The moon was cold and clear, stars scattered across the whole sky.

In the southwest, among the mountains of the Zizhou front, a strange atmosphere was spreading through hundreds of thousands of people.

An army is also a society. When results beyond all reason suddenly occur, and the news spreads, people will inevitably meet it with all sorts of different attitudes.

Shock, anger, confusion, the urge to verify, blankness, disbelief… and finally acceptance and adjustment—among thousands upon thousands of people, there would be thousands upon thousands of different reactions.

After nightfall, torches still spread through the mountains. Inside camp after camp the mood was grim and tense, but in various places, warhorses still galloped, information was still being exchanged, and troops were even being redeployed.

Within the Jin army, senior officers had already entered a round of meetings. Some went in person to Lion Ridge, while other generals were still making various arrangements.

At the Xiukou Ridge front, corresponding to Lion Ridge, close to midnight, a battle broke out on the northwest side of the still-alert mountain foot—a Jurchen unit attempting to circle around for a surprise attack ran into a Huaxia Army patrol, and several more units soon joined the fighting. On the direct front at Xiukou, Jurchen forces under Saba’s command also organized a night raid.

When Ning Xi hurried to arrive at the Xiukou camp, what he saw was a scene of fierce fighting in the dark night: cannon fire, grenades, and flaming arrows crisscrossing the far side of the mountain, soldiers running back and forth between the camp and the front line. He found Qu Zhengyan, who was in charge of the fighting here, currently directing troops forward to reinforce the line; only after issuing his orders did Qu Zhengyan turn his attention to him.

“Ning Xi. What brings you here?” Qu Zhengyan, brows perpetually slightly knit, spoke in his usual steady, grounded way. The two saluted each other, and Ning Xi, looking at the flashes of light at the front, said, “So Saba really did take the reckless gamble.”

“Two scouting parties came down from the north—it looks like they got intercepted. It wasn’t hard to predict the Jurchens would make some desperate move. The thirty thousand men lost at Wangyuan Bridge so inexplicably—unless they intend to surrender, they were bound to act soon. Maybe they thought that if they caught us off guard here, they could break through the line in one stroke and claw back some ground.” Qu Zhengyan looked ahead. “But it really is just a desperate gamble. The two units to the north can’t get around, and the frontal assault, however impressive it looks, has actually already lost its steam.”

Ning Xi nodded. He hadn’t had much direct contact with the front lines, and now, listening to the fierce sounds of battle ahead, he was apparently adjusting his sense of things in his mind: so this counted as already losing steam.

Then he smiled, a little embarrassed. “The fighting at Wangyuan Bridge is over. Father sent me here to hear what you and Uncle Wu think about the next stage of the campaign… And there’s also the matter of Ning Ji—he should be making his way over this direction, so I came to check on him along the way…”

Qu Zhengyan nodded, glancing without changing expression toward the mountain foot on the northwest side of the battlefield, then patted Ning Xi’s shoulder and led him to the small wooden shed serving as the command post. “So that means you were at Wangyuan Bridge this afternoon.”

“Yes. I followed a small unit in the rear guard and watched from a distance. Afterward I actually took part in guarding the prisoners, and only set out for here after dark.”

“Good. Then tell me in detail about how the battle went, and about the rocket shells.”

Naturally, other people had already reported to Qu Zhengyan about the Wangyuan Bridge battle earlier that afternoon, but a messenger’s account could never compare to what Ning Xi, who had been there in person and was Ning Yi’s eldest son, understood. Qu Zhengyan brought Ning Xi into the shed and poured him a cup of water. Ning Xi then recounted the entire situation at Wangyuan Bridge, and gave a rough introduction to the basic properties of the “Dijiang.” Qu Zhengyan considered for a moment, then discussed with Ning Xi the overall trend of the battlefield. By this point, the sounds of fighting on the battlefield had gradually died down.

Saba, having gambled recklessly and gained nothing for it, chose to withdraw bit by bit. The Huaxia Army did not pursue.

It was now close to midnight. Not long after Ning Xi finished talking with Qu Zhengyan, among the crowd returning from the fighting, he spotted Ning Ji, blood covering half his body. This youth, a full head shorter than everyone else, was running alongside a stretcher, on which lay a badly wounded soldier whose stomach was bleeding steadily. Ning Ji was working with practiced speed, trying to stop the bleeding.

The camp for treating the wounded was not far off, but in truth, after every battle there were never enough army doctors to go around. Ning Xi rolled up his sleeves, carried over a basin of hot water, and went to help.

