The war in the north continued on; the south, too, was far from peaceful.
Several days after news of the battle at Daming Prefecture reached the southwest, the rain continued falling on and off, and the water level of the Min River had risen sharply—the flood season had already arrived.
Though his thoughts remained fixed on the situation north of the Yellow River, from the moment the flood warnings turned urgent, Ning Yi and the Huaxia Army’s forces had already set out toward the Dujiangyan irrigation works.
Looking back from later ages, the Chengdu Plain was known as the “Land of Heaven’s Abundance,” yet the greatest threat to this region, year after year, had always been flooding. The Min River entered the Chengdu Plain through the Yulei Mountain gap, flowing from west to southeast, but it was, in a very real sense, an elevated river running above the level of the surrounding plain—the drop between the riverbed and the plain reached nearly three hundred meters. For this reason, flood control efforts on the Chengdu Plain had been ongoing since the Qin dynasty; in another timeline’s history, it was not until the Song dynasty that flood management here became truly systematic, and once the Dujiangyan works took final shape, they greatly eased the pressure of flooding in this region, allowing the “Land of Heaven’s Abundance” to gradually live up to its name.
But even so, in the twentieth century, the Chengdu Plain had still suffered two catastrophic floods, when the Min River and its downstream tributary, the Tuo River, overflowed and turned the entire plain into a vast lake. The same held true now—if the Min River could not be held, the coming year on this plain would be exceedingly difficult, and any hope of the Huaxia Army moving out of Sichuan in the near term would become nothing more than an idle fantasy.
And the threat the Huaxia Army now faced was not limited to natural disaster alone. Given the current situation, with the Huaxia Army now in control of the Chengdu Plain, the intelligence department had already received reports that the Wu dynasty was secretly plotting to breach the dikes of the Min River.
This kind of scheme—creating a flood to drown an entire army—had considerable currency among many Wu dynasty scholars; back when the Jurchens attacked Bianliang, the idea of breaching the Yellow River to repel the invaders had crossed the minds of quite a few people, and it was hardly any great secret. With the Huaxia Army only just having taken the Chengdu Plain, if a major flood truly struck, the following year or two would feel like carrying an enormous burden—so while it might sound alarmist on the surface, if someone truly intended to act on such a scheme, it would come as no surprise at all.
On one hand needing to guard against natural disaster, and on the other hoping to use a major event like this to deepen its still-unstable foundation of rule, in the early part of the fourth month the Huaxia Fifth Army mobilized all of its political departments, deployed forty thousand troops, and mobilized nearly fifty thousand civilians from the villages and towns near the Min River to take part in flood-prevention and dike-reinforcement work—in fact, the early groundwork of propaganda for this had already begun two months earlier, and once the water levels rose further in the fourth month, the Huaxia Army further expanded the scale of mobilization. Ning Yi personally went to the front lines to oversee operations, and in terms of conscripting labor and managing propaganda, the army committed virtually everything it had; by the time this flood-control effort was over, much of the money and grain the Huaxia Army had seized upon taking the Chengdu Plain had been spent.
But an undertaking of this scale, bringing the local populace and the army together in such close cooperation, naturally had its benefits as well—it let people experience firsthand the Huaxia Army’s rigorous discipline and its determination to bring the flooding under control. The main force sent to the front lines consisted primarily of soldiers, supplemented by civilian laborers experienced in water management, while, to ensure rapid coordination across the region, the administrators assigned to each village and town mobilized those civilians not sent to the front lines to repair and expand roads instead—laying down, in effect, a store of infrastructure for the future as well.
Through the middle and later part of the fourth month, the sky above the Chengdu Plain stayed gray day after day, with rain falling on and off. Ning Yi set up his command post in a few requisitioned houses near the county town by Dujiangyan, partly also to deter any petty troublemakers hoping to take advantage of this natural disaster. News from outside poured in toward this command post every day, and on the nineteenth of the fourth month, word arrived that Wanyan Chang, having finished sweeping Daming Prefecture north of the Yellow River, was now moving swiftly to his next objective.
At Liangshan Marsh, where the families of the Light and Might Army and Dulong Ridge, numbering in the tens of thousands, had gathered, the garrison force now consisted of barely more than two thousand men.
Separated by thousands of li, no amount of anxious concern could change anything. By the time this news reached them, the hundreds of thousands of Han troops pressed into service under Wanyan Chang had, it was estimated, very nearly completed their mobilization.
Still, by the twenty-third of the fourth month, somewhat better news arrived.
After the great battle at Daming Prefecture, survivors began, one by one, to turn up around Liangshan Marsh—sometimes in groups of several hundred, sometimes several dozen, sometimes a dozen or so, sometimes lone individuals. The survivors were not many, but many of the accounts they brought back stirred a deep sense of sorrow.
