In the thirteenth year since Ning Yi killed the emperor, the first year of the Wuzhenxing era, the southwest turned into a boiling pot of chaos within its opening month.
In the early and middle third of the month, with Jianmen Pass as the dividing line, the southwestern front endured twenty days of ceaseless slaughter; on the northeastern side, seventeen battles were fought in the space of seven days.
By the end of January and start of February, the collected intelligence from the southwest reached Lin’an. At the time, the capital was tense over the loss of Fuzhou—naturally the tension fell hardest on the faction of Left Chancellor Tie Yan, whose standing at court had plummeted after the death of his cousin and the loss of Fuzhou. Meanwhile figures such as Wu Qimei, Gan Fenglin, and Li Shan, along with many high officials at court and in the army, were busy marveling over the clash between Xiyin and Qin Shaoqian.
Qin Shaoqian, leading over twenty thousand men, broke through more than ten defensive lines in seven days before beginning to withdraw. Ahead of him, Xiyin remained perfectly composed—though he had organized seventeen armies that rushed in one after another only to be scattered, his own foundation had gone entirely unscathed. In everyone’s eyes, this was the bearing of a true master of war, fully on display.
“…This so-called Huaxia Seventh Army, led by Qin Shaoqian, has been nailed down behind the Jurchen lines, and its original purpose was purely deterrence. With those twenty-odd thousand men there, Zonghan’s main force at the front has to worry about how it might turn back, and so it can never throw everything into the offensive—it always has to leave itself a way out. As long as this Black Banner Seventh Army stays put, it holds infinite possibilities; the moment it moves, it’s just twenty thousand men, and that actually puts it at a disadvantage—hardly the mark of a first-rate strategist.”
“…It’s just a pity that the Black Banner forces on the southwest front, commanded though they are by the far more famous Ning Yi, don’t really live up to their reputation. They won a victory at year’s end and had already exhausted their strength doing it—by the fourth of the new year they’d suffered a crushing defeat. Qin Shaoqian must be feeling the strain too; he had no choice but to push forward. His twenty thousand men are true elite troops, a match for even the fiercest Jurchen units. At Hubuda Gang, twenty thousand Jurchens once broke seven hundred thousand—but sadly for Qin Shaoqian, the man ahead of him isn’t the Yelu Yanxi of old, but Xiyin, who defeated the entire Yelu clan…”
“…With roughly equal numbers of Han troops, Xiyin laid down more than ten defensive lines in the rear, meeting each assault one after another. Qin Shaoqian couldn’t produce the momentum of a rolling advance—if anything, his own force struck hard once, then flagged the second time. He broke through seventeen lines in a single burst, but Xiyin can regroup the Han troops under his command and lay down seventeen more, twenty-seven more if need be. What good does one crushing blow do, in the end? By the time he reaches Xiyin’s front, he’ll probably no longer have the strength left to lift his blade…”
For a good stretch of time, Lin’an talked of nothing but this battle—from Wu Qimei on down to the scholars in the teahouses, nearly everyone had some opinion to offer.
“…Xiyin’s use of troops is truly seasoned and ruthless, but Qin Shaoqian knows how to pick his moments too—he broke through seventeen lines cleanly, then pulled his camp back and kept up the deterrence. His Seventh Army showed no fear before that hungry wolf Xiyin, and if anything, the army’s combat strength and threat have become more concrete because of it. Truly, he’s worthy of the Qin family name—unassuming, understated, and yet he traded blows with Xiyin and came out an even match. If you ask me, in the Huaxia army, Ning Yi’s name is just a name—the real strength lies with the Qin faction…”
“…But in the end, this probing clash settled nothing. Qin Shaoqian withdrew gracefully, coming away whole. Strategically speaking, though, his hope of striking the Jurchen rear to relieve pressure on the front came to nothing—seventeen battles in seven days, all victories, but can he really claim no losses of his own? So in this exchange, the true winner was Wanyan Xiyin, who simply waited at his ease while the enemy wore itself out. As it stands, the Black Banner Army’s fortunes in the southwest now rest entirely on the so-called Fifth Army stationed there—and pity poor Ning Yi, whose Fifth Army is retreating on every front as we speak…”
Sitting thousands of li away, watching the tigers fight from the safety of the mountaintop, gave a person the same comfort as sitting in a warm room on a snowy day, watching others shiver on the road outside. Wu Qimei and the others spoke of the subtleties of troop deployment, mixing in sighs here and there, more or less feeling as though they were pointing out the shape of the world with the whole realm as their chessboard.
Of course, the reason people analyzed the clash between Qin Shaoqian and Xiyin in such detail was that the entire southwestern theater beyond Jianmen Pass remained shrouded in fog for the moment. Still, one trend was beyond doubt: after breaking through Huangming County, the Jurchens had begun pressing their forces toward Zizhou, and Ning Yi’s defense line was falling back.