The stretcher was set down under the tent canopy, and Ning Xi put down the hot water and reached in to help. Ning Ji glanced up—half his face was smeared with blood, and there was a scrape on his forehead—and seeing his elder brother had arrived, lowered his head again to keep working on the wounded man’s injuries. The two brothers worked together without a word.

Seeing this, Qu Zhengyan turned and left.

In fact, Ning Ji, who had been following Mao Yishan’s unit, had been further north as recently as yesterday, and this was the first time they’d made contact with this side. Even as word was sent to Wangyuan Bridge, Qu Zhengyan had also issued orders for this separated unit to quickly converge toward Xiukou. Mao Yishan, Ning Ji, and the others had apparently hurried this way at speed, and happened to be nearby when Jurchen forces were first spotted in the northwestern hills, so they had quickly joined the fighting.

When Ning Xi arrived, Qu Zhengyan had, in truth, not yet been fully confident that Ning Ji would make it back safely.

Having followed the army medical corps for nearly two years, and himself well taught by a good mentor, young Ning Ji was, in the matter of treating wounds, by now not far behind the other army doctors. Ning Xi had also received specialized training in this area, and could lend a real hand while helping. But the wounded man before them was simply too badly injured; after working on him for a while, the man’s gaze finally, gradually dimmed.

In recent years Ning Xi had been studying broader strategic planning under Ning Yi, Chen Tuozi, and others—this kind of brutal hands-on work was something he rarely did. He had assumed, somewhat naively, that with the two of them working together, they would surely be able to save the man, and as he watched the wounded soldier slowly die, a great sense of failure rose up in his chest. But Ning Ji, kneeling beside him, was silent only a moment; he checked the man’s breath and heartbeat, then closed the man’s eyes, and stood up.

“Brother, let’s go help over there.”

Ning Xi came back to himself and followed.

Working as a pair, the two brothers went on to save one severely wounded man and bandage another with lighter injuries. Under the camp canopy, army doctors and orderlies moved about everywhere, but the tense atmosphere had eased. Only then did the two of them go wash their hands and faces and slowly walk off to one side of the camp.

The night sky was full of stars.

Ning Xi looked at his younger brother, more than four years his junior, as though seeing him anew. Ning Ji glanced around. “Brother, where’s Sister Chuyi? Why didn’t she come with you?”

“She’s back at Wangyuan Bridge leading the women soldiers to help out. Father sent me here to talk with Uncle Qu and the others about what comes next, and to check on you while I was at it.” As he spoke, Ning Xi suddenly remembered something and pulled a small bundle from inside his coat. “Oh right, Chuyi asked me to bring you some rice cakes—they’ve gone completely cold by now… I’m hungry too, so let’s split it, half each.”

“Sister Chuyi gave those to me. How can you eat half?”

“I carried them the whole way here—if that’s not worth something, I don’t know what is. So, do you want the bigger half or the smaller half?”

“I practice martial arts, I’m still growing. I want the bigger half.”

“Don’t you know the story of Kong Rong giving up the pears?”

“I do. If you were me, would you want the bigger half or the smaller half?”

“I’d obviously say I want the smaller one.”

“So I want the bigger one, hahahaha…”

“Hahahaha…”

At this point the two brothers both burst out laughing. This little routine was one of the Ning family’s classic jokes, and its origin was probably Ning Yi himself. Each holding half a rice cake, the two of them sat down on a patch of open ground beside the camp.

“Brother, I heard Father made his move at Wangyuan Bridge?”

“Yeah. Father emptied out the whole arsenal—six thousand men wiped out Xiebao’s thirty thousand, and our losses were light. The Jurchens are in for a headache.”

“That impressive? How’d it go?”

Ning Ji had been marching all night and had then taken part in the fighting, so he’d only caught bits and pieces of news about Wangyuan Bridge afterward. Ning Xi told him the whole story again in detail:

“…I heard that toward evening, Father had already sent men to the Jurchen camp to arrange a talk with Zonghan. With thirty thousand elite troops wiped out in a single battle, the Jurchens really don’t have much left to fight with.”

By the time they finished talking, both brothers had finished their rice cakes. Ning Ji looked up toward the north, where the fighting had just been, brow slightly furrowed. “Sounds like the Jin dogs aren’t planning to surrender.”

“It’ll take some time for them to digest the news from Wangyuan Bridge. The Jurchens might make reckless moves at first, but as long as we don’t give them an opening, once they come to their senses, they’ll only have two choices: push forward or fall back. The Jurchens fought their way up out of the White Mountains and Black River, and for thirty years they’ve had the advantage in narrow, desperate clashes where courage wins the day—pushing forward isn’t without its dangers for them. But overall, the most likely choice is still retreat… and when that happens, we’ll need to bite down and hold on all the way, and swallow them whole.”

