On the night when great flakes of snow came drifting down from the sky in abundance, a small fire broke out in an abandoned, uninhabited villa at one edge of Zizhou.

The cause of the fire was that the wind and snow had knocked down a lantern hanging in the corridor of the residence, which slowly caught a pile of debris that had accumulated along one side of the corridor. The couple standing at the very top of the Huaxia Army, who happened to be present, were briefly alarmed, but soon set about fighting the fire in the cold winter night, and amid the falling snow, the small blaze was quickly extinguished.

Many years later, in the most tense period of the southwestern campaign, this mysterious little fire that occurred in a corner of Zizhou might well be dug up by some literary figure or third-rate writer from old records, turned into some piece of unofficial history or the spark for some conspiracy tale. But at the time, hardly anyone paid it any mind. As the couple made their way back to the command post along the dark road that night, the whole world had already filled with drifting snow, and both their faces carried a certain indescribable but genuinely relaxed smile.

—A memory left behind.

This was what happened on the night of the twenty-seventh of December, in the eleventh year of Wu Jianshuo. By the time dawn broke the next day, the heavy snow still had not let up, and the rolling mountains of the southwest had all been wrapped in a coat of silver.

New Year was drawing close. Along the line from Huangming County and Yushui Creek toward Zizhou, the escort of prisoners continued — the Huaxia Army was still processing the gains from the Battle of Yushui Creek. Because of the heavy snowfall, some of the Jurchen prisoners took the risk of fleeing into the mountains, causing a bit of chaos, but overall, it was no longer enough to affect the larger picture.

Meanwhile, along the mountain road stretching from the front lines toward Jiange, the Jurchen encampments, gradually being buried under the snow, were filled with an atmosphere of oppression, grim resolve, and a touch of madness.

Amid the spreading snow, small disturbances from skirmishing could occasionally be heard in the mountains. In the wind and snow, sheets of paper came whistling and drifting toward the Jurchen army’s camps.

Even in the lull following this stage of victory, the Huaxia Army’s opportunistic strikes had not let up. Scouts carrying leaflets would approach the Jurchen camps or the mountain roads the enemy had to pass through, and scattering these leaflets had become a fairly regular occurrence.

The leaflets recounted the course of the Battle of Yushui Creek: how the Huaxia Army had crushed the Jurchen forces head-on, killed Elili, and then surrounded and stormed the Yushui Creek camp; how large numbers of Han troops had already switched sides on the battlefield, and how, based on their performance in battle, the Jurchens did not even regard these Han units as human beings… After this account, the leaflets appended a bounty on the heads of Zonghan’s two sons.

Even without these leaflets, wariness and hostility toward the Han troops had already taken root within the Jurchen camps.

Over the previous several days, Yuyu had executed dozens of Han scouts for “disobeying orders” — many of them dying because of their connection to Ren Hengchong.

In the earlier battles, in order to keep these Han scouts fighting effectively, the Jurchens had relied on offering bounties to spur them into action — a reasonably sound strategy in principle. However, when Ren Hengchong discovered a route leading toward the Huaxia Army’s rear, he had refused to report it up the chain, choosing instead to act alone and lead men to seize this “credit” for himself — and in doing so, effectively strangled a “possibility” that the Jurchens might otherwise have been able to exploit.

If, instead of a mere twenty-odd men sneaking into the enemy camp to take action, it had been two hundred, or even two thousand skilled Jurchen fighters — the enemy’s camp might well have already descended into chaos, Ning Yi’s own son might have been captured or killed, and the resulting turmoil in the wounded soldiers’ camp might have been used to strike back at the front at Yushui Creek. The battle on the nineteenth of December might have ended very differently indeed.

While Yuyu was carrying out the executions of these dozens of scouts, Dalai, who controlled the troops, simultaneously kept a close watch on every Han army camp. Large numbers of Han soldiers found in possession of Huaxia Army leaflets were dragged out and made examples of on the spot. A grim, oppressive atmosphere bore down on the living space of every Han unit.

