Many years later, Li Shishi would often find herself thinking back to Bianliang in the thirteenth year of the Wu dynasty’s Jinghan era.

That was the eve of the Jurchens’ southward advance. In her memory, Bianliang was warm and prosperous, its towers and eaves carrying an air of peace and plenty as far as the eye could see. The Fanlou stood at the eastern end of the imperial avenue, and the setting sun spilled broad and golden from one end of the street to the other. In her memory it was always autumn, that warm, golden light, the crowds in the marketplace mingling with the poetry and music drifting down from the towers above.

That kind of splendor always seemed sharper in memory, once the wind and rain had swept it away.

Ning Yi, for his part, had his own peculiar theory about memories like this.

“It’s all thanks to pigment,” the man—who had never had much of a poetic bent—would declare with total confidence. “Across all of history, the colors we’ve actually had access to have always been limited. Take building a house, for instance—bright reds and purples were expensive, and hard to find surviving out in the villages and countryside. Bianliang looked so prosperous back then because the buildings at least had some color to them, and were maintained, unlike the bare mud brick and cow dung of the countryside…Once industry gets going, you’ll find that Bianliang’s splendor wasn’t really worth much after all.”

The man who said such things had, admittedly, no great taste for aesthetics himself—later on he would often insist on having walls painted a single flat white, giving people the sense of stepping into some entirely different world, utterly disconnected from mountains and rivers. He could write poetry, but he clearly had no eye for painting.

In her memory, Bianliang was always autumn, always dusk, the great setting sun warm and beautiful. It was the sunset of two hundred years of the Wu dynasty’s prosperity—and, from another angle, perhaps it was simply that Li Shishi’s own days there, at that stage of her life, were also drawing to a close. The days of her dozing by the window as the reigning beauty of the Fanlou were about to end, and in her heart she still hesitated over what path to take.

She never managed to decide.

Romance and splendor are always swept away by wind and rain in the end, and a vast, chaotic era had come crashing suddenly into view before her—and before the people of the Wu dynasty, who had known two hundred years of peace.

She thought of who she’d been back then, of the people who had come and gone through the Fanlou, of He Lei’er. People tumbled through the darkness, and the great hand of fate seized every thread and tore at them roughly—from that point on, some threads went off toward places entirely unforeseeable, and some simply snapped in midair.

By the time her gaze could finally come to rest again, the world had already become something else entirely.

Looked at from another angle, she would sometimes also think back on that moment of meeting Ning Yi again in Jiangning.

Whether to the world at large or to her own life, that name was one that had proved impossible to ignore for decades. She had once been infatuated with him, and later confused by him, even angry and bewildered…as time flowed on and the world changed, the small private matters of the heart could seem trivial at times, but around that man, she always sensed the outline of something far larger.

Recalling those final days at the Fanlou, she had been facing one of the most important choices of her life—as so many women did. A woman chose a husband, married him, and spent the following decades in mutual devotion, raising children together—if all went smoothly, such a woman could expect a happy life.

A courtesan like Li Shishi had rather more autonomy than most. A girl from a respectable family had no say in who she’d marry, but Li Shishi could, to some extent, choose for herself—though the trade-off was that she could never become anyone’s principal wife. She might find a gentle, talented man to devote herself to, a man who perhaps also held some standing, and bear his child before her looks faded, thereby securing her position and, hopefully, a dignified life, or even a whole dignified lifetime.

There was too much uncertainty in a choice like that, but everyone lived out their lives that way regardless. In those warm, sunset-colored days, Li Shishi had once envied the atmosphere that surrounded Ning Yi; she had drawn close to it, and then had been swept away by that vast, larger thing, carried along a road she could not control.

It was hard to say whether it had been fortune or misfortune, but over the following decade-plus, she saw far deeper truths about this world. If it came to choice, of course there had been junctures along the way where she’d had one—her time in Dali, for instance, or, over the years, every time someone expressed affection for her, she’d always had the option, if she wished, to turn back and hand the matter over to some man to manage for her.

