In this brief lull before the fighting truly began, Ning Yi—a man who had lived two lives—found himself sighing to his wife about how his children had grown less adorable as they aged. For him, at least, this was a novel experience he’d never had before.

But what was truly worth celebrating was that so many children still had the chance, and the space, to grow up at all.

To secure that space, the southwest had already been fully mobilized on every front. The first clash at the Huangming County pass had already lasted four days, with Balishu turning probing skirmishes into wave after wave of targeted, heavy assaults.

Over the three days following the twenty-fifth, Cibushi reflexively reined in the pace of his assaults to reduce casualties, and Pang Liu’an’s side likewise held off on large-scale shelling when not facing the Jurchen main force. But even so, the Jurchen-side troops driven forward had already suffered casualties exceeding ten thousand, with combat losses approaching fifteen thousand.

The vast majority of these casualties came from the elite surrendered Han troops pushed to the front lines. Though they were mixed in among the great mass of civilians repeatedly driven forward, though the walls no longer subjected them to large-scale bombardment, though the walls ahead stood no higher than three zhang… even in pure melee combat, these soldiers, unable to form ranks and scale the walls properly, could do little more than charge forward and be slaughtered again and again.

A siege was never a fair fight to begin with; the defenders held the advantage in formation no matter what. Even setting aside the cannons that could rain fire down from above at any moment, and setting aside the logs, boulders, arrows, and boiling oil and all the other tools of city defense, in a pure contest of blades and spears, a soldier climbing a ladder up a three-zhang wall, facing two or three well-coordinated Huaxia Army soldiers, would often find himself cut down before he could even swing a single blow.

Even the Jurchens’ famously fearless, high-morale elite troops, who had swept across the entire realm, met exactly the same fate when they tried to scale those walls.

A fierce vanguard commander like Wulitan, relying on the protection of his armor, managed to trade a few blows before falling, while the rest of the Jurchen soldiers charging in with the same ferocity found themselves met only by the equally ferocious crash of iron shields. The coordination behind those shields was enough to bring despair, and the soldiers behind them showed a resolve and fervor every bit the equal of the Jurchens’ own—when the shields parted, their blades thirsted for blood just the same.

Within the Huaxia Army, preparation for a war against the Jurchens had, in truth, begun ten years earlier. From the Battle of Xiaocang River up to the present, every form of propaganda and encouragement had grown steadily more solid, more weighty, and more infused with a sense of mission. It could fairly be said that, at the moment the Jurchens finally arrived in the southwest, it was in fact the Huaxia Army—having waited in restless anticipation for years—that was hungrier and more eager for this fight than anyone.

Along the mere fifteen hundred meters of wall, the first troops deployed were the Huaxia Army’s elite, men who had placed in various inter-army competitions in the past. In these opening moments of the war, still at their fullest strength and spirit, the Jurchens’ ferocity only made these men’s blood boil all the hotter—an enemy’s ferocity combined with their death was, after all, what brought the greatest sense of pride.

The soldiers cut down, methodically and without haste, the surging attackers who, whatever their numbers or formation, were always at a disadvantage, and hurled their bodies from the walls. The officers in command savored this kind of low-casualty slaughter as well; they all knew that as the Jurchens came at them wave after wave, even the smallest losses would gradually accumulate into wounds too large to ignore. But for now, the more blood spilled, the higher their own side’s morale would climb in the days ahead, and the more likely they would be able to cut a bloody path through the enemy’s endless tide.

On the twenty-seventh, the afternoon of the third day of fighting, the Han army soldiers who reached the base of the walls no longer dared to climb. They weren’t fools—this first wave of attacks was clearly not going to crack open this seemingly low wall ahead of them, and the casualties already suffered just reaching the base were bad enough. But climbing the ladders was even worse: for two or three days now, what waited up there was like the gaping maw of some ravenous beast, swallowing whatever was fed to it. Except for a few who lost their nerve mid-climb and leapt back down, everyone else who came back down came back as a corpse.

On the twenty-eighth, Balishu had several Han army officers executed in front of the ranks.

By this day, fires still burned intermittently in the rugged forests nearby, black columns of smoke raging into the sky above the trees, the smell of scorched earth drifting across the battlefield far and near.

On the twenty-ninth, a light rain began falling from the sky. Balishu halted the assault on the Huangming County pass and began his first round of tallying losses and rest and reorganization—it had become necessary, given the limited transport capacity of the roads to the rear. Even though most of the casualties were cannon fodder, replenishing them still took time.

