fierce, its momentum, too, had begun to slow. As long as he could bring the enemy’s advance to a halt, he judged, the situation from here on would favor him.
That was what he thought — and, in truth, it wasn’t wrong.
Only, right at noon, a massive explosion suddenly erupted from the rear flank of his main position. Smoke and dust billowed upward, the earth shaking as though the mountains themselves trembled. Li Xizhi turned to look and found, to his shock, that the explosion had occurred barely two hundred zhang behind his own flank — someone had detonated the supply train’s gunpowder. War horses screamed and bolted, chaos spreading rapidly, and a group of riders came charging forward. “The Black Banner is here — kill Li Xizhi—”
“Lu Jianyun has turned traitor—”
“The little wretch is asking to die!” Li Xizhi’s expression turned fierce, and he drew the great blade at his side with a single motion. “The Black Banner’s assault has already worn itself thin! This is nothing but a desperate, reckless gambit from a bunch of clowns! Today the advantage is ours — men, follow me, and we’ll cut this traitor down! I’ll take his head with my own hands—”
He did not stop, in that moment, to question why there should be traitors so close to him — the Black Banner planting spies was, after all, nothing unusual — and, seasoned in war his whole life, he roared and charged forward himself. But the elite troops behind him had already blocked the cavalry’s advance. The mutineers retreated in panic, and nearby troops were already closing in from every direction. As Li Xizhi shouted his orders, a rider covered head to toe in blood came galloping frantically from the northeast. The scout tumbled off his horse as he reached him, and his very first words left Li Xizhi frozen in place.
“Withered Grass Shop has fallen—”
“…What did you say!” Li Xizhi’s mind went blank for a moment. For an instant, he swung his blade toward the man — but the scout, his voice choked with sobs, went on to his second sentence.
“Tang Dingyi has turned traitor — he’s cut off General Liu Hui’s head…”
“Turned traitor, your mother’s traitor, Tang Dingyi…”
Li Xizhi’s whole body shook, rage leaving him speechless — yet five li was no great distance, and already, to the northeast, chaos was swelling into something enormous, troops caught up in the collapse and routed, surging this way. Li Xizhi immediately dispatched twenty thousand men forward, the military police drawing their blades to maintain order on one hand while trying to gather the fleeing troops and hold off the advancing Black Banner on the other. But the chain reaction had already begun — before Lu Jianyun and the other earlier mutineers could even be surrounded and killed, two more acts of defection erupted within the ranks, followed almost immediately by yet another explosion among the supply train.
The twenty thousand men sent forward began to break apart the very moment they made contact with the oncoming enemy formation. The Black Banner surged into view like a great wave crashing through, and voices could be heard shouting, “The Chinese Army is here — surrender and live!” Li Xizhi ordered the military police to begin executing deserters, hoping to lead his elite central guard in a charge of his own — but what lay ahead of him now was already a full-scale rout rolling backward like an unraveling scroll. On his flank, a force of roughly five thousand routed men, originally under Feng Qize’s command, now shouted their own defection and charged furiously toward Li Xizhi’s position. During the battle at Linhe Hollow, what Feng Qize had feared above all else was exactly this — betrayal from within his own ranks — and yet in that battle, no Black Banner infiltrators had ever appeared. This same group of routed men, having made their way back to Li Xizhi and been reorganized, was now the very last group anyone would have expected to turn traitor.
Over two hundred thousand men had been locked in slaughter since morning, and by now the entire battlefield had boiled over into an inextricable mess, chaos upon chaos. In that single hour at midday, Li Xizhi witnessed the most surreal spectacle of his entire life. With Tang Dingyi’s defection as the turning point, out of his hundred and seventy thousand troops, as many as twenty thousand men defected outright after their commanders were turned, in acts of betrayal both large and small, riddling his army through like a sieve in an instant and simultaneously shattering the morale of his more than a hundred thousand remaining troops.
His eyes bloodshot, Li Xizhi led his twenty thousand personal elite troops in a desperate charge. Before long, his nephew Li Xuanwu arrived as well, bringing his own men. These thirty thousand troops clashed on the battlefield, set against the backdrop of the collapse and scattering of more than a hundred thousand others. The Black Banner and the Guangwu Army pursued from behind, the battlefield stretching for over ten li, spreading westward past Daming Prefecture. Li Xizhi’s personal forces were chased the entire way, all the way to the bank of the Yellow River southwest of Daming Prefecture.
By evening, over fifteen thousand of his troops had been surrounded on the riverbank, attempting a last, desperate stand. In the brutal assault that followed, great numbers of soldiers, crushed together and pushed from behind, were driven straight into the Yellow River. Li Xizhi, shielded at the center by his nephew and personal guards, had by now lost all his fighting spirit, shaking his head over and over, muttering only: “Impossible, impossible…”
If the Black Banner had truly possessed this many infiltrators from the very start, this battle could never have lasted until noon at all.
And yet, all of it had unfolded before his very eyes.
Before this, he had been a warlord ruling a portion of the Central Plains in his own right; by rights, he should have been one of the players moving pieces on this great board. Yet with the outbreak of war, his hundred and seventy thousand elite troops, facing an assault of only fifty thousand men, had collapsed within a single night.
