The collapse of the great edifice came all at once, without warning.

The fourth month of the eleventh year of Wu Jianshuo was one of the most crucial periods in deciding the fate of the entire realm. The great battle at Jiangning was at its fiercest, and more than a thousand li away, at Xiangfan, hundreds of thousands of defenders were still struggling to hold their ground against Wanyan Zonghan’s ferocious assault.

Since the two sides had first clashed the previous year, the Wu Dynasty, under the fierce onslaught of the Jurchens’ fourth southern campaign, had still shown the depth of its national strength and its underlying resilience.

Nearly a decade of restraint and preparation had, despite the loss of the Central Plains, built an even more prosperous economic system in the Jiangnan region, supporting a body as strong and towering as a giant’s. Over the course of the following year of great battles, though the Wu Dynasty had at times suffered defeat and often found itself at a disadvantage, its deep reserves and its steady stream of soldiers made up for the losses of those defeats. Even after the Yangtze defensive line had been broken, several crucial pillars supporting Jiangnan’s backbone continued to hold fast, and in some places the fighting even became a back-and-forth affair, keeping the Jurchen army—which had staked everything on this all-out campaign—pinned near the Yangtze, unable to advance south for a long time.

If this state of affairs proved that the Wu Dynasty still possessed enormous overall strength, then the incident at Zhenjiang at the end of April perhaps revealed, in a far deeper way, the hidden wounds and contradictions concealed within this giant’s body.

Compared to the Jurchens’ first southward campaign more than a decade earlier—when, despite the Wu Dynasty’s million-strong army being crushed at a single blow before the Jurchens’ overwhelming military strength, many people throughout the realm had still held onto the dignity that had once belonged to a great nation; one could flee in defeat, but few had actually defected to the enemy, and even where military strength fell short, resistance had sprung up throughout the entire Central Plains region without end.

But after more than a decade of gradual change, the fervor of resistance against the Jin had shifted more and more toward the tragic laments of performers’ tongues and scholars’ pages. Though for ordinary people, what had happened during the Jingping era remained an enduring, bitter humiliation, and waves of anti-Jin sentiment among the populace kept rising higher and higher, among the actual power-holders of the Wu Dynasty’s upper and middle strata, and among the wealthy gentry families, the proportion of those maintaining ties with the Jurchens—or even outright defecting to them—had grown considerably.

Over more than a decade of back-and-forth conflict, even as the two sides remained locked in opposition, the Jin and Wu had also been steadily deepening their ties beneath the surface. Once the balance of power became clear on the surface, most clever people inevitably made their own calculations. By the time of the battle at Zhenjiang at the end of April, it was, in truth, less a contest between attack and defense than a brutal collision between the two sides’ comprehensive strength.

This was a battle unlike any that had come before it. Though on the surface it appeared to be merely a successful act of espionage and subversion on Wanyan Xiyin’s part, the groundwork for this ordinary-seeming battle had, in fact, already been laid with clear purpose the previous year. The Jurchens’ infiltration of the Wu Dynasty, and the unsettled hearts within the Lin’an court, made the whole affair feel, more than anything, like a large-scale replay of Ning Yi’s destruction of the Liangshan bandits.

Compared to the speed of information, the movement of tens of thousands, even more than a hundred thousand troops, appeared, with every major maneuver, painfully slow. In the middle of the fourth month, when Wanyan Xiyin’s great army turned toward Zhenjiang, all sides had already caught the scent of something unusual in this all-or-nothing move. But to keep up with his movements, the various Wu Dynasty armies also needed a considerable amount of time, and throughout this process, everyone had to remain wary of the possibility that this was merely a feint.

By the nineteenth of the fourth month, once Xiyin began preparing to besiege the city, the surrounding armies were finally able to confirm the truth of the whole maneuver, and converged toward Zhenjiang.

On the twenty-second, Xiyin sent envoys into Zhenjiang to sow discord among Jun Wu and the others, and on the same day, released a great quantity of leaflets into the city, spreading word that anyone who took part in defending the city would face the extermination of their nine generations of kin, while whoever surrendered the city first would be granted the title of Lord of Ten Thousand Households. At the same time, they kept spreading news and evidence claiming that certain high officials of the court had already surrendered to the Jurchens. In this atmosphere, that same afternoon, the Jurchen army launched an all-out assault on the city.

