Atop the walls of Wozhou.

The bitter wind howled across the ramparts, slicing at flesh like a blade. Mouths opened, and from parched throats rose the metallic reek of blood; the roar of battle thundered like continuous peals of thunder, seething across the entire battlefield. Figures surged forward in waves, iron staffs crashing down onto skulls; bodies weighing nearly two hundred catties toppled like wild boars charging through the mountains, crashing to the ground, the dull, sickening sound of skulls striking the stone flagstones lost amid the countless other noises of battle. Arrows filled the air; amid the ice and snow, smoke and fire mingled atop the walls, soldiers pushed massive logs down toward the base of the walls. A boulder came hurtling through the sky, suddenly filling one side of his vision — he grabbed a soldier and rolled them both aside; flying shards of stone stung his face, and his vision swam amid the thunderous impact. Shi Jin shook his head, hauled himself up from the ground, snatched up a spear, and charged toward two Jurchen soldiers who had just scaled the wall a zhang or so away.

Still reeling from the boulder’s impact, his vision and balance not yet fully restored, he thrust the spear several times before finally driving it through one Jurchen soldier’s chest. The man, powerfully built as an ox, gripped the spear shaft in a death grip and refused to let go, even as another Jurchen warrior lunged at him from the side. Shi Jin let out a great roar, unleashed a burst of internal force, and the spear shaft shattered into splinters with a crack; he stepped forward and brought his fist down hard on the Jurchen’s forehead, and the man’s body crumpled limply onto the wall.

The Jurchen warrior who had charged from the side found his strike meeting empty air; as he turned, sword raised for a counter-slash, Shi Jin’s body was already crashing into him, mouth gaping wide with blood, the broken half of his spear shaft plunging into the man’s throat with a wet burst of thick blood. The Jurchen warrior staggered backward in his death throes; as Shi Jin wrenched the spear shaft free, the man collapsed into the pool of blood beneath the parapet, and moved no more.

Only then did Shi Jin turn back to retrieve his own weapon, and in the distance, at one corner of the wall, more than a dozen Jurchen soldiers had already surged up; the defending soldiers were being driven steadily back in the fighting, an officer shouting hoarsely. Shi Jin gripped his iron staff tightly and charged toward them.

“Don’t fall back — cut them down—!”

Countless hoarse, desperate shouts merged into a single tide of battle, and looking out across the field, the attacking soldiers below still surged forward in three separate columns across the snow-covered plain. In the distant snowfield, above the besieging army’s camp, flew the banner of the Jurchen general Shuliesu.

The eighth day of the twelfth month — the traditional Laba Festival. This was already the second time Shuliesu had led his troops to attack Wozhou.

The city’s defenses were in grave peril.

And not long before this — south of Taiyuan, in the region of Fenzhou, Prince Jin’s army had suffered a massive defeat. Over four hundred thousand men had been shattered, driven south in scattered retreat. Amid the chaos and confusion of reports, Prince Jin Tian Shi himself, who had personally led the campaign, had been swept away and separated from his forces — his whereabouts unknown.

…

A world of ice and snow.

Countless men trudged unevenly through the snow, one foot sinking deep, the next barely finding purchase. Tian Shi, clad in a black cloak, supported and was supported in turn by the soldiers and officers around him, pressing southward. After such a crushing defeat, having fled through the night without rest, he now felt waves of cold and fever washing over his body in turn, though he had not yet told those around him. Every so often he still turned back to shout encouragement to the men trailing behind.

He had a horse, of course, but was not riding it now. It was said that a truly great commander shared hardship equally with his men; in the heat of the earlier battle he had made no such show of it, but now that they had been defeated, he felt that as a regional lord, he ought to set this example — though he no longer knew whether it would do any good.

He had no idea how many soldiers were still following him, and there were many things he ought to have been thinking through, yet his thoughts refused to gather into anything coherent. At some point, Tian Shi felt everything go dark before his eyes, and he collapsed into the snow…

…

Weisheng. A grim, murderous atmosphere hung over the city.

A procession of carriages rolled through the long avenue, making its way toward the Tianji Palace at one end of the city.

