February. Rain fell across the realm.
Upstream along the rivers, drift ice moved with the current. In the south, the snow had begun to melt.
In the Jin territory, the mountain roads through the lingering snow remained rugged and difficult, but the outside world was already stirring from the depths of winter. Schemers had long since been at work through the harsh cold, and as spring drew near, the land whose contest had yet to be decided would soon return to its killing ground once more.
Lou Shuwan could now face all of this with composure.
After inspecting the storehouses where seed stock was kept, she boarded her carriage and set off toward the location of Yu Yulin’s main camp. Outside the carriage a light rain was still falling; seated beside the driver was the “Eight-Armed Dragon King” Shi Jin, cradling his bronze staff, which meant Lou Shuwan didn’t have to worry overmuch about the risk of assassination, and could focus instead on reading through the intelligence reports that had already been compiled for her inside the carriage.
Since the New Year, she had put on a little weight, and perhaps grown a bit more beautiful for it—her old dresses could finally fill out properly again. Of course, in front of others, Lou Shuwan had long since grown accustomed to keeping a stern, unsmiling manner, which lent her more authority. Only when alone did she occasionally let her more vulnerable side show.
That day, after leafing through a few pages of the reports, her expression went briefly blank.
The information gathered from various places ranged from major to trivial, and the report that left her momentarily dazed was only a few lines long—it recorded the number of people who had frozen or starved to death that winter in a small county town in the direction of Jinning, and among them, the name of a local gentry figure who had died of illness from old wounds had been noted as well.
That name was Zeng Yuhuai.
Holding the report, her thoughts grew briefly muddled. She had no idea who had compiled this piece of intelligence, or what purpose lay behind it. Had she ever told anyone to keep an eye on this man? Why had this particular name been singled out? Was it because he had taken part in the fighting against the Jurchens, and had later opened his family’s grain stores to relieve refugees? Was that why, once his wound worsened and he died, whoever was below her had assumed she’d want to know?
Why would this name turn up here at all?
Her mind circled the question for a moment; she turned the page, read a few more lines, then flipped back to check these lines again.
Zeng Yuhuai.
Before the war began, at General Yu’s private estate, he had scolded her for paying too little heed to her own reputation, and then, quite earnestly, had poured out his heart to her. He had taken part in the fighting against Liao Yiren and against the Jurchens, and not long after had lost both legs on the battlefield. She had once glimpsed this middle-aged man, unconscious on a stretcher, among the crowds retreating from the front—but she had been too busy, and hadn’t followed up any further.
…The pieces fit together now. After being carried home behind the lines, with both legs gone, his wounds had wavered between better and worse; he had opened his family’s stored grain that winter to relieve the refugees near Jinning, and on some unremarkable day in the first month, his wounds had finally taken a turn for the worse, and he had died.
Lou Shuwan’s gaze turned cold, her lips pressed tight; she balled her fist and struck the wall of the carriage twice, hard.
Ahead of her, both the driver and Shi Jin turned back at the sound. Shi Jin spoke up. “My lady.”
“…It’s nothing.”
Lou Shuwan turned the report to the next page.
Had this happened in Hangzhou over a decade ago, a story like this alone would have been enough to bring her to tears. But after all she had lived through since, such intense emotion tended to be diluted—or perhaps it was more that it got buried under things heavier than mountains, and before she could even fully react, she was already being pulled into the next matter at hand.
Turning the page again, she came to the news concerning the southwestern front—the very center of the realm’s great struggle, where hundreds of thousands of lives were locked in fierce, violent conflict. From mid-January onward, the entire southwestern theater had blazed and churned in chaos; in the reports gathered from thousands of li away, many of the finer details, the maneuvering and countermoves of both sides, were difficult to make out clearly.
Because of this, until the outcome fell, Lou Shuwan could only read these reports and take in the heat of the struggle within them. That man in the southwest, that army of his—they were putting up a fight so ferocious it left everyone in awe. Against the Jurchen army that no one, across the past two or three decades, indeed across Liao, Jin territory, the Central Plains, and the south, had ever managed to withstand, this Black Banner force alone was mounting a genuinely fierce counterattack—it could no longer even be called mere resistance; it was, truly, an evenly matched clash of forces.
She had once admired and been drawn to that man.
Though, to be honest, it had only ever been a private infatuation, a somewhat twisted feeling…she’d been drawn to and enamored of the mystery, the composure, and the strength he projected—but honestly, by whatever standard she judged him, in all the time she’d known him, she had never really thought of Ning Yi as someone who could go toe-to-toe with the whole of the Great Jin.
