Chapter 860: Speaking of Terror at Terror Beach, Sighing at Solitude on Solitary Ocean (I)

Sandalwood incense curled faintly upward, the dim candlelight swaying with the gentle rise and fall of the ocean waves.

She saw the blue expanse of the sea, a translucent agate glow shimmering across it. As her body turned, beneath the ocean lay a vast, bottomless abyss.

That deep, immense darkness filled her with dread; a chaotic, dreamlike clamor rang in her ears, and a figure in yellow plunged into the water.

The instant she sat upright, the noise receded into the surrounding darkness, and before her eyes lay the now-familiar cabin — the bedding, faintly perfumed each day from incense treatment, a single starlike candle flickering, waves rising and falling beyond the window.

From the outer chamber came the faint rustle of someone rising.

“Your Highness, are you awake?”

“It’s nothing. No need to come in.”

Zhou Pei answered, then sat quietly for a while on the dimly candlelit bed. She turned her head to look at the light outside, then began dressing.

When she stepped out into the outer chamber, her attendant Xiaosong, who slept in the adjoining room, had likewise risen quietly. After asking whether Zhou Pei wished for water to wash with, she followed her out.

Passing through the corridor of the cabin, orange lanterns still glowed, stretching all the way to the doorway leading to the main deck. Stepping out from the inner cabin onto the deck, the sky over the sea had not yet lightened; waves rose and fell across the water, and overhead the stars and moon, woven together like a tapestry, seemed set into a pane of pale gray-green glass, the horizon merging sea and sky into a boundless, unbroken whole.

Looking back, the massive dragon ship blazed with hazy lantern-light, like a palace afloat upon the sea.

Ten years earlier, to facilitate Zhou Yong’s escape, countless craftsmen had joined together more than a dozen great vessels and carried out all manner of modifications, constructing this enormous sea-borne dragon palace, stable as solid ground even upon a stormy sea. After relocating to Lin’an, the dragon ship had been moored at the docks of the Qiantang River, further refined over the years with all manner of ingenious craftsmanship. Looking back at it now, on this quiet night, it truly appeared magnificent and imposing.

But in Zhou Pei’s heart, there was scarcely a ripple of feeling left to stir.

The vast dragon-ship fleet had now drifted upon the sea for three months. It had been summer when they left Lin’an; now the Mid-Autumn Festival was drawing near. In these three months, much had happened aboard ship. Zhou Pei’s emotions had drifted from despair to something like the death of feeling itself. At the end of June, taking advantage of a moment when her father had come to see her and the guards nearby had stepped back, Zhou Pei had leapt from the ship’s rail into the sea.

And then, the first figure to leap into the water after her — clad in imperial robes — had been Zhou Yong himself.

Ever since the Jurchens had come south, Zhou Yong had lived in constant fear, his frame at one point wasted down to skin and bone. Given his years of indulgence, his constitution had grown all the frailer by now — yet on that day at the end of June, when his daughter leapt into the sea, no one could quite explain the reflex that seized him in that instant. A man who had always feared death above all else had thrown himself into the water after her.

His leap accomplished nothing practical — had it not been for the guards who dove in one after another to pull them out, father and daughter alike would likely have drowned in the sea.

But it was precisely because of that single act that, once pulled back aboard, Zhou Pei’s hatred toward Zhou Yong gradually transformed into something far more complicated. She wept in her cabin for half a day, unwilling to see him again — but Zhou Yong, in the time since, had gradually fallen ill. What began as a minor ailment worsened steadily by mid-July, until by now he lay bedridden, unable to rise at all.

Under these circumstances, whether hatred or contempt, both had come, for Zhou Pei, to feel like hollow, empty things.

She sat on the deck beneath the night sky, quietly gazing at the stars and moon. The autumn sea wind blew past, carrying the scent of moisture and brine. Her attendant Xiaosong stood quietly behind her. At some point, Zhou Pei turned her head slightly and noticed tears on the girl’s face.

She made room on the bench beside her. “Sit.”

“This servant would not dare.”

“You’re Chancellor Zhao’s granddaughter, aren’t you?”

“…Yes.” Xiaosong wiped at her tears. “This servant… was only thinking of a poem her grandfather once taught her.”