At Xiaocang River, she had once quarreled bitterly with Ning Yi over the matter of Jingping; nothing he said could win her over, and in her anger she had gone off to Dali. Through the three years of great war at Xiaocang River, as he faced down the Central Plains’ million-strong army, as he stood fiercely against the Jurchens without pause, Li Shishi had believed that was simply who he was—but then word of his death arrived, and in the end she couldn’t help herself; she went out searching for an answer to “why.”

Ning Yi never answered her. During the period when she believed him already dead, members of the Huaxia Army accompanied her from south to north, and then north to south again. Over nearly two years, what she saw was a human tragedy utterly unlike the peaceful years before—people wailing in desolation, trading their own children for food to eat, scenes that stirred nothing but pity and grief.

But in this pitiless world, if people truly lost every trace of the will to resist, the raw, bloody instinct to fight—pity alone would not keep them alive. The songs and dances of the Fanlou were mere ornaments of peaceful times; a pitiable little girl, in the end, could only become a skeleton, frozen and starved to death.

How many people needed to awaken, needed to resist, to hold up this world at all? Ning Yi’s answer had once struck her as painfully naive: “Ideally, everyone.”

Back then Li Shishi had understood at once: “That’s impossible.” Ning Yi had said: “If it can’t be that way, then what’s the point of this world at all?” Should everyone in a pointless world simply die? Should everyone without meaning simply die? At the time, Ning Yi’s rather flippant answer had once made Li Shishi furious. But later, gradually, she came to understand just how deep an anger and helplessness lay behind those words.

If one person set down their burden, someone already awakened had to pick it up in their place. The ones who resisted died at the front—and once they were dead, the ones who hadn’t resisted knelt down and died behind them anyway. Over those two years, everything she witnessed traveling with Lu Junyi, Yan Qing, and the others was exactly this, played out again and again.

She still hadn’t fully understood Ning Yi even after the battle of Daming Prefecture, when she returned to the southwest with Qin Shaohe’s widow. The two of them hadn’t seen each other in many years, and their first meeting carried some awkwardness at first—but fortunately both were open-hearted people, and before long that awkwardness dissolved. Ning Yi arranged some work for her, and spoke to her at length about larger matters as well.

“There’s nothing so remarkable about the Fanlou,” Ning Yi had said at the time, sometimes clever, sometimes remarkably tone-deaf, showing off in his own way. “Women in this world—few of them get an education, few get to see much of the world; on the whole, honestly, that makes for a rather dull existence. Men, for their own pleasure, invented the pleasure house, so that women who could read and write and speak well could sell…the feeling of love. But personally, I think that between two independent people, this kind of thing can happen on its own.”

Ning Yi wasn’t saying this idly—at least as far as Li Shishi could tell, the way he and Su Tan’er and Nie Yunzhu and the rest of his household got along together was something genuinely enviable, and so she found nothing in it to argue against.

“In the future, boys and girls alike will all be able to read and write. Once girls see more of the world, understand it, learn to communicate and exchange ideas—naturally, there’ll be no more need for the Fanlou. If we’re talking about equality between everyone, then of course men and women can be equal too.”

“Of course, don’t get too excited too soon, either. The real foundation of equality between people lies in the ability to bear responsibility—someone who can’t shoulder responsibility, in truth, can’t be handed any power either. For women to be equal to men, the precondition is that they have to develop their own capabilities—once that condition’s met, there’s still a process afterward of proving that capability and fighting for that power.”

“That process is already underway now, in fact. We already have some female officers in the army, and I think you could consciously start preparing to fight for women’s standing yourself. Look at you—you’ve seen the world, you’ve been through so much, and now you’re taking charge of diplomatic matters. You’re a living example of a woman who’s no less capable than a man—more capable, even.”

This was what Ning Yi had said to her when discussing things at length, after Shishi had asked to take on some outreach responsibilities from him.

And so Shishi took charge of the many negotiations and exchanges with the gentry clans of the Sichuan-Shu region.

In this world, people sometimes drift closer together, sometimes drift apart. Of course, the line between closeness and distance was never as clear-cut as people liked to imagine.

Persuading the gentry and prominent families across the region to stand with the Huaxia Army, as far as possible, more often than not called for a mix of interest, coercion, and inducement; and often, too, it called for arguing and explaining the greater truths of the world with people. In the time after this, Shishi and Ning Yi had many more conversations, about the Huaxia Army’s governance, and about where it was headed.

