In this world, there are some things that are truly great.

The fall of mountains and rivers, the change of dynasties—at certain turning points, these vast historical events completely alter the course of people’s entire lives, decide the future direction of an entire nation, and leave their heavy mark upon the pages of history.

But in the smallest of places, such things cannot truly interrupt the days that people live through, one after another. No sorrow, however immense, can change a person’s basic physical needs; no humiliation, however great, can make a person forget the need to eat and drink.

In the first month of the new year, in Lin’an, a fragile equilibrium had naturally begun to take shape in this city that had endured the ravages of war.

The Jurchen had entered the city the previous year, in the fifth month. After they entered, there had been sustained slaughter and suppression, as well as a mass breakout and flight involving over a hundred thousand people. Large numbers of craftsmen had been seized by Jurchen soldiers and marched north; countless instances of rape against women had occurred; and repeated uprisings within the city had been met with massacre.

After several months of chaos, the great city that had once held over a million people now had just over seven hundred thousand residents remaining. The markets still had to open, goods still had to circulate, the government offices had begun functioning again, and the constables went about investigating petty theft and the occasional search for troublemakers disturbing the social order. A few pleasure houses had reopened as well.

Trade guilds in the markets had gradually reorganized themselves; after the old local gangs that once collected protection money were wiped out, burly men would show up to fill the vacuum, and occasionally one would hear rumors of so-and-so having ties to the Jurchen, having backing from above.

After Zhou Yong’s departure, the small court left behind in Lin’an had continued maintaining the fiction of the “Wu Dynasty,” resting its foundation on the several regent ministers Zhou Yong had left behind when he fled—Zhou Yong had taken trusted confidants like Qin Hui with him when he ran, leaving several ministers behind in Lin’an to carry on ongoing negotiations with the Jurchen. Among these officials, there were of course a few die-hards who stood unyielding before Zongfu and Zongbi’s might, but within three months, they too had been thoroughly wiped out.

The “Wu Dynasty” court that followed gradually formed a core group around figures like Tie Yan and Wu Qimei.

This Wu Dynasty court had, on several occasions, issued surrender letters in Zhou Yong’s name, demanding that Zhou Junwu abandon resistance and negotiate with the Jurchen for the sake of the realm. By the time Zhou Yong died at sea and Junwu proclaimed himself emperor at Jiangning, the court produced Zhou Yong’s “blood edict,” accusing Zhou Pei of murdering ministers to seize power and regicide at sea, and further accusing the crown prince of defying his sovereign’s command, stripping Junwu of his right of succession.

And so, when Junwu proclaimed himself emperor at Jiangning and changed the era name to “Revival,” the small court in Lin’an dug up an obscure member of the imperial family said to carry Zhou blood, and, citing Zhou Yong’s blood-written decree as proof, enthroned him as emperor under the new era name “Jiatai.”

Compared to the reckless, warmongering “former crown prince” who had proclaimed himself emperor at Jiangning only to abandon it, the Jiatai Emperor was gentle and mild by temperament, keeping the realm and its common people foremost in his mind. After taking the throne, he began on one hand to reflect on the Wu Dynasty’s past failures, and on the other to actively pursue negotiations with the Jin state, hoping to find some proper way to end the war and save the common people from their suffering.

By this point, Jiangnan had already fallen into deep and desperate misery. Though in the broader sense, the common people of the realm had no goodwill toward the Jin state, the small court in Lin’an chose a different direction for its propaganda.

On one hand, it publicly declared itself actively pursuing peace talks with the Jin state; on the other, the Lin’an court dredged up decades’ worth of suppressed scandal and gossip, including the corruption and incompetence of the Wu Dynasty court, Cai Jing’s total grip on power, Tong Guan’s buying-back of the Sixteen Prefectures of Yan and Yun, military incompetence, generals who valued their own lives over duty, and even the sordid secrets of Emperor Zhou Zhe of the Jinghan era and various other sovereigns, the reckless abuses of imperial power in matters of state, and so on and so forth.

