The eleventh of the third month, before dawn, Fuzhou.

Lamps still burned in the courtyard serving as the temporary imperial residence. Zhou Junwu woke with a start at his desk, realizing he had fallen asleep.

A tall stack of ledgers sat piled upon the desk; the sudden movement of him rising sent the papers that had been pillowed beneath his head rustling loudly. Outside, the maid keeping watch through the night was startled awake as well, and hurried in.

“Your Majesty.”

“What hour is it? Why didn’t you wake me?”

“Nearly the third quarter of the Hour of the Tiger.” The maid knelt on the floor. “Your Majesty… you haven’t been resting properly these past days…”

“When did I fall asleep?”

“Around… past midnight. Your Majesty was simply too exhausted.”

“It’s nothing.” Junwu rubbed at his forehead and cheeks. “It’s nothing. Bring me a basin of water. And pour me a cup of ginseng tea — I need to keep reading.”

The maid withdrew. Junwu continued rubbing at his temples. He had been staying up late for several days running now, sleeping only a little each night, until last night, past midnight, he had finally been unable to hold out any longer. By now he had slept perhaps two hours — but for a young man, there was still energy enough left in him.

Spread before him on the desk were the records of goods entering and leaving the city since the takeover of Fuzhou, together with the income and expenditure accounts of both the army and the court. None of this, strictly speaking, needed the emperor’s personal attention — back in Jiangning, for instance, when they had been developing new technologies, all such accounts had been handled by men like Wenren Buer and Lu A’Gui. But now that the army had settled into Fuzhou, Junwu, who might well have allowed himself to breathe a little easier, had instead begun immersing himself in every detail of how his forces’ resources flowed and were spent.

One does not know the price of firewood and rice until one runs the household oneself — and now that he was the one running this household, he understood only too well that before long he would be enclosed within some great mansion, forever cut off from any real sense of what the common people suffered. And so he needed to grasp the details of every matter as quickly as he could. Working through the ledgers was the easiest way — how much a single soldier’s monthly pay ought to be, how much he needed to eat and wear, what a blade or spear cost, how much compensation was owed when a soldier died in battle… down even to the going prices of goods in the marketplace. Once he had thoroughly digested this kind of account book, he would have a clear framework of these matters fixed in his mind.

Truly mastering a set of ledgers was, in fact, an enormously troublesome undertaking. Junwu had Cheng Zhouhai find him a trustworthy accounting tutor, one who would teach him not only the surface methods of bookkeeping but also all the hidden tricks and loopholes buried within. During this stretch of time, Junwu spent his days handling government affairs and receiving visitors from every quarter, and his nights studying and puzzling over the ledgers, recording his own understanding and opinions, which he would later gather together and discuss and compare with his accounting tutor.

In this bright third month of spring, the situation in Fuzhou appeared to have stabilized for the moment — though in truth this was no more than a fragile peace confined to a single corner of the realm. After proclaiming himself emperor, Junwu had fled one step ahead of pursuit the whole way, only reaching Fuzhou in the second month to rejoin his sister Zhou Pei. With an initial foothold secured, Junwu now had to try, in the name of legitimate succession, to restore the Zhou dynasty. By now the Jurchen Eastern Route Army had already struck camp and marched north, leaving only some ten thousand troops in Lin’an to prop up the puppet court there — but even so, persuading everyone to throw their unwavering support behind the legitimate line of the Zhou dynasty was no easy task at all.

Over the past year, the destruction wrought by the Jurchens had touched every corner of the Zhou dynasty. With the cooperation and encouragement of the puppet court, the civil and military order had fallen into chaos; from Lin’an outward across the whole of the former Zhou territories, a pattern of fragmented, warlord-like rule had gradually taken shape, propped up by various great clans and local gentry pulling forward whichever military officers they favored.

This was the inevitable outcome of local gentry, terrified after the Jurchens’ crushing defeat of the Lin’an court, taking measures to protect themselves. And after Zhou Yong’s death, as Junwu fled through one dangerous situation after another, the transfer of political authority had never, in truth, passed cleanly to him. Over that half year of severed authority, the great clans of every region had, by and large, already tightened their grip on whatever power they held. Though many claimed loyalty to the Zhou dynasty, in substance the degree of control Junwu could actually exert over the realm was already less than half of what it had been a year before.

