The sky hung gray and overcast, a fine rain falling steadily, weaving itself into a curtain beneath the eaves.
In the courtyard of the Zizhou command headquarters, the meeting had already been underway not long after the rain began, with essential information being relayed out in a steady stream. By midmorning, the most urgent matters had finally been dealt with; what remained now was to wait for news from the front before any further deployments could be made.
Back in his own office, there followed a brief lull. Juan’er brought in hot water and, blade in hand, began shaving the stubble beneath Ning Yi’s chin. Ning Yi sat at his desk, fingers drumming against the tabletop, chin tilted up, his gaze lost somewhere out the window in the gray, overcast sky.
“Just a few more days till Minor New Year… Guess we’re not getting to celebrate this year.”
“Don’t move.”
Juan’er, fully focused, pressed her fingers against his neck, and Ning Yi fell silent. The room went quiet for a moment, the sound of rain still drumming outside. After a while, someone came in to report that Elili had taken advantage of the rain to launch an assault toward Rainwater Creek.
“That the news is reaching us this early means Elili must have already begun mobilizing his men when the rain started before dawn.” Division Commander Han Jing came in from outside, having received the same report. “These Jurchens really seem to be getting addicted to fighting in the rain.”
“Elili is known throughout the Jurchen army for his decisiveness and boldness—no surprise there,” said Ning Yi. “At this point, the fighting at Huangming’s probably already broken out too.”
“Just like you said—Balishu is a madman.”
“If we keep trading like this, it won’t work out in our favor either. This is, in its own way, a kind of psychological warfare too.” Ning Yi exchanged a few more words with him, then picked up a straw raincoat from the room. “I’m heading up to the city wall for a bit. Coming?”
“Sure.” Han Jing nodded.
Juan’er, nearby, picked up two umbrellas from the room, but Ning Yi waved her off. “No need for umbrellas. Juan’er, stay here—if any important intelligence comes in, send someone up to the wall to call me back.”
He threw the straw raincoat over his shoulders and walked out of the room, breath coming out in visible puffs of white; the moment his hand reached into the rain, an icy chill soaked in at once. Ning Yi glanced over at Han Jing beside him. “There’s a school of acting that says if you immerse yourself in the actual environment, you can grasp far more detail. The front lines are fighting in exactly this kind of weather. After a whole half-night of meetings, my head’s spinning—I need to go clear it out a little.”
Han Jing put on a raincoat as well, and the two of them walked out into the curtain of rain, crossing the courtyard and out onto the street. Zizhou’s city wall stood not far off; the surrounding area was mostly garrison quarters, and the sentry posts along the road stood in orderly rows. Han Jing looked out at the gray curtain of rain around them. “Qu Zhengyan and Chen Tian are at it again.”
Ning Yi smiled faintly. “How do you know? Did you see them?”
“Manpower got shuffled around in a hurry last night—a group borrowed passage through checkpoint number twelve. My guess is it was them.”
“The plan went up the chain half a month ago. Exactly when they’d move on it was entirely up to them—I don’t actually know.” Ning Yi laughed wryly. “Those two troublemakers… Qu Zhengyan already went charging in with five hundred men once before, and I told him off for it. I was hoping he wouldn’t be along for this one too.”
“Probably not, though I’d guess he went to Rainwater Creek. Hit the vitals up front, go for the snake’s head from this side.”
“He’s got his sights set on Elili, hasn’t he—showed off in front of him once already last time.”
The two of them traded low remarks amid the drizzling rain.
Over the past month and more, the fighting at the front had grown into a grinding stalemate, trading blows back and forth—and not only along the main roads either. Huangming County might have looked, on the surface, like a static exchange of losses, but privately, Balishu had already dug several tunnels trying to bypass the county walls, or else to collapse them outright; along the rugged mountain ridges near Huangming County, the Jurchens had also sent out suicide squads attempting to scale the cliffs and slip around into the city by another route.