Ever since the humiliation of Jingping, when the Jurchen captured Zhou Ji and dragged him back to the northern lands, this kind of scandal had in fact been trickling south year after year, but as long as the Wu Dynasty’s legitimacy still held, the court had been able to suppress such talk entirely, and even the occasional leak could be countered—at least while the Princess Imperial’s household still stood, the court still commanded some cohesion, and someone would come forward to refute it.

But in the vacuum left after Zhou Yong’s departure, all such discourse now truly rested in the hands of the Lin’an court.

“Speaking of these matters, the Jurchen are certainly savage, but for the Wu Dynasty to have fallen to this state—it truly was self-inflicted…”

“The scholar-officials forming factions, the sovereign misruling, the generals greedy and cowardly…”

By the turn of this year, such sighs could often be heard from the mouths of the surviving scholars still within the walls of Lin’an.

As for those of somewhat higher standing, those with better access to information, they of course knew a good deal more. In order to protect the legitimacy of the “Jiatai” Emperor, the court’s scandal-mongering carefully avoided touching on Zhou Yong himself—but as for the shameful spectacle of Zhou Yong abandoning the city and fleeing as the Jurchen closed in, every great and noble family understood it perfectly well in their hearts.

Once the elders of these great families stopped suppressing the talk, people speaking of Zhou Yong’s farce of abandoning the city, of the countless foolish acts committed over the years, even of the “former crown prince” who took the throne at Jiangning only to flee again shortly after—none of them could help but shake their heads. Strange as it seemed, people living through it at the time had never quite noticed—but once they were free to speak of it openly, most couldn’t help feeling that if such a state hadn’t fallen, that in itself would have been the truly strange thing.

More than half a year had passed since the Wu Dynasty’s collapse. The massacres suffered by those who resisted, the inner turmoil of those who wavered, the clashes and struggles between those who surrendered and those who fought on, the blood spilled on execution grounds and within city walls—all of it was too much to recount in detail. By this year’s turn of the new year, most of the fiercest resisters had already been cleared away, and the court led by Wu Qimei and others had for the moment settled into stability.

On the fifth day of the new year, Vice Minister of Personnel Li Shan rode his carriage through the streets of Lin’an, on his way to a gathering at Wu Qimei’s residence.

He lifted the carriage curtain; outside, the streets still looked bleak, few shops had opened, snow lay piled along the roadside, and the passersby, arms tucked into their sleeves, all seemed to carry a gloomy, resentful look in their eyes as they gazed at everything in the marketplace, especially at the figures of the “powerful and privileged.” Li Shan could always sense in it a flavor of anger that dared not speak its name.

To be born into an age of great upheaval was the misfortune of the age’s people. But to have survived it—one ought to be content with that.

So he thought to himself, and let the curtain fall.

No one was born a villain, of course, but few people were born ready to face death unflinching, either. Sometimes one had to play along, sometimes one had to advance by roundabout means, and sometimes… such as when the Wu Dynasty had rotted through to its very core, there was nothing left to do but let go and move on. This was Li Shan’s view of things now.

Li Shan’s teacher and mentor was the current Right Chancellor, Wu Qimei. The Wu family had long been a great clan of Jiangnan. During the Jinghan era, when the Wu Dynasty’s political center still lay in the Central Plains, the powers of Jiangnan sat at the margins. Though Wu Qimei had gained a scholarly reputation in his youth, he grew weary early on of the infighting of officialdom, and after losing out in several political struggles, retreated to Jiangnan to live in quiet seclusion, cultivating his reputation. His renown was comparable to that of men like Qian Xiwen of Hangzhou back then—covering a single region, but unable to break into the central court.