Faced with these concrete questions, Ning Yi spoke with her in far greater detail, and Shishi finally came to understand the Huaxia Army’s whole undertaking far more clearly—a level of communication she’d never had, back when she left Xiaocang River years before.

“…People are born equal, or rather, we believe people ought to be equal in the end. But an idealized equality needs real conditions to support it—can a clever person and a fool really be equal? Can a hardworking person and a lazy one really be equal? Can a scholar and someone who’s never learned a single character really be equal? What we have to do is close the gap in starting conditions as much as we possibly can…”

“…The techniques of natural philosophy have already opened up the possibility of spreading books widely; when people can draw wisdom from books, when we spread books and basic literacy education, everyone gains a real possibility of bettering themselves. We also need to improve how education itself is delivered—not just having people mindlessly recite the classics, but actually working out ways of teaching and enlightening ordinary people, finding ways to make the great truths understandable to as many people as possible, through simpler, more accessible means…”

“…Natural philosophy might have its limits, but for now that limit is still a long way off. The man in charge of boosting grain yields is a clever fellow, and what he says is right too—if you pull too many people into workshops, there won’t be enough hands left to farm the land. We’ve already calculated this problem years ago—the people studying agriculture have already made some headway, like the chicken farms they’re running out at Heding, or the work on seed selection and breeding that’s been mentioned before…”

“…But the most important thing is that Mister Gongsun’s laboratory researching explosives has recently turned up some rather interesting results—we’ve produced some fertilizers that might multiply rice yields several times over…For now we haven’t found a way to mass-produce it, but at least the agricultural side has found some direction. It really just takes time, and it also needs peace—only then can this kind of work be done properly and without worry. Right now we’re desperately short-handed…”

“…The problem of imperial authority not reaching down to the county level absolutely has to change—but for the moment, I don’t want to do what Old Bull Head did, seizing every landed family and simply killing them off. I don’t care whether they’re happy about it or not; what I hope for, in the end, is the rule of law as the highest authority. They can keep their land and their houses locally, but the moment they oppress anyone else, the law will teach them their place, and education will strip away the roots that let them do it. There’ll naturally be a transition period in the middle of all this, maybe a long one, maybe with setbacks—but since we’ve already declared equality, I hope the people themselves can seize this chance. What matters most is that whatever people take hold of on their own is what actually takes root and grows…”

Some of what Ning Yi said, Shishi understood; some of it, she didn’t.

The great tide of the age rolled on, sweeping past everyone, and in the decade-plus after the sun set over Bianliang, it had, at times, seemed utterly chaotic—even hopeless. The enemy’s strength seemed so overwhelming and unstoppable, like some great wheel turning with the will of heaven itself, crushing every last one of the old order’s beneficiaries beneath it.

The teachings of the Great Radiance Sect held that people, having lived too comfortably in an age of peace, had grown decadent and dissolute—and so heaven would send down thirty-three great calamities before the light could be restored. Such words, in those times, seemed to carry a strange kind of logic. Even those who resisted with desperate, unyielding conviction often seemed, in the end, hopeless and powerless against it.

In Li Shishi’s memory, it wasn’t until the first spring after the Wujianshuo era had fully passed that those two threads of feeling finally came together into one.

The great southwestern campaign, for Li Shishi, had also been a busy and chaotic stretch of time. Over the past year, she had continuously worked and pleaded on behalf of the Huaxia Army; sometimes she faced mockery and scorn, sometimes people looked down on her for her past as a courtesan—but backed by the strength of the Huaxia Army, she had naturally developed her own way of dealing with people and negotiating with them.

Ning Yi’s wife, a woman named Liu Xigua, had helped her a great deal—many of the military operations and bandit-suppression campaigns within Sichuan and Shu had been led by this particular wife of Ning Yi’s, who was also the most vocal advocate within the Huaxia Army for its ideas about equality. Of course, sometimes it troubled her to be recognized only as Ning Yi’s wife—since everyone would naturally give her some measure of deference regardless, whenever she managed to make someone back down in some matter, it felt more like a performance staged by Ning Yi than a reflection of her own ability.