The situation at Rainwater Creek was even more fluid. And in the mountains stretching back from the battlefield, the Huaxia Army’s scouts and special-operations units had, on several occasions, gathered in the hills, attempting to close in on the Jurchens’ rear supply routes and launch heavy strikes there; the Jurchens, naturally, had sent several units of their own scrambling over the mountains to appear behind the Huaxia Army’s lines as well. Such surprise raids had produced results on both sides, but on the whole, the Huaxia Army’s response had been swift, and the Jurchens’ own defenses were far from weak—in the end, each side had managed to sow confusion and inflict losses on the other, without either achieving anything truly decisive.
At this point, the commanders capable of leading troops out here were, for the most part, already among the finest talents the realm had to offer. Qu Zhengyan handled his troops like some kind of conjurer, forever walking a tightrope without ever once falling off; Chen Tian and the others carried out orders with astonishing precision; most of the soldiers within the Huaxia Army were already the elite of this entire world—and, to put it in the grandest terms, Ning Yi himself had once killed an emperor. But on the other side, men like Zonghan, Xiyin, Balishu, Elili, and Yuyu had already toppled several kingdoms of their own. When it came to clashes between the very best on either side, no one could claim to be all that much better than the other.
Until one side or the other achieved a truly decisive result, this kind of endless back-and-forth exchange would simply keep happening, again and again. To ensure orders could be carried out quickly, Ning Yi never interfered with command decisions at any local battlefield. At this very moment, the raiding party Qu Zhengyan had organized might already be picking its way through the rugged mountain forest under this dim, overcast sky, and the hunters under the command of the Jurchen commander Yuyu would hardly sit idle and let such an opportunity slip by either—on a rainy day like this, it wasn’t only the cannon fire that would be suppressed; the hot-air balloons that would otherwise rise high into the sky for observation had likewise been rendered useless.
Scouts would run into the enemy’s main forces; fiercer, harder-fought clashes would break out more and more often on days exactly like this one.
Ning Yi and Han Jing walked on toward the city wall, the drizzling rain soaking into the steps of the old, weathered wall, water trickling down the stone in little rivulets. Even beneath their raincoats, the cold and damp seeped in, and each breath came out as a visible puff of white.
“You know, it hasn’t snowed at all yet this year.”
“If we were still at Qingmu Stronghold, the mountains would’ve been closed off two months ago by now. Nice weather here—I’m having a bit of trouble adjusting.”
“No New Year celebration this year. Think there’ll even be one next year?”
“As long as it makes things a little harder on the Jurchens, wherever I am, it’ll be a good year for me.”
“…Hah, that’s a good line. I’ll have the propaganda team put that up on a wall somewhere…”
Reaching the top of the wall, Ning Yi held out a hand to catch the falling rain, then lifted his gaze. The overcast clouds pressed down over the foothills, stretching off into the distant horizon; the world beneath was vast but heavy and low, like some turbulent, storm-churned sea turned upside down before his eyes.
Ning Yi found himself imagining the bone-deep cold at the front, the soldiers locked in combat in weather just like this.
Such fighting might well continue to yield no decisive breakthrough. Over a month and a half of formal combat, the Huaxia Army had withstood wave after wave of Jurchen assault and inflicted enormous casualties on the enemy in turn. But overall, the Huaxia Army’s own losses were nothing to be optimistic about either—casualties had already surpassed eight thousand, edging steadily closer to the loss of an entire division’s worth of men.
This was not some fight against a rabble unworthy of the name; there would be no easy reversal of fortune to exploit here. With both sides fully prepared psychologically for what lay ahead, the early stages could only be a grinding, monotonous cycle of high-intensity exchanges, wave after wave—and within this rhythm of assault and defense, both sides would keep reaching for every clever scheme they could muster, hoping that at some point, in some place, the other side might reveal a single crack. If that didn’t work, it was entirely possible that the whole thing could tip over into a total collapse on one side or the other.
