The twenty-third of May. Forty li west of Xuzhou, at the foot of the hills north of Xiao County.

The sky was clear, the air still and oppressively heavy. A hawk circled overhead.

The rugged mountain road wound on, vanishing far off into the dense forest at the base of the hills. On the slopes ahead of the road, the sound of massed human breathing gathered.

The smell of gunpowder drifted through the crowd of men. Lead shot was rammed down into gun barrels.

Black banners stretched out in a line — a formation of nearly a thousand men had already spread out across the slope.

Luo Ye stood on a rock, watching the hawk in the sky. A faint trembling rose from the earth. The enemy was coming.

This was but one corner of the great retreat from Xuzhou.

From the ninth year of Wujian, when the Jurchen had launched their southern offensive, through to the first half of the tenth year of Wujian, as the Jurchen’s eastern and western armies pressed south, the Central Plains had erupted, one after another, into a series of large-scale blocking battles. The land of Jin had been turned entirely into a sea of fire, and the resistance of the Guangwu Army at Daming Prefecture had been the most brutal of all. During this same period, the resistance at Xuzhou had been comparatively steady. Aside from being besieged through the winter by nearly a million starving refugees, it was not until the first half of the tenth year, when Wanyan Zongfu and Zongbi began their assault on the city, that Xuzhou — having held for less than three months — began its withdrawal in mid-May.

Compared to the five-month resistance at Daming Prefecture, which in the end cost the lives of most of the more than ten thousand Huaxia Army reinforcements sent to relieve the siege, leaving only a few thousand survivors after the breakout — a battle of genuine tragic grandeur — the war at Xuzhou seemed, in the eyes of many hypercritical observers, not glorious enough. At the very least, in the eyes of Li Anmao, the prefect of Xuzhou who had originally invited the Huaxia Army to help defend the city, the ten-thousand-strong reinforcement from the Huaxia Army, combined with the tens of thousands of troops he himself had raised in Xuzhou, ought to have held this contested ground for half a year, even a full year. If it meant dying a martyr’s death, so much the better — it would have completed his loyalty to the Wu Dynasty.

But Liu Chengzong and the others had never intended anything of the sort from the very beginning.

From the moment this ten-thousand-strong Huaxia Army arrived at Xuzhou, they had been working to move the local residents south. Li Anmao, having already resolved himself to die, had little opinion on the matter of evacuating the populace — indeed, he cooperated with it wholeheartedly. Later, once the starving mobs outside Xuzhou’s walls dispersed and the Jurchen came, the remaining residents of the city took advantage of the early spring to head south, and Liu Chengzong, together with the nearly fifty thousand defenders remaining in the city, mounted a stubborn defense.

The Jurchen eastern army, over three hundred thousand strong, had been preparing to besiege the city since the start of the previous winter. After several tens of thousands of men had held the walls of Xuzhou for over two months, Liu Chengzong and the others knocked Li Anmao unconscious at a meeting, seized his command, and announced the decision to withdraw from Xuzhou.

The troops nominally under Li Anmao’s command numbered as many as fifty thousand, but their composition had always been a mess — some were remnants of Liu Yu’s former forces who had defected back, others were nothing more than drifters who had enlisted merely to be fed. Li Anmao had gathered these fifty-odd thousand men to bolster his numbers, hoping to keep the Huaxia Army tied down here. But this force had had no real combat capability to begin with. After the Huaxia Army arrived, they trained alongside these men, tightened discipline, held meetings and heart-to-heart talks, and only in this way managed to raise their fighting strength somewhat. Now that the Huaxia Army said it was time to leave, there was no one left among the Xuzhou defenders willing to obey Li Anmao’s order to fight to the death. The absorption of these tens of thousands of men, who had endured two months of war, into the Huaxia Army’s command became, quite naturally, a foregone conclusion. At the very least, throughout the withdrawal, no one dared disobey the Huaxia Army’s arrangements.