Because of this, Xigua had come to genuinely envy Li Shishi—partly because Shishi carried such a refined, literary air about her, and partly because she wasn’t burdened by that same question of status. Over the course of that year, the two of them had gotten along wonderfully, and Xigua had come to treat Shishi almost as her own “strategist.”

After the end of autumn, opportunities for the two of them to work together grew even more frequent. With the Jurchens closing in, some of the gentry factions on the Chengdu Plain, who had originally kept their heads down waiting to see how things would turn, began to declare where they stood. Xigua led her troops chasing them down across the region, while Shishi, at times, was sent out to threaten and persuade those who were wavering, or those who seemed open to persuasion, urging them—on the grounds of the greater cause of Huaxia—to abandon the losing side, or at least to stop causing trouble.

Xigua’s work leaned toward the martial side, spent mostly out in the field; more than once, Shishi had seen that round-faced woman drenched head to toe in blood, her eyes cold and fierce.

Shishi’s own work, by contrast, required a great deal of intelligence work and paperwork to support it. She would sometimes travel to Zizhou to liaise with Ning Yi—most of the time he was busy, but when he had a spare moment, the two of them would sit down together over tea, and mostly talk about work.

The fighting at the front was extraordinarily brutal, and often, in Ning Yi’s words, Shishi could sense the things he kept hidden away—she’d made a career of exactly that kind of reading, after all. The brutality at the front weighed on Ning Yi too, a tremendous pressure, even if he carried himself with composure.

During times like these, Shishi sometimes wished she could play him a tune on the pipa or the guqin, but in the end, she never found the chance. A man who threw himself entirely into his work, who carried such an enormous weight of responsibility, was always compelling—and at times this would set her thinking again about matters of the heart. In the gaps of such moments, her mind would drift back to old stories she’d once heard—of women offering themselves to departing generals before they rode off to war, or confessing their affections, this or that.

But she never said any of it aloud—not because she no longer hoped for such things. In the small, private corners of her own time, she still hoped for stories like that, of the heart. But in that particular moment, being close to Ning Yi, she suddenly understood something: the reason women offered themselves to departing generals in those old stories was that, for a woman, it was the greatest encouragement and support she could give.

Now, she had more practical things she could do instead.

The Huaxia Army’s manpower had remained perpetually tight, and by the end of the twelfth month, the largest wave of unrest yet had broken out—and it hadn’t been purely spontaneous rebellion, either; much of it, in fact, had long been engineered by the Jurchens, with Wanyan Xiyin’s own manipulation and incitement behind it. Xigua led troops to hunt down and suppress the unrest, and part of Zizhou’s own garrison had been diverted for it as well. Shishi, meanwhile, worked with the intelligence department to analyze several factions that might still be talked back into line, preparing to go persuade them herself, to convince them to give up their resistance.

Shishi had been involved from beginning to end in the analysis of these factions. Given the considerable danger involved, the intelligence department hadn’t originally intended for her to go in person, but Shishi took it upon herself to handle two of the factions—those with scholars anchoring them, where her own powers of persuasion were most likely to work.

On the third of the first month, she succeeded in persuading a clan that had risen up and fled into the mountains to lay down their weapons for the time being and stop opposing the Huaxia Army. To secure this success, she’d even made a promise on Ning Yi’s behalf: once the Jurchen troops withdrew, Ning Yi would hold a fair public debate with the family’s resident scholar, in front of everyone.

Once the matter was settled, Shishi headed for Zizhou to pass the news along to Ning Yi in person. By the time she arrived it was already evening; inside the command center, people came and went constantly, messengers on horseback arriving without pause—the unmistakable sign of an urgent situation at the front. From a distance, Shishi caught sight of Ning Yi hard at work; she left a written summary and turned to leave.

Hoping to save time and resolve matters with the second faction as quickly as possible, her carriage set out from the city that night. Half an hour after leaving Zizhou, disaster struck.