Among them were some who had endured half a month in the barren wilderness under Jurchen blockade before finally, with great difficulty, breaking through the encirclement; others had been gravely wounded and survived only by sheer luck. Most of their comrades had died—some had gone missing, others had been captured—and each of them bore wounds of one kind or another, but gradually, they found their way back toward this place.
Some had received help either from enemies or from local people nearby; a few groups had clearly been let through by Han soldiers conducting the mountain sweeps; and there were also members of the Light and Might Army or the Huaxia Army who, wounded, had been hidden away by nearby villagers. Once word reached them that Wanyan Chang’s next move was an attack on Liangshan, these people could no longer bear to stay put, and many, still bearing unhealed wounds, set out on the road back toward Liangshan.
It was, in fact, a curious thing—during the ten years since the Jurchens had conquered the Central Plains, in the early period, people’s spirit of resistance had run high for a time, but gradually, as most of those who resisted died off, the survivors who remained grew increasingly numb. By the time of this latest Jurchen southern campaign, and the Light and Might Army’s assault on Daming Prefecture, those who truly rose up in response were, in fact, already few. And of all of them, it was specifically toward the Huaxia Army’s banner that most people held anything but goodwill.
In the eyes of the world at large, though the Huaxia Army had emerged from among the Han people, and had taken the name “Huaxia” for itself, the vast majority of people in the Central Plains likely still saw them as no different, in essence, from the Jurchens themselves—demons of slaughter, one and the same. For this reason, the Huaxia Army had, all along, had no genuine base of popular support in the Central Plains.
And yet, after the crushing defeat at Daming Prefecture, at least across this stretch of land north of the Yellow River, many people who had already been reduced to lives with nothing left to lose seemed… at least a little, to be starting to accept them.
The Light and Might Army that had finally broken out of Daming Prefecture, together with the Huaxia Army that had come to their aid, numbered close to thirty thousand in total; the number of casualties could not yet be tallied by anyone, but at least half—several thousand—had been captured, and the brutal massacre had already begun. The survivors—however many of them there still were—kept trickling back, one after another, heading toward Liangshan to take part in what would very likely be an even more brutal battle still to come.
Like scattered sparks.
On the twenty-seventh of the fourth month, the list of officers confirmed dead gradually began arriving back, along with records of the brutal massacres of prisoners taking place city after city. By this point, the Min River’s floodwaters had grown even more violent; even as the various Huaxia Army units worked to reinforce the dikes and hold back the flood, the intelligence department was still tracking down and investigating rumors from various localities about pro-Wu factions preparing to breach the dikes.
By the fourth of the fifth month, rumors of one group preparing to cause trouble and breach the dikes were confirmed to be true; the ringleader was Chen Song, a prominent Confucian scholar local to Chengdu. The Chen family had originally been a prominent clan of Sichuan; after the Huaxia Army took the Chengdu Plain, some of the local gentry had fled with their entire households, but the Chen family had not left. When this year’s spring floods began, the Chen family judged that flooding on the Min River would have the greatest possible impact on the Huaxia Army, and so had secretly coordinated with a number of martial artists and wandering swordsmen from the martial world, appealing to their sense of righteous cause, preparing to strike at the opportune moment.
Chen Song had originally assumed the hardest part of this undertaking would be the psychological barrier of actually going through with it; but as it turned out, once the flood season arrived, the Huaxia Army mobilized en masse—though they too called upon large numbers of civilians, the surveillance and patrols around the site were extraordinarily tight. By the fifth month, when the Huaxia Army moved in and took every last one of them into custody, Chen Song, who had already prepared a large quantity of gunpowder, had still not decided where to strike.
The operation to arrest the Chen clan and its associates was conducted with considerable show of force, and Ning Yi personally accompanied the operation to oversee it. Chen Song was captured at a villa belonging to the Chen family, not far from the Min River. Ning Yi met this graying, half-white-bearded old man—the two of them had met several times before—and this time, the old man, no longer showing the dull, listless air he’d had before, launched into a furious tirade against Ning Yi right there in his own family’s main hall.
Ning Yi pulled up a chair and sat down before him, listening quietly until the old man had finished cursing him out entirely.
In his past dealings with Confucian scholars—especially with young scholars and men of letters—Ning Yi generally preferred to engage them in calm, reasoned debate. But this time, he had no interest in arguing. There were all kinds of martyrs in this world—Qian Xiwen, Qin Siyuan, Kang Xian, and Wang Qisong, whom he had never even met—and for those who had already resolved to die for their cause, argument had already lost all meaning.
He simply listened, his gaze grave, until the old man had finished cursing him out. Only then did he speak. “Ten days from now, you and your family will stand for public trial before several thousand people. Guilt will be judged strictly. As for the necessity of breaching the dikes, you can make your case then.”