Xuzhou had been contested ground since ancient times. The city sat within a basin, surrounded on all sides by rugged mountains and rivers — terrain easy to defend and hard to attack. Zongfu and Zongbi’s eastern army, seeking a swift victory, had chosen to storm the city fiercely rather than encircle it and starve it into a dead trap. The Jurchen had left one side of the siege open, so the breakout of the tens of thousands of defenders had not been especially difficult — it was the withdrawal afterward that drew the ferocious pursuit of the great Jurchen army.

But as for the withdrawal plan as a whole, the Huaxia Army had begun surveying and rehearsing it since the previous year. Once the main force left the city, Liu Chengzong split the core strength of the Huaxia Army into several groups, methodically using the rugged terrain to stage blocking actions and retreats one after another. The tens of thousands of Jurchen pursuers coming from different directions behind them were instead battered into disarray. By this day, the twenty-third of May, Chaoxian Ridge, north of Xiao County, had become the forward strongpoint of the entire great retreat.

More than ten thousand Liaodong troops were bearing down from nearby, led by the Han Chinese general in Jurchen service, Liu Guangji. On the Huaxia Army’s side stood Luo Ye, commanding a special forces regiment of nearly twelve hundred men. They had been formed as an experimental unit of the Fifth Huaxia Army — their full equipment had never before been tested in real combat, but every member who made up this special regiment was a veteran of the Huaxia Army.

This special regiment had performed adequately, nothing more, in the earlier defense of Xuzhou, and had not made use of the new weapons issued to every man — because their effect in a siege defense had not proven especially good. That they had chosen to make their stand at Chaoxian Ridge this time was, first, because the terrain here was the most ideal; and second, because with the nearby friendly forces having already withdrawn, this mountain pass now sat at a salient point on the front line, likely to bear the heaviest pressure of defense. And there was a third reason, one Luo Ye had not mentioned to many — according to earlier tactical projections, this location was the most likely spot to draw a visit from the enemy’s foremost vanguard general.

And the most formidable vanguard general in the Jurchen ranks was none other than the one who had all but dictated the entire offensive posture of the eastern army — the Jurchen’s “Fourth Prince,” Wuzhu.

To Luo Ye’s mind, this was the perfect place for the new weapons to shine.

If circumstances allowed, he meant to take a head.

It was only unfortunate that the tides of battle shift in an instant — the man charging toward them was not Wuzhu.

This year’s Jurchen southern campaign came more than a decade after their first push south. The eastern and western armies together now numbered nearly six hundred thousand men under arms — though even after years of rest and recovery, the Jurchen soldiers who had once earned the fearsome reputation of “ten thousand of them are unstoppable” could never have swelled to such numbers on their own. In truth, the Jurchen children newly added to the ranks could hardly recapture the ferocity of those who had once fought their way out of the White Mountains and Black Waters.

And so the army as a whole had come to include a great many peoples of other stock — Bohai, Khitan, Xi, Han Chinese, who ranked second-tier within the Jurchen state, and so on. Though in later ages people would say that among Han there should be no two ways of speaking, in this era the Han Chinese of Liaodong looked down upon the “southerners.” In their eyes, it was only natural to follow the valiant Jurchen, and to carve out fame and rank for oneself by following the Jurchen on their southern campaign was likewise seen as entirely proper.

The Han Chinese of Liaodong held low status within the Jin state at this time, and it was precisely for this reason that, in order to raise their standing, they had no choice but to fight with everything they had. Liu Guangji was a fierce general under Zongbi’s command, notorious for his violent temperament, his iron-fisted discipline, and his savage use of troops. In his camp, in the early days, he would have one Han slave flogged to death every day, to shock the many Liaodong soldiers into fearing the fate of cowardice: “Whoever dares not shed blood can go and be a slave!” Later, after the Grand Emperor decreed that Han slaves could not be killed at will, Liu Guangji instead took to hacking off the hands and feet of one Han slave each day — and if the man died of his wounds, given Liu Guangji’s standing, he need only pay a fine as penalty. In truth, with Zongbi shielding him, even that fine was, by and large, never actually collected.