Three thousand li away, the people of Lin’an had no way of knowing, for the time being, just what kind of quagmire the Jin army had actually fallen into in the southwest.
Just after the New Year, the Jurchen breakthrough at Huangming County had indeed dealt the Huaxia Army a heavy blow.
Tallying the Second Division’s losses from the more than two months of holding Huangming, the number of casualties had passed four thousand—but from the disastrous struggle of the third and fourth alone, the dead and missing on the battlefield reached over two thousand eight hundred.
Most of this horrifying toll stemmed from the Second Division’s desperate refusal to give up Huangming County. For the Huaxia Army, the sudden loss of the city meant losing not just a stretch of wall but also a great quantity of cannon and siege equipment that couldn’t be evacuated in time—among the most critical strategic resources at the moment. In fact, in preparation for a possible counterattack, the Huaxia Army had even been stepping up shipments of explosives and other supplies to Huangming County.
The idea of launching a counterattack at either Huangming County or Yushui Creek had been brewing within the General Staff for some time. The original plan had called for an offensive around the twenty-eighth of the twelfth month, but once Yushui Creek yielded results on the nineteenth and Balishu pulled his forces back at Huangming, the counterattack plan there was shelved.
Had a real counterattack been launched, the Second Division would necessarily have needed coordination from other units, but the Fourth and Fifth Divisions had also taken heavy losses after their victory at Yushui Creek and still had wounded to watch over—asking Huangming to commit to an all-out counterattack on top of that would have been asking too much.
On the night of the third, the Jurchens’ furious assault broke through the walls, and fighting erupted along the ramparts. Along the long stretch of wall the Huaxia Army held, a hundred guns fired at once; the artillery crews poured every last store of gunpowder into the onslaught, and several barrels overheated and burst, injuring their own men in the process. Even so, none of it was enough to check the battlefield’s descent into chaos in the darkness.
Through the entire night, the Huaxia Army fought and retreated through the small county town, engineers dragging what cannon and matériel they could toward the rear of the town, while small squads led by the cadre corps launched charge after charge. Under Balishu’s strict orders, the Jurchens held what ground they had taken on the walls, but inside the town, wave after wave of soldiers pushing in were struck so hard by the Huaxia Army’s counterattacks that their nerve nearly broke.
Corpses piled like hills, blood flowed like rivers—even among the Khitan, Xi, and Liaodong troops that formed the core of the Jin forces, some units inside the town were routed and scattered like a receding tide.
But numbers eventually overwhelmed the Huaxia officers’ and soldiers’ valor. Some Huaxia units were cut off and surrounded in their own positions, fighting on deep into the night and even until dawn, but were gradually swallowed by the bloodshed of the battlefield. In some positions that could no longer be held, the soldiers detonated their shells and gunpowder, taking their own cannon up in flame along with them.
By the morning of the next day, the fighting still raged. Most of the Huaxia forces holding positions at the edge of Huangming County were already wounded, unable to withdraw with their heavy equipment under the enemy’s continued pressure. They held on until roughly the hour of si, when Han Jing’s pack-mule train reached the battlefield, and only then did the evacuation of the wounded and the artillery begin, moving out in orderly fashion along the mountain road.
Balishu had no intention of letting things end there. By this point, the Huaxia Army had lost its defensive advantage at Huangming County. He gathered his elite troops and threw them repeatedly against Han Jing without pause. Han Jing set his formation and held from the afternoon of the fourth through the daylight hours of the fifth, beating back several Jurchen assaults, and only began his withdrawal once the enemy’s attacks appeared to be easing.
His retreat had barely begun when the Jurchen forces closed in again from behind. The First Division’s troops fought and fell back along the mountain road; once they’d put roughly three li between themselves and Huangming County, the terrain gradually opened up. The Jurchen force pursuing from the rear was suddenly cut off at the waist by Qu Zhengyan’s unit, which struck out from the mountain path—the First and Fourth Divisions had coordinated perfectly. They surrounded and dumplinged more than five hundred elite Xi troops pursuing at the front; over a hundred were driven off a cliff by the crushing pincer attack, and more than three hundred surrendered and laid down their arms. Only after their rear forces failed to relieve them did the Jurchens finally pull back.
Balishu’s pursuit on the fifth was thus brought to a temporary halt.
On the sixth, with the support of a scout unit led by Yu Yu, Balishu organized his forces to push forward again—and it was only then that the real trouble began to show itself.
Stretching from Jiange toward Zizhou, Huangming County and Yushui Creek were the two key chokepoints. Past these two positions, the terrain leading toward Zizhou eased somewhat, and there were more route options. But that did not mean the road ahead was open ground.