Ning Ji had already spent some time on the battlefield and had a fair record to show for it, but he was still too young to weigh in much on matters of grand strategy.

Ning Xi smiled. “Actually, here’s one thing you can probably count on: if you hadn’t been recalled to Xiukou, by tomorrow you’d probably find that Li Rulai’s Han Chinese troops are already retreating fast. Whether they advance or retreat, to the Jurchens this Han army has become completely worthless. One volley of our rockets, and I’d guess they’ll defect wholesale and rush over to the Jurchens’ side.”

Ning Ji blinked, his eyes suddenly lighting up. “If the whole army pulls back at a time like this, we’d just need a few charges from behind and they wouldn’t be able to hold, right?”

“That’s the idea, but what matters most right now is concentrating our strength to absorb the Jurchens’ last desperate gamble and crush any wishful thinking they still have. Once they start withdrawing, that’s when we start carving away at them. Also, Father’s planning to go show off in front of Nianhan—so don’t you go and get captured by the Jurchens in the meantime.” Having said this, Ning Xi added, “So, I’m here to keep an eye on you.”

Under the starlight, Ning Ji’s expression turned gloomy, his face falling.

By now it was already the early hours of the first day of the third month of that year. As the two brothers talked through the night beside the camp, elsewhere in the mountains, the Jurchens had still never chosen to surrender after a sudden crushing defeat. By Wangyuan Bridge, several thousand Huaxia Army soldiers were guarding the twenty thousand newly defeated prisoners; more than ten li away in the mountains, Yuyu had already led a unit setting out through the night toward this area.

Waiting ahead of them was another round of blocking action led by Han Jing and others on the Huaxia Army side.

In the dark woods of the Lion Ridge front, scattered but eerie scout skirmishes kept breaking out through the night as well. The Jurchens were anxiously trying every possible means of breaking through, and in response, a small Huaxia Army unit was secretly advancing on the eastern side of Lion Ridge.

A wind blew through the night, moaning as it swept across the mountains.

The technical crew, accompanied by elite scouts, set up their iron-plated equipment at the edge of the mountain foot; someone had already calculated the bearing.

“…Testing the level line… azimuth west by forty-three degrees, launch elevation thirty-five degrees, planned distance three hundred fifty zhang… two rounds…”

A hot air balloon floated above the peaks of Lion Ridge. Standing on it in the dim light, however, were several senior Huaxia Army officers including Pang Liu’an, each holding a telescope, some rubbing their hands together, waiting quietly for the moment the weapon would be demonstrated.

In the Jin camp, lights flickered here and there. At one moment, a rocket shell, trailing a bright tail, rose up from the mountains east of the camp.

The explosion flipped over tents in the camp and set off a blaze. The Jin camp stirred into commotion, but it did not trigger any large-scale panic or stampede—a sign the enemy had already made preparations. Not long after, several more rocket shells came screaming down into the Jin camp; though they couldn’t achieve a single decisive mutiny-inducing effect, the impact they made was still stunning.

The Jurchen scout units showed a response, and the two sides clashed briefly in the mountains. About an hour later, two more rocket shells flew in from another direction into the Jin camp at Lion Ridge.

Under the cover of stars and moon, on a night that seemed calm on the surface, who knew how many more clashes and hostilities were waiting to erupt.

As long as there was even the slimmest chance, neither side would give the other any room to breathe.

Zonghan, Gao Qingyi, Han Qixian, Balishu, Wanyan Sheyema, Dalai, and others gathered in the tent behind the Lion Ridge lines. They were working through the variables and possibilities for what came next in the battle. Dalai argued strongly for an all-or-nothing charge into the Chengdu Plain, while Balishu and others tried to calmly analyze the effects and weaknesses of the Huaxia Army’s new weapon.

Zonghan said little. He sat in a chair at the back, and in the span of half a day, this old Jurchen general, who had dominated battlefields all his life, seemed to have aged ten years. Like an aging but still dangerous lion, he sat in the darkness recalling the countless hardships and dangers of his life, drawing strength from past adversity, wisdom and resolve flickering alternately in his eyes.

Decades ago, when the Jurchens numbered only a few thousand supporters and everyone feared the mighty Liao state, he alone, together with Wanyan Aguda, had held firm in their resolve to resist Liao. In the shifting tides of history, they had seized the one crucial moment that decided the rise or fall of their people, and thus determined the Jurchens’ decades of prosperity. In this moment before him now, he knew that such a moment had come again.

