The Waking of Insects had long since passed, and this year Lin’an, inside and out, wore a look of heaviness and decay.

Many of the mansions scattered across the city had already fallen into disrepair; after their masters died and the ravages of war followed, the ruins became gathering places for refugees and the destitute. Rebels occasionally passed through as well, bringing with them the government troops sent to hunt them down, and sometimes the fires of battle would flare up again within the city walls.

Some of the flagstones along the Imperial Street had cracked, with no one left to repair them. After the spring rains, the drainage channels clogged, and filthy water surged up to flow along the streets; once the sky cleared, the stench rose and choked the noses of passersby. The minor court and government offices that managed civil affairs were forever entangled in countless troubles and had no capacity to deal with matters like this.

In truth, in times such as these, a little foul odor and dirty water could no longer disturb anyone’s peace.

A year ago, Lin’an had still had many gilded, brightly colored places, but by now the paint had faded, and most of the city had been overtaken by gray and black. Walking through the streets, one might occasionally spot a tree that had not yet died putting out fresh green in the corner of some courtyard wall — that alone counted as a striking sight. The city, stripped of its painted ornamentation, was left with the heavy, plain weight of its raw earth and stone — though one could not say when even that weight would lose its dignity.

In the second month, the main force of the Jurchen Eastern Route Army had already withdrawn from Lin’an, but the continuing turmoil left the city little room to recover. When the Jurchens first arrived, they had slaughtered hundreds of thousands, and over the half year they remained, the Han people living in the cracks had attached themselves to the Jurchens, gradually forming a new order of survival. Now that the Jurchens had withdrawn, that order had been shattered once more.

Every night, gang wars and killings among the lowest rungs of society and the desperate played out across the city, and every morning brought fresh corpses lying in the streets.

Compared with a year ago, the population of the city had already shrunk drastically, yet the living space available to each person had not expanded accordingly — it had instead contracted sharply. This was because the supplies within the city had shrunk even more steeply. Emaciated people now killed their own countrymen in dark alleys over trifles they wouldn’t have deigned to glance at in better days — a few pounds of rice, the profits of a butcher’s stall — and it was hardly strange anymore for dozens to die in a single brawl.

One could hardly blame these people struggling to survive. When the resources available within an ecosystem shrink drastically, culling the population through slaughter becomes, in a sense, an inevitable mechanism by which every such system operates. Rations for ten cannot feed eleven; the only question is how the eleventh person is to die.

Only a few still managed to maintain a decent life.

The rain fell in fits and starts. The carriage of Li Shan, Vice Minister of Personnel, rolled down a long street awash with filthy water, flanked by an escort of ten armed guards, who kept beggars from the roadside away from the carriage. Through the window, Li Shan watched as a woman clutching a child rushed forward, only to be shoved to the ground by the guards. The infant in her arms turned out to be fake.

Poverty breeds cunning schemes, he thought to himself, and lowered the curtain with irritation.

What truly troubled him in that moment was not these wretched sights he saw every single day, but the strange and unsettling reports arriving from the west.

Since the previous year, a faction of former officials and powers of the old Zhou dynasty, led by his teacher Wu Qimei and Tie Yan, had defected to the Jin state and installed, as ruler, a distant member of the imperial clan said to share blood with the Zhou family, thereby establishing the minor court in Lin’an. At first, everyone had trembled with unease, and being called traitors to their people had made more than a few of them blush. But as time passed, some of them had gradually grown comfortable within the public narrative they had constructed for themselves.

In truth, given the state of the realm at present, establishing this minor court of the Zhou dynasty was perhaps not the worst possible choice. In the more than two hundred years of the Zhou dynasty, the most recent emperors — whether Zhou Zhe or Zhou Yong — could each fairly be called incompetent and tyrannical.

Even Zhou Ji, the Jingping Emperor who had reigned for less than a year sandwiched between them, had been a fool who put his faith in oracles and divination. He had entrusted the defense against the Jurchens to a so-called “Celestial Master” named Guo Jing, and the result was that he himself had opened the city gates, letting the Jurchens march into Bianliang with barely any effort during their second southern campaign. Perhaps no one had dared say so at the time, but looking back now, both the humiliation of Jingping and the half-lifetime of disgrace Zhou Ji suffered afterward could be said to be entirely of his own making.