Perhaps the relative closeness of their acquaintance had, to some degree, worn away the sense of mystery. Ning Yi’s scheming and calculation were the kind of thing that made one’s scalp prickle with awe, and even now, when Lou Shuwan put herself in his enemy’s shoes, she still felt a sense of helplessness before him. But in any case, these were always things with a traceable logic—resorting to schemes was itself proof that one’s raw strength wasn’t overwhelming, that there was always some flaw driving one to take the crooked path. His act of killing the emperor in a fit of rage, over the matter of Qin Siyuan, had also struck many as a rash, poorly considered move.
At bottom, his strength had always come with plenty of limits. If he’d truly been strong enough, he would never have found himself trapped in Hangzhou all those years ago; if he’d truly been strong enough, the Su family wouldn’t have been half-wiped-out by Liangshan; if he’d truly been strong enough, he could have saved Qin Siyuan instead of watching him die helplessly. It was precisely because of this string of “not strong enoughs” that after killing the emperor in his rage, Ning Yi had been forced into a hurried retreat to the northwest, ultimately enduring three years of slaughter and flight at Xiaocang River.
In the end, his strength had always left concrete traces behind it. But the Jurchens’ strength was of a kind that crushed the entire realm beneath it. That was precisely why, in years past, people had always felt the Huaxia Army fell a notch short of the Jurchens—but this time, many people—Lou Shuwan among them, at least—could now see clearly that in this great battle in the southwest, the Black Banner Army stood as an opponent on the same level as the Jin’s western army, or perhaps even beyond it, landing blows the enemy could barely withstand.
If an attack like that landed on her own side… she wasn’t sure her side could take it.
From the reports that had come in, the fighting from late January into early February could only be made out in rough outline.
Originally, everyone had assumed and calculated that the outnumbered Huaxia Army would take a defensive posture in this great battle, using fortifications to offset its inferior numbers—the delaying actions at Huangming County and Yushui Creek had, at first, seemed to confirm this. If that approach had continued, once Huangming County fell, the Huaxia Army would presumably have pinned its hopes for victory on Zizhou’s defenses, harassing and picking off small gains with a handful of elite units as the Jurchens advanced—a steady, controlled retreat would have been the sound strategy.
But large-scale open-field battles shouldn’t have happened, because even though terrain advantage might tilt an attack slightly in the Huaxia Army’s favor, victory or defeat in open combat was never as easy to control as in a defensive battle. In several such engagements, if the enemy managed to seize on a single opening and bite down hard, the losses for the Huaxia Army could well prove unbearable.
And yet, according to the reports coming in, from mid-January onward, the Huaxia Army had adopted exactly this kind of proactive fighting style. With fifty li still separating Huangming County and Yushui Creek from Zizhou, the moment the Jurchen forces crossed the fifteen-li mark, the first wave of ambush attacks had already appeared; past the twenty-li mark, the Huaxia Army units at Yushui Creek used the cover of heavy fog to slip back and begin cutting into Balishu’s advancing forces along the road.
The farther the Jurchen forces extended, the wider the gaps grew between their individual units—the forward troops tried to advance steadily, clearing and familiarizing themselves with the local mountain roads, while the rearward troops were still catching up. And it was precisely then that the Huaxia Army began striking at the somewhat isolated units scattered through the mountains.
By this point, the two road networks from Huangming County and Yushui Creek had begun to converge, and the number of side paths through the surrounding mountains was multiplying. In late January, the Huaxia Army used the mountain fog and these side paths to launch its attacks; over ten days, six engagements broke out involving over eight thousand combatants on the Jurchen side, three of which successfully routed Jurchen units, killing over six thousand of the enemy. In one instance, the withdrawal came too late, and the two sides very nearly fought a full-scale positional battle.
On the twenty-seventh of the first month, three divisions of the Huaxia Army even showed clear signs of an attempt to encircle and surprise the Yanshan Garrison—but thanks to Balishu’s swift response, the nearly twenty-thousand-strong Huaxia force, having exposed its movements too clearly, was forced into an ignominious retreat. The reports treated the matter lightly enough, but one could imagine that had Balishu’s reaction been just slightly slower—had he given the Huaxia Army even half a day more—they might well have forced a localized decisive battle against the beleaguered army under Wanyan Xiebao’s command.
Lou Shuwan could hardly fathom what the Huaxia Army was drawing on to display this kind of confidence.