Before the two sides came within sight of one another, word had already come in from the sea-eagles and the scouts: blocking the road ahead was a force of roughly a thousand men from the Huaxia Army. Since the terrain ahead began to narrow, a battle there would be unfavorable to the attacking side, and since the Huaxia Army had arrived first, the higher ground would certainly already have cannon positioned on it — the first wave of any attack would inevitably bear tremendous losses on his own side.

The moment the enemy formation came into view, Liu Guangji, looking through his spyglass, also noticed the strange, elongated line in which they were arrayed. Infantry formations of this era were mostly built around the square — even though the appearance of cannon posed a great threat to such formations, a square was still necessary, or else the battlefield would fall into chaos and the line would be unable to withstand a charge. Yet the formation ahead was only two or three ranks deep, and what the men held in their hands were — showy, impractical fire-lances.

This type of pyrotechnic weapon of the Wu Dynasty had existed for decades already, yet it had never amounted to much of anything — short range, weak power, and prone to bursting and blinding the very man who fired it. Although, since the rise of the Huaxia Army, every faction had come to place great importance on gunpowder, these fire-lances in particular had, for the time being, never proven decisive in any major battle.

Liu Guangji knew well the fearsome reputation of the Huaxia Army, and seeing this scene before him, one he could not quite make sense of, he frowned. But there was little room left for him to maneuver. Under Zongbi’s orders, he had to break through Chaoxian Ridge swiftly and cut into the central column of the retreating Huaxia Army.

Even with cannon, the fight had to go the same way regardless…

He glanced briefly over the enemy’s line of defense, gritted his teeth. In terrain this constricted, if he was to attack, the enemy’s cannon were the weapon he had most to fear. But there was no other way. Past experience had taught him that the more ferocious the cannon fire, the more fiercely one had to press the attack — only by breaking through to the enemy’s position in a single breath could their defensive strategy be shattered. Fortunately, on his own side, there were, in the end, men enough to spare.

“Damn it! When men die, their pricks point at the sky…” Liu Guangji spat twice into his palm and swung his long saber. “Sound the horns! Lads, get ready — “

The shrill blare of horns rang out through the mountain pass. Each unit formed its ranks, and Liu Guangji rode along on horseback, shouting loudly before his own lines to rally their spirits. On the other side, Luo Ye’s gaze was steady and calm. He climbed down from the rock he had been watching from, moved to the side of the formation, took up the drumsticks, and began beating the great drum before him with force.

The drums rolled and roared, moving with the rhythm of every breath. Among the ranks of soldiers, muzzles rose thick as a forest. In battle, morale surges once, wanes on the second effort, and is spent by the third — in this moment, both sides, eager to force a swift decision, had raised their fighting spirit to its very peak.

At the hour of noon that day, Liu Guangji’s army launched its charge. The surrounding terrain was too complex, and any flanking maneuver would have taken them too far out of the way — he could wait no longer. Driven forward by military orders, the vanguard, led by a squadron of light cavalry, surged into the slope at the mouth of the pass in a fan-shaped formation. The roar of cannon fire rang out, and the ranks surged forward like a tide. This Liaodong army, howling in near-hysteria, loosed the first volley of arrows.

Facing the incoming arrows, the long ranks of the Huaxia Army stood motionless, rifles raised. Because the formation was long and narrow, this hasty volley inflicted few casualties — only a scattered few men were struck. The charge ahead surged forward violently, the light cavalry pulling apart from the infantry behind them, and as the terrain narrowed, the formation began to draw together. Someone raised a hand high into the air.

“Hold steady—”

“Hold steady—”

“…”

“…”

“Fire!”

“…”

At the fan-shaped mouth of the pass, the cavalry had already come surging in, and a long line of fire-lances erupted all at once. Along a line barely sixty-some zhang in length, three hundred shots rang out, three hundred wisps of blue smoke rose, three hundred lead balls flew forward across the ground together, and blossoms of blood bloomed ahead.