The fortunes of the Zhou dynasty, in any case, had run out. With the Central Plains and Jiangnan both fallen, whatever resistance remained might well be nearing its end — there might still be some further turmoil, but as the Jurchens stabilized the whole of the Jin state, that turmoil too would gradually fade away.

After all, this was simply the process of one dynasty replacing another.

The choice was between accepting this reality or dying amid the foreseeable chaos to come. Framed that way, some things became easier to accept — and besides, most people had little room to choose in the first place. The current of history was too vast, too violent; in recent days Li Shan had often felt himself nothing more than an ordinary man swept into a raging tide, either clinging with all his strength to the one plank of wood within reach, struggling to eke out survival, or letting go and being swallowed by the current. That he had managed to rise to the position of Vice Minister of Personnel within this minor court was, more than anything, a matter of luck rather than ability.

He had taken Wu Qimei as his teacher; when Wu Qimei became the Right Chancellor of the court, he had risen along with him. Had he not taken that path, he would truly have had few other options.

Over these past few months, on the whole, the faction led by Wu Qimei — the “Jun Society” — had developed quite favorably. Within the minor court, Wu Qimei had originally held the lesser position of Right Chancellor, with the greater power resting in Left Chancellor Tie Yan, much of whose strength came from troops based in Fujian. Earlier this year, Princess Imperial Zhou Pei had used a stratagem to seize Fuzhou and kill Tie Yan’s cousin Tie Sanwu, and Tie Yan’s standing had declined ever since. Wu Qimei, proceeding more steadily, had not only expanded his own influence but had, to a certain degree, won greater favor from the Jurchens as well.

The court in Lin’an at present placed little value on checks and balances; with Wu Qimei’s power rising sharply, everyone around him rose with him. As a disciple of Wu Qimei, Li Shan remained only a vice minister within the Ministry of Personnel, yet even the minister himself did not dare fail to show him deference. Over the past two months, though conditions at the bottom of Lin’an society remained harsh, all manner of things — curios, land deeds, beautiful women — had flowed to Li Shan’s doorstep like water.

In circumstances like these, Li Shan had, for the first time in his life, come to understand what it meant to have the tide of the times at one’s back, what it meant for heaven and earth to align in one’s favor. These benefits required no effort on his part to seek out — he felt it would offend others even to refuse them. Especially in the second month, once the main Jurchen forces had withdrawn one after another, conditions at the bottom of Lin’an grew turbulent again, and even more benefits found their way to Li Shan.

In the foreseeable near future, the “Jun Society” led by Wu Qimei would become the true ruling power over all of Lin’an, over the entire Zhou dynasty, with its hand covering the sky, and Li Shan need only keep following along to have everything he wanted.

After all, the dynasty was already changing hands; he was merely going along with it, seeking only to protect himself, not actively harming others — by his own reckoning, he had nothing to be ashamed of before his conscience.

If not for the reports that had arrived in recent days, everything he had experienced would have counted as something like a dream of paradise.

At the Battle of Changsha, Chen Fan had crushed the Jurchen army and killed Yinshuke in battle.

In the southwest, the Black Banner Army had dealt a crushing defeat to the main Jurchen force and slain Wanyan Xiebao.

These two pieces of major news — the first had arrived several days earlier, and everyone was still trying to confirm its truth; the second had reached the city the day before yesterday, and for now only a small number of high officials truly knew of it, with various details still trickling in.

Across a distance of thousands of li, even an express relay covering eight hundred li a day took several days to arrive; the first wave of news often carried errors, and confirming it took an extremely long cycle. It was hard to say whether there were other problems mixed in — some even suspected that Black Banner Army spies, taking advantage of the turmoil in Lin’an, were stirring up trouble with false intelligence. Such suspicion was not unreasonable.