“I heard it — ‘Over the sea, a bright moon rises; across the world’s ends, we share this same hour…’ Your family comes from a scholarly household too. I heard your name mentioned once, back in Lin’an.” Zhou Pei murmured, turning her head. The “Chancellor Zhao” she spoke of was Zhao Ding. When abandoning Lin’an, Zhou Yong had summoned Qin Hui and others aboard ship, and had summoned Zhao Ding as well — but Zhao Ding had not come, sending instead a few of his more promising grandchildren aboard the dragon ship in his place. “You shouldn’t be a servant…”

As she said this, Zhao Xiaosong behind her, unable to contain her feelings any longer, broke into more violent weeping, wiping frantically at her tears. A deep sorrow stirred in Zhou Pei’s heart — she understood well enough why Zhao Xiaosong wept so bitterly. Before them, the autumn moon lay across the rippling waves, the sea wind calm and still; she thought of the line about the bright moon rising over the sea, shared across the world’s ends — yet her family and grandfather back in Lin’an had, in all likelihood, already died beneath Jurchen blades, and the entire city of Lin’an was, by now, probably nearly reduced to ashes.

This violent grief gripped tightly at her own composure, a pain like an enormous hammer crushing against her chest — yet no trace of it showed on Zhou Pei’s face. She gazed quietly at the sky and sea before her, and slowly spoke.

“If I remember correctly, Xiaosong, you already had a reputation as a talented young woman back in Lin’an. You’re sixteen this year, aren’t you? Are you promised to anyone? Do you have someone in your heart?”

Zhao Xiaosong shook her head bitterly. Zhou Pei’s expression remained composed. By this year, she herself was nearing thirty; her marriage had been an unhappy one, and she had spent herself running ragged over countless matters — in the blink of an eye, more than a decade had slipped away, and by now, all that running had settled into a hollow emptiness within her. Looking at Zhao Xiaosong, she caught, faintly, a glimpse of herself as a young girl more than a decade ago.

“It’s just as well you have no one. In times like these, love and romance tend, in the end, to become things that only wound you. When I was your age, I used to envy the tales of gifted scholars and beautiful maidens that circulated through the marketplace. Thinking back on it now… when we left Lin’an, it was the fifth of May — the Dragon Boat Festival, wasn’t it? Over a decade ago, in Jiangning, there was a poem written for the Dragon Boat Festival. I wonder if you’ve ever heard it…”

Zhou Pei called the verse to mind, and slowly, softly, began to recite it: “A faint sweat lightly soaks through green silk gauze; tomorrow at Dragon Boat, one bathes in fragrant orchid. Perfumed oils spread across the sunlit river. Colored threads loosely wound round rosy jade arms; a small talisman hangs askew from cloudlike hair. When beauties meet…one thousand years…“

She recited this enchanting verse through to its end, her voice gradually fading to near-inaudibility, only the corner of her mouth curving into a faint smile. “And now, with Mid-Autumn drawing near, there’s a poem for that too… When will the bright moon appear? Cup in hand, I ask the azure sky… I wonder, in those palaces above, what year it is tonight…“

The low murmur shifted into something closer to song, rising light and soft across the deck. Zhao Xiaosong knew the author of these verses — such poems had, in years past, circulated among the accomplished young ladies of Lin’an — yet the melody and cadence coming from the Grand Princess’s own mouth were unlike anything Zhao Xiaosong had ever heard.

She looked toward the princess before her; her expression remained as calm and still as water, yet within the sound of her singing seemed to lie something inexhaustible — something Xiaosong could not yet fully grasp, some echo of that seemingly endless tranquility and splendor from over a decade ago, flowing like water through the sound of her voice…

Listening to that voice, Xiaosong felt her own sorrow gradually stirred and deepened by it. At some point, without quite meaning to, she asked, “Your Highness… they say that gentleman truly was your teacher, once?”

This was not a question she should have asked. The moment the words left her mouth, in the dim, uncertain light, the ever-composed Grand Princess pressed a hand to her forehead. Time ground on as relentlessly as a millstone, and in that instant, tears fell.

—The news from land had arrived only a few days earlier.

Facing the crisis at Lin’an, Zhou Yong had made no advance preparations for flight; the dragon-ship fleet had departed in great haste. In the earliest days, fearing the Jurchens might trace their whereabouts, they hadn’t dared put in at any port. It was only after drifting upon the open sea for over two months that they finally paused briefly, sending men ashore to gather news.

That news had come back four days earlier. After reading it, Zhou Yong had vomited blood and fainted; upon waking, he had summoned Zhou Pei to his side — the first time father and daughter had met since Zhou Pei’s leap into the sea at the end of June.

By this point Zhou Yong’s illness had worsened severely; he had wasted down to skin and bone, unable even to rise from bed. Looking at Zhou Pei as she approached, he handed her the report that had been delivered to him, his face carrying nothing but a heavy, overwhelming grief. That day, once Zhou Pei had finished reading the report herself, her body began to tremble, and gradually she broke into tears.