The instant the volley fired, the soldiers dropped swiftly into a crouch. As the beat of the drums shifted, the second rank’s three hundred fire-lances were already raised.

“Second rank, ready—”

“—Fire!”

Blue smoke rose amid a chorus of thunderous cracks.

“Hold steady!”

“Third rank, ready—”

“—Fire!”

The narrowing slope became a great maw swallowing lives whole.

This was but one corner of the great retreat from Xuzhou. It did not halt the Jurchen advance southward, and at the time, it drew little attention from anyone.

Throughout the entire withdrawal from Xuzhou, Liu Chengzong made use of the advantage of the complex terrain to stage a series of counterattacks, routing several tens of thousands of Jurchen pursuers who had been eager to claim credit, and reaping several thousand heads from the Jurchen eastern army. And in the battle at Chaoxian Ridge on this twenty-third day of May, after Luo Ye broke apart Liu Guangji’s frenzied assault, he launched a counterattack, and in the second quarter-hour of the hour of Wei, cut down Liu Guangji himself, who had led the charge personally after the battle turned against him, thereby scattering the entire attacking force.

In the series of engagements between the Jurchen and the Huaxia Army, faced again and again with such martial prowess from the Huaxia Army, the Jurchen side had, little by little, come to regard it as nothing out of the ordinary.

Lightning flashed suddenly bright, thunder rolling and shaking the sky.

Chengdu. A rainstorm.

In a room of the teahouse, Cheng Zhouhai stood by the window, his face clouded, listening to the roiling clamor of voices rising from the street and the square below. A public trial had already drawn near its close, and the crowd’s shouts of condemnation all but drowned out the thunder overhead: “Kill that old wretch—”

“Not one of that family is any good—”

“Kill him! Kill, kill, kill—”

This public trial was for the great Confucian scholar Chen Song and his faction of followers, who had earlier plotted to breach the dikes of the Min River. These men had been captured on the twenty-seventh of April, and the trial, originally meant to take place within about ten days, had instead been drawn out with great care, so as to complete the matter thoroughly and to establish the reputation and credibility of the Huaxia Army’s judicial system. Every piece of evidence, every testimony, the entire process of the arrests, had all been made public through newspapers and storytellers. By this day, Chen Song had been sentenced to death, and the dispositions for his various followers were being announced one after another. Though the rain had come down suddenly and without warning, the crowds that had gathered in the city of Chengdu to watch still choked every road to the point where not a drop of water could pass.

Throughout the proceedings of the trial, Cheng Zhouhai, who had come to this region, had been negotiating continually with Ning Yi, hoping through some manner of compromise or exchange of interests to save this old, unyielding Confucian scholar — yet Ning Yi had never once relented. Now that the verdict had been publicly pronounced and the matter settled beyond recall, Cheng Zhouhai’s expression was plainly displeased. He was a man of considerable depth and guile, but before Ning Yi, he did not trouble himself to conceal such feelings.

“How does Chen Song down there compare to Qian Xiwen back in the day? When the Jurchen struck Bianliang, didn’t you, and your teacher too, once consider breaching the Yellow River? You even made preparations for it in advance, at Xia Village! So how is it that he’s the villain, and you’re the righteous one!?”

He rapped his hand against the window, looking toward Ning Yi, who sat in the room drinking tea. Besides the two of them, the room also held Qin Shaoyu and Song Yongping. Cheng Zhouhai had brought Song Yongping along to discuss “business” with the Huaxia Army, and in response, Ning Yi had brought in Qin Shaoyu — whose legs had been crippled by Lin Ecan and who now sat in a wheelchair — to handle the complexities of the negotiations, to balance out the matters of personal obligation involved in the deal. At this, Ning Yi set down his teacup and raised his eyes.