These clans, gentry, and generals who claimed loyalty to the Zhou dynasty now held their own territories divided among themselves, their true loyalty still needing to be sorted out; many of them harbored their own private demands, and there remained every possibility that negotiations with them could still break down. For the moment, Junwu’s forces had not even managed to reclaim the whole of Fujian, and it was hardly realistic to count on aid or allegiance from these men.

Consolidating his own position, establishing clear rules, and securing a firm foothold — these had become the first problems Junwu’s regime needed to solve. For now, the force he held most firmly in hand was the army of nearly a hundred thousand led by Yue Fei and Han Shizhong, troops already free of the old clans’ interference and control. But to move forward, he would also need a clear plan for how to grant benefits to those clans and gentry, how to offer official posts and promises in exchange for their support — and how to preserve the fighting strength of his army amid it all was likewise a balance he had to maintain.

These new rules would need to be built up step by step, and to build them, Junwu — this emperor so newly risen to power — would also need to understand clearly every single man beneath him: what sort of man each one truly was, and what he truly wanted.

This was the explanation Junwu gave, on the surface, for the half month of round-the-clock work he had thrown himself into, day and night — this was what he told Zhou Pei, and what he told his ministers. But only a few of those closest to him understood that, beneath this reasonable-sounding explanation, Junwu’s punishing workload these days carried a deeper, darker cause.

The crushing weight that comes with kingship had, quite literally, settled onto Junwu’s back.

And the process by which it had come to press down upon him had been anything but easy.

The year before, outside the walls of Jiangning, Junwu had proclaimed himself emperor after a desperate, all-or-nothing gambit that turned near-certain defeat into a stunning victory — but afterward, unable to hold Jiangning against siege, the new emperor had still been forced to lead his army in a breakout. A portion of Jiangning’s people had escaped successfully under the army’s protection, but a great many more had died in the massacre that followed. This was the first crushing weight upon Junwu’s heart.

After Jiangning was reduced to a killing field, the army was pursued relentlessly by Zongfu and Zongbi, retreating and shifting position again and again, until by the first month they reached the area near Haiyan County, south of Jiaxing. By then Zhou Pei had already taken Fuzhou, and her fleet sailed north to offer aid, urging Junwu to relocate first — but Junwu, weighed down by what lingered in his heart, refused. At the time, the army had built a defensive line around Haiyan, and within that line a great many civilians were still being sheltered.

He wanted to see the civilians relocated first. But such a choice was, of course, naive — not only would the civil officials refuse it outright, but men like Yue Fei and Han Shizhong likewise urged him repeatedly to leave first. The main reason behind this urging was that the Jin state had all but crushed the Zhou dynasty already, and the only reason Zongfu and Zongbi were still chasing this particular group so relentlessly was the new emperor himself — once Junwu took to the sea, with no one left worth chasing, Zongfu and Zongbi would have little appetite to linger long in Jiangnan.

Reasonable as this argument sounded, how different, in truth, was the whole course of action from the choice Zhou Yong had once made? Seen through another’s eyes, might it not look exactly the same? Junwu’s heart was torn; he agonized over it for a full day, and in the end boarded the ship only after Wenren Buer’s persuasion, leading the imperial fleet in a swift dash back up the Qiantang River toward Lin’an. The situation in Lin’an grew tense at once, and the members of the puppet court fell into anxious disarray; Zongfu turned his army back toward the city. But at Haiyan, Zongbi — who had already come to blows with Han Shizhong — refused to let the matter rest, and launched days of furious assault, resulting once more in mass death and displacement among the people there.

After this great battle, the Jurchens struck camp and marched back north, and the pressure on Haiyan eased considerably. But the fact that Junwu had abandoned his people and fled out to sea was still seized upon and widely broadcast by the Jin state and by the officials of Lin’an alike; in Jiaxing and elsewhere, no small number of people who had escaped the slaughter took to the hills as bandits, seeking only to protect themselves.

Several bands of righteous militia and displaced refugees rose and expanded around this same time as well; among them, the scattered survivors of Zongbi’s massacre north of Haiyan County coalesced into a militia flying the Black Banner, gradually swelling to a force of several tens of thousands — one that no longer submitted to Zhou authority. The fate of these scattered, massacred people weighed on Junwu’s conscience as well, another scar, another crushing burden upon this new emperor’s heart.

