It was still the small hours of the morning when he rose. Stepping out of his room into the courtyard, the sky before dawn hung with a scattering of faint stars, the air cold and still, an orange glow glimmering from the guardhouse just outside the compound.
Buttoning up his clothes, Ning Yi made his way to the quiet sitting room and poured himself a cup of hot water. As he drank, he yawned a few times, then rubbed his face to wake himself up properly.
He’d had a few dreams during the night, but upon waking they had already slipped hazily from memory. There was still some time before his morning exercises. Jin’er lay beside him, sound asleep, holding little Ning Ke in her arms. Seeing them sleeping so peacefully brought a certain calm to Ning Yi’s heart, and he dressed quietly and rose from bed, careful not to disturb them.
Without lighting the oil lamp, Ning Yi sat for a while in the dark sitting room, the starlight outside filtering faintly through the window lattice, casting a crescent-pale glow across the room. After a moment, a figure entered. “Can’t sleep?”
It was Hongti.
“It’s nothing. Did I wake you?”
Hongti only smiled, walked over, and reached to touch his forehead — only to be pulled down onto his lap instead. “Had a few dreams, woke up thinking things over. Saw Jin’er and little Ke sleeping so soundly, didn’t want to disturb them. You went to bed late — you could go back and sleep a bit more, you know.”
“Mm.” Hongti answered, but made no move to leave, wrapping her arms around his neck and closing her eyes. In her younger years, she had traveled the martial world, weathering wind and rain, and there remained about her a certain rustic simplicity, like a village girl. In these recent years, having settled and found peace at Ning Yi’s side, she had taken on a softer, more tender quality.
The two sat together like that for a while before Ning Yi finally rose. Hongti, not the least bit sleepy herself, went off to the kitchen to fetch washing water. In the meantime, Ning Yi stepped out into the courtyard and began piling up the snow he’d shoveled into a corner a couple of days earlier. Over the intervening days, the unmelted snow had hardened considerably. By the time Hongti returned with the washing water, Ning Yi was still busy shaping a snowman with a small shovel; she called out to him softly a couple of times, then simply wrung out a towel and wiped his face for him before washing her own, pouring out the used water, and coming to help.
Two snowballs, one large and one small, formed the body of the snowman; Ning Yi used stones for the eyes, branches for the arms, then shaped two more snowballs into a gourd and set it atop the snowman’s head, tucking a withered leaf behind it. Stepping back, hands on his hips, he admired his work, picturing how the children’s faces would light up when they came out later. Satisfied, he clapped his hands together, then turned and gave the resigned Hongti a triumphant high-five.
The two of them walked out toward the edge of the compound. Beneath the dark canopy of the sky, scattered lights still flickered here and there across Zhang Village — the outlines of streets, the outlines of houses, the silhouettes of workshops and waterwheels along the riverbank, the distant shape of the army camp, all faintly visible in the scattered glow of firelight. A patrolling soldier passed by in the distance; slogans written in white lime lined the courtyard walls. Ning Yi skirted around the riverbank and climbed the small hillside on one side of Zhang Village; beyond the cluster of houses, the vast plain of Chengdu stretched away into the distance.
Ning Yi gazed out at the distance, Hongti standing beside him, not disturbing his thoughts.
Points of light gradually multiplied across the night sky, and gradually the shapes of people began stirring within his field of view. A dog barked here and there; before long, roosters began to crow. White smoke began rising from the houses below, the stars faded, and the sky seemed to shudder as it revealed the first pale light of dawn along the horizon.
It was the twenty-eighth of December, in the tenth year of Wujian Shuo — the old year drawing once more to its close. Having lived here for over a decade now, the antique elegance of that deep-walled mansion from his earlier life still felt close at hand, and yet in this moment, the small details of daily life in Zhang Village felt more like memories from some entirely different world — a rustic farming village, with its neatly kept dirt roads, courtyard walls, the white-lime slogans painted across them, the crowing of roosters and barking of dogs at dawn. In some vague, indefinable way, this world seemed almost to be reaching out to connect with something else entirely.
But of course, that was merely an illusion.