“…If it weren’t for these southern dogs turning coat, there never would have been this setback at Yushui Creek!”

On the twenty-eighth, amid a sky full of falling snow, at the main camp of Shili Ji, Dalai pulled back his cloak as he entered the camp gate, shaking off the accumulated snow, still railing to the officers he passed about the “black sheep” of this great battle.

In a certain sense, his view represented one of the mainstream sentiments within the Jurchen army at the moment. A passing officer looked toward the distant Han army camp and waved his hand forcefully.

“…The southerners are utterly useless — I said all along they’d be more trouble than they’re worth! Hmph, and now that things have gone slightly wrong at Yushui Creek, I say we can’t trust them at all anymore!”

“…In war, nothing is more dangerous than something dragging you down. The terrain around Yushui Creek is complicated enough, and the southern dogs were useless — the moment they took even a small push, they collapsed and fled, and in doing so blocked the supply roads to the rear, so reinforcements couldn’t even be organized in time on the battlefield. If you ask me, we should send them all up to Huangming County instead — the terrain’s more open there, let them wear down the Black Banner Army’s shells for us…”

“…Huangming County can only take so many more men anyway. Send fifty thousand southern dogs up there today, and if the Black Banner Army pushes back, who knows how many of them will turn coat again — and when they come running back, are you going to open the camp gate for them or not?”

“…As far as I’m concerned, no. Anyone who fails to take the wall and dares to come back — kill them all!”

“…That’s just handing them straight to the Black Banner Army. And if the Black Banner Army won’t take them in either, then you’ll have fifty thousand men stuck in the middle of the battlefield, and we won’t even be able to advance.”

“…A bunch of rats. The southern dogs are simply rotten to the core!”

“…I’ve got dozens of Han slaves at home, and all they know how to do is slack off…”

A few officers, tramping through the snow, made their way toward the higher ground of the camp, trading remarks like these. At the other end of the camp, Yuyu met with a grim-faced Wanyan Xiebao, watching the sprawl of tents while listening to the “Baoshan Prince” speak in a low voice: “…Elili was brave enough, but careless, always overreaching for credit. If he hadn’t already died at Eagle Beak Cliff, he’d bear the greatest blame for this setback!”

“He’s already dead — let’s not say too much more about it.” Hearing Wanyan Xiebao’s words, his elder brother, Wanyan Sheyema, walked over from the side.

Amid the wind and snow, the many generals of this southern campaign were converging on Shili Ji.

The sudden collapse of the front eight days earlier at Yushui Creek had shaken the entire Jurchen southern expedition force. Aside from Dalai and Yuyu, who had rushed to Yushui Creek immediately to salvage the situation, nearly every senior general had been shocked, almost disbelieving, at the news that had suddenly come out of Yushui Creek.

Elili, leading a personal guard of a thousand men, had been killed at Eagle Beak Cliff near Yushui Creek; the Huaxia Army, with fewer than twenty thousand men, had launched a sudden strike and crushed the entire attacking force at Yushui Creek head-on. Their own side had collapsed like a landslide, and in the end only a few thousand men had managed to hold onto half of the Yushui Creek camp…

Over the more than two months of the campaign, among the Jurchen generals, aside from Elili and Balishu holding the front and directing the assault, and Yuyu commanding the scouts in support, the rest of the generals, though stationed in the middle or rear, had also stayed sharp, taking part in the overall maintenance and preparation of the entire battlefield.

The road from Jiange to Huangming County and Yushui Creek stretched nearly fifty li through narrow, rugged, treacherous mountain terrain. In many sections the road was crudely built, requiring painstaking maintenance after every passage of carts and horses, and after every rain. And yet, through Xiyin’s advance planning and Han Qixian’s logistical management, an army numbering in the hundreds of thousands had, over the course of two months, cut roads through the mountains, not only widening the original road twofold but even building new plank roads across stretches previously considered impassable, wherever the ground allowed.