It was almost impossible to imagine just how many wavering, uncertain men had already existed within his army before this — as this battle, with no room left for turning back, unfolded, the Chinese Army’s agents within had completed the work of turning every one of them.
The sun was setting. The Chinese Army began calling for surrender. Li Xizhi, covered head to toe in filth and blood, took up his blade, unwilling to yield. What answered his personal guard was a volley of incoming cannon fire; Li Xizhi was knocked to the ground by a shell, staggered back to his feet, and charged, blade swinging, at the Chinese Army soldiers closing in — who cut him down where he stood.
“We told you already — grown men are fighting here. Kids, get out of the way.”
At that moment, along the Yellow River, countless corpses tumbled and turned in the churning water, the gunsmoke outside Daming Prefecture still not yet cleared. That day was only a few days before the arrival of Wanyan Zongbi’s Jurchen vanguard — and yet the collapse of this hundred-and-seventy-thousand-strong army would, in these few short days, draw the attention of the entire world.
Turn the clock back some twenty-odd days. Wang Shanyue met with the Chinese Army’s Zhu Biao on a hillside, and brought with him a dangerous proposal.
“I have a reckless plan, and I’ve come to bring it to you today.”
“…”
“Ever since the Jurchens marched south, the Central Plains has fallen silent, without a voice of resistance, for years now. I mean to seize Daming Prefecture and cause the Jurchens some real trouble — but a small nuisance like that likely isn’t enough to stir people’s spirits, nor can it guarantee the Jurchens will stay tied down at Daming… The Black Banner has countless agents in place. Help me finish off Li Xizhi first.”
“…The Chinese Army does have agents in place, but agents are no gods. However incompetent Li Xizhi may be, he still has a hundred and seventy thousand men arrayed before him — that’s no small task.”
“Help me finish off Li Xizhi, and I won’t ask you to help me defend Daming.”
“…You really don’t care whether you live or die.”
“…These years, Li Xizhi and the Jurchens have grown more and more brutal, and yet fewer and fewer people dare resist. This time the Jurchens march south with no intention of leaving the Wu Dynasty any room at all — and yet, in the Central Plains itself, hardly anyone dares to lift a hand, even though you’ve captured Liu Yu and could return the realm to Wu… The chief of Yellow Snake Stronghold, Dou Mingde, had his whole family killed by the Jurchens, and now no longer dares raise a hand against them. Yan Kan of Grey Mountain had his daughter taken and tortured to death by the Jin — I went to ask for his help, and he didn’t even believe me. If we can crush Li Xizhi, if we can pin the Jurchen army down at Daming Prefecture, then every extra day we manage it gives these people one more measure of confidence… Ning Yi was right — saving the realm requires the people of the realm themselves. Relying on us alone will never be enough.”
As he spoke these words, the stars stretched overhead across the night sky. Wang Shanyue, his hair long and his features almost feminine, carried in his eyes something that seemed to hold within it a cold, quiet hope. But Zhu Biao understood even more clearly — with all the Chinese Army had built up over the years, throwing everything into crushing Li Xizhi was not, in itself, impossible. The real problem was: once Li Xizhi was crushed, who would hold Daming Prefecture afterward? Without Li Xizhi to guard it, the only ones left to come for Daming would be the Jurchen army itself.
But the men of the Wang family had always been like this. More than twenty years earlier, when the Liao invaded from the north, Wang Qisong had led every man of his household to resist the Liao army, and all had been slaughtered — the elders skinned alive, their remains left incomplete even at burial. Now, the last surviving male of the Wang family was about to walk that same road once more.
“Help me kill Li Xizhi,” he said.
“I’ll hold Daming Prefecture — turn it into another Taiyuan!”
By the eleventh of the eighth month, Li Xizhi’s army, under the ferocious assault, collapsed like an avalanche. The Guangwu Army absorbed a small portion of the surviving troops and took over the supply train, but as for the greater number of men whose loyalty could not be trusted, they were released after a bit of persuasion. On the thirteenth of the eighth month, several hundred men arrived at Daming Prefecture from Yellow Snake Stronghold, and from then on, day after day, more and more bands of fighters arrived, absorbed one after another into the Guangwu Army’s ranks. By the sixteenth of the eighth month, as Wanyan Zongbi’s cavalry advanced to within a hundred li of Daming Prefecture, the righteous fighters who had gathered at Daming already numbered as many as six thousand. Many of them had lost family members to the Jurchen blade; others were men of conscience who had spent years chafing under Jurchen oppression, unable to act. Most of them understood well enough that once they entered Daming Prefecture, there would be little chance of ever leaving it again.
The Chinese Army withdrew from Daming Prefecture.
The moon of the fifteenth grows fullest on the sixteenth — and that night, Zhu Biao was the last to leave with the departing column. Looking back at Daming Prefecture, he saw Wang Shanyue atop the wall, smiling and waving, his robes white as snow, fluttering like something out of an old painting. In that moment, deep autumn had settled in, the Yellow River to the south still surging on as ever, and within that lone city, bathed in moonlight, lay an ambition of the most magnificent, heroic kind.
I will hold the Jurchens back — for as long as I possibly can.
Until…
…victory finally comes.