“Old Qian’s martyrdom, back then, implicated only himself — in that, he certainly can’t compare to Chen Song. The catastrophe at Bianliang was a matter of facing the Jurchen — a foreign people. If it truly could not be won, then all that was left was to go down together. If you people think of the Huaxia Army the same way you think of the Jurchen, as a foreign race, then yes, Old Qin and I really are no different from this Chen Song. Though at least I’m not carrying out massacres — that’s a bit better than the Jurchen, at any rate.”

“How great, really, is the difference between destroying a tradition and destroying a nation?”

“If you want to argue semantics, sure, there’s not much difference. But before I’d destroy a tradition, I’d need to be certain your tradition has real problems, and that neither of us can find a way to reform it. It’s not as though I’m some child throwing a tantrum — if you can persuade me, if you can make me accept your view, I’ll correct myself. But if you don’t want to argue semantics, then Chen Song is simply a scoundrel, and you know it as well as I do — whether by conscience or by plain self-interest, I have every right to kill him without a shred of guilt. If you were sitting in my seat, would you let a man live who was preparing to breach the Min River just to oppose you!?”

These past several days, the two of them had already sparred like this, sharp with gunpowder, more than once, and Qin Shaoyu and Song Yongping could only sit by and stay out of it. In truth, Cheng Zhouhai had come representing the Princess’s estate, seeking cooperation with Ning Yi, and Ning Yi, for his part, held nothing back — over these recent days he had taken Cheng Zhouhai around to visit many places, even some of the weapons workshops currently in operation, revealing to him one by one the more advanced ideas that had grown out of the study of natural science.

Ning Yi did not particularly mind that Cheng Zhouhai was learning things from the Huaxia Army — if anything, he seemed more like someone actively trying to “infect” Cheng Zhouhai’s thinking. That morning they had originally gone to visit a newly built firearms workshop in the city of Chengdu, and before they had even finished looking it over properly, they had come here to watch the public trial instead. Cheng Zhouhai and Ning Yi argued for a while, but since the matter was already settled beyond recall, he did not press the point any further.

After both fell silent for a moment, Cheng Zhouhai finally spoke. “I know you’ve always been passionately devoted to firearms. But these fire-lances — the Wu Dynasty already had them to begin with. Do you really intend to put them on the battlefield? I know this weapon is cumbersome to use, prone to blowing up in your own hands, and its range doesn’t match a bow. Have you actually solved these problems?”

“Of course I haven’t.” Ning Yi held his teacup. “But things always get solved, little by little. The potential of the bow has already reached its ceiling — a good bow takes two or three years just to make, and training a skilled archer takes over a decade. Firearms had a great many problems at the start too, it’s true, and even now they’re only slowly catching up to the range of a bow. But as manufacturing techniques advance, they’ll gradually be produced far faster than bows ever could, and training a shooter is much simpler as well — one day, even a woman holding a gun will be able to kill you. Human strength has its limits; the potential of material science does not. The study of natural science is nowhere near its end yet.”

“Then… will you sell this thing to me?”

“Sure, why not.” Ning Yi smiled as he said it.

Cheng Zhouhai’s brow furrowed at once, and beside him, both Song Yongping’s and Qin Shaoyu’s brows furrowed as well — though Qin Shaoyu’s gaze remained relaxed, while Song Yongping’s carried more wariness.

— There’s a scheme here.

Ning Yi sighed, stood up, but did not shy away from saying it plainly: “I can sell you fire-lances. I can even sell you the entire philosophy of natural science. If you people can genuinely master it, and use it to defeat the Jurchen, then all the better. But if you can’t learn it, then when the enemy comes and you want something good in hand, you’ll find that the path of natural science has no end — there’s always something better. How can you guarantee you’ll always be the ones to see what comes next, if you refuse to open your minds, if you stay bound by things you simply take for granted? To let the people truly understand — do you dare do that? Today, Jun Wu can push forward natural science only because there’s a war to fight right now. Once the war is over, it’ll be better to let the people simply follow, rather than understand.”