Inside a carriage lit by candlelight, Lou Shuwan pored over a great map, news of Prince Jin’s disappearance having already reached her by the fastest possible means. She forced her mind to steady itself, searching the map — already marked and annotated in countless places — for the traces of each army, working through every possible turn the situation might now take.

Once war broke out, military intelligence traveled to the seats of power of every faction with the greatest possible speed; by the time news reached her, it meant others had already received it too, and at such a moment, she had to move quickly to steady the entire center of command.

The carriage was sealed all around; in the glow of the candlelight, the woman’s eyes, red and irritated from having gone without rest since the day before, remained wide open nonetheless. Suddenly the carriage lurched — Lou Shuwan reached out to steady the lamp, and from outside came the sound of shouting: “Kill that… bitch…”

“A hen crowing at dawn, bringing ruin upon the realm…”

“Treacherous whore, wicked woman—”

“Open your eyes and see clearly…”

“Being used by others—”

“She deserves to die—”

…

The chaotic shouts tangled together into a single roar. You Hongzhuo held his breath, drew his long saber, and moved toward the front of the carriage, his pace quickening with every step…

Through the vibrations traveling through the carriage floor came the sound of footsteps from the compartment ahead. The light through the window grew brighter and brighter; You Hongzhuo leapt out, and at the same moment, a figure burst from the window of the next carriage over, a red-tasseled spear already leveled at the carriages below. You Hongzhuo raised his long saber and swept it upward through the air; the other man, still staring at him in astonishment—

A flash of the blade.

A white-haired, long-bearded head flew up into the sky. You Hongzhuo landed back on the ground, and the surging crowd around him erupted into shouts as he swung his blade in a wide arc and charged toward the assassins from the martial underworld.

“Protect the Female Chancellor!”

“Fools deserve to die—”

“None of you would listen to the Dragon King’s words!”

Killing intent surged into the sky—

…

“What’s happening?” Lou Shuwan asked, though she already had a fairly clear idea in her heart.

“An assassination attempt, and also people who’ve come to protect you. Lady Lou, we…”

“…” Lou Shuwan listened quietly to the chaotic noise outside, and perhaps from having been too long exposed to the smoke of the flames, her eyes felt faintly warm. She reached up and firmly wiped her nose and mouth. “Leave a squad behind to hunt down the assassins. We continue on to the palace.”

“Yes.”

The carriage began moving again, leaving behind a long avenue where the fighting still continued.

…

At Linzhou, another siege was underway. The attacking force belonged to Wang Juyun’s most elite troops, the Mingwang Army; because the assault had been launched in haste, siege equipment was in considerably short supply, yet even so, with Wang Juyun himself leading from the front, the fighting remained extraordinarily brutal.

Linzhou had originally belonged to Zhangde, and like Wozhou, was one of the border cities on the northeastern edge of Prince Jin’s territory. The general defending Linzhou, Li Chengzhong, commanding a force of over thirty-seven thousand, had announced his defection to the Great Jin four days earlier. Retreating in defeat all the way, Wang Juyun had led his elite remaining forces here in a reckless, all-or-nothing assault, determined to smash Linzhou before Jurchen reinforcements could arrive, to serve as a warning to others.

The losses were enormous.

The defenders of Linzhou were faring no better. Although the Jurchens’ terror had loomed over everyone for more than a decade, and with the great army now bearing down, surrender had faced little real resistance — it likewise did little to inspire particularly high morale. As the two sides exchanged assault and counter-assault, Li Chengzhong himself climbed the walls repeatedly, constantly rallying the defending troops.

“Hold the walls! The Jin army will be here soon…”

“General Wanyan Shaba of the Great Jin is on his way with reinforcements — just hold one more day! One more day—!”

Wanyan Shaba’s army was indeed already on its way. Wang Juyun’s forces had launched three days of fierce assault without breaking the city’s defenses, and morale on both sides had gradually begun to shift. By the afternoon of this day, banners appeared on the southeastern side of the city.