Wanyan Xiyin’s fierce attack on Zhenjiang was itself already an all-or-nothing gamble; nearly all of the high-explosive shells were hurled recklessly at the city walls, and in the lulls between the bombardments, the Mountain-Razing Guard launched reckless, suicidal charges against the ramparts. By this time, more than two hundred thousand troops were already on the move toward Zhenjiang from the southeast and south, while within the city, Jun Wu and the others intensified enforcement by the military police, adopting a strict one-on-one strategy of oversight over the generals within the army, and even reassigned each unit’s defensive zone before the siege began.

Had Xiyin’s assault on the city failed, the Mountain-Razing Guard under his command, along with the tens of thousands of troops led by Yinshuke and Aluba, would very likely have found themselves surrounded by the great converging Wu Dynasty army and ultimately buried beneath the walls of Zhenjiang. And even if they had managed a bloody breakout, only at tremendous cost, the morale of the Wu Dynasty’s forces would have soared as a result, and the Jurchens’ fourth southern campaign would have come to a dismal, forced end right there.

The Jurchens’ furious assault, combined with the declaration that defenders would face the extermination of nine generations, brought enormous pressure to bear on the troops within the city—but it also made the defenders’ resistance all the more resolute. Yet compared to the attackers, what would decide the outcome of the city’s defense was not the strongest point of the defenders’ morale, but a single critical flaw, which was all it would take.

On the twenty-fifth of the fourth month, before dawn, that flaw appeared. A minor officer named Geng Changzhong led a small band of his own personal guard in a mutiny, and after making contact with the Jurchens, attempted to open the Twin Horn Gate on the east side of Zhenjiang. His mutiny did not fully succeed, but the Jurchens, exploiting the internal chaos, launched a fierce assault on the Twin Horn Gate, seized the walls, and opened the gate—and from there, the Jurchen army surged in through the eastern side of Zhenjiang.

Flames and explosions ravaged the interior of the city; the fighting spread and pushed forward within its walls. The Jurchen soldiers, having entered the city, were high in morale at first, but before long, they too met with fierce counterattacks and desperate resistance from the defending forces. Jun Wu led troops out from the main camp, rallying soldiers throughout the city to fight back against the Jurchens, while at the same time organizing the common people to flee through the docks and roads on the city’s other sides.

Perhaps few could truly understand what Jun Wu felt in that moment—the resistance of more than a hundred thousand people undone by the weakness of a single man. Of course, had that man held out a little longer, some other weak link might well have appeared instead. But in the darkness of that dawn, Jun Wu did not fall before this fierce counterattack. Mounted on his silver-armored warhorse, he rode about everywhere, brandishing his sword, ceaselessly issuing orders, rallying the spirits of his soldiers, and guiding the fleeing common people toward safety.

At the docks near Zhenjiang, naval transport vessels and merchant ships still stood at anchor. Officials of the crown prince’s household—including Wenren Buer—tried to persuade Jun Wu to board a ship and flee the now-hopeless city, but Jun Wu flatly refused this suggestion. He ordered the navy to ferry the common people across the canal so that the city’s population could escape, and ordered the defenders on the southern side of the city to clear a path for the people.

Zhenjiang was the hub where the Grand Canal and the Yangtze crossed; by the previous year, the population gathered in and around Zhenjiang had reached as many as a million. After the great battle began, the surrounding populace had scattered, but more than four hundred thousand people still remained within the city. This night, slaughter and fire spread through the streets; the columns of fleeing refugees stretched on and on, and the entire city was plunged into a boiling maelstrom of killing.

Breaking through Zhenjiang was the single most crucial step in Xiyin’s entire war plan, and once the goal of taking the city was achieved, even he found himself caught up in a state of exhilaration. Not long after the Mountain-Razing Guard and the other Jurchen elite forces entered the city, they met with fierce counterattacks from the defending army head-on. Zhenjiang had now fallen; by Xiyin’s own declaration, every Wu Dynasty soldier could expect, once the Jin came to rule this land, to face the extermination of nine generations of kin. In an instant, resistance throughout the city reached a fever pitch.

At this point, Xiyin, leading the Mountain-Razing Guard together with part of Yinshuke’s and Aluba’s forces, commanded close to seventy thousand Jin troops, while the Wu Dynasty forces within Zhenjiang numbered just over a hundred thousand. Yet on this twenty-fifth day, after the city had already fallen, the fighting against the Jin within Zhenjiang reached its most tragic and intense climax—some generals led their soldiers in wild, reckless charges, fighting to the point of exhaustion and death without ever retreating a step, and some of the Mountain-Razing Guard troops who had entered the city were even stunned and driven back again and again by the ferocity of the counterattack.