By early February, the Jurchen forces had crossed the midline, twenty-five li from Zizhou, advancing in three columns. The thirty thousand men coming down from the Yushui Creek side were under Dalai and Wanyan Shaba; in the center and lower routes, Balishu had another thirty thousand troops pushing forward; and Wanyan Xiebao, leading the Avenging Army built around the core of the Yanshan Garrison, brought nearly twenty thousand elite troops. More forces still trailed behind, hurrying to catch up.
The advancing mountain roads inevitably fragmented the Jurchen forces to some degree. Though the three columns kept in contact and supported one another, for the moment they had settled on a strategy of digging in and consolidating step by step, holding their camps as a base while sending out troops and scouts to learn and secure the surrounding mountain terrain. But the moment any sizable force broke camp and pushed forward, it found the going nearly impossible. From this point on, whatever units first probed ahead could barely gain a foothold on the roads beyond.
The intelligence reaching the Jin territory covered only the first ten days of February, but by the seventh alone, two Jurchen vanguard columns had already been ambushed by the Huaxia Army mid-advance and forced into a hasty retreat, and at the time the report was sent, a Jurchen force of over three thousand had been cut off and boxed in along a mountain road, currently under a siege-and-relief-interception tactic…
The situation was fierce, yet locked in stalemate. Lou Shuwan couldn’t guess how it would turn out. Even granting the Huaxia Army’s courage and skill, slapping the Jurchens across the face blow after blow like this—how long could they possibly sustain it, given their numbers? What was Ning Yi really thinking? Could he truly be this simple-minded? And what of Zonghan, waiting ahead of him?
“…Playacting mystic tricks… who knows how much of it is even real.”
Holding the report, she stayed silent for a long while before finally murmuring this to herself.
Her thoughts could linger on the great battle in the southwest, but she couldn’t afford to pour too much of her attention into chasing the developments of a war thousands of li away. After a while of turning it over in her mind, Lou Shuwan pulled herself together and finished reading through the rest of the reports. There was work of her own in the Jin territory that needed handling too.
As evening approached that day, the carriage arrived at Yu Yulin’s camp. The atmosphere within the military camp was noticeably grave, and as Lou Shuwan and the others walked into the main tent, they found Yu Yulin, who had only just finished hearing a report.
This man, who oversaw all military authority in the Jin territory and could rightly be called a battle-tested general, had his brow furrowed, and there was an ominous cast to his eyes. Lou Shuwan stepped forward. “What’s happened at Qi County? Have you found Li Guotang? Did he turn on us again?”
“Qi County has been massacred…”
“…”
Lou Shuwan’s eyes widened for an instant, then gradually narrowed. “Liao Yiren…has his whole family truly grown tired of living? And Li Guotang? He had over three thousand men under him—did everything I gave him just go to the dogs?”
“Li Guotang is dead. His head was cut off and hung up in the county town. Also—it’s said this wasn’t Liao Yiren’s doing.”
“His head cut off—could be a trick to fake his own death and slip away.” Lou Shuwan frowned; compared to everything else, her first concern in that instant was still the possibility of betrayal. But after a moment she calmed herself. “What exactly happened?”
“…We found a few people who survived by luck. They say a group of merchants, from out of town, claimed to have gotten hold of a shipment of seed stock and made contact with Li Guotang. Li Guotang let them into the county town—several dozen of them, it seems—and once inside, they suddenly turned on him, killed Li Guotang on the spot, drove off his personal guards, and threw open the gates… No one knows how many came in after that. All we know is that the sack of Qi County lasted three days, and the ones sent to report it never made it out.” Yu Yulin paused here for a moment. “The survivors say that from their dress, the attackers looked like northern barbarians…like people from the grasslands.”
Lou Shuwan thought for a moment. “A few dozen men seizing a city…Ban Dingyuan?”
Yu Yulin said, “Liao Yiren has no one like that under him. And I think the reason General Li opened the gates was that he’d confirmed these weren’t Liao Yiren’s men—that’s exactly why he really meant to go through with the deal. He knew we were short on seed stock.”
“…Keep investigating,” Lou Shuwan said. “Even if the Jurchens really did send him reinforcements, it won’t have been many—or perhaps he scraped together some help of his own over the winter…Whatever he can afford to keep, we can afford to crush.”
The venom in her eyes gradually settled. “As long as Li Guotang didn’t betray us, we owe him vengeance for this.”
Outside the tent, a light rain was still falling, the sky overcast, the wind carrying a slight chill. At almost that very same moment, hundreds of li away, Liao Yiren was gazing upon Li Guotang’s severed head.
This was how the year began, in the Jin territory.