In fact, several li past Huangming County, although the mountains looked somewhat gentler, the roads beyond were entirely unfamiliar territory to the Jurchens.
Yu Yu’s scout unit felt its way forward through the mountains and soon ran into trouble with landmines—a minefield no one had touched since the war began. Even as a few seasoned scouts began a new round of mine-clearing, the Huaxia Army’s own scouts came charging in without letting up.
Relying on the minefield in the woods, the Huaxia scouts widened the exchange ratio further in their favor. After only brief contact, Yu Yu had no choice but to adopt a conservative posture, pulling his scouts together and creeping forward along the main road corridor instead.
There were no mines on the main road itself. Balishu massed several units to advance in coordination with the scouts, but even that formation couldn’t stop the ferocity of Qu Zhengyan’s Fourth Division counterattacks. The Huaxia Army’s special operations squads moved through the woods like ghosts, loosing crossbow bolts or rifle fire at the Jurchen scouts or main force troops along the roadside at any moment.
These special operations units acted with extraordinary boldness—often, the instant a Jurchen scout spotted a roadside mine and tried to clear or detonate it, they would close in fast and strike. Sometimes they were spotted by gyrfalcons, sometimes they came under counterattack, but it made no difference; when counterattacked, they simply fled deeper into the woods, where more uncleared mines lay waiting along the escape route. Whenever a small Jurchen detachment fell out of formation, a Huaxia strike squad would pounce and finish it off.
From the sixth onward, there was not a single quiet moment along the road the Jurchens advanced from Huangming County. When the enemy pushed, they withdrew; when the enemy tired, they harassed; when the enemy retreated, they pursued. Now that they finally held complete advantage in local terrain, Qu Zhengyan pushed this tactic to its absolute limit in the Jurchens’ face.
Yu Yu suffered terribly for it. At the very start of the southwestern campaign, there had already been scout-versus-scout killing in the woods, mine-clearing and even mine-walking advances—but back then a huge numerical advantage had been needed just to push the line forward. Now the numerical edge his scouts held over the front at Huangming was no longer significant, while the other side had prepared thoroughly and waited at their ease; every step forward cost him something that felt, to him, like a knife twisting in his gut.
But the great army’s advance could not simply stop.
Looking at the overall picture, the Jurchens had gained a certain advantage at Huangming County—an advantage rooted in the fact that the Huaxia Army’s manpower was stretched to its absolute limit, while the Jurchens still had a considerable reserve of fighting strength to commit. Strategically speaking, the most profitable course was to attack on multiple fronts and snap the Huaxia Army’s line of defense. It didn’t matter that the Huaxia Army held the terrain advantage and fought better tactically—even if it cost several men for one, there would come a moment when the whole line collapsed.
Even as the advance on Huangming pressed forward, fighting at Yushui Creek had also resumed. Zonghan’s goal was to use this two-front war to exhaust every last reserve of strength the Huaxia Army had on the battlefield.
And in order to threaten the rear approach to the Yushui Creek line, Balishu needed his troops to secure roughly fifteen li of road ahead of Huangming County. Along that stretch, the Huaxia Army’s defensive advantage was no longer as pronounced—after all, the mountains here were relatively easier to traverse, and any impassable spots could be worked around, at worst by wading through a minefield—but enduring the Huaxia Army’s attacks along the way was, in the end, an ordeal that had to be borne.
Of course, understanding all this didn’t change the fact that, for a Jurchen, being harried like this on the battlefield was truly the most humiliating campaign of Yu Yu’s life.
The constant nibbling around the flanks of the main road was just the appetizer. Sometimes a gyrfalcon would spot several hundred scouts massing in the rugged mountains, which set the Jurchens on edge every time. On the ninth of the first month, Qu Zhengyan led a unit to cut into the advancing Jurchen main force; finding them well defended, his men loosed a few arrows and fled.
On the eleventh, the Khitan commander Xiao Ke led over three thousand elite troops in an attempt to counterattack after spotting signs of Qu Zhengyan’s raiding. Sensing something was off, Qu Zhengyan turned and ran. Xiao Ke’s force pushed into the mountains after him; though the minefield they encountered wasn’t dense, Qu Zhengyan’s three hundred men proceeded to carve away at Xiao Ke’s three thousand piece by piece.
Relying on his intimate knowledge of the terrain, Qu Zhengyan led his main strength in a swift strike against the flank of the enemy’s still-disoriented column, chewing it up bit by bit. Though Xiao Ke’s force outnumbered Qu Zhengyan’s ten to one, it soon fell into disarray in the unfamiliar mountains. Xiao Ke, charging at the front on the strength of his own courage, nearly had his skull blown apart by a rifle shot from the woods not long after. Once he came to his senses, he pulled back quickly—but by then his three thousand men had suffered over two hundred casualties, and their fighting spirit was completely spent.