On the morning of the twenty-fifth, a good portion of the city had already fallen into flames, and great numbers of common people were still fleeing toward the outskirts. By now, fighting had also broken out near the escape routes to the south of the city. Aluba’s forces attempted to seal off the southern road, but met fierce resistance from the Wu Dynasty troops Jun Wu had stationed there. The Wu Dynasty general leading twenty thousand troops in this defense, Zou Tianchi, was nearly sixty years old; once Jun Wu had placed him here, he never retreated. Over the following two days, his forces were scattered or destroyed, some surrendering; and when, two days later, he finally faced the full brunt of Aluba’s assault, the old general was thrown into the air by a cannon blast. Getting back up, his right arm reduced to bloody ruin, covered in blood from head to toe, the old general took up his blade in one hand and led the charge, at last falling along the staggering path forward.

This was but a small episode within the larger battle for Zhenjiang. On the morning of the twenty-fifth, Jun Wu, having run himself ragged through the entire night, found a brief moment to catch his breath. In a house by the street, he drank the rice porridge his wife brought him, and in a moment when no one was watching, wiped away the tears that welled up in his eyes despite himself. He then mounted his horse again and rode from place to place across the battlefield, rallying the soldiers’ spirits. During this time, countless people urged him to leave Zhenjiang at once—even some common people who had not yet managed to flee, seeing the exhaustion in the crown prince as he rode past, called out to urge him to board a ship and leave. Jun Wu shook his head and refused, shouting hoarsely.

“The soldiers defending this city have staked their lives on it—how could I possibly leave first! If I go, you’ll have no path left to survive!”

He said this to the common people, and then, reaching the edge of the battlefield, kept rallying the defending soldiers: “The Jurchens will give none of us a way to live! They will give the people of our Wu Dynasty no way to live! I stand with you all—until the people have finished evacuating, none of you will retreat, and neither will I—”

Zhenjiang was no small city, yet over the course of that single day, soldiers and common people alike caught sight of the crown prince rushing past two or three times over. His robes grew increasingly filthy and grey, his voice grew hoarser and hoarser as he called out, his movements grew increasingly weak—but the words he shouted, and the resolve behind his actions, only grew firmer. Because of this, some soldiers who had originally been fearful found themselves stepping onto the road that led them charging toward the Jurchens.

On the evening of the twenty-fifth, Jun Wu fell from his horse. Wenren Buer, who had been following him, again tried to persuade him to leave, and again Jun Wu refused: “I cannot leave. The morale of the army can still be used, the hearts of the people can still be used—I have seen it, we still have hope!”

Wenren Buer shook his head. “Zhenjiang has already fallen; everything after this is a lesser matter. The Wu Dynasty cannot afford to be without Your Highness! If you withdraw to Lin’an, there is still a chance of survival, Your Highness…”

Jun Wu shook his head over and over. His face had already turned an ashen grey, mixed with traces of blood; tears now flowed from his eyes. “This is not a lesser matter! The lives of hundreds of thousands—of a hundred-thousand-strong army—how could that be a lesser matter! Brother Wenren, I know what you’re thinking! But have you seen it? The hearts of the people can still be used—they can fight, they dare to fight, Zhenjiang has not yet fallen for good! They’ve broken in, and we’re beating them back! There are still hundreds of thousands of people rushing this way from nearby—we can keep Wanyan Xiyin pinned here! We still have hope!”

In Jun Wu’s eyes was the resolute, feverish glint of a man who had glimpsed his final hope—perhaps also because he had witnessed the fierce, magnificent resistance of this twenty-fifth day. Wenren Buer’s heart ached with sorrow, but he no longer tried to talk him out of it. On the twenty-sixth, the Jurchen troops who had entered the city began urging surrender, and resistance remained fierce, though it had begun to wane.

On the twenty-seventh, half of Zhenjiang was engulfed in a sea of fire, with tens of thousands of common people still unable to escape. The defensive line at the southern outskirts of Zhenjiang had already begun to falter under Aluba’s fierce assault. When Jun Wu led troops there to reinforce it, the old general Zou Tianchi had already died along the path of Aluba’s charge.