Unlike his father Zhou Yong, once an emperor chooses to take responsibility seriously, such burdens will present themselves tenfold, a hundredfold, without end.

He drove himself relentlessly through this exhausting work, and yet those around him made no great effort to console or dissuade him from it. In a sense, for a young man in his twenties to try to shoulder an entire nation, this kind of self-exhaustion was not necessarily a bad thing — the darkness and torment within one’s own heart were, after all, exactly the fastest road to true growth.

It was only once the situation in Fuzhou had settled somewhat that Zhou Pei, having taken stock of the supplies within the city, set aside a portion of the stored grain, loaded it onto two ships, and had Wenren Buer escort it north to the refugees still struggling through famine around Haiyan County. Earlier, Cheng Zhouhai had gone to try to persuade these refugees and militia bands, laying out the stakes involved, and some groups had set aside their grievances against Junwu — but the militia flying the Black Banner still refused to accept orders from the Zhou court. This time, Zhou Pei had Wenren Buer deliver the supplies regardless, so that even without their submission to Zhou authority, they would still be given a portion of grain, free of charge. When Junwu heard of this, he said nothing outwardly, but the anxiety in his heart eased somewhat.

Of course, these past few days had also brought other news that offered some relief — the outcome of the Battle of Changsha, for instance, had already reached Fuzhou by now. Junwu, on hearing it, had been overjoyed.

That day he had pored over the ledgers until dawn, gone out to the courtyard for a round of martial forms, and only then washed and eaten breakfast. After the meal, word came that Wenren Buer had returned, and Junwu quickly summoned him in.

Though the trip to deliver supplies had, on the surface, been an act of mercy, the real reason for sending Wenren Buer along had been to negotiate with the militia’s leader, a man named He Wen, and to explain the unavoidable circumstances behind Junwu’s departure back in the first month. In truth, had Junwu not still had so much to attend to and coordinate, he might well have preferred to go in person, to meet this “former member of the Huaxia Army” who had saved so many lives during the massacre, and to speak with him about the southwest.

Among those around Junwu and Zhou Pei, the one with perhaps the sharpest hand for getting things done was Cheng Zhouhai, resolute in temperament and ruthless in his methods — yet even he had failed to win He Wen over before. This time, with Wenren Buer sent instead, the visit had been more a matter of extending goodwill. Once Wenren Buer entered and gave his brief report, Junwu understood that He Wen’s resolve remained unshaken, that his resentment toward the Zhou dynasty had not softened at all. Junwu was not angered by this, and was about to press for further detail when someone hurried in to announce that Her Highness the Princess Imperial had arrived on urgent business.

Only moments later, Zhou Pei appeared at the doorway, dressed in a plain long gown, elegant yet unburdened, a letter in her hand, her steps quick. Once inside, she greeted Wenren Buer first, waving off his formal courtesy, before handing over the weighty-looking dispatch. “Word has come from our informants in Lin’an — something Your Majesty will want to see. I have already summoned General Yue to the palace at once; since Master Wenren happens to be here as well, he might as well see it early.”

“Oh? Is there further word on the battle at Tanzhou?” The news of the initial victory at the Battle of Changsha, received a few days earlier, had been the happiest moment for Junwu in recent memory; he took the dispatch, guessing aloud, then drew the letter from its envelope. There was a good deal inside — several essays’ worth of closely written pages. Junwu, momentarily fumbling, let the papers slip and fall to the floor; as he picked them up, he saw that the topmost page bore the title “On How the Qin Fell in Two Generations.” “What is this?”

Zhou Pei glanced at it, her expression somewhere between amusement and irony. “A new masterwork by Old Mei, freshly written in Lin’an — I hear it’s causing quite a stir there these past few days. Your Majesty might want to take a look.”

“Oh?” Junwu settled himself and read through it line by line. Within moments his brow had already knit into a frown. “A pale imitation of Su Xun’s ‘On the Fall of Qin’… but why would Wu Qimei write such a thing? Has he nothing better to do… is he obliquely accusing me of reckless militarism?”