Amid all the speculation, on the whole this news had not yet stirred up too great a storm here, thousands of li away; people held their thoughts in check and tried not to say too much. On a more honest level, it was simply that people did not yet know how to respond to such news.

At the end of last year, when word came that Eli Li had been killed in the southwest campaign, people had still been able to react in some fashion — and not long after, Huangming County had indeed fallen, the Jurchen forces in the southwest had achieved their own successes, and the discussions had soon settled down. But now… the Black Banner Army had truly managed to crush the Jurchens.

Wasn’t the Jurchen Western Court supposed to be the strongest? Could it be that a legendary figure like Wanyan Zonghan had been overstated all along?

What exactly was going on?

What kind of man was Wanyan Zonghan, really? What was the true state of the southwest? What kind of war was this, in truth?

All sorts of questions circled in Li Shan’s mind, his thoughts restless and hard to put into words.

The carriage rolled all the way into the Right Chancellor’s mansion, and the members of the “Jun Society” arrived one after another, exchanging greetings and discussing the situation in the city over recent days — in nearly every sphere of interest touched by the minor court, the “Jun Society” had come away with the lion’s share. People spoke of it, exchanged smiles, and then turned their attention to matters of training troops and conscription.

Only within very private, small circles did anyone dare bring up the intelligence that had been arriving from the southwest these past several days.

As a disciple personally taken in by Wu Qimei, Li Shan held no small standing within the “Jun Society.” Though he could not be called a figure of great weight among his fellow disciples, he got along reasonably well with the others. When “Senior Martial Brother” Gan Fenglin arrived, Li Shan went over to make conversation; Gan Fenglin drew him aside for a few pleasantries, and once Li Shan had gently touched on the matter of the southwest, Gan Fenglin lowered his voice to ask about something else.

“Back in Lin’an, Brother Li knew no small number of people. I hear you once had dealings with that Li Pin — Li Dexin. How well did you actually know him?”

“When Li Dexin was in Lin’an, I did indeed have dealings with him, and called on him several times to seek his guidance…”

Li Shan frowned, momentarily unable to grasp what Gan Fenglin was driving at. In truth, back when Wu Qimei had lived in reclusion cultivating his reputation, though he was a great Confucian scholar with many disciples, none among those disciples had proven especially brilliant — at the time, they were considered too accomplished for menial work yet not accomplished enough for high position. Of course, nowadays one could simply say that treacherous officials held sway and talent went unrecognized.

That Li Pin, Li Dexin, had for some reason had a falling-out with Ning Yi years ago that had caused a great stir and spread far and wide; after he began running a newspaper in Lin’an, his reputation had risen with remarkable speed, to the point that he was now spoken of in the same breath as men like Wu Qimei. Li Shan himself had had no particular accomplishments back then and had kept a humble posture, going about Lin’an making connections and seeking to learn. Sharing a surname with Li Pin, he could claim to be of the same clan, and had had several chances to speak with him at gatherings; afterward, through calling on him to seek guidance, he could fairly claim to be on good terms with him.

But within the circle of Wu Qimei’s disciples, Li Shan generally still tried to distance himself from the connection. After all, Wu Qimei had labored long and hard to build a reputation as a recognized Confucian master, while Li Pin, a mere upstart, had gained standing as one of the leading figures in Confucian scholarship simply by picking a quarrel with Ning Yi — that struck him as far too much of a case of buying fame on the cheap.

What was so remarkable about quarreling with Ning Yi anyway? Master Mei himself had written more than a dozen essays condemning that regicidal fiend, each one a sweeping, eloquent work of high argument. It was only that the ignorant masses cared to make noise only over vulgar affairs.

“What did you and this Li Pin actually talk about?”

“Er…” Li Shan looked a little embarrassed. “Mostly… matters of scholarship, I suppose. The first time I called on him, I asked him about the passage on sincerity of intention and rectifying the mind in the Great Learning, and at the time he said…”

Li Shan recounted the exchange in brief. Gan Fenglin waved a hand. “Did he ever bring up anything about the southwest?”