Shaba’s army would certainly be coming from the north — so who was approaching from the south? Reinforcements from Prince Jin’s forces, or had the Jurchen eastern army already secured Daming and sent reinforcements of their own? Li Chengzhong rushed to the eastern wall, and then caught sight of an army coming into view, its banners standing out with striking clarity against the snow-covered ground…

“Who… how could this be… how could it be black…”

Black banners, spreading toward them…

…

The winter of the ninth year of Wujian. Heavy snow gradually sealed the land north of the Yangtze in ice, yet the fighting north of the Yellow River had not paused for a single moment since it began.

Between the ninth and tenth months, the Jurchens’ eastern and western armies had each engaged the forces standing in their path in major battles. The eastern army had quickly compressed the fighting into the area around Daming Prefecture, but the stubborn resistance in the west had only just begun to unfold.

From Yanmen Pass all the way to the ruins of Taiyuan, Wang Juyun and Tian Shi’s resistance had come in wave after wave, scattering and regrouping again and again — armies numbering in the millions, gathering and dispersing, as though grinding down the Jurchen army’s will through sheer attrition. Yet as among the most accomplished of the old guard who had founded the Jin state, Zonghan and Xiyin continued to crush these successive waves of attack, and by late in the tenth month, Shuliesu, leading a detached force, had struck sideways into Wozhou, and with the coordinated support of generals like Yinshuke, Balishu, and Shaba, posed one difficult challenge after another to the forces rallying against them.

Shuliesu’s first assault on Wozhou had been held off through the stubborn resistance of the city’s defenders, together with Lin Zongwu, Shi Jin, and various other forces from the martial underworld, delaying long enough for Yu Yulin’s army to arrive from the south and relieve the siege. Through the eleventh month, the fighting continued amid the ice and snow, only slightly slower than it might have been in other seasons; Wang Juyun, Tian Shi, and Yu Yulin suffered defeat after defeat, and the front-line forces steadily dwindled. Defeated soldiers retreated south, surrendered, and no small number froze to death in the snow during the chaos of flight.

Though at the outset of the war both Wang Juyun and Prince Jin’s leadership had already resigned themselves to a war of continuous defeats, after more than a month of relentless attrition, even with the worst already anticipated, the morale and strength of both forces had sunk to a low point.

On the third day of the twelfth month, Li Chengzhong’s surrender of Linzhou to the Jurchens triggered a sudden shift across the entire situation. Facing Xiyin’s assault, the four-hundred-thousand-strong army under Tian Shi’s command was crushed and routed; in their effort to hunt down and kill Tian Shi himself, the Jurchen forces pursued the scattered troops for dozens of li, slaughtering the fleeing soldiers in great numbers, and publicly declared that Prince Jin Tian Shi had already been captured. Meanwhile, Wang Juyun, continuously retreating southward and now able to gather no more than thirty-odd thousand elite troops, threw everything he had into a desperate assault on Linzhou, hoping to shore up this one collapsing plank before the entire ship went under.

At the same time, Shuliesu’s forces doubled back to strike Wozhou once more. A smaller detachment under Shaba’s command moved toward Linzhou, while Yinshuke and Balishu led their troops in a central thrust, aiming straight for the heartland of Prince Jin’s territory.

During the brief period when Tian Shi was believed to be dead, the whole of Prince Jin’s territory seemed on the verge of total collapse. On the afternoon of the eighth, amid urgent pleas from Zhan Wu and others in Weisheng, the Huaxia Army column led by Zhu Biao cut across several hundred li to arrive at the walls of Linzhou just ahead of Wanyan Shaba.

The city fell that same day.

The rebel leader Li Chengzhong took his own life before the city fell; the other officers who had joined the rebellion, along with their families, were dragged onto the city walls and beheaded to the last.

Yet the overall situation continued to unravel. That very night, Wozhou’s defenses were breached. Shi Jin fought on atop the walls until he was nearly spent, and afterward the defending troops threw open the city gates, letting the citizens flee south. Yu Xiaoyuan, the general defending Wozhou, ordered his troops to hold the Jurchen advance at the front, fighting a delaying street-by-street battle to buy time for the fleeing civilians, but morale had nearly collapsed entirely. To rally his men, Yu Xiaoyuan personally charged the front lines twice with his own guard, fighting hand to hand, and was finally struck down by a Jurchen arrow.