This period of rest lasted only two or three days. On the first of the eleventh month, the weather cleared; on the third, the battle at Rainwater Creek broke out; and on the fourth, a Jurchen team of craftsmen, who had followed all the way from the Great Foundry, assembled four enormous wide-wheeled siege carts—covered in sandbags and iron plating, capable of withstanding cannon fire and, to some degree, navigating uneven terrain—and had soldiers push them forward toward Huangming County to begin a formal assault.

By the time the eleventh year of the Jianshuo era drew to a close, the fighting in the southwest had never once let up.

The war raging across the realm had likewise never let up for a moment.

In mid-November, on the East Sea, the whirling north wind whipped up the waves, and two massive fleets met upon the murky waters. Hu Sunming, the commander of the Taihu fleet who had already defected to the Jurchens, watched as the Dragon Boat fleet came surging toward him.

“Crush that gang of pampered lordlings! Take the former dynasty’s Princess Zhou Pei alive! They’re all cowards afraid to die! When the Great Jin came, they abandoned their country and fled without losing a single man! Heaven’s mandate no longer belongs to the Wu Dynasty—”

At the pre-battle mobilization assembly, Hu Sunming spoke these words with a near-hysterical edge. As for that great, unwieldy dragon boat—massive but clumsy—he in fact believed it to be the single greatest weakness of the enemy fleet: crush that one ship, and the rest of the fleet’s morale would shatter, surrendering without a fight.

But the dragon-boat fleet had not, at this point, deployed that palatial great ship as its flagship. Princess Zhou Pei, dressed in pure white mourning garb, climbed to the highest point of the central warship, standing where everyone could see her, and raised the drumstick to beat the war drum with her own hands.

For a time, Hu Sunming assumed this was a decoy, a stand-in. The Wu Dynasty’s forces had long grown accustomed to every manner of tactical trickery—the notion of feigning weakness where there was strength, and strength where there was weakness, had long since become second nature to them. But in truth, this moment was no illusion. In preparation for this very battle, Zhou Pei had practiced beating that drum every day for two full months; every day, the faint sound of that drumming could be heard drifting from the surrounding ships, and by the end of those two months, her arms had visibly thickened.

When word first got out that she intended to take part in the battle herself, some officials had come to try to talk her out of it—her presence might well raise morale, they argued, but it would also inevitably become the fleet’s single greatest vulnerability. Zhou Pei rejected every one of these arguments in turn.

However vast the world might be, there was nowhere left to retreat to. With her father dead and her brother’s fate unknown, in that moment, she found she had little else left to think about at all.

The drumbeat carried on across the water for over an hour, and all the warships pressed forward around Zhou Pei in a single advance. After that, the Taihu fleet mutinied and collapsed; Hu Sunming was driven into the sea by his own mutinying soldiers, later fished back out, and awaited a sentence of death by slow slicing not long after.

Even as Zhou Pei was carving her own bloody path across the southeastern waters, Jun Wu, aided by Yue Fei, Han Shizhong, and the others, broke out of Jiangning and began his flight toward the southeast.

Along the way, Zongfu and Zongbi pursued relentlessly at his heels, while Han Shizhong and Yue Fei, taking turns leading and covering, fought off several major engagements one after another. By the end of November, they had retaken Suzhou, and after a brief period of rest and reorganization, they dealt with a number of officials who had collaborated with the enemy, while also releasing a number of others who had been persecuted under the old regime.

Walking out of the great prison, snow had already begun falling thick and fast. He Wen hugged his own body against the cold, clothed in rags, thin as a skeleton, looking like a beggar. Before him lay the ruined, chaotic sight of the city. No one paid him any mind.

He had once been a scholar-knight, skilled in both letters and martial arts. When the Wu Dynasty had fallen into peril, he too had once, with a heart full of fervor, thrown himself into working for his country. He Wen had at one point traveled to the southwest intending to assassinate Mr. Ning, only to find himself, through some strange twist of fate, joining the Huaxia Army instead—even having, for a time, a romantic relationship with Lin Jingmei, whom Ning Yi treated as his own daughter.

He had watched the Huaxia Army grow, and yet he never came to trust in its ideals. In the end, his outside contacts were discovered; Ning Yi tried to persuade him to stay, but failed, and in the end had no choice but to let him return home.

After He Wen returned home to Suzhou, the local officials discovered his connection to the Huaxia Army and threw him back in prison. He Wen offered every defense he could, but once the local officials learned that his family was quite wealthy, they saw their opportunity. They subjected He Wen to brutal torture, then began extorting money and property from the He family. This all took place in the ninth year of the Wu Dynasty’s Jianshuo era.

