In the third month of the first year of Wuzhenxing, with the Battle of Wangyuan Bridge as the turning point, the southwestern campaign, which had already lasted four months, entered the phase of the Chinese Army’s strategic counteroffensive.

The struggle and slaughter over control of the roads unfolded alongside the “peace negotiations” over the prisoner exchange. Though it was only a matter of exchanging a few hundred prisoners, the Jin side still put considerable effort into vetting the list. On the third day after negotiations began, the Chinese Army deployed four columns of troops extending toward Huangming County and Yushui Creek, clearing a path for pursuit.

The Jurchen side likewise moved its troops swiftly. Even as the Chinese Army advanced, the Jin forces raised white banners, brought out every weapon they had, and put on the posture of a full-scale, do-or-die offensive by a grieving army. In the first few days, this posture appeared extremely resolute; in several key local areas, Jurchen units even launched fierce assaults, the fighting intense and fragmented, positions crisscrossing back and forth.

Looking back on it, this seasoned feint deceived a good many people for a time — though it could not be called pure feint either. Had the Jurchens truly thrown caution to the wind and pushed recklessly into the Chengdu Plain, then in the long run they might not have made it home, but in the short term they could still have caused the Chinese Army a great deal of trouble. Because of this tactic, the Chinese Army’s movements in the first days of the month were relatively cautious, and because the Jin army’s posture appeared so convincing, efforts to turn men like Li Rulai were in fact delayed.

Such a situation naturally could not last long. On the sixth of the month, as several of the Chinese Army’s special operations units continued their steady, resolute advance, the Jurchens’ position at the front could no longer hold. That day, as Balisu led the front-line troops in a general offensive, the main Jin force began to withdraw — and the moment the last card was revealed, the mountain battlefield stretching for dozens of li suddenly erupted into chaos.

From Lion Ridge to Xiukou, the attacking troops met dense artillery fire; half of the remaining rocket shells were approved for use, and tens of thousands of Han troops were pinned down before the battlefield. Turning the Han troops became, at this point, one of the keys to the battle.

Although most of the rank-and-file soldiers in the Jin army still did not understand the significance of what had happened days earlier at Wangyuan Bridge, and the Han troops had been strictly cut off from any such news, senior commanders like Li Rulai understood full well how things stood. If at first they had only half-believed the rumors that the Jurchens intended to retreat, by the sixth their true intentions had become unmistakable.

The large-scale offensive at the front was carried out with great show of force, and Wanyan Saba kept a close watch on Li Rulai and the others — but through the Chinese Army’s espionage network, the necessary information still reached several key commanders.

For this round of turning, the terms the Chinese Army offered were, in fact, far from generous. Once they switched sides, the various Han units would have to throw themselves immediately into battle, taking charge of the counterattack, encirclement, and annihilation of the advancing Jin forces — in every particular, this was a variation on the Liangshan blood pledge, a whitewashing that had to be paid for in lives. Aware that the war had entered a critical stage, Li Rulai and the others had tried at one point to drive up the price, but the Chinese Army’s negotiators would not budge.

The man responsible for turning Li Rulai was Xu Shaoyuan, a Chinese Army officer who had once worked under Ning Yi in the secretarial office. He had already made contact with Li Rulai twice before with success. By the sixth, given how tightly the Jurchens were watching him, Xu Shaoyuan had originally planned to deliver a final ultimatum to Li Rulai by letter — but through some remarkable feat, he managed to swap identities with one of Li Rulai’s own guards right under the Jurchens’ noses, allowing the two to meet face to face.

After conveying the Chinese Army’s demands, Li Rulai’s face darkened and he began airing his grievances — that his men’s fighting strength was weak, that the “Jin dogs” watched him too closely to notify everyone in time to act, that facing Balisu would be suicide, and so on. Eventually he even resorted to a veiled threat: that if they didn’t surrender, with tens of thousands of men blocking the road, it would cause trouble for the Chinese Army too. Xu Shaoyuan only shook his head coldly.

“Headquarters and the general staff have already decided. If you don’t turn by midnight tonight, we attack and cut straight through you. If you fake turning and hold the road without really fighting, we’ll cut straight through you all the same. This is Plan Two — the preparations are already in place.” Xu Shaoyuan said, “Mr. Ning also asked me to pass along a few words to you.”

“…Go on.”

“Mr. Ning says: for a long time now, you have been generals of the Wu Dynasty. You should have defended home and country, ready to die wrapped in horsehide — and you failed to do so. Of course, you have your reasons. You can say that for more than ten years, no one managed to win a single decisive victory against the Jurchens. But that victory has come today.”

“The Chinese Army carved out a path with its own lives. If you want to walk it, then bring out your lives too — pick back up the dignity and character you’ve thrown away these past ten-odd years, and fulfill your duty as soldiers. Of course, if it turns out you can’t manage even that, if you think you’re only fit to cause trouble for others, that only proves you have no worth living for… All these years, the Chinese Army has never once been afraid of trouble.”

