As far as the eye could see, the world was still white with snow, sunlight filtering down through the thick clouds above. Toward evening, the weather cleared for a rare moment.

Linzhou’s city walls were not especially tall, but after a round of repairs in the latter half of the previous year, they still formed a fairly solid line of defense. Along the northern wall, a black banner fluttered in the cold wind; Huaxia Army soldiers moved back and forth, carrying siege equipment of every kind. Huyan Zhuo strode along the wall, occasionally lending a hand to soldiers hauling cannons, adjusting the equipment, or directing company and battalion commanders below into their assigned sectors, his expression stern throughout.

Huyan Zhuo had once served as a senior general in the Wu Dynasty; in the Huaxia Army, his current rank was regimental commander. Many of those who had come down from Liangshan had once carried a proud, haughty temperament, yet facing the soldiers now under his command, Huyan Zhuo found little of that pride left in himself.

For one thing, the Huaxia Army’s discipline was strict, and much of that discipline showed itself in training; once he had come to appreciate the formidable fighting strength this produced, Huyan Zhuo, as a commander himself, had come to greatly admire these regulations. For another, more than half of the men now serving under Zhu Biao’s banner were veterans who had lived through the northwest campaign and the battle at Xiaocang River — ten years of tempering had forged them like a sword, and though Huyan Zhuo had once been an old-school commander, he now held real respect for what many of these soldiers had endured.

Though this force of some ten thousand men had spent several years hidden away in the marshes of Liangshan, and so was less practiced with cannons and other such equipment compared to the Huaxia Army in the southwest, in the years of continuous warfare against the Jurchens, this was the only force north of the Yellow River that had stood against the armies of the Jin state without being defeated, that had lived through a battle like Xiaocang River without dying — this force of ten thousand alone, and no more.

Even now, simply watching the orderly preparations underway atop the wall was enough to show the morale and iron discipline carried by every soldier here.

Xu Chunyi, the commander defending Linzhou, watched this scene atop the wall with a sense of real shock. Just then, Guan Sheng came over and pulled him along to a military meeting. “By the way, General Xu, Shuliesu has arrived — our two armies will soon be fighting side by side, and since we’re allies now, we ought to get to know one another. Tonight the Huaxia Army is holding a rally, with some heart-to-heart sharing beforehand as well. I mentioned it earlier — we’d like to borrow your camp’s drill ground for it. It would be good if your men could join too…”

“Heart-to-heart sharing…”

“Oh, it just means sitting down after dinner to talk with each other, share what’s on your mind. It’s only the one time, and it won’t necessarily make everyone close, but it never hurts for the soldiers to get to know one another a little.”

“That’s certainly fine…”

“Good, General Xu has agreed — a small matter, Xiao Sun, go make the arrangements.” Guan Sheng turned to say this to a deputy, then turned back. “But the real business is the meeting we’ll all be having in a moment…”

“Still… if we hold the rally together, I worry the space might not be big enough, and besides…”

“Oh, no matter, no matter — like I said, it’s just to get acquainted. We can split up for the actual rally if needed. For now, let’s work out together what the Jurchens are likely planning this time…”

…

Among the trees, warhorses breathed out clouds of white steam, weaving past each other with a shrieking clash. The ring of weapons mixed with the thud of bodies striking the ground, kicking up sprays of snow into the air. Lu Junyi charged forward across the snow, his spear planted in the ground, dragging a corpse briefly before wrenching it free.

Red mingled with white. The pounding of hooves from the opposing side had already closed the distance rapidly; a mounted Jurchen warrior swung his steel blade downward. Just ahead of the charging horse, Lu Junyi’s body shifted; his great spear seemed to vanish silently behind him, and in the next instant its tip erupted from the other side of his body.

