In the grip of panic, he ran without stopping. The terror came from some distant place, but for reasons he couldn’t understand, even as he ran, he wanted only to close his eyes and shut out everything happening around him.
“…They’re coming to kill us…”
“…Run, run, run…”
Amid the noise and chaos, the voices around him grew louder, the shapes of people thicker, until, head down, he finally ran to the edge of the great river. Churning waves stretched out ahead of him; terror pressed in from behind. He stood there, and someone shoved him forward.
A small fishing boat pulled away from the shore, and he stood aboard it, hearing voices rising behind him, the great swell of waves rolling beneath his feet.
Don’t look back — he told himself this in his mind, and yet the figure in the scene finally turned around anyway. Through the drifting mist, the Jurchens came pouring in; the crowd on the shore ran and screamed, driven and pressed into the river, sinking down beneath the surface as blood spread through the water.
Zhou Junwu fell to his knees on the boat’s deck.
An overwhelming shame filled everything around him.
— He sat up abruptly from the dream.
…
Within the dark tent lingered the faint scent of sandalwood incense; the space was warm, yet carried a certain damp chill as well. When he sat up, cold sweat covered his forehead.
His mind still lingered in the dream for a while. After a moment, he rose from the bed, lit an oil lamp with a fire striker; the light illuminated a face with sharply defined features — thin, resolute, its jaw shadowed by a growth of beard that added years to his apparent age, lending him a greater air of steadiness. Once the lamp was lit, the voice of an attendant came from outside the tent, and he had hot water brought in.
The sky was still dim with the coming dawn, endless rows of tents stretching beyond the tent flap. After washing his face, he straightened his robes before the mirror, making himself look more composed. Stepping outside, soldiers offered him salutes, which he returned in kind — something that had never once happened under the old Wu Dynasty.
In this tenth year of Wu Jianshuo, Crown Prince Zhou Junwu was twenty-seven years old, and to those around him, he had grown into a steady, dependable man.
Toward officials across the Wu Dynasty, he was decisive and carried real authority; toward the technical staff and common people under his command, he was modest and courteous. He lived in the army camp, rising each day earlier than the ordinary soldiers, and would even return the salute of every single soldier who bowed to him — something unheard of before, learned from observing the Black Banner Army. If any scholar-official tried to remonstrate with him or criticize him to his face, he would offer a modest apology and then continue exactly as he had planned. Whatever else might be said, the great majority of soldiers and civilians alike had come to see him as the future ruler who would restore the dynasty to greatness.
His fierce, unyielding self-discipline had left him thin, and only sharpened the resolute cast of his features. Especially now, in this spring of the tenth year of Jianshuo, there was, in the eyes of this young man once raised amid comfort and privilege, a faint but unmistakable hardness — the look of a man resolved for war.
By the second month, the cold of spring had begun to ease, and the scent of war had already drifted in. Though the ice and snow had not yet fully melted, the upheaval in the Jin region had already sounded the first warning bell of the new year: the battlefield was a realm of merciless struggle, where no one waited for the true warmth of spring before making their move.
Passing through row after row of tents in the camp, Jun Wu had walked only a short distance when he saw Yue Fei approaching. After an exchange of salutes, Yue Fei handed him a report he had been waiting on.
“At Linzhou, Shuliesu has engaged the Black Banner Army — the fighting has begun…”
“The old ones are truly the most cunning. Zonghan and Xiyin’s methods are ruthless indeed,” Jun Wu murmured, lowering the report — at the very height of the resistance movement’s momentum in the Jin region, they had struck down the Prince of Jin, Tian Shi, shattering the one force in the Central Plains that had still held real promise. As an enemy, anyone confronted with a move like Xiyin’s could not help but feel a chill run down their spine.
“…And there’s more — something has happened at Xuzhou as well.”
At Yue Fei’s words, Jun Wu raised his head and looked north. In the darkness, there seemed to come, faintly, the sound of some vast iceberg cracking apart, of the earth itself stirring awake…
Weisheng, the Tianji Palace.
The massacre that Yuan Xiaoqiu had waited for on the fourth of the second month never came.
After that cold negotiation concluded, both sides went their separate ways. Yuan Xiaoqiu, who had expected the woman prime minister Lou Shuwan to make an example of everyone present, found her gaze remaining icy — but no further action followed.