The unsparing words Xu Shaoyuan delivered left the other man’s expression somewhat strained. Li Rulai was silent for a long while, then had Xu Shaoyuan escorted out. But just as Xu Shaoyuan was leaving, he added one more line: “Go back and ask Mr. Ning something for me too… doing things this way — when the wall comes tumbling down someday, isn’t he afraid everyone will come and give it a final shove?”

That night after dark, a large-scale uprising broke out in the Han army’s camp. About a quarter of the troops immediately moved to attack the Jin forces, another quarter gradually followed suit, and the rest of the units fell into utter chaos.

Wanyan Saba, in charge of overseeing the Han troops, led his personal guard into conflict with Li Rulai’s rebelling forces, and eventually fought his way out through the heavy encirclement Li Rulai had arranged.

Amid the vast, rolling mountains, a fierce struggle for control unfolded. During this time, most of the First and Second Divisions took on the task of pinning down Balisu head-on at Lion Ridge and Xiukou, while the most capable field units of the Fourth and Fifth Divisions, together with the several thousand men led personally by Ning Yi, threw themselves one after another into blocking, storming, and annihilating operations along the mountain roads of the Jin retreat.

On the sixth of the month, roughly seven thousand men launched the first attacks on six key points along the retreat roads; by the eighth this had grown to thirteen thousand; by the tenth, the forces pushing forward had reached twenty thousand, with the leading edge of the assault extending all the way to the rugged terrain of Yushui Creek.

From Wangyuan Bridge to Jiange was a distance of less than a hundred li — a forced march could cover it in a single day — yet nearly a hundred thousand Jin troops found themselves stopped dead on the winding mountain roads.

In truth, faced with the reality of retreat, the Jin troops and commanders, understanding that surrender offered no hope, put up a fierce and stubborn resistance. Although the Chinese Army now wielded firearms far ahead of their time, in the rugged mountain paths the power of those firearms was inevitably diminished to its minimum. The pursuing Chinese Army units had to travel along paths even rougher than the roads themselves, carrying only limited weapons and supplies. Their advantage lay only in the fact that seizing a single point could block an entire army — but in localized engagements, the Jin’s numerical advantage reasserted itself, and they no longer needed to fear the Chinese Army’s firearms as much as before.

Recognizing this, Wanyan Zonghan, in this retreat, did not act by fleeing in haste. Instead, he divided and mobilized the various Jin units by formation, spelling out the task down to every individual commander of a thousand: whenever they encountered a Chinese Army blocking force, they were to halt, mass their local numerical superiority, and swallow that portion of the Chinese Army whole.

From a purely strategic standpoint, one had to admit this response was entirely sound, and it precisely reflected the shrewdness and tenacity that Wanyan Zonghan had honed over a lifetime of campaigning. But what he had not considered — or perhaps had considered but could do nothing about — was that from the very moment the great army began its retreat, the invincible morale that Wanyan Aguda, Wanyan Zonghan, and their generation had spent thirty years forging within the Jurchen army had finally begun to crumble.

The hardships of the earlier advance into the southwest could still be attributed to facing an evenly matched enemy — after all, the Jin army had fought hard battles before, and the enemy’s strength had even stirred their blood. But now, with a numerically superior army turning to retreat, this fact alone silently spoke volumes.

Among the officers, the more perceptive ones still worked to maintain and rally morale, and in localized engagements in the mountains, the fighting remained ferocious and intense — Jurchen troops charged madly at the Chinese Army units blocking their path, with commanders leading from the front, determined to cut a road open for the retreating main force, to use their numerical advantage combined with the sprawling mountain roads to devour the Chinese Army piece by piece.

But the situation was undergoing a subtle shift. Even in close combat with cold steel, where the Jin were once masters, they now began losing again and again in what had always been their strength. Fearless Jurchen warriors were cut down and left lying in pools of blood, and some soldiers, having begun to value their own lives, chose to break and flee instead.

This shift was soon reflected in reports reaching the Chinese Army’s forward command: although the Jurchens’ responses remained extremely shrewd, and some commanders even displayed sharper, more proactive tactical thinking than before, and though the fighting remained fierce and aggressive, in large-scale coordinated engagements there increasingly appeared instances of excessive recklessness or premature collapse. They were gradually losing the composure and resilience that came from coordinated teamwork.

“…When Jurchens, accustomed to fighting like savages, start relying on numerical superiority, it shows that their decline has already become unmistakable.”

On the tenth of the month, Ning Yi’s orders and assessment spread through the entire army, and before long reached the Jin side as well: “What we need to do next is to strip away their dignity piece by piece, mile by mile, along this hundred-li mountain road, until every single one of them understands clearly: this so-called ‘ten thousand cannot be matched’ is nothing but an outdated old joke!”