Balishu’s frenzied assault on Huangming County was, in part, simply because his schemes were genuinely being carried out, even if without effect—but it was also, quite deliberately, an attempt to grind down the enemy’s psychological resolve: “I am a madman, and I will keep trading with you like this to the very end.” He was a superb gambler with an utterly expressionless face; over the course of nearly two months, his tactics had been continuously refined, yet his overall strategy had barely changed at all—he had simply traded an enormous number of casualties for four thousand of Pang Liu’an’s men, and he was still trading now.
And Ning Yi, just as calmly and without any outward show, kept right on trading in turn.
That was exactly how a game of all-in poker worked—whoever grew impatient first would be the first to show a crack.
Han Jing walked along the edge of the wall, slamming both hands down onto the bluestone parapet with a loud thud, sending up a splash of water into the gray air. Ning Yi, feeling the cold rain against his skin, gazed off toward the horizon and said nothing.
But by evening, unexpected news arrived from Eagle Beak Crag.
At Rainwater Creek, wave after wave of fighting was being repelled along the slope near Eagle Beak Crag.
Eagle Beak Crag was one of the narrow passages near Rainwater Creek, easy to defend and hard to attack—but over the past month and more, it too had already weathered several rounds of raids and assaults.
Attacking this particular position was, cost-benefit-wise, hardly worth it—breaking through would, of course, be a valuable win, but the main reason for its low priority was that it simply wasn’t an ideal point of attack to begin with. The approach ahead was narrow, and any force pushing through risked being intercepted by one of the Huaxia Army’s other positions along the way.
Only once the assault on the main front had reached full saturation would the Jurchens turn to launching a quick, fierce raid on Eagle Beak Crag; if that failed to break through, they would typically need to withdraw swiftly.
But Eagle Beak Crag did carry a significance of its own. Ahead of it lay a funnel-shaped slope; coming down from above, the Jurchens would enter the narrow passage and valley of that funnel. The wide mouth of the funnel out front wasn’t suited for building any real defenses, but once the enemy passed through the narrow corridor formed by Eagle Beak Crag and the surrounding cliff faces, they would find themselves in a gourd-shaped stretch of open ground—and only then would they finally come up against the Huaxia Army’s actual position.
The mountain road behind this position had relatively little overlap with the complex terrain around Rainwater Creek proper—meaning that if Eagle Beak Crag were ever breached, reinforcements from Rainwater Creek would have great difficulty coming to the rescue in time, and the Jurchens who broke through here could bypass the Rainwater Creek position entirely.
If the Huaxia Army massed heavy forces here, the Jurchens could simply ignore this spot altogether. If the Jurchens launched a full assault against it and failed to break through, they risked being trapped and wiped out in that valley instead. This position—seemingly important yet, in practice, something of an awkward, half-useful spot—put both sides in a somewhat uncomfortable position.
On the morning of the nineteenth of December, the Jurchens launched a full-scale assault on Rainwater Creek. At the hour of Chen, the first clash broke out at Eagle Beak Crag.
An assault that couldn’t quite be called frenzied, but was forceful all the same, continued for nearly two hours. As noon approached, an astonishing new assault suddenly appeared along the front line—a unit that looked, on the surface, like an ordinary combat team, but moved with uncanny, seasoned precision. Before they had even drawn close, Mao Yishan sensed something was wrong. He dashed up the slope, raised his binoculars, and was already calling out to his reserves. “Second Company, move up—something’s wrong on the left!”
Pressure on the left flank suddenly spiked; several Jurchen soldiers charged up a slope already nearly leveled flat with bodies and sandbags, their battle robes concealing scale armor beneath, with a surge of spears close behind.
“Grenades—!”
Someone shouted the order, and the soldiers hurled a first wave of grenades; of the dozen-plus thrown, only two actually detonated, and even then, without much real force behind them. The Huaxia Army soldiers pulled back slightly, forming a shield wall just as the enemy crashed into them with a thunderous impact!