“Selling us the fire-lances, fine, sell them to us — I’m not afraid of you copying them. Once you’ve copied them, I’ll simply have better fire-lances by then. And copying them may not even be realistic — you don’t have much time left.” Ning Yi smiled faintly and tapped his finger once against the tea table. “The urgent report that came in this morning…”

He said: “The western army… Xiyin has led the vanguard across the river.”

Outside the window, the rain went on falling. Not long after, word came that a seepage breach had appeared near the Dujiangyan irrigation works, and Ning Yi set off at once with his men, racing back to the front lines of the emergency response — there were problems to be found everywhere. On the Jurchen side, in order to deal with the problems constantly arising within their own territory, both the eastern and western armies had been forced to hasten their advance south. In late May, Xiyin led the vanguard of the western army across the Yellow River first, attempting to reach the Xiangyang front as quickly as possible, coordinating with the strategic aim of the eastern army’s advance toward the Zhenjiang line.

Not long after crossing the river, Xiyin received word of what had happened earlier on the Xuzhou front — the appearance of fire-lances at Chaoxian Ridge stirred his wariness all the more. In truth, ever since the potential of firearms had first been uncovered, all three powers — the Huaxia Army, the Wu Dynasty, and the Jin state — had been researching their application. In the Great Foundry Institute under Xiyin’s charge, fire-lances had also once been studied, though no decisive breakthrough had yet emerged there.

On the day the news reached him, the vast Jurchen army was gathering at a port on the southern bank of the Yellow River, banners and standards spreading like a forest. Xiyin stood atop the city wall outside the port, and for a moment it was as though he could see, in his mind’s eye, the shadow of that Huaxia Army from the southwest — that Han Chinese army that had gone on resisting, unyielding, for more than ten years now. Even now, the Jurchen still held the upper hand in this war, and if things continued as they were, the Jurchen would go on holding it. But still…

They had to seize this chance, in this one campaign, to settle the realm once and for all.

He thought no further on it, only reaffirmed in his heart, once more, the resolve he had held from the very start of this southern campaign.

If he were still young, he might not have been willing to fall in with Zongfu and Zongbi’s strategy for the western army — he would rather have swept through the entire Wu Dynasty on his own, and hoped, at most, that Zongfu and Zongbi might stumble into another disaster like the one at Huangtiandang.

But in this moment, Xiyin set such thoughts aside.

Lin’an. June.

The weather was so hot that all one could hear was the drone of cicadas.

In the study of the Princess’s residence, a bowl of chilled lotus-seed soup sat on the table, no longer cool, and the room had no cross-breeze to speak of. Reports and messages from every corner of the realm gathered on this very desk. Zhou Pei lifted her head from among the official documents, sweat beading on her brow, her face somewhat pale. She felt the air pressing down on her, oppressive, and pressed one hand against the left side of her chest. Thump, thump, thump, thump — the sound rising from within was like the beat of a drum.

Before her lay reports that had come from the southwest, and reports that had come from the north. Before things actually arrive, people can imagine all manner of turning points and solutions — but in this moment, the situation had grown clearer and more fixed by the day, and the preparations that could still be pushed forward through the ordinary work of each day had already reached the very limit of what capability allowed.

Along the front lines north of the Yangtze, war preparations had already been pushed to the furthest extent possible — the transport and distribution of army provisions and equipment, the rooting-out of spies, the reinforcement of the defensive lines — every ounce of strength had already been spent to its limit. Every day, men died; now and then, some bandits driven to revolt by desperation would emerge, but even this was, in its way, necessary to hold the entire situation together. As for the news arriving from the southwest, Cheng Zhouhai sent letters every few days, filled with all he had seen and heard, filled with news of blood and iron, and what Zhou Pei could see in them was the smoke of gunpowder and the taut, straining nerve running through every line.

This atmosphere left her heart uneasy, as though she were a gambler waiting for the moment the dice cup would be lifted, or a condemned prisoner waiting for the instant the sentence would be spoken. The entire air of the city of Lin’an felt oppressive and hushed. In this moment, not a single official spoke against the war faction — and within the palace itself, Zhou Yong had already gone several days without once visiting the rear palace…