Amid the moaning of the cold wind, lanterns began to light up one after another in the corridor below the small building and beneath the eaves.

A few points of orange flame lit up the courtyard’s gloom. Arms crossed, Tan’er looked down from the railing as Ning Yi came back up carrying a lantern. “The first time I came here, I thought it looked a lot like that little courtyard we had back in Jiangning.”

Tan’er, who had still been somewhat puzzled, laughed at this. “What are you up to?”

“What else would a married couple be up to? Since you’re here anyway, I thought I’d bring you to see it — I even brought food.” Ning Yi smiled, picked up the bundle again, and pushed open the door to the room beside them.

The room was simply furnished — it looked like it might once have been a woman’s chamber, with a table and chairs, a bed, a cabinet, and other such things. Perhaps it had been prepared beforehand, since there wasn’t much dust. Ning Yi pulled a brazier out from under the table, drew the machete he carried with him, and swiftly chopped up two of the room’s wooden stools into firewood.

Tan’er watched, amused by his actions — it had been a long time since she’d seen Ning Yi behave with such carefree abandon. She stepped forward and crouched down to help untie the bundle. “This house belongs to someone else, isn’t it a bit much to be so reckless with it?”

“It’s not great, I’ll admit — that’s exactly why I didn’t bring anyone else along.”

The knife skills he’d picked up from Hongti, Xigua, and the others made quick, clean work of splitting the wood, and before long a fire was crackling. The room grew warm. Tan’er opened the bundle and pulled out a pile of food from the small box inside: little pieces of steamed bun, marinated chicken wings, sliced meat, a few skewered meatballs, half a portion of fish, a bit of vegetables… two dishes of stir-fried food prepared in advance, and some liquor besides.

She couldn’t help smiling. When the family gathered, Ning Yi would occasionally organize a barbecue, and thanks to his obsessive research into food, it always tasted quite good. It was just that in recent years, with the Huaxia Army’s supplies far from plentiful, Ning Yi had set food rations for everyone and led by example — even setting aside a bit of meat for a barbecue like this often took some time to accumulate. And yet he never seemed to tire of it.

After all these years of marriage, though there had been plenty of days spent apart, the two of them had long since grown perfectly attuned to each other’s rhythms. Tan’er set the food and drink on the round table in the room, then looked around at what was, by now, a rather bare space. Outside, the sky and earth had already darkened, and only this courtyard, lit from below, was steeped in a warm, golden glow.

Ning Yi held a slice of fish over the fire on a skewer. “This place actually reminds me a lot of that building — the one that burned down.”

Tan’er turned her head. “The one that caught fire.”

“That’s the one.” Ning Yi nodded.

“You seem quite familiar with this place — how many people have you brought here to look around already?”

“Not that many, really — Hongti… Juan’er… little Hu and little Zhang from the secretarial office, Aunt Tiantian from the women’s association, and…” Ning Yi counted on his fingers by the flickering firelight, then, catching sight of Tan’er’s eyes, now widening slightly but with a hint of amusement in them, couldn’t help laughing himself. “All right, fine — I only brought Hongti here once, last time…”

“We win one battle and you’re this pleased with yourself,” Tan’er said gently. “Don’t get carried away.”

“I am pleased, but it’s not just that.” Ning Yi sat on his stool, looking down at the fish he was roasting. “This fight with the Jurchens — there were a lot of ideas about how it might go. When you’re rallying people, you can talk grandly about burning the boats behind you, but until now, there was never really any real development to point to. The Battle of Yushui Creek hit Zonghan hard. They won’t retreat now — from here on, these men who’ve spent their whole lives sowing chaos across the realm are going to gamble everything on the southwest. Every time it gets to a moment like this, I want to step back from the whole situation and just watch it play out.”

As he said this, his expression wasn’t one of pride, but of gravity. Tan’er sat down. She too had, by now, made countless major decisions herself, and she understood how easy it was for a person caught up in the middle of events, entangled by competing interests, to lose their clarity. This state Ning Yi seemed to be in — perhaps he really had managed to step back and view things from a higher vantage point, and had noticed something in doing so. Her own expression grew serious as well.

Ning Yi smiled faintly. “I’ve been remembering lately, back in Jiangning, before the building burned down — sometimes you’d come home at night and we’d sit out on the corridor and talk. Back then, we probably couldn’t have imagined what came after — Fang La’s uprising in Hangzhou, the business at Liangshan, resisting the Jurchens, killing the emperor… If you’d wanted to do a magic trick back then, at most you’d have ended up running the Su family, making the cloth business thrive. Would you say that I’ve… thrown your whole life into chaos?”

“I really wasn’t prepared for any of it…” Tan’er thought for a moment. “Especially after the uprising — everything I’d planned for the first half of my life just fell away. After that I was mostly just pushed forward by events… Before you killed the emperor, I’d actually planned out a lot for the Su family. Once we were free of the court, our whole family would go back to Jiangning — with family, with children, there’d be nothing left in the world to fear.”