Beyond this small enclave lay the Wu Dynasty still, and beyond the tenth year of Wujian Shuo lay the eleventh — the Jurchens laying siege to cities, slaughtering people, without a moment’s respite. And even this small village, seemingly so novel and sturdy in this moment, could, if it fell into the path of war, be reduced to rubble and ruin in the blink of an eye. Before the great tides of history, everything remained as fragile as a sandcastle upon the shore.
After lingering a moment longer, Ning Yi began jogging along the hillside. The view ahead gradually came into clearer focus; a warhorse came galloping down the distant road, turning off into a courtyard among the houses below.
“Probably news from the east,” Hongti said.
Ning Yi nodded. “No rush.”
He jogged around the hillside for a while longer. The bugle sounded in the army camp as the soldiers began their morning drills, and two figures approached from ahead — Chen Fan and Qin Shaoqian, who had likewise risen early. Though the weather was bitterly cold, Chen Fan wore only a single thin layer, showing not the slightest sign of feeling the chill, while Qin Shaoqian, by contrast, was dressed in full military uniform — likely out drilling with his own men — and the two had crossed paths here on the hillside. As they chatted, they spotted Ning Yi approaching and greeted him with a smile.
“Liheng’s here,” Qin Shaoqian nodded.
Chen Fan grinned. “Slept in this late — what were you up to last night?”
“Grown man now, and you go straight for asking what someone did last night — the way you’re eyeing me all thirsty like that…” Ning Yi ribbed him with a smile. “What are you two talking about?”
“Telling him what a heartless boss you are — it’s the twenty-eighth of the last month already, and you still haven’t given your people any time off.”
“You don’t give your family time off either, and your useless teammate keeps courting death — you think I give you a break, you’d actually be able to sleep?”
The two of them traded barbs back and forth. Qin Shaoqian chuckled from the side. “We were just talking about how, with everything Zhou Yong’s been up to, how we ought to respond… At first, when we heard what that emperor of theirs was doing, we all wanted to laugh — but by now, no one expected the consequences to turn out this severe. Wushu’s driving straight for Lin’an, the Wu Dynasty’s people are far from unified, and Zhou Yong hasn’t shown a shred of backbone. If it truly collapses, the consequences don’t bear thinking about.”
A faint smile crossed Ning Yi’s lips, then his expression turned serious again. “I told him from the start to take this up with his son and daughter directly — who would’ve thought this lunatic Zhou Yong would go and stir it up right in open court, must have lost his mind entirely…” He trailed off, then laughed again. “Funny when you think about it, really — back then I thought the emperor was a nuisance and had him stabbed and started the rebellion. Now here we all are, branded rebels ourselves, and it’s still this same emperor causing us headaches. Give the man credit, he’s got a real talent for it…”
At this, the others couldn’t help but burst out laughing as well. Chen Fan laughed for a while, then said, “Everyone can see it clearly by now — Zhou Yong proposing reconciliation with us serves two purposes: on one hand, testing the waters with his ministers, applying pressure on them; on the other, it puts the choice squarely on us. Old Qin and I were just discussing this — if we stepped in at this point and picked up the thread, maybe we could help steady the situation a bit. The General Staff’s been discussing it these past couple days too. What do you think?”
He looked at Ning Yi. Ning Yi shook his head, his expression serious. “We don’t take the bait.”
Hearing him say this, Chen Fan’s eyes visibly relaxed. Beside him, Qin Shaoqian likewise broke into a faint smile. “How do you see it, Liheng?”