The Jurchens, who had risen up in arms some thirty years earlier as a rough and untutored people, had produced, in men like Aguda and Zonghan, a generation with sharp, adaptable minds, skilled at absorbing the strengths of others, learning new tactics through battle after battle. In their first ten years of ascendancy, they had relied on sheer, unstoppable valor — the courage of men who feared nothing when narrow paths brought them face to face with the enemy. In the ten years after that, they had gradually gathered craftsmen from across the realm, learning to combine equipment with tactics. And now, thirty years on, men like Zonghan, Xiyin, and Han Qixian had finally achieved the coordinated, orderly movement of several hundred thousand men acting as one.

Most of the labor cutting roads through the mountains had been done by conscripted Han troops and skilled Han craftsmen captured after crossing the river, but the ones managing and overseeing them, in the end, were still the Jurchen generals stationed in the rear. Over more than two months of relentless assault at the front, the fact that the rear had managed to solve the thorniest problem of supply routes under such conditions left every general with a vague but genuine sense of the awesome power of “human will conquering nature.”

This, they felt, was the true strength of the Great Jin state fully mobilized!

Over these past two months, in the discussions among some of the generals, if this great campaign were truly to drag on indefinitely, they could even entertain the grand notion of conscripting Han slaves to “level these southwestern mountains flat.”

That the Black Banner Army opposite them had managed to hold out for two months at places like Huangming County and Yushui Creek, with defenses as solid and watertight as an iron bucket, was genuinely admirable — no wonder they had once defeated both Loushi and Cibushi. But when it came to the overall direction of the war, the Jurchen army as a whole still held more than enough confidence.

The sudden setback at Yushui Creek was a resounding slap in the face, landing at the very moment when everyone’s confidence stood at its firmest!

The situation at the Yushui Creek front had collapsed with astonishing speed. By the afternoon, the front line had been forcibly broken; Elili had been killed by the Huaxia Army at Eagle Beak Cliff, and a great many troops had failed to break out despite repeated attempts. The urgent reports sent back afterward, pleading for swift reinforcement, had not been kept secret, and by the early morning hours of the following day, further urgent reports came trickling back one after another: the Huaxia Army had not only crushed the main attacking force head-on, but had gone on to besiege the Yushui Creek camp itself, breaking through its outer perimeter before midnight and driving the slaughter deep inside.

The force at Yushui Creek had numbered nearly fifty thousand men, and the camp itself had held a favorable defensive position — yet in less than a single day, it had been driven to such ruin by a Black Banner Army force reportedly numbering fewer than twenty thousand. Just how formidable must the Black Banner Army’s fighting strength truly be, to accomplish such a thing?

As veteran commanders who had spent their whole lives on killing fields, many of the Jurchen generals in the rear turned pale upon hearing this news, and once their second thought finally caught up with the first, they began to wonder whether it might be a false report, or whether the Black Banner side had simply pulled off some extraordinarily clever tactic that happened to land at exactly the right moment.

The hot-tempered Wanyan Xiebao actually hacked down a tree at the edge of the camp with his own blade, shouting, “This is impossible!” and immediately made to ride for the front to execute the scouts he assumed were spreading false reports and sowing chaos among the ranks. He truly could not bring himself to believe the outcome. The more composed and steady Wanyan Sheyema could only say, with quiet confidence, “There must be something strange behind this.”

No one could believe such an outcome. In thirty years, whether under fair conditions or foul, this was a taste of defeat the Jurchens had never before experienced.

Nearly a decade earlier, Loushi had at one point pushed the Black Banner Army in the northwest into a disadvantageous position — though in the Huaxia Army’s own records, it was described as an evenly matched, chaotic struggle — and it was only through a small coincidence that he had been unexpectedly beheaded on the battlefield by a small Black Banner unit, giving the Jurchens their first taste of defeat at the hands of the Black Banner Army.