On the way back, the heavy rain gradually eased into a light drizzle. Around noon, Ning Yi and his party stopped to rest at a roadside post station along the way. Ahead, three riders in straw raincoats approached; seeing Ning Yi’s group, they dismounted and entered the inn. The one in front took off her raincoat, revealing a tall, slender woman—Juan’er, who had long handled miscellaneous affairs for Ning Yi. She had brought some news from the north.
By this point, as time had passed, news from around Daming Prefecture and even Liangshan had begun coming into clearer focus. The deaths of some individuals had now been confirmed—including the repeatedly verified deaths of Xu Ning, Huyan Zhuo, Nie Shan, and others—but there were also generals such as Qin Ming, Li Jiakai, and Xue Changgong who had already made it back to Liangshan. This first group of returning officers and soldiers numbered over four thousand—essentially the surviving core force from the breakout at Daming Prefecture.
Because part of the army and its soldiers had been scattered so thoroughly during Wanyan Chang’s half-month-long blockade and sweep, it was likely that more soldiers would continue trickling back over time—or, equally possible, that they would not return at all—and in any case, the total number was likely to be small from here on.
“So that means… out of nearly thirty thousand, at most six thousand remain…” In the room at the post station, having listened to Juan’er’s brief report, Ning Yi murmured to himself.
“A great many were captured. The people over there are planning a rescue.”
“Don’t even think about it—Wanyan Chang isn’t some fool, and he’s known for being cautious and methodical. Killing people out in the open like this is exactly the kind of thing meant to draw others out.” The situation at Liangshan was urgent, and over these past few days, the picture had gradually become clearer as intelligence personnel at the front sent back reports one after another—so much so that several pages of intelligence were now covered edge to edge with dense writing. Ning Yi read through them, frowning and muttering to himself as he went.
Juan’er stood there for a moment. Ning Yi glanced up at her and gave a faint, wry smile. “Sit down. There’s been too much happening these past two days, and I’m in a foul mood—no need for you to stand there. In a bit I’ll need to write a letter to send to Liangshan…”
“Um…” Juan’er’s expression turned a little strange. “The last page… reports on something else.”
“What is it?” Ning Yi frowned and flipped to the last page.
Seeing Ning Yi start to read, Juan’er pressed her lips together and sat down on a stool off to the side.
The last page contained news that Li Shishi was about to be married.
The mission to rescue the Light and Might Army had been a gamble against near-certain death, but in this ordinary campaign as well, the Huaxia Army had thrown everything it had into securing that one sliver of a chance. The Han troops under Wanyan Chang’s command lived under extremely harsh conditions, and the intelligence team led by Yan Qing had gone to great lengths trying to persuade some of the Han officers to hold back, or even defect. Such efforts naturally met with both success and failure, but what few people knew was that Li Shishi, who had originally been staying at Liangshan, had likewise taken part in this operation.
When she learned that the Huaxia Army, having defeated Shulisu, was pushing southeast, Li Shishi understood that Zhu Biao and the others would never fail to attempt a rescue of Wang Shanyue, who was already trapped in a death trap. When the Huaxia Army set out, she, having come from Liangshan, took action of her own—she went to persuade a Han officer named Huang Guangde, trying to get him to hold back during the siege, and later, once the campaign moved into its manhunt phase, to help save people wherever he could.
This Huang Guangde had originally been a provincial graduate of the Wu dynasty; in his early years in the capital, with no one to back him, he had never managed to secure a real post even after passing his examinations. He had drifted about the capital for a long time, and had once spent many a night lodging at the Fan Tower. Back then, Miss Shishi had been at the height of her fame, and Huang Guangde, naturally, had had little chance of getting close to her—the two of them had met only a handful of times. It was during Li Xizhi’s rule that Huang Guangde had risen swiftly through the ranks under him, and by now, among the Han troops mobilized by Wanyan Chang, he had become a general of considerable standing, commanding over ten thousand men under him, with many trusted subordinates of his own, and the actual capacity to get things done.
When Li Shishi approached Huang Guangde, he had wrestled with the decision for quite some time—but eventually, having agreed to some condition or other, he had finally lent a hand. Only now did it become clear that Miss Shishi had promised to marry Huang Guangde as a concubine—and it was, perhaps, only thanks to Huang Guangde’s boldness, nearing fifty as he was, or perhaps a lingering nostalgia for the glory of his younger days, that he had taken such a reckless risk. By now, Miss Shishi had already moved into the rear courtyard of the Huang household.
Ning Yi read through this piece of news carefully, his brow furrowing even more deeply, then flipped back to the beginning and skimmed through the whole report once more. He understood now, of course, why Juan’er’s expression had been so odd, and his anger only deepened. He slapped the report down onto the square table. “Who’s in charge of intelligence over at Liangshan?”