After the Central Plains fell, the court that fled south had to rely heavily on the power of the great Jiangnan clans, and so the Wu family became one of the pivotal great families of Jiangnan. Wu Qimei had his sights set on the chancellorship—in his moments of frustration, he often compared himself to Lord Qin Siyuan, who had endured the Black River Alliance; at that time Qin Siyuan had not yet been rehabilitated, but as the leader of a great clan, Wu Qimei understood much of the inner circumstances clearly enough. He was deeply moved by the memory of Qin Siyuan’s later resurgence—the disaster relief efforts, the northern campaign, the defense of Taiyuan and Bianliang, all the painstaking effort Qin Siyuan had poured in, only to fall in the end to the balance of power within the court.

Yet even with statesmanlike talent, and even though the court’s move south had granted the southern clans standing and power, the handful of positions that truly touched the center of power remained firmly in the hands of a few court elders. Zhou Yong, aware of his own limited abilities, had sought only stability in his appointments, showing little enthusiasm for elevating new talent or nurturing new factions.

Wu Qimei therefore could not reach the very summit of officialdom, but his reputation had grown high, and his clan’s power was great; if he could not become chancellor, then any lesser post held little appeal. For this reason, once the Jianshuo court settled in Lin’an, Wu Qimei founded the “Jun Society”—taking its name from the idea of “the weight of ten thousand jun,” and quietly cultivated a following, building a small circle within officialdom. This too was a kind of political maneuvering—if he could not become chancellor, he might as well make his own standing all the more transcendent, becoming the man behind the throne of the Wu Dynasty court instead. That, too, would not be a bad outcome.

In truth, the “Jun Society” Wu Qimei had founded had, for a time, hoped to become the “Sovereign Society” instead—an ambition much like Qin Hui’s had been. Zhou Yong, in matters of actual governance, could only be called a figurehead, and many had initially wanted to place their bets on Junwu instead. Wu Qimei himself had vast connections, formidable strength, and many capable disciples at his disposal—by any measure, he seemed like a second Qin Siyuan. But in the end, that hot-headed young man named Zhou Junwu never gave him his approval, and this left Wu Qimei feeling both indignant and humiliated.

As it turned out, the realm was never short of capable ministers like Qin Siyuan—it was only that the realm itself had already rotted through, unable to make room for even one or two such men.

—As for the full particulars of this matter, Li Shan himself did not know them very clearly. He had originally studied under Wu Qimei’s household, and in the third year of the Jianshuo era, Wu Qimei had helped elevate him to the rank of presented scholar; his official career had gone smoothly ever since. When the Jurchen came, Li Shan had once called for resistance, even imagining himself fighting the Jurchen to the death in some heroic last stand. But such thoughts, easy to hold with fervor before the moment arrived, wavered like everyone else’s once the moment truly came.

Afterward, as Zhou Yong fled, his mentor was heartbroken, crying out that the Wu Dynasty was doomed—but what had the common people done to deserve this? By the time the Jurchen entered the city, the situation spiraled swiftly out of control; some chose defiant resistance, and were massacred for it. Tie Yan, Wu Qimei, and others stepped forward, trying to save what innocent lives they could, and the small court was established as a result.

These were, admittedly, humiliating actions, ones that might well earn condemnation in the pages of future history. But if no one had done what they did, even more of the realm’s people would have died.

What could ant-like common people ever understand of such things?

The carriage rolled onward, and upon arriving at Wu Qimei’s residence as Right Chancellor, quite a few people had already gathered. These were either Li Shan’s fellow disciples under the same teacher, or friends and allies within the Wu faction’s network at court, and many exchanged New Year’s greetings upon meeting. Li Shan met with a few familiar fellow disciples, and what he mostly heard them discussing was the progress of Chen Wei, Dou Qingfeng, and other capable men of the Wu faction in expanding and training new army units.