In the days after, the struggle for power spread outward from Weisheng like a restless undercurrent. On the night of the fourth, Lou Shuwan, An Xifu, Lin Zongwu, and representatives of the various anti-Jurchen factions divided among themselves their respective areas of responsibility and interest within the Tianji Palace. By the fifth, Lou Shuwan had begun meeting one by one with the regional power-holders across the territory, including Lin Zongwu, disclosing, as far as possible, the resources, arms, troop numbers, and personnel records of every city and district in the Jin region.
That same morning, in a private meeting with Lin Zongwu, Lou Shuwan spoke with him with complete candor about how to divide authority and territory among the various branch temples of the Great Brightness Sect. Between the “Descended Mystic Maiden” and the “Sect Leader of Great Brightness,” they worked to split their respective spheres of power in a way that would minimize friction between them, with Lou Shuwan’s side conceding a good deal of ground in the process.
Small-scale clashes and killings had already begun to appear across Weisheng, but thanks to the restraint shown by every faction, no large-scale outbreak of violence had yet occurred.
With the Prince of Jin dead, and the pressure of the advancing Jurchen army bearing down, the defection of the various noble clans had already become an established fact. But given the peculiar circumstances of the Prince of Jin’s territory, an outright coup — swords drawn and blood spilled — had not immediately followed.
Building on the mutual understanding, and the reluctant consensus reached during the negotiation meeting, every household and clan was now busy courting allies and choosing sides. During this period, military forces, equipment, and stores of supplies scattered across the region became the primary targets that every faction sought to seize and control. Even as Lou Shuwan continued her negotiations with the various leaders, Yu Yulin had already begun working to secure control of several key strategic points in the southwestern Jin region.
As for the several factions still committed to resisting the Jurchens, Lou Shuwan chose to hand over her own resources outright, even directing those still loyal to her to lend them assistance — helping them occupy cities and strategic passes, and dividing up important storage sites among them. Even if this meant the formation of numerous small, wavering pockets of independent power, that was still better than letting these ungovernable regions fall directly into Jurchen hands.
Politics, once it loses an absolute central authority, naturally becomes a game of gathering followers.
At the negotiation meeting, the words of that old man Liao Yiren — giving up five cities, or ten — had sounded absurd at the time, but in practice, something very like it was now slowly taking shape. Every faction on both sides of the conflict understood that in a situation this tangled, where each side’s interests were interwoven with the other’s, if every faction could first secure whatever territory it was capable of holding, then whether to fight or surrender in a few days’ time would still leave a sliver of hope for survival. But if open conflict broke out immediately, the entire Jin region would instantly become a sea of fire, and the Jurchens would sweep southward across the ruins that remained.
At that point, no one at all would have any way out.
And in the midst of this fierce yet strangely suppressed confrontation, everyone was still waiting for the outcome of a great clash unfolding to the north.
At Linzhou, on the eighth of the second month, Shuliesu had already launched his assault on the city.
…
A thunderous crash sounded atop the wall, and with it, the ground shook amid scattered stone and pools of blood. On the morning of the eighth of the second month — the second day of Shuliesu’s siege — the fighting at Linzhou had reached a white-hot intensity.
The main Jurchen force had arrived at Linzhou at noon on the sixth; by the seventh, they had completed a three-sided encirclement and launched their assault that same day. For a siege of this scale, such a rapid opening was extraordinarily hasty — yet Shuliesu had chosen this direct approach regardless.
Along Linzhou’s eastern, western, and northern flanks, the entire front had launched a nearly simultaneous assault, using little more than bows and arrows and scaling ladders. But beneath the cover of this large-scale feint, Shuliesu had selected two points as his true breakthrough targets, relying on the sheer ferocity of his elite Jurchen troops. His fiercest assault columns had been cleverly concealed within the advancing ranks of Han soldiers, singling out sections of the wall clearly not defended by the Black Banner Army for their strike — and by the afternoon of the seventh, they had already posed a serious threat to Linzhou’s defenses.