The attack on the carriage came out of nowhere; someone outside could be heard shouting: “Take Ning Yi’s mistress!” Shishi’s escort engaged the attackers in fierce fighting, but one skilled fighter among the assailants managed to force his way onto the carriage and drove it forward at a gallop. As the carriage bounced and lurched, Shishi lifted the curtain to glance outside, and a moment later, made her decision—she threw herself forward toward the front of the carriage.

It was a full-force collision. Shishi and the man who’d seized the carriage tumbled together off the road into a snowbank. The attacker rolled and sprang back up at once; Shishi, too, struggled to her feet and threw herself into the rushing waters of a narrow, swift-flowing stream that ran alongside the road.

The winter water was bone-numbingly cold; the instant she hit it, her heart clenched violently, her mind going dizzy for a moment. The current swept her downstream, and at a bend, her body struck against a rock, jolting her back to a moment of consciousness; she fought her way through the water. She finally dragged herself ashore on a stretch of cobbled riverbank, her body no longer feeling like her own, her mind wanting nothing more than to simply stop.

But she didn’t stop. For however long that stretch of time lasted, it felt as though something not quite her own was driving her forward—she had seen crippled soldiers in the Huaxia Army’s camps, had seen unspeakably bloody sights in the wounded soldiers’ wards; there had been times Liu Xigua walked up to her carrying a great blade across her back; there had been the smell of poor children starving to death by the roadside, their bodies already rotting. These images flickered mechanically through her mind, and her body, just as mechanically, searched along the riverbank for kindling, for anything that would catch fire.

A hollow in the rock face along the riverbank saved her life. She found a few dry twigs, broke off some kindling, and with trembling hands, painstakingly struck a fire with flint…She stripped off her wet clothes and laid them by the fire to dry; the night wind howled through the mountains, and it wasn’t until near dawn that Huaxia Army soldiers, searching the area for a second time, finally found her in this blind spot along the riverbank.

She was carried back to the wounded soldiers’ camp for examination and rest—a chill had already set into her, and there was no choice but to recuperate. Xigua sent word telling her to rest well and take care of herself; from what others told her, she also learned that when Ning Yi heard news of the attack on her, he had, in great urgency, dispatched a small squad of soldiers to search for her.

This should have been the closest brush with death in her entire life, the most worth telling—but once she’d recovered enough to think back on it, she found, oddly, that it no longer felt like much of anything. The past year, several years, of travel and dealing with people like Xigua had toughened her considerably; by mid-January her injuries had healed, and she made another trip to Zizhou. When Ning Yi saw her, he asked about that night—but Shishi only shook her head and said, “It was nothing.”

She reconnected with Xigua and the intelligence department, and returned to the work that was hers to handle.

Caught up in the vast, complicated machinery of the Huaxia Army’s whole undertaking, Shishi could sometimes sense a faint, half-visible plan advancing quietly, invisibly, behind everything. Every problem resolved on the Chengdu Plain meant that much more fighting strength could be freed up for the Zizhou front.

By late February, the work in the rear no longer seemed as thorny as before. Shishi traveled with a unit of soldiers to Zizhou, arriving on the morning of February twenty-third; the city, as always, was under strict martial law, tense and grim. Since Ning Yi had no time to see her right away, she went first to the wounded soldiers’ camp to visit a medical officer she’d known for some time, who, upon seeing her, seemed to realize something. “You’ve come too, then—so it really is something big happening…”

“What?”

“…You don’t know?” He blinked, surprised, then said, “Never mind, then—see for yourself, slowly.”

Having spent so much time around the military, one inevitably encountered certain classified matters, but there were also things a careful eye could still pick up on. Leaving the wounded soldiers’ camp, Shishi soon noticed signs of troops assembling throughout the city, and gradually pieced together the rest.

In the afternoon, having finished meeting with the intelligence department and the General Staff, she saw Ning Yi arrive in full military dress; the lead troops were already passing by on the street outside.

“They said you’d arrived, so I came to see. No trouble along the way, I hope?”

“…You’re going to the battlefield?”

“Zonghan’s very close now. It’s time to go meet him.”

“Out there…in a decisive battle? They said…that doesn’t sound good. We’re outnumbered.”