From the fall of Lin’an to the present, looking out at the wider world, there were three ongoing wars: first, the former crown prince, still being chased about by Zongbi’s troops; second, the bloody struggle Yinshuke was waging near Tanzhou; and third, the contest in the southwest between the local rebels and the forces of Zonghan and Xiyin, which still hadn’t reached its conclusion.

But for the people gathered in the Lin’an court, aside from Zhou Junwu’s existence, which counted as an immediate threat, the Black Banner Army—well, they hadn’t been anywhere near Jiangnan for over a decade now. Yes, more than ten years ago they had committed the vicious and extreme act of regicide, but a decade of never actually witnessing anything of them left the sense of it lacking in weight.

The army—that was what truly mattered to all the various factions in today’s Lin’an small court.

As for the reasoning behind surrender, why the Wu Dynasty had fallen, one could argue that any way one liked, spinning it into whatever shape suited. But the surrender faction was not naive—one might even say that only the surrender faction understood reality with any real clarity. A thousand fine arguments couldn’t save one’s own life; once the Jurchen withdrew, the only thing anyone could truly rely on was an army.

Fortunately, the Wu Dynasty’s rule had already thoroughly collapsed, and the various factions and groups that made up the small court each generally held their own “base areas,” their own spheres of influence in many places. After surrendering, the great clans led by Tie Yan and Wu Qimei had immediately pushed forward with military recruitment—and toward such activity, Zongfu and Zongbi felt no aversion at all; if anything, it was under their tacit encouragement that the various local powers had begun making such moves in the first place.

To the Jurchen, who could not reach every corner of this vast territory themselves, a chaotic, fragmented, but broadly pro-Jin “Wu Dynasty” in Jiangnan best served Great Jin’s interests. And for the various factions who had already chosen surrender to save their own lives, the fastest possible destruction of the Wu Dynasty’s legitimate mandate—so that it could never rise again under the banner of “righteous cause”—was what best guaranteed their own safety.

Owing to this shared, unspoken understanding, over the past several months, while Zongfu and Zongbi pursued Junwu and gathered up the spoils of war, the people of the Lin’an court had busied themselves both blackening the Wu Dynasty’s name and carving out their own territories. Wu Qimei held the center, and his chief generals now commanded over three hundred thousand troops across various regions, while civil officials like Li Shan worked hard to funnel what remaining resources the Lin’an court still held toward these armies, hoping they might quickly transform into an elite force, one that could someday become the foundation of a new Wu Dynasty.

Since Wu Qimei modeled himself after Qin Siyuan, the Wu faction now bore no small resemblance to the old Qin faction of years past. For instance, after becoming chancellor, Wu Qimei had swiftly established a new Wu Dynasty secret intelligence bureau, placing it under his most trusted disciple, Gan Fenglin, to recruit various figures from the martial world to serve its purposes. Among his disciples, those with a talent for commerce were also held in particular favor by Wu Qimei.

When the gathered men met like this, they would sometimes speak of the old days of the Qin faction. They mentioned the monk Juemin, noting that though he carried royal blood, his achievements had come mostly through connections—his fame outstripped his substance. They spoke of Ji Kun, a man of servant origins, competent enough with small matters but lacking in vision. They spoke of Cheng Zhouhai, who had assisted Zhou Pei yet failed to foresee the infighting within the royal house, resulting in Zhou Yong’s flight and the swift collapse of the Princess Imperial’s household’s power—also, they judged, unfit for great responsibility. As for Wenren Buer, an utterly ordinary man of middling talent, hardly worth mentioning at all.

And then there was Ning Liheng, whose act of regicide had been far too reckless—had he moved more gradually, would the realm ever have fallen to such a state as this today… And so the discussion went on, this and that, on and on without end.