This opening blow, delivered like a sudden strike to the head, amounted to Shuliesu’s first real probe against the Huaxia Army forces before him, though it ultimately failed to break the city. By the morning of the eighth, more than thirty catapults had been assembled by the Jurchens overnight and wheeled out into position, and together with more than eighty scaling ladders, launched a fierce assault against Linzhou’s western wall.
Including the twenty-three thousand men under Xu Chunyi’s command, the total defending force at Linzhou now numbered more than thirty thousand. Though the Jurchens had deliberately left one side of their encirclement open, no section of the city walls could afford to relax its guard for even a moment. Under the Jurchens’ sudden fierce assault, the pressure on the western wall reached its breaking point almost instantly.
Huaxia Army soldiers stationed there began converging toward the threatened section. Cannons roared atop the walls, and arrows fell like rain. Jurchen soldiers, swarming like a hive of bees across the field of view, pushed sandbags and earth-filled sacks forward, carrying scaling ladders, filling the moat in the blink of an eye and raising their ladders against a wall roughly two zhang high.
Linzhou’s walls were not especially tall, and more than eighty scaling ladders soon filled every visible section of the city’s defenses. Jurchen soldiers, utterly fearless of death, charged up them — but atop the wall, Huaxia Army soldiers held firm, like a wall of iron themselves. Even the fiercest Jurchen warriors found it difficult, alone, to break through the seamless coordination of the Huaxia Army’s defense. This quickly turned the western section of the wall into a slaughterhouse.
The fierce assault and close combat continued at its most intense for roughly half an hour, and just as the defensive strength atop the wall reached its own saturation point, a thousand-strong Jurchen unit launched a surprise attack from the north, precisely targeting a weak point left thin by troops drawn away to reinforce the western assault. At the same time, two li further north along the wall, Han troops under Jurchen command launched a fierce assault of their own.
This kind of siege tactic was nothing unusual — although the defenders held the advantage of terrain, as a defending force they were, in effect, like a stretched rubber band; the attacking army needed only to apply repeated pressure at a few chosen points, and the defenders’ strength, drawn toward those spots, would inevitably leave other areas weak, making it easier for the attackers to break through and scale the wall elsewhere.
Of course, tactics like this only worked for a force of exceptionally high fighting caliber — like the core elite troops of a Jurchen general such as Shuliesu, especially the very best among them. Against an ordinary Wu Dynasty army, such tactics could often let them scale the wall quickly; even if the city didn’t fall right away, retaking the wall from them would typically cost the defenders several times over in losses.
Atop the wall, a squad leader in Xu Chunyi’s army named Niu Baoting watched the Jurchens spreading toward him, his hands and feet growing cold. He was an old hand who had eaten army rations for many years, a seasoned veteran of military life through and through. The Prince of Jin’s army was a mixed bag of good and poor soldiers, and Niu Baoting had only risen to squad leader by muddling along, but he had sharp instincts and understood danger well enough — seeing that his section of the wall had become the enemy’s chosen point of fierce assault, he knew the odds were grim. And by now, there were far fewer Huaxia Army soldiers stationed nearby than before.
Leading the handful of men under him, Niu Baoting fired several arrows down from the wall. In the blink of an eye, scaling ladders had already been raised, one after another, and Jurchen soldiers, shields raised and blades drawn, surged fiercely upward. The battlefield is the truest test of mettle — simply watching the calm, practiced ease with which they mounted the ladders was enough to tell that every one of them was a battle-hardened killer who had cut down countless men — a bearing that an old muddling veteran like Niu Baoting could never hope to match.
Cannons roared along the nearby wall, and stones were hurled down, but before long, Jurchen soldiers had still made it onto the wall. Niu Baoting and his men killed one, held their position briefly against a second, and then another Jurchen soldier scaled the wall as well. Two fierce Jurchen warriors forced Niu Baoting’s group of five steadily backward; one of his comrades was cut down in a pool of blood, and Niu Baoting himself narrowly avoided having his head split open by a blade. Terror rising in his chest, he retreated again and again, watching the Jurchens’ momentum surge as they pressed forward.
I’m going to die, I’m going to die, I’m going to die—
The old veteran thought this in a rising panic. On one hand, the Jurchens before him were terrifyingly fierce; on the other, if the Jurchens broke through the city, everyone inside would die regardless. Amid the chaos, one of his men took a blow to the shoulder and, thoroughly terrified, fled toward the other end of the wall.