Shishi racked her brain, trying to recall the military reports she’d overheard recently—until now, no one, in fact, had imagined this entire great battle would be fought right in front of Zizhou’s walls. Ning Yi was throwing every last soldier he had into it…

“That’s war for you—it’s the plans no one sees coming that actually work. Don’t worry. I spent a long stretch of time at the front during Xiaocang River too.” Ning Yi smiled. “I killed Cibushi with my own hands, you know.”

“I always thought you were just the one who wrote the best poems…” As she said it, she felt the words fell short of what she meant, and her eyes were nearly welling up with tears. In that moment, she found herself, once again, feeling something like what a lover might feel offering herself to a general before he rode off to war—it turned out to be far easier to bear than trying to put it into words.

“Ha, poetry, huh…” Ning Yi smiled, though Shishi couldn’t quite read the meaning behind that smile. The two of them fell silent for a moment; then Ning Yi nodded. “Well…I’d best be going. Time to go teach them a lesson.”

“Ning Liheng…Liheng.” Shishi called out to stop him. She had always had a rather high forehead, but carried herself with great poise; now her eyes were wide, and it seemed as though the countless thoughts racing through her mind might crystallize right there in her gaze—fear, anxiety, a tangle of feeling, and the urgency of not being able to find the right words. Her lips trembled a few times.

“That…I…if you…if you die on the battlefield, do you…do you have nothing to say to me? I know you all have to write a will before going into battle, and you’ve written yours for your family, haven’t you…I don’t mean, that…what I mean is…your will is for your family, but we’ve known each other for so many years now, if you die…don’t you have anything to say to me? I—we’ve known each other for so long…”

She couldn’t find a better way to put it; by this point, her tears were already falling. She could only turn her face away, one hand clutching hard at the skirt over her thigh, the other braced against the table beside her, holding herself in a slight, unsteady bend rather than letting herself sink to the ground. The tears fell in heavy drops.

Ning Yi looked at her, his gaze complicated, his fingers tapping absently against his leg. After a long moment, he finally said, “If I make it back…let’s talk about this then, alright?”

A moment later, he made to turn, but seemed to feel the words had come out sounding ill-omened, and reached out to knock once on the table. “Don’t worry…it’s nothing so big…I’ll definitely make it back.”

And with that, he turned and walked away.

This was the twenty-third of February, as it lived on in Li Shishi’s memory—at least in that moment, the future uncertain, the great tide of fate rolling in, carrying with it something of that tragic air from the old verse about the wind sighing and the cold river.

In that moment, the southwest, the realm entire, and every act of resistance the Jurchens had met across their thirty years of sweeping the world before them, were all coming to their end. If it failed, that would be the end of the realm itself.

As Shishi stepped out from the room, soldiers—few, in the scale of the whole battlefield—were passing through the thin sunlight beneath the city gates.

Because of the limits of pigment, the scene lacked any real sense of grandeur. This was a pale, washed-out early spring, in every sense.

The first year of Wuzhenxing, the fifteenth year of the Jin’s Tianhui era. Spring. The twenty-third of February.

Amid the mountains of the southwest, the several armies under Balishu, Wanyan Shaba, Dalai, and Wanyan Xiebao, all part of the southern campaign, suddenly launched a coordinated large-scale advance by mutual agreement, attempting to break through the tangled, terrain-confused deadlock that the Huaxia Army’s desperate resistance had created.

At the very moment this advance began, the Huaxia Army command ahead of Zizhou responded in kind, massing its forces for a sweeping strike to cut off and isolate the weaker Jurchen lines that had pushed forward, hoping to seize what gains it could before the enemy’s stronger lines could react. The two sides fought for a full day.

On the night of February twenty-third, into the morning of the twenty-fourth, a single message went out from Zizhou and, traveling by various different routes, gradually reached the main camps of the Jurchen commanders at the front. This message, to some degree, even threw off the response each Jurchen force chose to take. Dalai and Shaba’s forces opted for a conservative defensive posture; Balishu continued his measured, unhurried advance; but Wanyan Xiebao’s Avenging Army suddenly picked up its pace, pushing forward at a furious rate, trying to break through the Leigang–Zongxi line in the shortest time possible.

On February twenty-third, Ning Yi personally led an elite force of over six thousand men out through the gates of Zizhou.

—Bearing down on the front line.