Within their assessments lay, naturally, hidden comparisons. Now that Zhou Pei had gone out to sea, and Zhou Junwu was fleeing east and west, and the fighting in the far southwest remained a distant, uncertain thing, when Wu Qimei and Gan Fenglin occasionally spoke of Zonghan and Xiyin’s strength, few dared question it—and moreover, the Black Banner Army had acted so tyrannically, winning no favor among the common people, that over the two-plus months since the Jurchen marched into the southwest, not only had the Sword Pavilion side turned toward Jin, but the southwest itself had seen rebellions large and small breaking out one after another, without end.

According to reports arriving from the southwest, by mid-December alone, in the course of the Black Banner Army’s struggle against the Jurchen, over thirty rebellions had broken out across the territories it controlled. These uprisings, ranging from dozens to hundreds of participants, took advantage of the moments when the Jurchen advance left the Black Banner Army unable to cover both ends at once, destroying roads and leading bands into the mountains behind the Black Banner lines.

For Li Shan and the others, what pressed most urgently before them now wasn’t actually the Black Banner Army—Wu Qimei and the others, when they spoke of it occasionally, showed the clear-eyed detachment of bystanders: the unrest in the southwest was, in their view, the consequence of Ning Yi sending veteran soldiers down into the countryside, competing for power against the local gentry.

—Ning Yi had sent veteran soldiers, patrol teams, storytelling troupes, and army medical teams down into remote villages, and the local scholars in these villages had begun quietly spreading word that the Black Banner Army was a lawless calamity, a horde of demons who recognized neither sovereign nor father.

“He who breaks the rules—the rules will turn around and devour him.”

The far-off war in the southwest had, in the eyes of the people of Lin’an, already found its direction; what drew more interest in casual conversation were instead some of the old anecdotes from years past: over a decade ago, when Fang La rose in rebellion and seized Hangzhou, that demon-hearted Ning Yi had once been trapped there himself. The camp of the Hegemon Blade Battalion where he’d been stationed back then now stood just two streets from the chancellor’s residence, though the scenery had changed entirely from what it once was. As for the current Right Chancellor’s residence itself, it had once been an even more famous site—originally the ancestral home of the great scholar Qian Xiwen. When Fang La broke through the city, Qian Xiwen had led his household in resistance, and the residence was afterward burned to the ground. After Fang La’s downfall, someone bought the land, renovated it several times over the following decade or so, and it eventually became the Right Chancellor’s residence.

At the gathering, these anecdotes spanning over a decade were recounted at leisurely length by Gan Fenglin, the steady “senior disciple” among them. Li Shan glanced outside to see snow and winter plum blossoms setting each other off charmingly in the courtyard, guests coming and going one after another. Thinking of these ten-odd years gone by, he felt that though Lin’an still remained in Jurchen hands for now, the future might yet hold a chance to hold their heads high again, and a certain boldness of spirit stirred in his chest.

Once the idle anecdotes had run their course, before long the conversation turned once more to the most pressing matter: recruiting and training troops.

This was the fifth day of the first month of the first year of Wu Dynasty Revival—or, one might say, the first year of Jiatai. Few yet realized just how turbulent and relentless the year ahead would prove to be. But that very afternoon, a war report from the southwest arrived in Lin’an, striking everyone then present in the city like a thunderclap.

It was the news that on December 19th, the Chinese Army had broken through at Yushui Creek and killed Geli Li in battle. The news struck like a bolt of thunder, and for a moment it even left Li Shan and the others stunned with disbelief. He could still clearly recall the look on Wu Qimei’s and Gan Fenglin’s faces that day; that night, when they gathered privately, he heard Wu Qimei, after weighing his words for a long while, say with a dark expression, “Only what’s in your own hand truly belongs to you. From now on, the new army is our first priority.”

Wu Qimei said little more, but everyone understood perfectly well: whether it was Zhou Junwu’s eventual return, or the southwest truly holding out against Zonghan’s great army, the only thing that could truly save them in the end was an army held firmly in their own hands. The report from the southwest had simply struck the warning bell all the harder.