Niu Baoting and the others also began dodging in a panic. Within moments, Jurchen soldiers were scaling the wall from multiple directions at once, the whole scene a churning mass of combat. Soldiers under Xu Chunyi, like Niu Baoting, began to fall into panicked disarray — yet even so, a mere handful of Huaxia Army soldiers, no more than a dozen or so, had formed two tight formations and were locked in fierce, unyielding combat against the Jurchens climbing the wall, refusing to give ground for a long stretch of time.
After a moment, more Huaxia Army soldiers came charging in from both sides. Niu Baoting and the others hadn’t even managed to escape the chaos when two Jurchen soldiers bore down on them; he and two of his men struggled to hold them off, when four Huaxia Army soldiers — some bearing shields, others spears or blades — rushed past him and skewered both Jurchen soldiers on their spear points. The spearman, clearly an officer within the Huaxia Army, clapped Niu Baoting on the shoulder. “Well done. Follow me, let’s kill these Jurchen dogs.” Niu Baoting and his men fell in behind him almost without thinking.
This section of the wall, just breached by the Jurchens moments earlier, was retaken by the Huaxia Army in short order. The officer leading the charge directed the men to throw the bodies of the fallen Jurchen soldiers down the ladders. With the crisis briefly eased, Niu Baoting saw a Huaxia Army soldier sitting amid the scattered bodies, binding a wound on his own body, laughing to himself. “Ha ha, that felt good — Shuliesu, damn your mother—”
A few days earlier, at the Huaxia Army’s rally, Niu Baoting had felt something stir within him, but faced with genuine Jurchen elite troops, he had still felt nothing but fear. Only now did he suddenly realize — this army before him, this black banner, was the only Han army in the entire realm capable of fighting the Jurchens head-on without shame. The battle unfolding right in front of him was a clash between the two finest armies in the world.
I’m going to die…
There was little heroic fervor left in the old veteran’s heart. Once he grasped this truth, he also understood clearly that the battle now underway was bound to grow more ferocious than anything he had ever known, and that he and his fellow soldiers, caught between these two armies, might not die this instant — but before long, death was probably certain regardless…
On a battlefield this fierce, in the space between life and death, all kinds of intense thoughts converge. At the northwestern position outside Linzhou, Shuliesu lowered his telescope, sighing at the failure of his thousand-strong assault unit to make any gains. But in truth, this outcome was one he had already anticipated.
This was, after all, not his first engagement with the Black Banner Army.
Years earlier, at the great battle of Xiaocang River, it was Shuliesu himself who had led the besieging army — after nearly half a year of siege, he had finally breached the walls, forcing the defenders of Xiaocang River to break the dam and stage a desperate breakout. He already knew well what to expect from the calm, unyielding resolve of these Huaxia Army elite troops on the defense. The fierce assaults from yesterday through today had only confirmed one thing for him.
This army before him was not simply some secondary detachment of the Black Banner stationed in Shandong — many of these men, he suspected, were his old adversaries from years past.
His gaze remained calm, though his blood burned within him.
As one of the Jurchen’s renowned generals who had followed Aguda in the founding uprising, Shuliesu, now forty-nine, could sense the decline creeping through the younger generation of Jurchens over these years — young soldiers no longer carrying the courage of their forebears, officers and commanders growing soft and incompetent. The old spirit of “against ten thousand, none can stand” that had marked Aguda’s rise, and the tiger-like ferocity with which Wuqimai had once launched his war against the Wu Dynasty, was gradually fading away.
The string of setbacks in the assaults on Xiaocang River and in the northwest campaign years earlier had, for many Jurchen commanders, served as a wake-up call. In a way, it had shattered the complacent thinking of many Jurchen leaders and helped preserve what edge remained among the surviving officers and troops. It was for this reason that, facing this Black Banner force once again, Shuliesu did not feel discouraged by his momentary setback — if anything, the setback only sharpened his fighting spirit.
At any other time, facing an army like the Black Banner, he would have taken more time to prepare before launching an assault. But the present situation was different.