Mao Yishan stood not far from the point of engagement; through the rain, what seemed to be arrows and crossbow bolts came flying in as well—a feeble, ineffective sort of sniping. He held his binoculars steady, unmoved, when another observer came running over from nearby. “Commander, Commander, look over there, that—”
Both men looked in the same direction: behind the dark mass of enemy troops massed at the far end of the valley, someone else was also raising a pair of binoculars, watching in this direction.
“Is that…” The observer voiced the suspicion already forming in his own mind.
Mao Yishan lowered his binoculars and strode down from the rise, waving his hand. “Orders! Whole regiment, listen up—”
At that very moment, the entire Rainwater Creek battlefield beyond had already erupted into a white-hot frenzy of attack and defense. When word reached the command post that Position Two outside Eagle Beak Crag had very nearly been broken through by a Jurchen assault, Qu Zhengyan, who was at that moment discussing the battle situation with Yu Zhongdao, frowned slightly—something had just occurred to him. But in truth, he had drawn up a great many contingency plans across the entire battlefield, and in the ever-shifting chaos of real combat, even Qu Zhengyan had no way of obtaining every piece of precise information all at once. In this moment, he still could not be certain which way the overall situation was truly heading.
Much of what had actually happened would only become fully clear to everyone later, during the after-action review.
…
Above Eagle Beak Crag, the north wind howled mournfully, the midday sky as gray and overcast as dusk, rain lashing the valley from every direction. Mao Yishan mobilized his entire regiment—at this point numbering eight hundred and thirteen men—and, alongside them, summoned four soldiers assigned to special operations.
“Elili’s here.” He laid out the entire situation for the four soldiers in a few brief words.
“According to the original plan, two go up first, two stay in reserve.” Mao Yishan pointed toward the massive, sky-piercing crag looming at the mouth of the valley, wind and rain swirling around its peak. “Once you go up, there’s no guarantee you’ll come back. In this kind of rain, whether your commander’s plan holds up or not—I honestly don’t know either. Are you going or not?”
“Commander Xu’s been blowing up mountains for a whole year now,” one of them said.
“We’ve been training for exactly this day,” said another.
“Then go.” Mao Yishan waved them off, then walked back among his own men. “Everyone, get ready—”
Mao Yishan roared out: “Time to serve it up—!”
At noon that day, Elili personally led his own guard in a resolute, decisive push against Eagle Beak Crag; to avoid tipping off the enemy too soon, he hadn’t even raised his personal banner. By this point, the rain shelters and coverings that had once protected the Huaxia Army’s forward position had already been almost entirely destroyed, minimizing the threat from artillery fire, and the walls that had originally served as defensive works had, for the most part, been smashed and leveled flat. What advantage the Huaxia Army held here now amounted to little more than the slope of the terrain itself.
Elili’s blood was already boiling.
Mao Yishan’s blood was surging just as hot.
Two figures made their way up the rugged rock face of Eagle Beak Crag, braving the wind and rain. At one point, Elili caught sight of this.
Several skilled Jurchen scouts likewise raced toward the cliff face.
The Huaxia Army’s demolition specialists had already studied the structure of Eagle Beak Crag many times over; in theory, a series of waterproof explosive charges had already been placed within the various cracks and fissures along the upper rock face. But at this very moment, no one could say for certain whether the plan would unfold exactly as intended, because when it had first been discussed and coordinated, the technicians from the Fourth Division had sounded somewhat guarded about it—it hadn’t exactly inspired confidence.
The fighting surged and roiled ahead of him; Mao Yishan brandished the steel blade in his hand, his gaze steady and calm, breathing out a long plume of white mist into the rain. He gave his simple orders with total composure.
But even if that clever plan failed to come off as hoped, there was not the slightest wavering in his heart. Across the long, winding river of time, through wave after wave of battle, tested again and again, the soldier who had once walked out of Xia Village could, by now, stand firm against the very worst malice the world had to throw at him.
The fierce Jurchen elite came surging in like a tide; he bent slightly at the waist, settling into a posture as steady and immovable as a mountain.
The rain fell in endless sheets, the wind howled in fury.
Steel crashed against steel—