“You two are testing me on this one too, huh,” Ning Yi said with a rueful laugh. “The dignity of the throne is the very foundation of imperial rule. I killed Zhou Zhe, and Zhou Yong still bowed his head and accepted it — if he, the emperor, has nothing left to fear, then who else at that court would ever fear anything? Anyone paying attention in that court could see it clearly. Even if you put me in his exact position, I’d never let an emperor do something this foolish. It’s a shame Zhou Yong is just too naive…”
He sighed. “For him to pull a stunt like this — the ministers blocking him, even Hou Shao dying in protest — that’s the least of it. The real problem is this: once the crown prince committed to resisting the Jin, the people of the Wu Dynasty were, for the most part, still relatively unified. Even those harboring second thoughts didn’t dare act on them openly. But with this move of Zhou Yong’s, anyone secretly wanting to surrender, wanting to rebel, or at least wanting to leave themselves an escape route, will now start stirring. All those agents the Jin state has secretly been cultivating over the past decade-plus are now going to be impossible to restrain. And on top of that, Xiyin’s people have already begun making their own moves…”
Ning Yi paused briefly. “I’ve already had our intelligence operatives within the Wu Dynasty mobilized, though in recent years our intelligence work has been concentrated mainly in the Central Plains and the north — our approach toward the Wu Dynasty has largely relied on commercial channels. Tracking down Xiyin’s network of agents there won’t be easy in the short term… And another thing — even though Wushu may well have been following Xiyin’s own calculations, laid well in advance, the fact that his fifty thousand cavalry crossed the Yangtze three separate times before anyone caught wind of it strongly suggests there are Xiyin’s own hidden agents embedded within the Jiangyin military command — no one could convince me otherwise. At a moment this sensitive, I’d guess Xiyin, stationed at Xiangyang, must be utterly stunned by Zhou Yong’s sheer foolishness once he hears the news…”
“If Zhou Yong wants reconciliation with us, any Wu Dynasty scholar with even a shred of sense will try to stop him — and if we were to step forward at this exact moment, however it might be dressed up publicly as rallying morale, in practice it would only deepen the backlash and further destabilize Zhou Yong’s position. And our own forces are a thousand li away — Chen Fan, would you really send your ten-odd thousand men on a thousand-li dash to Lin’an?”
“Chengdu’s only just barely stabilized as it is. The fifteen thousand or so we recruited through the tournament during the New Year haven’t even begun training yet. Distant water can’t put out a nearby fire. And if we answered Zhou Yong’s call, the Wu Dynasty would only collapse that much faster — though I suppose it would mean we’d get to face off against Zonghan a little sooner.” Ning Yi gave a faint smile. “And there’s this too — the whole reason we’ve been able to rise up in rebellion at all rests on unity of purpose among our own people. We’ve only just expanded our territory, and people’s hearts here still aren’t settled. If we suddenly turn around and say we’re going to help the emperor fight his war, the brothers who’ve followed us all this way will feel their loyalty betrayed, while new recruits will get entirely the wrong idea about what we stand for. It’d be cutting our own throat in the process…”
His voice trailed off gradually. Chen Fan laughed. “Well, you’ve clearly already thought this through completely — nothing left to say, then. Ah, here I was thinking, if we stepped up and picked up the thread, all those Wu Dynasty scholars would end up with quite the colorful faces, hahaha… eh? What are you thinking about?”
He noticed Ning Yi’s eyes had grown distant, lost in thought, and asked the question. Ning Yi turned his gaze toward him and was silent for a good while.
“…I was just thinking — if I were Wanyan Xiyin, right about now, I could pass myself off as the Huaxia Army and pick up this thread myself…”
“Uh…” Chen Fan blinked, momentarily frozen in place.
In Lin’an, in the moment just before dawn, lights moved about within an antique, elegant courtyard estate.
As the New Year approached in Lin’an, the festive atmosphere arrived hand in hand with tension and grim severity. With news of Wushu’s southern advance arriving day after day, the garrison troops had already begun mobilizing on a massive scale. Some residents chose to abandon the city and flee, but the great majority of the common people remained within its walls, the mood of the coming New Year mingling in strange counterpoint with the tension of impending war, each passing day stirring up a bittersweet, anxious unease in everyone’s hearts.
The scene within the Grand Princess’s residence was much the same.
The stewards and servants responsible for daily life hung lanterns and decorations to build up the festive mood, but the residence’s other, parallel apparatus — the many personnel involved in intelligence, politics, logistics, and military affairs — had, in these recent days, remained in a state of high alert, responding to one development after another. As Ning Yi had put it, with the enemy showing no signs of resting and their own “useless teammate” racing against the clock to court disaster, those handling the real work could hardly afford to pause simply because the New Year was approaching.
The two systems ran strangely intertwined with one another — overlapping in places, entirely separate in others — forming an oddly singular, almost surreal tableau.