With the ice and snow melting away, Lord Gushen had already begun moving against the entire Jin region — killing Tian Shi, splitting the Jin region apart, crushing the Black Banner — a chain of strikes, each building on the last. Should this campaign succeed, the entire obstacle posed by the Jin region’s supposed million-strong army would crumble at once. Thirty thousand Jurchen elite troops against ten thousand Black Banner soldiers — even at some cost, he had to settle this fiercest and most critical battle quickly.
And on top of that, Lord Gushen’s calculations formed a net cast wide across the whole realm; the contingencies he had prepared were surely not limited merely to killing one Tian Shi. If, under these circumstances, he himself could not take Linzhou, then there would truly be little point in ever facing the Black Banner Army again in the future.
With this thought, Shuliesu narrowed his eyes, and after a moment summoned another of his generals, giving orders to watch for an opportunity to strike…
On the eighth of the second month, the assault on Linzhou surged like a rising tide. Under Shuliesu’s direction, the repeated waves of attack came close to gaining a firm foothold atop the wall several times, only to be driven back each time by the Huaxia Army’s fierce counterattacks. Blood flowed freely up and down the city walls, and losses mounted heavily on both sides.
And yet the intensity of the assault only continued to grow. As if determined to crush the Huaxia Army in a single decisive blow, and with it the morale of the entire Jin region, Shuliesu paid no heed to the mounting casualties among his own troops. Over the course of that day and more of fighting, many Huaxia Army soldiers had already fallen forever into pools of blood, and most of those who remained had fought themselves into a state of bloodshot fury.
Toward evening, as the setting sun cast a warm golden glow across one side of the sky, Huyan Zhuo stood at a corner of the wall, watching the besieging army briefly withdraw below. In the distance, traces of snow still lingered across the land; closer at hand, smoke from battle and the smell of blood hung heavy in the air.
This corner of the city had just been struck by fire arrows that ignited several stored shells, throwing the Linzhou garrison troops under Xu Chunyi into momentary chaos. Huyan Zhuo had led a detachment over to reinforce the position and had driven back a wave of Jurchen attackers. Looking around now, the wall here bore scorched black marks everywhere, bodies and weapons scattered in disarray across the ground, with some soldiers already beginning to clear the wreckage. Huaxia Army soldiers first tended to the severely wounded; those with lighter injuries, or simply exhausted, took shelter behind the parapets, catching their breath, resting as best they could, their eyes still carrying traces of blood and a kind of feverish excitement.
“Back in the day at Xiaocang River, it was far more lively than this…”
The voice of a nearby veteran reached his ears, breathless yet carrying a boastful edge — in truth, meant as much to steady the men around him as anything else. Looking down the length of the wall in both directions, wherever the black banner fluttered, clusters of Huaxia Army soldiers could be seen.
Huyan Zhuo recognized many of the men among them. Soldiers who had lived through the battle of Xiaocang River tended to share a certain unmistakable quality — in ordinary times they might be tense, or grim, or indifferent, each in his own way, but on the battlefield, these men were more like stones: unremarkable amid the chaos of combat, yet always finding the exact right response at exactly the right moment.
Among these men, those capable of leading others had largely become officers within the Huaxia Army; even the more solitary ones could still, on the battlefield, draw several others together into a small, tight-knit circle. Now, scattered across various points along the wall, after such fierce fighting, many of them likely found themselves thinking back to that brutal struggle at Xiaocang River all over again.
Out on the open field beyond the wall, the Jurchen battle banners stretched into the distance, marking the presence of the fiercest army in the realm. And when Huyan Zhuo’s gaze swept back across these figures atop the wall, he seemed, in that moment, to see an unbreakable wall of his own. Years ago at Liangshan, Song Jiang had gathered heroes from across the realm, trying to arrange one hundred and eight great champions into their places among the stars of heaven and earth — yet even they, he thought, might not withstand a single strike from this army as it stood today.
After a full day of assault, the Jurchen soldiers were, for the first time, withdrawing along the entire front, pausing their exhausting offensive. Those watching from atop the wall were mostly puzzled by this. Beside Huyan Zhuo, the Black Banner Army staff officer Li Nian came over and quietly relayed some information.