Cibushi, though caught by a stratagem at Yanzhou, had still led tens of thousands of troops that smashed open the gates of Xiaocang River, driving the Black Banner Army of that time into a miserable retreat south — on the open battlefield, the Jurchen army could hardly be said to have suffered a crushing defeat.

Now, years later, at the very moment when the Great Jin had mobilized its strongest forces for a southern campaign, with many of its veteran generals still very much active on the stage — the Black Banner Army opposite them had shown such astonishing fangs… Had the southwest truly given rise to an army even more ferocious than the Jurchens of thirty years ago?

Fortunately, further explanations arrived one after another over the following days.

At noon on the nineteenth of December, Elili, a man long accustomed to taking reckless gambles, had finally been unable to contain his restlessness after two months and personally led his guards in a direct assault on a key breakthrough point known as Eagle Beak Cliff. There, he fell for a Black Banner Army trap, his column cut off by a landslide of boulders, and Elili was ambushed and killed.

Beyond that, the varied and shifting terrain around Yushui Creek had complicated the assault. The Huaxia Army had thrown its elite forces into the fight, while the Jurchens had been forced to reckon with the consequences of having Han troops mixed into their ranks — these originally surrendered units became a liability the moment they faced a real counterattack. As some Jurchen elites tried to retreat or move to reinforce others, their paths were blocked by these very Han troops, delaying the flow of the battle and costing them the initiative at critical moments.

Worse still, some Han troops swiftly defected to the Black Banner side on the battlefield, and that same night launched a sudden uprising within the camp, breaking the outer perimeter of the Yushui Creek camp and inflicting even heavier losses on the main Jurchen force at the front. With Elili already dead, though several mid-ranking fierce commanders fought desperately and managed to hold onto a small portion of the inner camp, it did nothing to change the overall outcome of the battle.

With this information in hand, the rout at Yushui Creek finally had a reasonable explanation.

Elili was already dead. As the head of his own force during his life, no Jurchen officer of lesser standing was in any position to speak ill of him, and having died on the battlefield, he could only be honored for it. So the greatest share of the blame had to fall on the Han troops. In the days following the battle, the various armies stretching from Jiange to the front still needed to have their morale steadied and their unrest suppressed; units along the Yushui Creek line were gradually redeployed forward, while generals in other positions worked to bring their own troops back into order… By the twenty-eighth, amid falling snow, several of the great generals, having received the order, were finally summoned back to Shili Ji by Wanyan Zonghan’s command.

The weather was bitterly cold, and the vast military camp, built along the contours of the mountains, stretched out across the rolling ridgeline as far as the eye could see, the heat and clamor of the gathered crowds steeped in the swirling, drifting snow. Some generals had arrived that morning; others trickled in through the afternoon. As evening approached, Wanyan Zonghan had a great bonfire lit on the open ground outside his main tent — the gathering was to take place in the open air, amid the falling snow.

Wanyan Zonghan tossed a piece of wood into the bonfire and watched the sparks fly upward, the snowflakes pushed back by the roaring flames.

Amid the white snow, the generals arrived one after another: Saba arrived, Yuyu arrived, Dalai arrived, Han Qixian arrived, Gao Qingyi arrived, Wanyan Sheyema arrived, Wanyan Xiebao arrived… and one figure after another who had lived through years of campaigning to reach this point. Seeing the roaring flames, amid the swirling snow, they gathered here together.

Zonghan’s tall figure stood in silence. He tossed in another piece of wood, and the fire roared up with a sudden burst, sending countless sparks flying into the sky.

Before long, a low chant of a familiar shamanic war song began to rise among the crowd.

“…O my white tiger mountain spirit, roar!

“I am the one who has surpassed ten thousand men and won the favor of heaven!

“…

“O mighty spirit, speak to me!

“…

“O those who stand beside me!

“Lend me your ears.

“…

“My gyrfalcon spreads its wings—

“and flies free!”

Around the roaring bonfire, it seemed as though countless figures joined in, echoing the chant…