This was a technique from the “return spear” style — the spearhead whistled upward into the sky, snow scattering in a burst, and the warhorse’s neck was sheared open by the blade’s edge under the tremendous force of the blow. The spear then drove on into the Jurchen rider’s chest, bursting out the other side. The horse collapsed into the snow mid-stride; the rider tumbled across the ground, and by the time he’d struggled to his feet, a horrifying gash already ran across his chest. Lu Junyi was already upon him, pinning the equally tall Jurchen scout down into the snow and slashing his throat open with a single motion.

In the blink of an eye he had killed two highly skilled Jurchen scouts. He searched them quickly, then retrieved his own mount and pushed swiftly through the snow-covered woods toward the mountaintop.

Once known as the finest spearman in all of Hebei, Master Lu was now forty-six years old. After joining the Huaxia Army, his original intention had been to serve as a field commander leading troops in battle, but eventually he and Yan Qing had both been assigned by Ning Yi to serve as instructors within the special operations unit. When Li Shishi traveled through the Central Plains, he and Yan Qing had accompanied her, secretly handling no small number of covert missions along the way. Now, with war breaking out across the Central Plains, he had joined Zhu Biao’s forces to help out, doubling as a scout. As soon as the Jurchens broke camp, Lu Junyi had rushed to the very front of the line.

Having killed the two Jurchen scouts he’d chanced upon, Lu Junyi made his way to the mountaintop. On the far side of the ridge, along the main road, an endless line of banners and marching columns came into view. Lu Junyi raised his telescope, carefully noting the distinguishing features of each unit and any weaknesses he could find…

More than thirty-six thousand Jurchen troops, together with nearly forty thousand Han soldiers following behind them, more than seventy thousand men in total, marched south in a great mass, and Lu Junyi tracked them the whole way, occasionally engaging in pursuit and skirmish. At night, he and his companions would meet up to rest in mountain caves; overhead, Jurchen falcons occasionally flew past against the night sky.

Against this dance of life and death, this crucible of iron and blood, so many of the scenes from more than a decade ago now seemed like child’s play by comparison.

…

“…According to the latest intelligence from the front, the Jurchen force coming this way numbers roughly seventy-five thousand. About half are Shuliesu’s own elite core troops — the very force that followed Aguda in his conquest of the realm. Though somewhat diminished now, they’re still nearly as formidable as ever. Whatever their plan this time — whether to crush us outright or to surround us — either way, we cannot allow it…”

“…At the same time, we cannot retreat. If we fall back, Weisheng won’t be able to hold either. So we will fight — ideally, we should make them bleed for it, but we don’t need to press for outright victory. Holding this position handsomely once isn’t a difficult task. We have ten thousand Huaxia Army men here; General Xu commands more than twenty-three thousand men under him. Before we arrived, Wang Juyun had already mobilized his Prince of Ming forces to come help — nearly thirty thousand in the main force, plus another twenty thousand recently added. In terms of raw numbers, we still hold the advantage. Ha, so what is there to fear…”

In the warm room, the meeting among commanders continued. Guan Sheng sat beside Xu Chunyi, working through the various arrangements and coordination between the two forces. Given the weight the Huaxia Army’s name carried, Xu Chunyi had few objections to raise on military matters. But as the meeting went on, he gradually became aware of sounds rising from outside, and a sense of unease crept over him.

“Kill the Jurchen dogs!”

“…Kill the Jurchen dogs!”

“We’re human beings too!”

“…Human beings too—”

Such cries drifted in from time to time, and taken alone, they might have almost sounded absurd — but as more and more people joined in, the swelling volume of that clamor grew genuinely unsettling. Xu Chunyi asked Guan Sheng about it once. “Is this…”

“Oh, nothing to worry about. Everyone’s opening up to one another out there — it does tend to get quite intense to listen to. Let’s talk about the south gate — I have a few thoughts…”

Outside, on the camp’s drill ground, the vast open space had been divided into sections. The Huaxia Army’s soldiers had gathered first, and once the garrison troops finished their evening meal, they too came out to watch. On the platform, one man after another stepped up to speak of things that had happened to them — some spoke of the fighting in the northwest, of how that land had become a blank white wasteland; some had lived through the three-year siege at Xiaocang River, and spoke of what had gone through their minds the first time they killed a Jurchen; others, whose families were from the Central Plains, spoke of the horrors left behind after wave upon wave of Jurchen killing.