“Word just came in — Wang Juyun’s Prince of Ming forces are now within twenty li. With the roads difficult to travel in the dark, they’ll arrive by tomorrow at the latest. Also, Old Zhu has already linked up with the three thousand men out there… Shuliesu surely knows all this. Pulling his troops back after a full day of exhausting assault — he’s not doing it to rest.”
Huyan Zhuo nodded and called over the officers nearby. “Have everyone stay sharp. Shuliesu isn’t that lazy — the attack could resume at any moment.” He then raised his telescope and looked over toward the opposing position, where a dark mass of men and horses moved busily about, unusually lively.
Then something began slowly rising up from behind the Jurchen camp.
“I— fuck!” Huyan Zhuo swore. A buzz of voices rose along the wall.
It was an inflating hot-air balloon.
Ever since the Huaxia Army had mastered hot-air balloon technology, it was said the Wu Dynasty had recently developed working examples of its own as well; with Wanyan Xiyin overseeing research into natural science and mechanics for the Jurchens, it was hardly surprising that they too had mastered the technology — but this was the first time it had ever been brought onto an actual battlefield.
It was proof enough, though, of just how seriously Zonghan and Xiyin regarded this battle, and how determined they were to win it.
The atmosphere atop the wall turned immediately grim; figures rushed about, hauling up signal flares meant for anti-aircraft use. Before long, in the direction of the Jurchen camp, another assault formation had once again taken shape.
Night had begun to fall, campfires stretching out into a sea of light; preparations for the assault were already underway. In the darkness beyond, three massive balloons slowly swelled and rose into the sky. Amid the bustling, horse-neighing camp, a surrendered general named Shen Wenjin made his way past the assembled ranks and finally arrived before Shuliesu’s command banner.
Given the Jurchens’ overwhelming strength, Shen Wenjin was a Han commander who had surrendered to Zonghan’s forces at the end of the previous year, bringing with him more than ten thousand well-equipped soldiers. This force had lost its nerve when facing the Jurchens, collapsing after a single engagement; after surrendering, in hopes of proving his loyalty and earning some measure of wealth and status, Shen Wenjin had fought with real vigor. Earlier that day, his troops had scaled the wall twice, holding out fiercely once without retreating, inflicting considerable casualties on the Huaxia Army defenders atop the wall — a genuinely impressive showing.
Shuliesu had summoned him now, praising him openly before everyone present, then had him stand aside to listen quietly as the discussion of strategy and the coming assault continued. On the surface, Shen Wenjin appeared quite pleased, but privately he found it strange — in a situation this tense, if Shuliesu simply wanted to give orders for the attack, he could easily have sent a messenger. Summoning him here personally left Shen Wenjin uncertain of the intent behind it — perhaps, seeing that today’s assault had failed to take the city, Shuliesu meant to call him over to needle the other Jurchen commanders with his example.
Having spent many years navigating official circles, Shen Wenjin understood well the wisdom of keeping a low profile, and he grew increasingly anxious at the thought of becoming the singled-out target among a room full of commanders. But Shuliesu, above him, said only what needed saying and no more, and for the time being did not seem to be using him as bait to provoke the other Jurchen generals. As things went on, the assault plan was largely finalized, orders relayed to every unit in preparation — and still, Shuliesu did not release Shen Wenjin to leave.
Before long, once night had fully fallen, the assault began. As the Jurchen war horns sounded, catapults hurled stones soaked in oil and set ablaze, and enormous fireballs went shrieking toward Linzhou’s walls; fire arrows followed like a swarm of locusts, while the assault troops surged forward carrying scaling ladders…
“General Shen, come with me.”
At some point, Shuliesu had come over and spoken these words. Shen Wenjin hastened to comply and followed along, his personal guards trailing behind as well.
Shuliesu led Shen Wenjin along the length of the assault formation. The night was filled with an unceasing clamor; to one side, the spectacle of the siege played out like some boiling drama. After walking some distance, Shuliesu finally spoke. “General Shen, do you think we can take Linzhou tonight?”
“With the general’s elite troops, and an assault of this intensity, this humble general believes the city will surely fall tonight.”
Shuliesu turned to look at him, his gaze unfriendly. “General Shen, you are a commander of troops. I make use of you because you understand warfare and strategy. Given the present situation, what I want from you is your honest judgment — spare me the flattery.”