By the tenth year of Jianshuo, with He Wen still in prison, his family had gradually been squeezed dry. His parents died of grief and despair in the first half of that year, and eventually, his wife and children stopped coming to visit him at all—whether they had died of illness or starvation outside the prison walls, he had no way of knowing. He Wen had thought of escaping more than once, but one of his hands had been broken during his torture, and he had fallen seriously ill several times while imprisoned—by now, he had no martial skill left to speak of. In truth, he was hardly the only one wrongfully imprisoned in that jail.

While in prison, he gradually learned of the Wu Dynasty’s downfall, but by then it all seemed to have nothing to do with him anymore. On the day he was finally released, looking out at this ruined world, it seemed the world no longer had any need of him either.

He made his way back, by memory, to his family’s old residence, only to find the house had, not long before, been burned to a ruin by someone—perhaps by soldiers running amok. He Wen asked around the neighborhood after the fate of the rest of his family and learned nothing at all. Pure white snow fell, gradually beginning to blanket the blackened ruins.

He Wen knelt in the snow and let out a wretched, ugly sound—his throat had grown so hoarse that he could no longer even manage to cry properly.

Over the past year, the Jurchens had ravaged Jiangnan without mercy; whatever had become of his wife and child under the abuse of those corrupt officials, they had almost certainly not escaped this greater catastrophe either. He Wen searched Suzhou for half a month. As Jun Wu’s army began withdrawing from the city, He Wen followed along among the fleeing civilians heading south, beginning, in a daze, a bloody journey of his own…

In the north, the snow grew heavier by the day, and the land was gradually blanketed in ice and snow.

Yunzhong Prefecture still had some semblance of life left in it.

Tang Minjie, carrying an armful of split firewood, made his trembling way into a small, seemingly long-uninhabited hut and crouched down beside the stove to light a fire. Having lived here for several years now, he had grown accustomed to this way of life; every gesture he made now looked exactly like that of the most rustic old farmer. Once the flames caught in the stove, he pulled his sleeves in close and, shivering, bounced lightly by the fire like a toad.

The weather here, after all, was bitterly cold.

Anyone who could survive in a place like this, buried under ice and snow, really was something to be feared.

Heh heh heh… I’m not scared of the cold either…

He rehearsed this rather unreal, twisted little thought in his mind, when a rhythmic knock came from outside.

Tang Minjie exhaled a puff of white breath and stood up. Still hunched, sleeves pulled in, he shuffled over to open the door, and a blast of cold wind came howling in!

“Ugh…”

Wind and snow whirled violently, and Tang Minjie couldn’t help stumbling back a step. The figure that burst in had already grabbed hold of his clothes; Tang Minjie’s hand shot up to block, and the figure’s hand pulled back, then lunged in again, seizing him by the throat and slamming him against the wall behind him.

Cold wind still poured in from the open door. Pinned there, Tang Minjie slapped weakly at his attacker’s arm a few times, his face gradually turning red.

The figure now standing in the room was a woman with a blade at her waist, brows raised in fury. Gripping Tang Minjie’s throat, she glared at him with murderous intent, teeth gritted. Tang Minjie, unable to breathe, waved his hands, pointing at the door, at the stove, gesturing wildly in every direction. The woman spoke through clenched teeth: “You’d better remember this, I—”

“Ugh, ugh…”

Tang Minjie’s tongue was slowly poking out, further and further, wet saliva about to drip from its tip down onto the woman’s hand. Only then did she release her grip. “…You’d better remember it—I’m going to kill you…” The moment his throat was freed, Tang Minjie’s body doubled over, coughing furiously. His right hand shot forward almost carelessly, poking straight toward the woman’s chest.

“You—”

“Cough—cough cough cough cough! Cough—cough cough cough cough—” In the room, the woman had already drawn her blade, but Tang Minjie, seemingly oblivious, hunched over clutching his throat, turning in circles a few times before marching straight to close the door. Then he went to the stove, where the fire he’d just lit had already gone out again. He sat down on the floor, glaring at her accusingly. “Are you out of your mind!”

“You’re really asking to die—” The woman raised her blade toward him, her gaze still trembling with fury.

“Go ask your mother! Cough cough—” Tang Minjie coughed a few more times, and though he was still sitting on the floor, his words grew even more vicious. “You dead old shoe! Playing at purity, are you! Been sold here as a maid for years and forgotten who you even are, haven’t you!”

Tang Minjie’s words were vicious, and the woman’s eyes flushed red at once; she raised her blade and lunged, but the man sitting on the floor kept right on cursing without pause: “—You’re the one trying to kill me! You mealy-mouthed little tramp! Even a bit of spit disgusts you! One touch to your chest and you jump back! What’s wrong! Weren’t you passed around by men before you got dragged up here! Already forgotten, have you! Cough cough cough cough…”

Rubbing his throat, he coughed a few more times, then stood up from the floor. Facing down the tip of her blade, he walked straight toward her and pressed his own throat right up against it, staring directly into her eyes. “Come on, then, tramp! You look like you’ve got some spine now—stab it right here.”