“The southwest… what about it?” Li Shan was struck with alarm. Given the current situation, anything touching on the southwest was sensitive, and not knowing his senior brother’s intent, he felt a flicker of fear that he might say the wrong thing. But Gan Fenglin only shook his head.

“Our teacher has set me to investigate the state of the southwest,” Gan Fenglin admitted candidly. “The news from these past few days has now been confirmed from several directions, and it appears to be largely true. We had assumed there was little doubt about the outcome of the southwest campaign, but it now seems there is far more doubt than we thought. Everyone always said that Nian Han’s Mountain-Guard Army was unmatched across the realm, rarely if ever defeated — and now it seems either that was overstated, or there are other reasons behind this.

“On the other hand, these past several years, we have known remarkably little about the southwest. That is why our teacher has set me to seek out anyone with ties to the southwest — just what kind of ferocious force is this Black Banner Army, and what has become of things there since the regicide… Know yourself and know your enemy, and you will never be imperiled in a hundred battles — we ought to have a clear picture in our minds by now. These past two days I’ve gathered some intelligence, but as for anything more specific, I doubt many people actually know…”

Understanding dawned on Li Shan.

For a long time now, when people in Lin’an spoke of the southwest, they were, in truth, speaking only of a black curtain of ignorance. People cursed it, condemned it, damned it — but as for the actual conditions in the southwest, the people of Lin’an truly knew far too little. This was partly because of the immense, unrelenting pressure the Jurchens exerted at every turn, and partly because, when it came to an “enemy” like the Jurchens, people could still afford to adopt a rational stance — but toward the “rebels” of the southwest who had committed regicide, people could only respond, in speaking of them, with ever more extreme and heated attitudes.

Tyranny and treachery, to be condemned by all the realm, doomed to die in the end — on that point there was no doubt. But to speak of treating the southwest with the seriousness of a national war would, people felt, be somehow shameful. People were willing to try to understand the Jurchens, yet in reality had no wish at all to understand the southwest.

The reasons behind this state of affairs were far too complex, and there was little point now in trying to analyze them. With this southern campaign of the Jurchens, the people of the Zhou dynasty had already found it hard enough to gauge and comprehend the Jurchens’ strength — with the whole of Jiangnan falling before the advance of the Eastern Route Army, no one could say, in any rational terms, just how powerful the supposedly even stronger Western Route Army truly was. As for what might unfold in a campaign against the southwest, that too lay beyond the grasp of people living in dire straits thousands of li away.

Nor had it seemed necessary to understand it further — in the end, once Nian Han’s army, the strongest under heaven, marched against them, the southwest would simply be wiped out entirely.

But now, things had gone differently than expected, and the people of Lin’an could no longer avoid seriously trying to understand and weigh the true state of the southwest.

What exactly had happened within the Jin state?

Was Nian Han truly still the foremost general under heaven?

Could it be that the Jurchen Western Court, said to have grown so powerful its might threatened even its own sovereign, was not actually so fearsome after all? Were all these rumors about the Jurchens simply false? Was the Western Route Army’s fighting strength actually lower than the Eastern Route Army’s? And if so, could one not also suppose that the rumors of internal strife within the Jin state might likewise be false?

All of this represented conclusions one might reasonably reach through rational analysis. But suppose, in the least likely scenario, another explanation existed instead…

Suppose the Jurchen Western Route Army truly was even stronger than the Eastern Route Army.

Suppose Nian Han truly was that undefeated general who had swept across the realm and built up half the territory of the Jin state.

Suppose men like Wanyan Xiyin, Yinshuke, Balishu, Han Qixian, Gao Qingyi, and so many others among the Jurchens truly still possessed all the strategic brilliance and martial prowess of years past…

Suppose there existed even the smallest chance that such a state of affairs were true…

Then, over these past several years, deep within the mountain ranges of the southwest that people had paid so little attention to, what manner of army had been built and forged there by that regicidal fiend? How was that place governed, how were its troops trained, how did it all function… And that force which, with a fraction of the numbers, had crushed the strongest army the Jurchens possessed — just how savage, how merciless, might it truly be?

Cold sweat began to seep out across Li Shan’s back…