“Er…” Shen Wenjin hesitated. “Then, this humble general will speak plainly?”
“Speak.”
“If the approach used during the day could have taken the city, it already would have. Continuing on as we are now amounts to a war of attrition, wearing down the Black Banner Army inside to its very limits. From what this humble general observed during the day, this Black Banner force’s fighting strength likely matches our own — if we truly intend to grind the city down to breaking, I fear it may take no less than three to five days to succeed. And… I fear our own losses will be heavy as well…”
Hearing this, the corner of Shuliesu’s mouth twitched slightly ahead of him, as if in the beginning of a smile. “Then tell me — why do you think I am fighting this way?”
“Only because… this battle bears on the fate of the entire Jin region. If the Black Banner falls, nothing left in the Jin region will be able to withstand a single blow from our great Jin state. And besides, I hear negotiations are underway to the south — once matters here are settled by morning, many watching from the sidelines will… choose which side to stand on.”
These words were spoken with unusual bluntness, touching on matters that, as a Han man, were perhaps not his to voice. Once he’d said it, Shen Wenjin grew visibly awkward — but it was only then that a genuine smile appeared on Shuliesu’s face. He studied Shen Wenjin quietly for a moment.
“Indeed. General Shen sees it clearly as well. I must win, and I must win quickly — what other choice is there?”
Shen Wenjin hesitated a moment. “…Yes… yes, that’s so.”
Hearing this answer, Shuliesu nodded, satisfied, and continued walking. Shen Wenjin thought a moment longer, then added: “And besides, in this humble general’s view, the wind direction isn’t favorable right now — those three balloons behind us won’t reach the wall. Raising them may put some pressure on the defenders atop the wall, but it does seem a bit premature to deploy them just yet.” This last remark was entirely sincere, but Shuliesu paid it no mind. After a pause, he spoke again.
“When I marched south with my troops, Lord Gushen gave me a sealed pouch, instructing me to open it once I reached the battlefield. Inside was a scheme for breaching the city — one that requires someone’s help to succeed. General Shen, watching you fight so fiercely today, with your men following your orders without hesitation, I would like to ask for your help in carrying out this plan.” Shuliesu turned to face him. “What do you say, General Shen — are you willing to claim the glory of breaching this city for yourself?”
Shen Wenjin froze for a moment, then dropped instantly to his knees in a full formal bow. “Whatever the general commands, this humble general will obey without question!”
“Good.” Shuliesu’s gaze turned toward the fierce fighting atop Linzhou’s walls, firelight dancing across his face. He then helped Shen Wenjin to his feet. “Let me explain the details of this plan to you. Whether we can break this city swiftly now depends entirely on you, General Shen…”
…
At midnight, in the snow-covered mountains northeast of Linzhou, the cold wind howled as a column of troops made its way forward through the rugged terrain.
Passing through dense forest and over snow-covered ridges, not a single torch burned anywhere along the length of the column, front or back. In the early days of the second month, the air had just begun to turn warmer out of the deep cold, causing the packed snow to lose the firmness it had held through winter. As the men trudged through the snow, each footstep sank in and had to be pulled free again; the snow, faintly melted by body heat, would then freeze once more in the deep chill of night, leaving this midnight march utterly without a trace of warmth.
Further on, the column passed through a narrow stretch of cliffside path. Amid the moaning cold wind, soldiers moved forward one by one, gripping simple ropes, edging along a cliffside trail barely wide enough for a single body to pass, with a bottomless ravine dropping away on one side.
Zhu Biao walked at the very front alongside the scouts guiding the way, probing the path ahead while securing ropes along the steep rock face — even with skill bordering on grandmaster level, a single misstep on a ravine like this could mean a body that would never be found.
And yet this stretch of cliff, one that even hunters would rarely dare to cross in ordinary times, was the only route by which they could approach Linzhou without being detected.
Days earlier, as soon as word came that Shuliesu had broken camp and marched south, the Huaxia Army’s general staff had reacted swiftly. After the assassination of Tian Shi and the resulting internal strife in the Jin region, crushing the Huaxia Army head-on was clearly a critical step in Wanyan Xiyin’s broader scheme. With Tian Shi now dead and morale across the Jin region at its lowest point, this force of a mere ten thousand Huaxia Army men could not afford to lose — yet neither could it simply avoid battle.