Juan’er blinked. “Um, well…”
“This is insane!” Ning Yi stood up and slammed his hand on the table. “An intelligence officer writing up every last trivial detail, chattering on about nothing! Is he writing a novel? Do I need to know that Huang Guangde is forty-nine years old? Li Shishi is a woman past thirty getting married, and something that could be written in two lines takes up an entire page—does he think I have too much free time on my hands? Does he think I’m interested in this sort of thing!? If it’s a case of mutual affection, then let them be together. If it’s coercion, forcing a good woman into this, then deal with this Huang Guangde for me! Was there any need to send this to me at all?”
Ning Yi’s voice had risen to a shout in the room. “As if I don’t know what he’s thinking! He thinks I have some kind of history with Li Shishi! Who the hell cares whether I have some history with Li Shishi! Tens of thousands of people are dead! A group of heroes gave their lives on that battlefield, and tens of thousands of their family members are about to be slaughtered! And in a report meant to convey something this important, he gives me an entire page about Li Shishi! It’s insane! Whoever sent this report needs to write a serious self-criticism!”
Juan’er nodded and put the report away. Ning Yi fumed for a moment longer, then sat back down. “Tonight I’ll write a letter to Liangshan—at the very least, to encourage them. Tens of thousands of family members at Liangshan, plus a few thousand soldiers—though they hold the advantage of terrain, whether they’ll make it through is anyone’s guess. Here in the southwest, the lives and futures of hundreds of thousands of people are hanging in the balance too. One person’s personal news really doesn’t need to take up this much space—can’t she just be in love with him, like anyone else?”
He glanced at Juan’er. “You’re being ridiculous too…”
Juan’er lowered her head slightly. “I thought… you at least cared a little about Miss Shishi…”
“I’ve known her for years now—back in the capital, she looked out for me well enough, I suppose… but what does caring have to do with anything? After reading a report like this, am I supposed to send an order from thousands of li away telling someone to go rescue Miss Shishi? If it really is mutual affection, they might already have a child on the way by now.”
Ning Yi rubbed the bridge of his nose, paused, then looked at Juan’er. “And besides—Miss Shishi and I really never did have anything going on between us…”
Juan’er smiled faintly at that, and the two of them let the subject drop. After lunch, they braved the light rain and headed back to the front lines at Dujiangyan. More news had already arrived from the outside world by then, including word that Cheng Zhouhai, special envoy of the Eldest Princess’s residence of the Wu dynasty, would be arriving within the next few days.
“…An old friend. Welcome him,” Ning Yi said.
By the time they reached the area near Dujiangyan, the Dragon Boat Festival had already passed. On the seventh of the fifth month, the weather had turned clear and bright. Cheng Zhouhai, riding on horseback with an escort of guards, saw the local villagers hard at work repairing the roads. Huaxia Army soldiers were taking part alongside them, and administrators wearing red armbands stood atop large rocks, delivering rousing speeches to encourage the road workers.
“What’s this for?”
“Master Ning says that while the workers and troops with experience in water management fight the flood up front, the rest of us here in the rear should make sure the roads stay clear and open—it’s all part of managing the flood, everyone doing their part together,” explained a Huaxia Army official accompanying Cheng Zhouhai.
Cheng Zhouhai nodded. “Once the water’s under control, the roads here will already be repaired too, and everyone will have gotten along well in the process… not a drop wasted—that’s Ning Liheng’s style, all right.”
Along the way, most of what he saw were scenes of labor much like this. When they reached a military medical camp where many people had come to seek treatment, Cheng Zhouhai finally met Ning Yi. The two of them had not seen each other in over a decade; Ning Yi had entered middle age, while Cheng Zhouhai was now nearing fifty. He dismounted and cupped his hands in greeting toward Ning Yi, who returned the gesture. The two men looked at each other, both smiling, saying nothing for a moment.
Then Ning Yi turned slightly and pointed off into the distance. “Over there—my son.”
“Ning Ji. The one apprenticed to the physician.” Cheng Zhouhai smiled. Back when he had served under Qin Siyuan, he had already earned a reputation as a schemer prone to excessive cunning; over these years, working under Zhou Pei, he had become the chief steward of the Princess’s residence, and when it came to intelligence concerning Ning Yi’s side of things, aside from Li Pin, he was likely the one who paid the closest and most thorough attention.
He went on. “The word that the Min River was going to be breached—that was released by me. And some of the people involved were arranged by me as well.”
Ning Yi nodded, but before he could reply, Cheng Zhouhai added with a smile, “Give me something in return, and I won’t cause any more trouble for you from within.”
“If you’re capable of that, then I’ll admit I’ve lost this round,” Ning Yi said, and smiled as well.