This grim mood lingered for seven days. On the evening of the twelfth day of the first month, Li Shan was summoned urgently to the Right Chancellor’s residence. This time, Wu Qimei’s expression carried, beneath its calm, a note of pleasure. “I said it before—those who break the rules never come to a good end.”

The second war report from the southwest had reached Lin’an with the greatest possible speed.

These past days, the war in the southwest had shifted moment to moment.

The battle at Yushui Creek on December 19th had not only brought the Chinese Army great confidence and advantage—it had also ignited the resolve of certain local powers behind the Chinese Army’s lines who had until then remained on the fence. Starting on the 24th, a series of uprisings organized by local gentry and landlords broke out across the southwest one after another. Though these disturbances didn’t directly affect the overall course of the war, they indirectly siphoned away troop deployments the Chinese Army could ill afford to spare. On the night of New Year’s Eve, at Huangming County, Balishu launched another wave of overwhelming assault against the Chinese Army.

It seemed as though spurred on by the sting of defeat at Yushui Creek, the assault on Huangming County came with unusual ferocity, and over the following three days, Balishu personally directed wave after wave of fierce attacks. The Chinese Army’s resistance along the Huangming defensive line was likewise extraordinarily stubborn, but still suffered enormous casualties.

During this assault, Balishu gathered the large numbers of Han soldiers already massed at the front, and even drove a portion of the wounded Han soldiers forward, ordering them to hurl themselves in a frenzied assault against part of the city wall. Huangming County had already endured two months of stubborn defense, with heavy casualties, and the general staff prepared to exploit the reality that the Han troops at the front were not particularly resilient, to strike back with a counterattack.

The state of siege and defense at Huangming County, in truth, left the Second Division under Pang Liu’an with little room for choice. Unlike the tangled terrain at Yushui Creek, Huangming County was simply a wall, with the battlefield before it and, beyond that, the Jurchen camp and a narrow mountain path. Once the Jurchen commanded their troops to attack, even cowardly Han soldiers had no room to retreat. If the Black Banner Army refused to accept surrenders, the enemy troops had no choice but to keep charging the walls again and again, or else wait to die cowering on the battlefield.

The Second Division’s defense proved extraordinarily stubborn, and it had the largest number of cannons in the entire Black Banner Army; over these more than two months, Huangming County had achieved a far more impressive exchange ratio than Yushui Creek. But regardless, their losses were also severe—even though this already represented the finest performance achieved in any defensive battle so far.

The unrest of the new year had stretched the Chinese Army’s lines to their limit, and though Huangming County still held, the steadily mounting casualties remained a constant source of anxiety. Given that the defeat at Yushui Creek was barely ten days past, and the Jurchen had not yet, in practical terms, adjusted their attitude toward the Han soldiers, the Black Banner Army’s positions at Huangming County began offering surrender terms to some of the Han troops.

The counterattack broke out on the evening of the third day of the new year. Once word spread across the battlefield that the Chinese Army had opened a channel for surrender, unrest began among the Han troops on the field. Pang Liu’an gathered the strength of one elite regiment to drive from the rear, and a Han unit that had decided to surrender cut into the Jurchen position from the middle of the battlefield; in an instant, chaos spread outward.

The entire disorder lasted nearly an hour on the battlefield, the chaos continuing to spread. An elite unit of Xi troops was cut off ahead and nearly wiped out entirely; the Jurchen commander Balishu himself once charged forward to press the line, holding back an elite Black Banner assault regiment that had pushed forward amid the chaos; meanwhile, in the Jurchen’s rear camp, a Han general seized the moment to stage an uprising, setting off nearly half an arms depot, flames scorching the sky.

With the situation both dire and delicately balanced, Pang Liu’an and Chief of Staff Guo Chen finally made their decision, committing two more regiments, striking with maximum force to settle the battle for Huangming County once and for all.

As three thousand men were committed to the fighting, pressing steadily forward, a Han army unit bearing the severed head of a Xi general came running toward the city walls, pursued by Jurchen troops; on the other side, another elite Han unit launched an attack against the Black Banner troops who had broken out from the walls.