The next wave of attacks came on the fourteenth, when the Han general Liu Nianzhi led over four thousand of his elite troops forward along the mountain road, only to be suddenly ambushed roughly seven li from Huangming County.
This time it was the Fourth Division’s chief of staff, Chen Tian, leading a similar force of over three hundred men. After the initial engagement, rather than retreat, he launched a hard flanking assault from the side of the mountain road. As Liu Nianzhi’s soldiers charged forward, they were hit by a barrage of over a hundred grenades thrown in three successive waves from the Huaxia Army side. Six sniper rifles opened fire at once through the woods, and the Han general Liu Nianzhi was struck down along with the horse beneath him in a pool of blood. Only after killing Liu Nianzhi did Chen Tian lead his men in a full-speed withdrawal.
At the battle for Huangming County on the third of the first month, in response to the Huaxia Army’s calls for surrender, two main Han units under the Jurchens had turned and mounted a fierce counterattack instead—one of them led by Liu Nianzhi. These were Han troops from the Central Plains who had long since surrendered to the Jurchens; they had fought at Xiaocang River in years past and harbored deep hostility toward the Huaxia Army. This targeted decapitation strike against Liu Nianzhi also showed that the Huaxia Army’s way of fighting had inherited Ning Yi’s own temperament—one that never let a grudge go unsettled.
After Liu Nianzhi was killed in the ambush, the other unit, led by the Han general Sun Wang, hardly dared move beyond Huangming County for days afterward.
At Wanfu Ridge, over ten li from Huangming County, the vanguard force Balishu had sent ahead struggled to make camp, and every single day they faced harassment attacks from the Fourth Division. By the seventeenth of the first month, before the camp was even fully established, Han Jing led the First Division’s troops, hauling artillery withdrawn from Huangming County, in a ferocious frontal assault.
At the time, the Jin forces that had reached this position numbered barely over fifteen thousand, while the troops Han Jing and Qu Zhengyan mobilized came to nearly ten thousand. In half a day of fighting, the camp was swept clean by the Huaxia Army, and over ten thousand Jin troops pulled back to nearby high ground.
Once the Jurchen commander chose to hunker down entirely, finishing the job wasn’t easy. Having wrecked the camp—and left their mark on it, quite literally—the Huaxia Army chose not to press a further all-out assault that day.
The harassment along the road continued without a moment’s pause, while the Jurchens did everything they could to learn and secure the ground along their route. On the twentieth of the first month, mist hung thick in the mountains, and the sound of fighting rose along the mountain road between Huangming County and Wanfu Ridge. This time, Qu Zhengyan ran into an unexpected enemy—waiting ahead of him across the mountainside was a sea of white banners.
The Avenging Army—formed from the merger of the Jurchen Yanshan Garrison once led by Wanyan Loushi with Cibushi’s own direct forces—had arrived at the battlefield ahead of schedule, now under the command of Prince Baoshan, Wanyan Xiebao. In the fog, they lay in wait, fully prepared, for the ambush.
Qu Zhengyan wheeled his men around and fled at once; the veteran scout unit of the Yanshan Garrison gave chase from behind without a shred of caution for their own lives.
Along the road from Huangming County to Zizhou, from that point on, killing and slaughter, ambush and counter-ambush, played out in these mountains and forests every single day—large in scale or small, but in every case, the Jurchens kept expanding their grip on the surrounding territory, loss after loss notwithstanding.
Over at Yushui Creek, the wounded in the field hospital were being moved to the rear one after another, but Ning Ji, who had been helping out at the camp, refused to fall back with them. As one of the medical corps’ more capable members, he intended to stay until the main force at the front itself withdrew before leaving. Hongti, for the moment, couldn’t talk him out of it.
The letter reporting this was sent to Zizhou, and when Ning Xi passed it along to Ning Yi, Ning Yi was staring at the large map ahead of him, lost in thought. He said quietly, “Let him be.”
“Father…”
“Enough. I’ll find some excuse to pull everyone at Yushui Creek back.”
“…What?” Ning Xi was startled by the words.
She studied her father’s face closely; at that moment, Ning Yi’s eyes were fixed on the map but not looking at her, and both his gaze and his tone carried the same cold edge.
It was the first time Ning Xi had ever been unable to tell whether her father’s words were a joke or serious.
In Ning Yi’s hand was a brief intelligence report just sent from the front. It recorded two pieces of news.
The first: nearly died…
The second: Baoshan has entered the field.
Ning Yi pressed the marker down onto the map.