On the other hand, holding Linzhou to the death with only ten thousand men, hoping to somehow rally the morale of the entire Jin region in the process, was clearly a foolish strategy as well. After receiving word back from Wang Juyun, Guan Sheng had split the eleven thousand Huaxia Army troops into two groups: one force of just over eight thousand entered Linzhou itself, relying on the advantage of its fortifications to engage Shuliesu directly, while a second force of just over three thousand headed toward the northeast, to await Zhu Biao’s arrival.
This arrangement was chosen mainly to prevent Linzhou from becoming a place they would simply die defending to the last man. On the other hand, given the strategic needs the Jurchens faced, Shuliesu’s assault on Linzhou would certainly aim for a swift victory; while a three-to-one numerical advantage was considerable, there was every chance further contingencies lay in reserve as well. And so, from the very outset, this battle was bound to become a fierce, no-holds-barred clash between two elite forces. The reserve force of three thousand needed to stay neither too far nor too close, ideally positioned to seize the initiative on the battlefield while also staying beyond Shuliesu’s watchful eye — and in the end, this treacherous mountain path became the only viable option.
The night wind cut like a blade of steel. Suddenly, a commotion rose from behind. Zhu Biao turned to look and saw, along that stretch of the mountain trail, several figures suddenly thrown off balance; three shadows plunged toward the ravine below, one of them caught at the last moment by a soldier ahead of him, the other two vanishing from sight in an instant.
No excessive noise rose from the mountain path, for strict orders had been given before setting out: absolute silence. The long column of three thousand men continued to make its cautious, silent way across this stretch of cliff, and in the course of it several more men fell, one after another, into the ravine below, leaving this world forever.
Some wept, but the column continued its silent advance regardless. Once everyone had finally crossed the cliffside path, some looked back to see the dark mountainside standing silent, showing no trace of what had just occurred. Before long, this stretch of cliff had been left far behind them.
Ahead lay darkness and cold, and the road to Linzhou still stretched far into the distance…
…
Past midnight, the assault on Linzhou finally paused once more. The fierce fighting had, at every moment, seemed as if it might breach the wall outright, but in the end, that outcome had still not come to pass.
The Jurchens sounded the gongs to withdraw, yet still maintained a posture that suggested a full-scale assault could resume at any moment. Behind the camp to the west of the battlefield, Shen Wenjin called his trusted officers into his tent. He said nothing of what he intended to do — only kept them there.
The best moment had not yet arrived. It still remained to wait.
…
After the hour of Zi came the hour of Chou, and as the hour of Chou drew toward its end, the wall had grown quiet as well; the defending soldiers changed shifts, and the night crept toward its deepest point.
Ten li away, Wang Juyun’s relief force made camp in the snowy night, waiting for daybreak to enter the battlefield. Once reinforcements arrived, the situation at Linzhou would ease somewhat — though naturally, this also meant greater pressure and more urgent timing for Shuliesu. Perhaps for this very reason, at the third quarter of the hour of Chou, the Jin camp suddenly stirred; three thousand-strong units launched attacks from different directions in succession, an assault that lasted a full quarter hour.
In the end, it too came to nothing.
Close to the hour of Yin, the Jin troops withdrew. It was now three in the morning; after the tension, an overwhelming exhaustion settled over everyone. At the first quarter of the hour of Yin, within Linzhou, the defending commander Xu Chunyi stepped out from his courtyard and headed toward the western wall, trusted men accompanying him.
One street over, Yan Qing, dressed in black, raised a hand and moved off in the same direction, following behind.
In the Jurchen camp, now gradually settling into quiet, Shuliesu stepped out from his tent and raised his telescope toward Linzhou, which had likewise fallen quiet before him. Ever since his arrival at Linzhou, the scene had been one of ceaseless boiling chaos; this stretch of night before him now seemed, by contrast, never so still.
In the mountains two li from the Jurchen camp, even the animals seemed to have fallen asleep in the deep cold of night. Lu Junyi, too, watched this camp from a great distance away.
The second quarter of the hour of Yin — four in the morning.
Something was about to happen…