Having waited patiently through over two months of repeated assaults, the defenders of Huangming County had, all along, fallen into the calculations of Balishu—this veteran commander second in standing only to Xiyin, Yinshuke, and Shuliesu. When thousands upon thousands of elite Jin troops surged forward crying out “you’ve fallen for it,” the Han army units originally planning to switch sides on the battlefield once again chose their allegiance anew.

That day, as daylight faded, hundreds of cannons fired at once from atop the walls of Huangming County, met by an answering barrage from the Jurchen artillery. Even with the overwhelming might of the cannon fire, half an hour later, the surging enemy troops finally snapped the thin defensive thread holding Huangming’s walls. After all, the Second Division was no longer in the vigorous condition it had been at the war’s outset—they had lost four thousand men, later reinforced with two thousand new recruits. When over three thousand fresh troops were committed to the field, the defenders atop the walls, who had barely been sufficient before, finally revealed their weakness. That night, from the moment the Jurchen set foot upon the walls, brutal slaughter and fighting for every position erupted across every corner of Huangming County.

What Balishu displayed in this battle was not some especially ingenious scheme—it was more like the culmination of a lifetime’s mastery of military strategy. On this day, whether it was the appearance of rout or the appearance of chaos, everything was performed with extraordinary realism, and it was precisely this realism that gave Pang Liu’an and the others just the right temptation, causing them, at the very moment they most needed to hold back, to instead find themselves unable to resist striking out—because if they didn’t strike now, this enormous opportunity would slip away in an instant, and Huangming County would be left to endure day after day of brutal siege and defense without end.

The third day of the first month also happened to be a critical psychological turning point: ever since the defeat at Yushui Creek, distrust of the Han army within Jurchen ranks had been steadily rising, and the Chinese Army had responded accordingly—distributing leaflets, calling out to encourage surrender—all of which made the position of the surrendered Han troops increasingly awkward.

The Chinese Army’s staff officers, when discussing these tactics, often felt a certain quiet pride in them. But that pride and satisfaction had, to some degree, blinded people’s eyes.

On the night of December 28th, Zonghan had gathered everyone for that impassioned rallying speech—in substance, an attempt to stabilize the position of the Han people within the army. The Chinese Army could see through the awkwardness of it all the more clearly: there were simply too many Han troops at the front, the roads to the rear too narrow; these troops could neither be withdrawn nor killed off in the moment. If their morale couldn’t be steadied, then the Jurchen’s southwest campaign might as well not be fought at all.

At the assembly of the ten-mile camp on the 28th, Balishu, who commanded the front lines, had not been present—he launched his attack on the night of the 30th, and by the third day of the new year, in theory, the Jurchen still would not have had time to properly address the situation of the Han troops… this factor deepened the genuine chaos within the Jurchen ranks.

On the fourth day of the new year, the Chinese Army’s Fifth Army, Second Division, was defeated at Huangming County.

Running parallel to the battle at Huangming County, there was, in fact, another line of fighting unfolding as well.

Beginning on the first day of the new year, the Jurchen carried out a secret, high-intensity redeployment of troops toward the front. In the early morning of the second day of the new year, the Yushui Creek position, having just recently completed a rotation of defenses, was struck by a sudden Jurchen assault, and, in the prisoner camp to the rear—not yet fully broken up and reorganized—a rebellion broke out as well. At the Yushui Creek front, the commander of the western army, Wanyan Zonghan himself, arrived at the battlefield at one point and launched an assault.

This piece of information caused a degree of misdirection within the Chinese Army’s general staff, who believed that the steady advance at Huangming County had, in fact, been meant to cover the sudden strike at Yushui Creek—such a gambit was indeed characteristic of Jurchen style—and as a result, they failed to respond in the best possible way.