“Back then.” Recalling this, Su Tan’er — who had spent over a decade as the head of the household — had a certain brightness in her eyes. “…Those thoughts really were some of the most grounded, solid things I ever had in mind.”

More than a decade ago, in the days before the killing of the emperor, though they’d faced all sorts of difficulties even in the capital, the thinking had been that once those difficulties were resolved, they would go back to Jiangning and everything would settle into place. These had all still been thoughts within the bounds of planning. As Su Tan’er spoke of this, something stirred in her, though she wasn’t quite sure why Ning Yi had brought it up. Ning Yi reached out and took Tan’er’s hand.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Husband…” Tan’er hesitated slightly. “Is that… what made you think of this?”

“Over these years, the decisions I’ve made have changed a great many people’s whole lives. Sometimes I’ve been able to look out for them, sometimes I simply couldn’t spare the attention. In truth, the impact has fallen even more heavily on our own family — your husband suddenly went from being a merchant to being the leader of a rebellion. Yun Zhu and Jin’er probably once imagined a quiet, stable life too — that has real value, all of it. After I killed Zhou Zhe, I stepped out to the front, and you had no choice but to move up alongside me. There was no buffer period at all — ten-odd years have simply gone by like that.”

Tan’er’s face flushed slightly. “You really… don’t need to say all this.”

“It’s not that I’m apologizing. Maybe there wasn’t really any other choice, but I still feel a bit of regret about it…” Ning Yi smiled. “Think about it — if there were a world like that, one where the Jurchens never existed from the start, you might still be running the Su family, and I’d be teaching, slacking off here and there, occasionally dropping by some gathering to watch a bunch of fools writing poetry, and every holiday the streets would be lit up with fireworks, dragons dancing through the night… If things had just gone on like that, it would have been quite something too.”

As Ning Yi said this, Tan’er’s eyes suddenly reddened. “You’re just… trying to make me cry.”

“New Year’s almost here — thinking back on things from when we were young, it’s actually rather fun.”

Ning Yi went on roasting the food in his hands, and sensing that her husband really had come out here in a reminiscent mood, Tan’er finally set aside the urge to talk business, helping him roast a bit more and telling him about how the children had been doing lately. The two of them raised their cups at the round table and clinked them together.

Daylight was rapidly giving way to dusk. Through the open door, distant points of light flickered in the city beyond, and below in the courtyard the lanterns swayed in the wind. Suddenly a sound rose up, like a downpour of rain but heavier still, a crackling patter enveloping the house. The brazier in the room flickered; Ning Yi tossed in another stick of wood. Tan’er got up and walked out to the corridor, then said, “It’s sleet.”

Ning Yi’s eyes flickered, and he nodded. “Everywhere else in the realm, it’s probably long since snowing.”

By now, the Central Plains and the region south of the Yangtze were already blanketed in heavy snowfall; only here on the Chengdu Plain had it remained overcast and rainy all season. But it seemed the moment had finally come. Tan’er returned to the room, and the couple sat eating and drinking as they watched the sleet come pattering down, chatting about little amusing things from home and gossip from the army.

Ning Yi brought up the matter of Xu Shaoyuan and Yong Jinrou:

“You know Xu Shaoyuan from the secretarial office — a bit awkward socially, but very capable at his work. He’s taken a liking to Scholar Yong’s sister, Yong Jinrou — you know her, early thirties, quite beautiful, well-read and refined, widowed for seven or eight years now, currently teaching in Hedeng. Word is a lot of men in the army have their eye on her, but proposing marriage through Scholar Yong won’t do any good — apparently she insists on choosing for herself…”

“Xu Shaoyuan fell for Yong Jinrou at first sight, but he had no idea how to court a woman, so he went looking for people at general staff for advice. A bunch of lunatics, not one of them reliable. You know Zou Lie? He said I was the one with good ideas, so he came sneaking around to sound me out, asking how to win a girl’s favor — I had no idea it was actually for Xu Shaoyuan pursuing Yong Jinrou, so I told him a few ‘hero rescues the damsel’ stories. Then Xu Shaoyuan went off to Hedeng, and in three days managed to turn the whole place upside down — from writing poetry, to hiring someone to pretend to be a thug, to faking an internal injury, to a confession… he very nearly resorted to force… got caught by Li Shishi, who rounded up a few female soldiers and gave him a beating…”

“After the beating, he came running to complain to me, saying someone from the secretarial office was harassing women. So I went and looked into it, called Xu Shaoyuan out, confronted him in front of Yong Jinrou, and after that I had Xu Shaoyuan give a sincere apology right in front of her… I even helped him put together a heartfelt confession — not that I wrote it for him, mind you, I just helped him sort out his feelings, so he could turn the apology into another confession… Clever of me, wasn’t it, wife? Li Shishi was in tears by the end, completely moved… and then Yong Jinrou, well — deeply moved, and then turned him down flat anyway. Tsk, honestly…”

“Deeply moved… and then turned him down…” Tan’er cut in. “What does that mean?”