“He certainly has his reasons. This piece was written for the great clans of Jiangnan to read. If you find it tiresome, turn the page and read on.”

Junwu turned the page.

He read for a moment, then drew out the sheet that had originally been placed on top, stepped back, and sat down in a chair. His expression turned grave, and he read the page over twice, back and forth. Outside the room, morning sunlight streamed into the courtyard, and birdsong drifted through the air. Junwu looked toward Zhou Pei, then back at the dispatch. “Is this…”

His voice came out somewhat hoarse; he paused, then finally asked, “Is this really true?”

Zhou Pei fell silent for a moment as well. “The news reached Lin’an first. Our own people there are too few to confirm it independently, and like Wu Qimei, they waited several days — it was only once Lin’an began circulating these essays that the truth of the matter could be confirmed. That’s why the report and the essays were sent together… The moment I’d read through it myself, I came straight here.”

The letter contained the details of the battle report from the southwest. Junwu nodded, and rose to his feet almost without meaning to. “The twenty-eighth of the second month… we still have no idea what the situation in the southwest looks like even now…”

He paused, idly flipping through the rest of the pages, then passed them to the curious Wenren Buer. He paced back and forth across the hall. “This — this is what it means to truly fight a war! My teacher actually cut down Xiebao! Right in front of Zonghan himself! Ha! If only I could have fought at his side…”

“Your Majesty.” Zhou Pei gave a weary sort of smile. “You are the Emperor of the Zhou dynasty now, Your Majesty.”

“Emperor, what does it matter what they call me! What matters is what one actually accomplishes!” Junwu waved his hand about the room. In that moment, clad in his dragon robe, gaunt of face with the beginnings of a beard along his jaw, he looked, at a glance, every bit the dignified sovereign — and yet now, unusually, he let slip a flash of the boyish manner no one had seen from him in a long while, pointing twice toward the report in Wenren Buer’s hands, his eyes reddening, unable to speak for a moment.

“…He… beat… the Jurchens. Sister, have you thought about it… more than ten years… over thirty years… all we’ve ever heard were defeats, the Jurchens marching down on us, the emperors of the Zhou dynasty scared into running every which way… and the southwest held its ground. He actually withstood Wanyan Zonghan, and killed his son… I never dared even imagine it, even when we heard the news from Tanzhou a few days ago, about killing Yinshuke, I still didn’t dare imagine what was happening in the southwest. Sister… he — a few tens of thousands of men against several hundred thousand — and he held them off, head-on! Ah… this news isn’t false, is it?”

Junwu’s eyes had reddened, his words coming with difficulty, and now and then he let out an oddly nervous laugh; by the end, a certain unreality had crept over him. This time Zhou Pei did not argue with him. “…I’m not certain either.”

Wenren Buer, looking over the reports, fell into a long silence of his own, saying nothing. They had fought their way out of Jiangning, drifted and shifted through danger after danger with the Jurchens on their heels. However steadfast a man’s resolve might be even unto death, in truth the shadow of the Jurchens had loomed over them like a boundless sky, an endless night with no dawn in sight; the whole of the Zhou dynasty had fallen apart within that nightmare, and such suffering had seemed likely to drag on much longer still. And yet now, at this very moment, word had come that thousands of li away, Ning Yi had, with terrifying force, overturned Zonghan’s entire battle formation.

Everything about it felt somehow less than real.

The three of them fell silent for a long while, until at last Junwu spoke, his voice touched with something like longing. “…The southwest must be a sea of fire and war right now.”

There was a kind of yearning woven through his words.

Just then, someone outside came to announce that General Yue had arrived.

…

Toward midday, the sunlight fell clear and warm outside the courtyard. Once Yue Fei arrived, everyone brought out maps and began working through the intelligence, running through the distant campaign again and again, replaying and re-examining it. During this time, Cheng Zhouhai, Han Shizhong, and a number of civil officials arrived one after another as well; on hearing the news, everyone’s expressions turned complicated.

People spoke and murmured excitedly among themselves. In truth, those who had once known Ning Yi seemed, if anything, quieter than the rest; Junwu let slip a little of his emotion only in front of a few close companions, and once the civil officials arrived, he no longer said anything untoward. Zhou Pei stepped aside, gazing out at the pavilion and scenery beyond a window, and found her thoughts drifting to Ning Yi as well.