And as far as the residence’s affairs were concerned, the so-called “useless teammate” now included none other than the current ruler of the realm himself: the Grand Princess’s own father, the reigning Emperor Zhou Yong.
Had this simply been a matter of Wushu suddenly crossing the Yellow River and driving south, the situation confronting the Grand Princess’s residence would certainly not have reached the level of chaos and desperate anxiety it now faced. But as things stood now — especially after Hou Shao’s death by striking his head against the pillar — every single day had become an agonizing ordeal.
The Wu Dynasty’s court seemed to have transformed overnight. Every clan, every faction that made up the greater southern Wu establishment now seemed poised to become an obstacle to the Zhou family itself, any one of them liable to cause trouble, or even turn against them outright, at any moment.
Petitions and remonstrances poured in from every direction; students from the Imperial Academy staged sit-ins in the streets, demanding the emperor issue a formal edict of self-reproach and that the deceased Hou Shao be posthumously honored, exalted, and granted noble rank. Jin agents continued moving in the shadows, lobbying in every direction to urge surrender. In barely the past ten days alone, the Jiangning front had already suffered two defeats, both attributable to collapsed morale in the face of the enemy.
Of the Wu Dynasty’s more than two centuries of accumulated institutions, precious few, admittedly, would openly declare allegiance to the Jin at this stage — yet under this wave of collapsing morale, the already precarious effort to resist the Jurchens grew increasingly perilous still. What might happen next, no one could say with confidence any longer.
At court, the enormous upheaval had, for the moment, settled down. Ever since Hou Shao’s fatal collision with the pillar in the golden hall, Zhou Yong himself had grown thoroughly despondent, withdrawing into the rear palace and refusing to hold court. Zhou Pei had initially assumed her father simply hadn’t yet grasped the gravity of the situation, and had intended to go before him once more to press the point — but upon entering the palace, she found her father’s manner toward her had turned cold and rigid, and she understood at once: her father had already conceded defeat.
Zhou Pei met urgently with Zhao Ding, Qin Hui, and the others, and together they confirmed that the most pressing task now was to contain the fallout and present a unified front against the Jurchens. But even as this was underway, Jin agents were already active in the shadows, and quite apart from that, even if everyone agreed to avoid discussing the matter of Zhou Yong directly, not a single scholar in the realm would remain silent on the subject of Hou Shao’s heroic death by remonstrance.
And to discuss Hou Shao at all was, inevitably, to discuss Zhou Yong as well.
For the most senior figures at court — men like Zhao Ding, Qin Hui, and Lü Yihao — simply declining to discuss the matter of Zhou Yong presented no real difficulty. But for officials of lower rank, and for the scholars soon to enter public service, the question of the emperor’s culpability, how this whole affair ought to be resolved, and how Hou Shao’s heroic act ought to be commemorated and characterized, could not simply be left unaddressed.
During this period, Zhou Pei often found herself waking in the middle of the night, sitting alone in her small upper chamber, staring blankly at the state of the residence around her. Whatever fresh piece of news arrived from outside, she made a point of reviewing it the moment it came in. On the morning of the twenty-eighth, she had already woken before dawn; as the sky began to lighten, drowsiness was just beginning to creep back over her when a messenger arrived from outside the residence bearing fresh news concerning the Jurchens.
This concerned Wushu.
Since the fourteenth of December, Wushu had led fifty thousand cavalry south in a stripped-down advance, abandoning the bulk of his supply train, burning, killing, and plundering along the way, living off the land as he went. The stretch of territory between the Yangtze and Lin’an was among the most prosperous regions of Jiangnan — densely populated despite its network of waterways. Though Jun Wu had urgently mobilized a hundred and seventy thousand troops from the south in an attempt to intercept him, Wushu’s forces pressed on in a relentless dash, routing the intercepting armies not once but twice, and over the course of half a month, slaughtered and pillaged countless villages along the way. Wherever the cavalry passed, once-prosperous villages were reduced to barren wasteland, women violated, men slaughtered or driven off… Eight years after the original horrors of the Jurchen “mountain-and-sea search” campaign, that same human catastrophe seemed, once again, to be descending upon the land.