This moment had arrived suddenly, so suddenly that even the outstanding men gathered around him, men like Gao Qingyi and Han Qixian, might not immediately grasp it. But Zonghan was a man who had carried the rise and fall of his people on his shoulders for years; as if by some unseen instinct, that skin-crawling, spine-shivering feeling had already descended on him. The truly terrifying thing wasn’t even the capture of his own son Xiebao—the defeat of those thirty thousand men was an omen that would fundamentally decide the fate of the entire Jin state’s future.

Zonghan could not even fully grasp this omen. In the darkness he had seen the rocket shells fly into the camp and explode; granted, they might have this or that weakness, but out on the larger battlefield, even with such weaknesses, the gap now opening between the Jurchens and the Huaxia Army might already have become an unbridgeable chasm.

And that gap might well keep widening.

Xiyin had once told him about the possibilities of the “study of things” research underway in the southwest; Zonghan hadn’t fully understood it—even Gushen himself might never have anticipated that such a scene could unfold on the southwestern battlefield. A thought flashed through his mind about his original reasons for the southern campaign: the Jurchens’ next generation had already begun indulging in idle pleasure, and perhaps one day they too would end up like the old Wu dynasty. He, Xiyin, and the others were trying to hold together the last glory of the Jurchens, hoping to eliminate this southwestern thorn in their side before that afterglow faded entirely.

Was there still time? How much hope was there in pressing forward?

If they retreated, the Jin state might lose its chance forever…

“…whatever kind of firearm it is, the first thing it must fear is rainy weather. So to deal with this sort of weapon from the enemy, what we still need first is a stretch of continuous rain… and now that spring has just begun, the southwest gets long spells of rain—if we can seize that opportunity, victory isn’t entirely out of reach… Also, the fact that Ning Yi only brought this thing out now may prove that he doesn’t have many of them. If we can’t take the southwest this time, when we fight again another day, this kind of weapon may well be everywhere by then…”

“…how do we know this isn’t exactly what they want, luring us in…”

“…if that were so, they wouldn’t have given up Yushui and Huangming in the first place, and we’d have marched in regardless. If this weapon of his were truly limitless, why would it be so hard to settle things in one battle once we reached the walls of Zizhou? Hundreds of thousands of men—how many of them could it really take down?”

“…that’s actually got a point.”

Everyone kept discussing, but in truth they could only discuss things as they stood—no one dared to be the first to speak of facing reality, of withdrawing the troops. Zonghan, hand on the arm of his chair, stood up.

“From when the war began last year up to now, it’s been more than four months. Our great army has pushed forward the whole way, meaning to sweep the southwest flat. But as for what to do if we can’t win—how to pull the whole army back out through Jianmen Pass—from start to finish, we have never once planned for that.”

Having said this, Zonghan let his gaze sweep slowly over everyone present; the tent fell so quiet it felt almost suffocating. Then, slowly, he said: “Let’s work on it… as quickly as possible, let’s work out a plan for withdrawal.”

Gao Qingyi, Balishu, and the others’ eyes sank, deep as old wells, but no one spoke. Dalai clenched his fists, his whole body trembling. Sheyema lowered his head. After a moment, Sheyema stepped forward and knelt in the middle of the tent.

“Your son is willing to command the rear guard for the army.”

A pale, ashen air was settling over the tent—a taste none of the Jin generals had ever tasted before. Countless thoughts, a tangle of mixed feelings, churned in their hearts; naturally, no careful decision could be made on this night. Zonghan did not answer Sheyema’s request either. He patted his son’s shoulder, his gaze fixed only on the front of the tent.

“At daybreak, have someone report back to the Huaxia Army—I want to speak with this Ning Yi.”

For the first time in decades, there was already a faint chill in the air around the Jurchen camp. Looking back from a later vantage point, in this night of conflict, the signal of an age turning caught many people utterly unprepared; some clearly felt that enormous gap and shift, while many more would need days, months, even longer, to slowly come to terms with it all.

At daybreak, the army Yuyu led in an attempt to rescue their comrades at Wangyuan Bridge was discovered and intercepted, and returned in defeat. The Huaxia Army’s front lines still held as firm as an iron wall, with no gap to be found. The Jurchen side sent back word agreeing to Zonghan’s meeting with Ning Yi to “talk things over.” At almost the same moment, other pieces of news arrived one after another that day in both camps.

In the morning light, Ning Yi read carefully through the urgent dispatch that had just arrived, and when he set the report down, he let out one long, long sigh. This news carried both a victory and a tragedy.

Over the years, victories and tragedies had, in truth, always come in much the same shape—a victory was invariably accompanied by a tragedy, though a tragedy did not necessarily bring a victory with it. War might stir the blood only in novels; in reality, perhaps the only difference was between wounding others and wounding them even more.

The Battle of Changsha had been won.