Ever since Zhou Yong had abandoned Lin’an and fled, the entire realm had spent the month of May brewing toward catastrophic upheaval amid the chaos; by June, the shape of it had already become clear. Through June and July, the many factions that had once belonged to the Wu Dynasty began, one after another, declaring their positions. On the surface, most armies and regional governors still professed loyalty to the Wu Dynasty, but as the Jurchen forces swept across the land, more and more localities began changing their banners.

Amid this, the region south of the Yangtze bore the brunt of it first. In June, the strategically vital city of Jiaxing near Lin’an, having refused to surrender, was breached through the combined efforts of turncoats within and Jurchen forces without; the Jurchens then put the city to the sword for ten days straight. By late June, Suzhou surrendered at the mere sight of the approaching army, and one major town after another throughout the Tai Lake basin followed suit in declaring allegiance. By July, more than half of all cities simply opened their gates and surrendered outright.

From the banks of the Yangtze to Lin’an — this had been the most prosperous, core heartland of the Wu Dynasty. There were those who still resisted, but their efforts grew ever more futile. The long-criticized problem of military commanders wielding excessive, unchecked authority — something the Wu Dynasty’s civil officials had complained of for years — now finally began manifesting across the entire realm. In the western Jiangnan circuit, disputes over unified command among military and civil officials erupted into open unrest; the military commander Hong Du led his troops storming into the prefectural seat of Jizhou, imprisoning every official there and raising the banner of surrender to the Jin. In Fujian circuit, two armies originally stationed there had already begun preparing to turn on each other.

Liu Guangshi, retreating south from Xiangyang, entered the Dongting Lake region and began carving out territory and seizing authority for himself, while simultaneously clashing with Nianhan’s forces to the north and with the Black Banner forces from the Miao territories that had invaded Changsha. Amid this vast, chaotic mobilization of countless individuals and factions across the realm, the Jurchen command had already gone out, driving all Wu Dynasty forces now nominally surrendered to the Jin to break camp and march west, their spearhead aimed directly at the Black Banner — a decisive battle that would truly determine the fate of the realm now loomed imminent.

And amid all this, the authority that had once belonged to the Wu Dynasty had, before everyone’s very eyes, come crashing down entirely.

The collapse of a dynasty might, in the ordinary course of things, take years to unfold — but for Zhou Yong and Zhou Pei, perhaps none of this vast, sprawling chaos was, in the end, the thing that mattered most.

In July, Jun Wu, having fought his way into Jiangning, refused to obey any command from the puppet court in Lin’an, tightening military discipline and refusing either to retreat or surrender. At the same time, several hundred thousand troops under Zongfu, together with the surrendered Han armies already gathered in the area and further Wu Dynasty forces arriving in successive waves of surrender, began launching a fierce assault on Jiangning. By the end of July, the forces converging on Jiangning and pressing the attack had swelled to as many as a million men — fully half of whom had once served under Crown Prince Jun Wu’s own command and authority, only to turn their coats one after another following Zhou Yong’s flight.

Wanyan Zongfu declared openly that even if Jiangning were a fortress of iron, he would melt it down into a river of molten metal.

As chaos and upheaval erupted violently across the realm, the Jurchen westward advance had only just begun — and so, through June and July, the single city of Jiangning became the very epicenter of the fiercest fighting anywhere in the realm. The Wu Dynasty had already collapsed; only the former crown prince remained, leading the Beiwei and Zhenhai armies, like some great, desperate beast whose homeland had already been destroyed, mounting a stubborn, tragic resistance amid the ruins.

Before him, the enemy still came surging forward like an unrelenting tide.

No one knew how much longer such stubborn resistance could possibly hold out.

“I’ve failed Jun Wu… I have failed… my own son…”

Perhaps it was that day’s plunge into the sea that had drained away his last vitality — and, with it, his fear as well. In that moment, Zhou Yong’s reason had partially returned, and amid Zhou Pei’s weeping, he could only murmur this single phrase over and over.

That same afternoon, he summoned all the ministers of the little court-in-exile and announced his intention to abdicate, passing the throne to Jun Wu, who remained in mortal danger, to give his son this final measure of help. But not long after, he met with fierce opposition from his ministers. Qin Hui and others raised a series of pragmatic objections, arguing that such a move would benefit neither the Wu Dynasty nor Jun Wu himself, and could only cause harm.

Amid the ministers’ arguing and clamor, Zhou Yong fainted once more.

And it was on that same day that Zhao Xiaosong first learned that Lin’an had been put to the sword — that her own grandfather and family had, in all likelihood, already died a wretched death…