Some broke down crying as they spoke — first one man, then a whole crowd. Soldiers of the garrison army were called up as well, and though they stammered through their words, in this world nearly everyone shared much the same suffering — especially those who had been forced into soldiering; whose family didn’t have some wrongfully dead soul to mourn?

This kind of “recall the bitterness, cherish the sweetness” gathering had also been adopted by Wang Shanyue’s people, though it had, of course, originated with the Huaxia Army. In this age, no one cared much about the suffering of ordinary people; countless hardships had become simply something everyone had learned to live with. Even during the Humiliation of Jingping, when noble figures — emperors, consorts, and the families of ministers — had suffered such horrors, an ordinary family losing one or two members to the Jurchens rarely found anyone willing to listen to their grief. At gatherings like this, for some people, stammering out the tragedy of their own household before a crowd willing to listen was, for the very first time in their lives, a moment of discovering they too possessed dignity and worth as a human being.

Whenever a Huaxia Army soldier took the stage to describe how he had killed Jurchens, the crowd would erupt in waves of near-hysterical shouting; some people even cried themselves into fainting spells.

By the time Xu Chunyi and the others had finished their meeting and stepped out with Guan Sheng, the whole scene had reached something close to a boil. Guan Sheng put an arm around Xu Chunyi’s shoulder.

“General Xu, the Prince of Jin trusted you while he lived. Now that he’s gone, we trust you too. Avenging the Prince of Jin, tearing off a chunk of the Jurchens’ flesh — it all comes down to this battle. Your army and mine will advance together and retreat together, truly as one from now on — take care of each other!”

Xu Chunyi’s expression turned solemn; he raised both hands and offered a deep, formal bow in return.

The night’s fever slowly settled sometime in the small hours; the long darkness passed, and when dawn broke the next day, brilliant morning glow spread across the eastern sky. Soldiers changed guard and climbed the walls, waiting beneath the shifting light for the Jurchen army’s arrival.

At noon on the sixth of the second month, the Jurchen banners spread out toward Linzhou, coming into view of everyone on the walls, Shuliesu’s command banner unfurling among them. Atop Linzhou’s walls, veteran Huaxia Army soldiers gripped their steel blades or clenched the gray stone parapets, their eyes fierce, their jaws clenched tight.

To the eyes of the nearby garrison troops, killing intent seemed to rise up into the very sky. Over these years, facing a Jurchen general as formidable as Shuliesu, they had never before seen an army capable of radiating this kind of tragic, almost eager readiness to charge out and fight rather than simply hunker down and defend.

What these men did not know was this: in the sixth month of the fifth year of Jianshuo, Shuliesu had led troops in the siege of Xiaocang River. After half a year of desperate defense, the defenders of Xiaocang River had breached the dam at the mouth of the valley and broken out in a fierce sortie alongside the forces at Qingmu Stronghold. Though soon after, Ning Yi had led twenty thousand troops into Yanzhou and killed Cibushi, reclaiming that city, in the eyes of many Huaxia Army soldiers, Shuliesu too had blood on his hands — the blood of their brothers — and was counted among their deepest enemies.

That brief, fleeting encounter in the snow at the start of the year, where both sides had held back the urge to charge at each other, might have looked to outsiders like a moment of easy banter between two bold and generous rivals — but for those actually involved, it had been a choice made in a state of mind that truly wished the other dead. And now, neither side needed to hold back any longer.

The clouds overhead shifted shape, tumbling quickly onward.

At Linzhou, the war drums thundered to life.