Wozhou’s defenders broke and scattered in chaos as the Jurchens swept through in slaughter; Shi Jin and the comrades around him were swept along, fighting and retreating in turns. By that night, those who had escaped and survived looked back toward Wozhou to see the entire sky lit ablaze — the massacre of the city was still underway.

Shi Jin stood on a dim hillside; something damp fell from his face.

A man does not shed tears lightly — perhaps it was only the hot blood on his body, which in this world of ice and snow lost its warmth within moments.

Many people had gathered around him — more, even, than after the dissolution of Red Peak Mountain.

Though he knew he had no talent for commanding armies, the reputation of the Eight-Armed Dragon King still carried some weight. After the first defense of Wozhou, he had continued running about, hunting down Jurchen spies and Han traitors. Through this period of fighting, Lou Shuwan, far away in Weisheng, had faced numerous assassination attempts; having killed so many, and being a woman besides, the outside world had cast her as merciless and cruel, and some with their own agendas had branded her a traitorous wretch, a poisonous woman scheming to bring down Prince Jin’s foundation on the Jurchens’ behalf, intent on plunging the people into misery.

Shi Jin had spoken up within the martial underworld to defend Lou Shuwan’s name, and after a month of these words spreading, quite a few had finally been swayed, spontaneously rallying in Weisheng to clear her reputation, even standing against assassins during the attacks that followed, protecting her safety.

Fighting and running throughout Wozhou, Shi Jin had no way of knowing what was happening in Weisheng; now, with Wozhou’s fall, what lay before his eyes was once again that most brutal of sights — a city being put to the sword. Over these past ten-odd years, he had fought battle after battle, only to lose battle after battle — the defeats seemed endless, and yet, once again, he had not died. He thought only: Wozhou is gone now. Brother Lin lived here for over a decade, and now that too is gone. Mu Anping was never found — and when that small, orphaned child someday returns here, there will be nothing left for him to see.

He made his way to the cities further south, and continued the fight.

The snow fell and stopped, fell and stopped again, the flames of war still spreading through the storm. South of the Yellow River, the wandering starving masses surged through the snow as well, causing no small trouble for the Jurchen forces marching south — a few small supply convoys were swallowed whole by these starving hordes — but as the cold deepened further, the starving, too, began dying off in great numbers, wave after wave. Only the great mass of starving refugees gathered near Xuzhou still clung to one last breath of life amid the storm.

At Daming Prefecture, the defending soldiers continued to dwindle in the bitter cold. The fiercest fighting had come in the first month of the siege, when the heaviest losses had occurred; some of the severely wounded had not survived the winter. Wanyan Chang’s thirty thousand elite Jurchen troops, together with two hundred thousand Han conscripts, continued to grind away, day after day, at the lives and spirits of the city’s defenders. By the twelfth month, careful reckoning showed that of the nearly fifty thousand men who had originally defended the city, only some thirty thousand remained, and most of those bore wounds.

The ice and snow had, in the end, suppressed the intensity of the Jurchen assault. Wang Shanyue and Xue Changgong still kept watch atop the walls every day, rallying the soldiers’ spirits day after day; for the city’s dwindling population, Wang Shanyue occasionally sent men to distribute food and relief, and spoke to the people of the spirit of resistance — though with the snow now deep, such efforts could no longer be carried out with much force.

Outside the city, the besieging army’s tents stretched out like an unbroken sea. They were waiting for spring to come. Spring was the season of new life, when all things grow and flourish — and yet, whether it was Wang Shanyue, or Xue Changgong, or Shi Jin, Lou Shuwan, Tian Shi, Zhu Biao, or even Ning Yi, far away in the southwest, all of them understood: the spring of the tenth year of Wujian, the thirteenth year of the Jin Tianhui era, would not be a season belonging to life.

It would be the season that buried everything — and amid the howling of the great snow, day by day, it was coming.