In truth, the figure she had long carried in her memory had already grown quite blurred with time. The Ning Yi she had once known had been, after all, no more than a rather refined young scholar; since their parting in the capital all those years ago, the two of them had never met again, and everything he had done since — wiping out Liangshan, warring against the martial underworld — had always felt somehow unreal to her.

By the time he had murdered his sovereign and turned rebel, Ning Yi had become, more than anything, a dark silhouette in her mind — a silhouette that at times acted in extreme and violent ways, yet one she could not deny was also the very embodiment of true strength. It was a strength her own position could never quite define; even now, more than a decade after taking on the role of Princess of Chengguo and witnessing all manner of things, she still found herself unable to fully grasp just how strong the man who had once been her teacher truly was.

Crushing a Jurchen army — a feat that seemed like a dream to the people of the Zhou dynasty — was, for him, hardly the first time such a thing had happened. More than ten years ago in Bianliang, he had gathered a ragtag band and crushed Guo Yaoshi, a man who could once hold his own against the Jurchens, at Xia Village, and afterward joined forces with Grandpa Qin to break the siege of Bianliang. Later, at Xiaocang River, he had killed Loushi and Cibushi one after another, dealing the Jin state a heavy blow in the northwest.

All of that, though, could only be counted as localized engagements against the Jin state. But with the war in the southwest, the Huaxia Army had truly faced off against half the might of the Jin state itself. The victory at Tanzhou had caught everyone by surprise, yet was not beyond comprehension — at most it could be called a welcome stroke of fortune. But the war in the southwest — even the most optimistic and confident admirers of Ning Yi could hardly have guessed at the outcome unfolding today.

At most, people had assumed the Huaxia Army would use the terrain to hold the Jurchen Western Route Army in the southwest, buying time through prolonged maneuvering, hoping to find some sliver of survival beneath the Jurchens’ overwhelming assault. No one could have imagined that the Huaxia Army, with a mere few tens of thousands of men, would fight the Jin state’s nearly two hundred thousand elite troops to a standstill — and that afterward, Ning Yi himself would lead seven thousand men out to strike, and with that very first blow crush the thirty thousand men of the Yanshan Guard under Xiebao, cutting down Wanyan Xiebao himself before Nian Han’s very eyes.

In all his life, against any opponent, he had almost never truly been on the losing end. Even against a demon like the Jurchens, risen out of the White Mountains and Black Waters to overturn the entire realm — after ten years of tempering, had he truly managed to land such a devastating blow against them?

How must Wanyan Zonghan see him now?

The southwest… truly is a sea of unending war…

These were the thoughts running through her mind. This was the first time in years she had thought of Ning Yi so seriously, so intently — though that figure had long since blurred beyond clear recall. Facing the nightmare of the Jurchens’ southward march, he had gone forward to meet it, and walked so very, very far… She found herself dwelling, somewhat uselessly, on these old memories, wondering: if only, after the Battle of Xia Village, the wretches at court, Zhou Zhe included, had not been so foolish, how very different might everything today have turned out…

Outside the window, the peach blossoms on the trees had all fallen. She closed her eyes, and let out a soft, quiet sigh.

None of that would ever come to pass now…

…

Not far off, Junwu, having fallen silent for some time, called Wenren Buer aside as well, returning to the question he had been interrupted from asking earlier:

“…Master Wenren, on this trip — that militia leader named He Wen — is he truly… a man who once served in the southwest?”

…

Outside, sunlight was falling steadily. In Fuzhou, this small corner of relative peace, people felt a surge of joy at the news that had arrived. But beneath that same bright sky, far to the north, the clouds of gloom had not lifted at all — hundreds of thousands of soldiers, and a million enslaved Han people, were forming into a bloated column, crossing the Yangtze River.

Victory and crushing defeat converged here; triumphant return and desolation intertwined. High above, the victors drove their fellow men northward like a great herd of livestock. For one side, this was the road home; for the other, a road with no return, ever. Each day, more corpses were swept up by the waters of the Yangtze, rising and sinking as they drifted toward some distant hell.

The news that had just arrived would soon interrupt this pure mixture of joy and sorrow all the same.