A single mistake on the battlefield would soon exact a devastating price.

The battles at Yushui Creek and Huangming County were separated in time by about half a month, but the news reached Lin’an only seven days apart. The moment the walls of Huangming County fell, the war report was rushed back the more than three thousand li to Lin’an with the greatest possible urgency, so that the ministers of Lin’an could reach their decisions as quickly as possible.

Upon receiving the report, Wu Qimei’s face flushed red, but his heart had already settled.

That the Jurchen had defeated the Chinese Army meant that the course of the realm still lay within the scope of their grasp and calculation. If, one day, a man like Wanyan Zonghan were truly defeated by the Chinese Army, that might mean the direction of the realm had slipped entirely beyond their prediction, beyond the bounds of what “common sense” could explain—and to them, that would in fact be the most terrifying thing of all.

“Train the troops… waste no time, train the troops.”

That night, Wu Qimei repeated this phrase briefly but forcefully, weighty words carrying the bearing of a great man.

Everyone else, having let out a breath of relief, nodded in agreement with the force of his words.

At that moment, the great men of Lin’an had not yet realized that this turbulent, momentous spring had only just begun—that their awareness, their speed, their very strength would not even be able to keep pace with the changes about to unfold.

Just as the Jurchen broke through the Huangming defensive line, the war in the southwest was rapidly plunging into white-hot, violent chaos.

Scouts raced at full speed through the mountain forests; Qu Zhengyan, Han Jing, and others led cavalry units, repeatedly attempting to cut into the enemy’s flank and rear along the rugged mountain paths. This was a period of rapid adjustment on a battlefield changing moment by moment, both sides trying to seize any opening before the other could steady itself again, to widen the chaos in their favor.

And on the very day—the twelfth of the first month—that Wu Qimei received the first Huangming battle report in Lin’an, the Chinese Army’s Seventh Army, which had been stationed north of Sword Pavilion Pass eyeing the Jurchen’s rear defenses, struck the first blow against the southern flank of the Jurchen’s rear lines under the command of Qin Shaoqian.

Facing this Chinese Army unit—the sharpest in bearing, the one that had consistently menaced the Jurchen’s rear—Wanyan Xiyin, holding the rear in command, responded without hurry. From the fourteenth to the twentieth of the first month, over the course of seven days, this force of twenty thousand men encountered and defeated seventeen separate blocking units of Han troops of comparable size, one after another.

Fierce and violent developments were brewing in still more places. In the first month, in Fujian, Cheng Zhouhai—the man Wu Qimei and Gan Fenglin had dismissed as “unfit for great responsibility”—quietly entered Fuzhou, then under the control of Tie Sanwu, cousin of the Jiatai court’s Left Chancellor Tie Yan. On the ninth day of the first month, rebellion erupted within Fuzhou; the army drenched the prefectural office in blood. On the tenth, Tie Sanwu’s head was hung above the city wall.

That same day, the Princess Imperial Zhou Pei, clad in bright yellow robes, was escorted by her followers up onto the walls of Fuzhou, where the severed head still hung. Through the bitter, biting wind, she gazed north toward the snow-covered wilderness. In that direction, Junwu, along with Yue Fei and Han Shizhong’s forces, were still being pursued by the Jurchen army.

Near Tanzhou, Yinshuke crushed Zhu Jing’s forces, and on that snowy day massacred the entirety of Juling County. Chen Fan and the others built a defensive line near Tanzhou, fighting and retreating as they went—but within the very army Yinshuke commanded, a great conspiracy was quietly brewing:

A young Han army officer named Yu Mingzhou, having twice devastated the very troops from his own household and having lost three fingers in the war, had, through his brutal and extreme temperament, gradually earned the trust of Wanyan Qingjue. Not long after, this young officer would show his true, savage face behind the backs of both Wanyan Qingjue and Yinshuke…

Spring had not yet arrived, but thunder had already struck the land.