Tang Minjie kept walking forward; the woman’s hand trembled twice, and finally she withdrew the blade. “You madman from the Black Banner Army…”

Tang Minjie rubbed his neck, twisted it a bit, then snapped his fingers. “I win!”

He turned and walked back to the stove to relight the fire, speaking as he went. “Whether I’m crazy or not is none of your business. In a place like this, everyone’s living on borrowed time—here today, gone tomorrow. You show up here every time just to threaten me a little, and I still don’t understand what you’re even trying to accomplish. What, are you a dog? Every time you have to bark a couple times beside your master, or you just don’t feel right otherwise? What exactly is it you’re threatening me with? Cutting me to a thousand pieces? Have I bullied your mistress somehow?”

The woman’s arm trembled, but strangely, she grew calmer instead. She gritted her teeth. “…After my lady saw you last time, something’s been wrong with her ever since—she even fell seriously ill and only recently recovered. My lady has done more for me, for my entire family, than I could ever repay. What exactly did you say to her…”

She no longer sounded threatening. Tang Minjie turned back and stood up. “None of your business! What did your mistress call me out here for in the first place? Just do what she wants. All this dithering around—can you really afford to waste time?”

The woman nodded, no longer angry now. She pulled several sheets of paper from a hidden lining in her sleeve. Tang Minjie snatched them up and sat down by the fire to read them. “Hm, whatever complaints you had, whatever threats—you can say them now if you want… Wow, your mistress doesn’t hold back. This is asking me to wipe out entire families? These are all Jurchen officials…”

The woman stood in the middle of the room, looking down at him, and now found she had nothing more to say. After a while, Tang Minjie finished reading, checked it over once more, then tossed it straight into the fire beside him and looked up. “What does your mistress want, exactly? Didn’t she tell you?”

“My lady asked me to pass on this message: what you told her, she has no way of deciding on. This is the only thing she can give you. How you use it is entirely up to you… She’s done everything she can.”

“…”

Tang Minjie was silent for a moment.

“…I understand.” he said.

Then he added, “Thank her for me. I have a great deal of respect for her.”

The woman seemed to want to say something more, but in the end turned and left. As she pulled the door open, a voice sounded out behind her.

“For the past ten years, over a million people have lived worse than dogs and pigs here. Over a million women have worked here as whores, as dogs. You were one too. If you have the chance to leave, then leave—no one will blame you for it. But if you mean to stay and learn to fight, then don’t ever forget: you were once a dog.”

The woman’s hand paused on the door bolt. “I know you’re all heroes… but don’t forget, there are still far more ordinary people in this world.”

“…Yeah. Though… that makes it harder, doesn’t it.”

That last line came out almost like a sigh, drifting from behind her. The woman pushed the door open and stepped out; turning to close it, she caught sight of the man from the Black Banner Army, code-named “the Clown,” curled up by the stove, warming himself by the fire. In that moment, there was no trace at all left of the venom and ferocity from moments before.

Outside lay a pure white blanket of snow. Over the past while, ever since the arrival of five hundred Han prisoners from the south, things in Yunzhong Prefecture had been anything but calm. Those five hundred prisoners were all family members of officials who had resisted the Jurchens in the south, and they had already been tortured nearly beyond recognition along the way. Because of them, Yunzhong had already seen several incidents of prisoner rescue attempts and assassinations. Over the past ten-odd days, rumors had spread of Black Banner operatives dumping animal carcasses, even poison, into the wells across Yunzhong Prefecture on a large scale, and amid the resulting panic, incidents had only grown more frequent.

The woman had no way of knowing how many of these incidents truly had anything to do with the man in that room, but one thing was certain—he was almost certainly not uninvolved.

Over the course of the past year and more, the things the man in that room had done had left both sides, friend and foe alike, more than a little afraid of him. After the five hundred prisoners arrived in Yunzhong, her mistress had managed to save two hundred of them, but for some reason—because of certain cutting remarks the man had made—her mistress had fallen ill for a stretch of time. When she woke, she had sent these documents over. They were the personnel files of the officials responsible for handling the aftermath of Han slaves—including information on their families, their weaknesses, their vulnerabilities—all gathered over these years and now sent out.

She stepped out onto the snow-white street, making her way back toward the residence of the Spirit of the Valley. In her heart, she knew that what awaited Yunzhong Prefecture next would be yet another storm of blood.

But the heavy snow muffled all the noise of the world. She breathed out a puff of white mist. It had been years now since she’d been taken captive to this place. Little by little, she had almost grown used to the wind and the snow here…