At this moment, Wushu’s forces were still rampaging along the western edge of Lake Tai, some two hundred li from Lin’an. The urgently transmitted intelligence report catalogued the names of the villages he had burned and slaughtered, along with rough estimates of the casualties. After reading it, Zhou Pei carefully marked out each location on the large map in her room — though she knew full well it would change nothing. By now, her eyes no longer welled with tears the way they had the first time she’d read such reports; she simply absorbed it all quietly, committing it to memory.
The distant crowing of roosters carried through the air, and outside, the sky had begun to grow faintly light. Zhou Pei stepped out onto the terrace beyond her chamber and gazed at the pale light breaking along the eastern horizon; below, the maids of the residence were already sweeping the courtyard. She watched for a while, and unbidden, the memory of the Jurchens’ earlier invasion surfaced in her mind; without realizing it, she wrapped her arms tightly around herself.
Suddenly, alarm bells and the sound of a citywide lockdown began ringing out across the city. Zhou Pei froze for an instant, then hurried downstairs. A moment later, someone came sprinting into the courtyard outside.
“What’s happened?!”
“Report — there are traitors stirring up trouble within the city! General Yu has already ordered a lockdown and is rounding up suspects…”
The defense of Lin’an at this time had been fully taken over by several units of the Imperial Guard, with contingency plans already in place for exactly this sort of situation. That morning, more than a dozen bandits had struck simultaneously at various points across the city, selecting the most crowded thoroughfares of Lin’an and, from elevated positions, scattering leaflets bearing seditious writing down into the crowds below. Patrolling soldiers had spotted the disturbance and reported it immediately, prompting the Imperial Guard to issue the lockdown alarm.
Zhou Pei left the princess’s residence by carriage. By this point, the city of Lin’an had already been placed under lockdown, with soldiers combing the streets to hunt down the culprits involved. But because the incident had broken out so suddenly, small pockets of disorder had already erupted along the way. Not far from the residence, Cheng Zhouhai came riding up on horseback to meet her, his face ashen as paper, blood on his clothing, several leaflets clutched in his hand. Zhou Pei, at first thinking he had been wounded, was reassured somewhat when Cheng Zhouhai briefly explained that the blood was not his own.
“…The bandits up ahead couldn’t escape in time and were killed by the city patrol guards — it was a bloody scene, Your Highness, I’d advise against going that way yourself. But as for what’s written on these — the malice behind it is beyond forgiveness. Your Highness should take a look.” He handed the leaflets to Zhou Pei, then lowered his voice. “Over at Qiantang Gate, the Imperial Academy and the National University were likewise flooded with copies of this same material. This has to be the work of the Jurchens — this is a real mess…”
Zhou Pei took the leaflet and looked it over, then abruptly closed her eyes, clenched her jaw, and opened them again. The leaflet was written in the style of a Black Banner Army proclamation.
It declared that the late Emperor Zhou Zhe of the Jinghan era had lacked both talent and virtue, indulging the Six Tigers and bringing ruin upon the Wu Dynasty, going so far as to murder the loyal minister Qin Siyuan through his own tyrannical misrule. Now, it claimed, the wise and benevolent Emperor Zhou Yong, facing this cataclysmic threat to the very heavens and the survival of the nation, was willing, setting aside past grievances, to seek reconciliation with the Black Banner — and that the Huaxia Army, filled with gratitude, was likewise willing to return to allegiance under the Wu Dynasty. Yet, it claimed, the treacherous chancellor Zhao Ding and the Grand Princess Zhou Pei, disregarding this great cause for the sake of clinging to power, had committed the unforgivable act of a hen crowing as a rooster — placing the reigning emperor himself under house arrest within his own palace.
The leaflet went on to call upon all loyal and righteous men of Lin’an and the Wu Dynasty to rescue Zhou Yong for the sake of this great cause and the very survival of their people, to root out the treacherous ministers, restore order to the court, and thereby unite together to resist the Jurchens and restore clear skies to the realm.
Having finished reading the leaflet, Zhou Pei looked up. Cheng Zhouhai saw that her eyes were entirely bloodshot, filled with red.