“Deeply moved — and then rejected him anyway.”

“Is that even a real saying…”

“I just made it up.” Ning Yi laughed. “And then, I asked Miss Shishi to help sort out Yong Jinrou’s romantic troubles — the two of them get along well — and through her I found out something…”

The couple went on chatting about these small matters in the room, and who knows how much time passed. The food had gone cold, the liquor had gone slightly to their heads, and Ning Yi sat on his stool watching the sleet fall outside, saying:

“Before the Battle of Yushui Creek, the overall approach to the southwestern campaign was simply to hold on and wait for the enemy to expose a weakness. After Yushui Creek, Wanyan Zonghan has truly become the enemy standing right in front of us. From here on, the approach is to use every means available to crush his army and take his head — and, of course, that’s exactly what he’s thinking too, about us.” Ning Yi laughed lightly. “Thinking about it, I find myself getting a bit worked up.”

Tan’er turned to look at him, and gradually began to understand.

She took his hand. “Don’t let anything happen to you.”

“Of course not.”

Over the past decade or so, from the small Su family household in Jiangning, through the affair of the imperial merchant, the danger in Hangzhou, Liangshan, the famine relief, the killing of the emperor — for a long time now, Ning Yi had carried a certain sense of detachment from many things. After killing the emperor, in the eyes of outsiders, he had increasingly taken on the air of a man who looked down upon the whole world, with most people simply not registering in his eyes at all — perhaps, in the view of men like Li Pin, even this entire glorious Confucian age of the Wu Dynasty meant nothing to him.

When facing the strength of Western Xia or the Jurchens, he would sometimes adopt a posture of outward compliance, but that was never anything more than a formality.

When Li Qianshun led a hundred thousand troops against him, Ning Yi’s only response to the envoy sent to him was: “The people of Huaxia do not surrender to foreign states” — and he then went on to crush the entire Western Xia army.

When Wanyan Loushi came storming toward the northwest with overwhelming force, and Fan Hongji sent the heads of Lu Yannian and others as a show of intimidation, Ning Yi told the Huaxia Army: “Circumstances are stronger than men — we should be courteous.” But once Loushi pressed directly toward Yanzhou, Ning Yi turned to the troops and said, “From today, the entire Huaxia Army is at war with the Jurchens.”

After Loushi’s death, there was no room left for compromise. The Jurchens, having hoped to win without a fight, tried once more to persuade surrender, threatening to turn Xiaocang River into a pit of ten thousand corpses. Ning Yi’s response was simple: this place would not be a pit of ten thousand corpses — it would be a pit of a hundred thousand, a million.

When feigning weakness served a purpose, he was willing to do so in his words and in certain minor tactics. But in action, Ning Yi, no matter who he faced, was always aggressive to the utmost extreme.

For a long time, the Huaxia Army had faced the entire realm from a position of disadvantage — but in her own husband’s heart, he had never once seen himself as at a disadvantage; his confidence in the future was absolute. Within the Huaxia Army, that same confidence had, layer by layer, been passed down to everyone working beneath him.

Facing the ferocious southern campaign led by Zonghan and Xiyin, under the influence of Ning Yi’s bearing, the Huaxia Army had simply treated it as “a problem that needed solving.” But in this moment, after the conclusion of the Battle of Yushui Creek, as Tan’er looked at Ning Yi, she finally saw in him a hint of tension — the kind of alert, keyed-up focus a fighter takes on just before stepping into the ring.

From the perspective of the realm as a whole, after Wanyan Aguda’s death, Zonghan and Xiyin had truly become the most formidable and terrifying giants on this stage of the world; for twenty or thirty years, nothing had been able to stand against wherever their gaze had fallen. In recent years, the Huaxia Army had achieved some notable victories, results that had drawn attention and respect from many across the realm — but in front of men like Zonghan and Xiyin, the Huaxia Army, and even Ning Yi, the so-called demon of the age, had always remained a level, or even two levels, below.

Their opponent was a demon king who had dominated an entire age, capable of crushing the world beneath him, and the realm still held the Wu Dynasty, a bloated, dying but not yet dead colossus. The Huaxia Army was merely a powerful armed force gradually transforming itself into a true nation.

But at this moment, Ning Yi had, for the first time, felt genuine killing intent toward Zonghan. In Tan’er’s eyes, if Zonghan was the most terrifying giant of this age, then the husband before her had finally stretched his limbs and was preparing to rise to meet him as an equally towering figure…

Such an image flashed through her mind as the sleet falling outside the window gradually grew lighter.

Great flakes of snow were about to fall — the world was about to become the kind of place the Jurchens had once known so well…