Along the southern road leaving Zhenjiang, beside the Grand Canal, the hills and valleys were now filled with fleeing refugees. Jun Wu gathered up scattered soldiers and organized a defensive line, while still urging the soldiers and civilians within Zhenjiang to evacuate as quickly as possible. By this time, the whole situation in Zhenjiang had become critical. A cavalry unit of the Mountain-Razing Guard, having pinpointed Jun Wu’s location, charged toward him. The generals and advisors around him tried again and again to persuade him otherwise. Jun Wu stood on the hilltop, looking down at the fleeing crowds below. “Can we truly not defeat them?”

The imperial guards accompanying Jun Wu formed a defensive formation, while the soldiers urged the people to evacuate as quickly as possible. The enemy cavalry appeared that afternoon; sunlight glimmered on the waters of the Grand Canal, wildflowers and green grass grew along its banks. Jun Wu had his royal banner planted on the hillside, watching as his guards drove back the cavalry’s charge; the cavalry then circled around to approach the crowd, loosing arrows into it. The guard’s own cavalry gave chase, and the fighting broke out in chaos.

At the second quarter of the hour of Wei, the Jurchen cavalry split into several groups and charged this way. Those around Jun Wu urged him to fall back to safety; having gone three days without sleep, he only shook his head instinctively. Before him stood a forest of spears formed by the imperial guard, with his escort all around him—he felt no fear. He left his wife beneath the royal banner and walked forward, wanting to see those Jurchens more clearly—and to remember their deaths all the more clearly, too.

A rain of arrows came flying.

Someone raised a shield, someone else grabbed hold of Jun Wu; he struggled instinctively, and several shields had already been raised above his body. Something struck his armor and glanced off; his body shuddered, as if struck heavily by some blunt object. By the time he came to his senses, an arrow had lodged itself in a gap in his armor—striking him in the abdomen.

He felt discomfort, but no pain. In the next instant, people rushed toward him in alarm. Jun Wu grasped the arrow shaft with his left hand and pressed it against the armor.

So this is what it feels like.

It hurts so much…

he thought to himself.

But at that very moment, his hands, which had trembled with fear for days on end, had stopped trembling.

—So this is all it is, then.

Jun Wu stretched out his right hand, slowly and firmly drew the longsword at his side, and pointed it toward the Jurchens, his mouth forming the words: “…Kill the enemy.” But his throat burned with pain, and he could no longer make a sound.

Someone around him said: “The crown prince is wounded…”

This word gradually spread outward; some people’s eyes filled with tears. These past days, the soldiers around him, and even some of the common people, had already witnessed the sight of Jun Wu rushing back and forth everywhere. Jun Wu was still drawing his sword, still moving forward; ahead, a general shouted and led his troops charging toward the Jurchens, and the cavalry among the imperial guard charged forward as well, braving the arrows, closing in on the racing horses, and crashing into them. After a moment, a stirring sound rose up among the fleeing crowd—some wept, some cried out, and gradually, men in the crowd began setting down their belongings—one, two, three… gradually forming into a group, surging forward toward the battle on the hillside.

The sunlight was blinding, dizzying. As he moved forward, Jun Wu collapsed into Wenren Buer’s arms. Where the arrow had struck seemed to hurt terribly, but it didn’t matter.

—It was only this, after all.

He was no longer afraid.

On Jun Wu’s pale, bloodless face, a faint smile appeared.

“…Kill the enemy.”

He said it hoarsely, softly.

More Jurchens were still closing in for the kill. At the hour of Shen, once Yue Fei had confirmed Xiyin’s intentions, he had rushed here at the fastest possible speed, leading the Beiwei Army’s cavalry in a slanting charge into the battlefield. He drove straight into the heart of Aluba’s main force, and in less than half an hour, cut down the Jurchen general Aluba with the most ferocious display of force.

By this point, the main cavalry force of the Beiwei Army, after prolonged and constant fighting, had dwindled to about five thousand men. Yue Fei personally took command as its leader, breaking through the enemy lines. Having cut down Aluba, his fighting spirit surged; both his warhorse and the spear in his hand were drenched in blood. By evening that day, this cavalry force swept across the battlefield, and before Xiyin could lead the Mountain-Razing Guard against Jun Wu, they struck at the main camp of this famed Jurchen general like a white rainbow piercing the sun—a strike staking everything on a single, desperate blow—