The quality of the Jurchens, once the finest army of this age, was crumbling — but for an ordinary army, they were still a nightmare. On the eleventh, Balisu and Saba’s forces, holding the front line, began to withdraw and break out after suffering enormous losses, and the Han army units that had been left in the rear stirring up trouble suddenly became lambs before a trapped beast.

Though caught in a squeeze from both sides, Li Rulai and the others, not daring to retreat, put up a stubborn resistance. But after a full day of fighting, Balisu and Saba still managed to lead their men cutting straight through Li Rulai’s camp, and the turned Han units suffered heavy casualties.

For Li Rulai and the Han troops, this proved something of a blessing in disguise. Years later, he would remark with a sigh: “At least those of us who survived can now hold our heads up before the Chinese Army.”

After news came of his elder brother Yinshuke’s death, Balisu tied a white cloth around his forehead and fought with extraordinary ferocity. Yet in the way he deployed his troops, this seasoned Jurchen commander maintained remarkable clarity and reason, rallying his men’s spirits with the posture of a grieving army, cooperating with Wanyan Saba to cover the rear and stubbornly resisting the pursuit of the Chinese Army’s Fifth Army, First and Second Divisions.

Ahead, in the mountains, conditions were growing steadily more difficult amid the brutal fighting.

Against the Jurchens’ bitter resistance, scouting operations continued unrelentingly through the complex terrain of the mountains. On clear days one could sometimes see wildfires spreading, smoke rising; on rainy days the mountain paths grew slick and treacherous, making passage even harder. The roads were repeatedly cut open by Chinese Army raiders, or mined, or seized at some key point by Chinese Army forces. While the assault on these points was underway, the following troops would be jammed and blocked across the mountains and valleys, and at such times, stray shots would occasionally fly out from the woods, striking down some officer or leader — and in the crush of the crowd, there was hardly even room to dodge.

Yuyu continued to lead his scouts and elite Jurchen soldiers, racing through the mountains to block the Chinese Army’s pursuit, and for a time managed to cause the pursuing Chinese forces real trouble. On the fourteenth, the scouting unit under Yuyu’s command encountered the First Regiment, Second Brigade, Fourth Division of the Chinese Army — an elite regiment later known as the “Hero Regiment of Victory Gorge.” In the previous year’s “Fire-Swallowing” operation at Yushui Creek that shattered Elili’s forces, this regiment, under Regimental Commander Shen Changye, had blocked the enemy’s retreating main force at Victory Gorge, suffering over fifty percent casualties without yielding a single step.

Regimental Commander Shen Changye himself had fallen in battle in the mountains a month after the fighting at Victory Gorge. The man who now held his position was Qiu Yunsheng, formerly the commander of the Second Battalion. Upon encountering Yuyu’s forces, he directed his troops into battle.

Yuyu was a veteran commander who had risen alongside Aguda, originally the shrewdest of hunters, moving through mountains and over ridges as though on level ground, able to loose an arrow with deadly accuracy even in pitch darkness. Qiu Yunsheng, by contrast, had come from a peasant family; his relatives had died fleeing the chaos in the Central Plains, after which he was conscripted into Tian Hu’s forces and, somewhat by accident, ended up joining the Chinese Army during the assault on Xiaocang River. Upon encountering Yuyu, he had his troops engage frontally using the terrain, while he himself, relying on advantages gained from earlier reconnaissance, took a company of men around the most treacherous, slickest section of the mountain path to encircle Yuyu’s rear.

After the battle ended, Yuyu’s body was pulled from among the dead.

News of the victory spread across the entire battlefield — for the Jin forces, of course, it could only be counted as one more piece of grim news.

Nor would it be the only grim news of the month.

On the sixteenth, Dalai died in battle, leading from the front as he always had.

Throughout the more than four months of the southwestern campaign, this hot-tempered Jurchen commander had thought constantly of avenging himself against Qu Zhengyan for an old defeat suffered years before in the northwest, and the Chinese Army had drawn up several contingency plans in response. But in the end, no such confrontation ever took place — the two sides never once faced each other directly on the battlefield from start to finish.

On the sixteenth, Dalai led his troops in an attack on a small hill called Fish Ridge along the retreat road, attempting to surround and drive off the Chinese Army unit dug in there, which was threatening the road along the mountainside. The Chinese Army held the high ground and defended it; the fighting lasted most of the day, jamming up tens of thousands of troops waiting behind. Dalai personally led three charges.

During one assault that had nearly reached the hilltop, a severely wounded Chinese Army soldier, lying in a pool of blood, suddenly rose up in a final act of desperation. At the time eight Jurchen warriors still stood guarding Dalai, but amid the frenzied clash of blades, no one managed to react in time — the two men exchanged blows: Dalai’s long blade ran the charging Chinese soldier straight through the chest, while the soldier’s own blade came down squarely on Dalai’s face. The helmet was split open, and half of Dalai’s skull was cleaved apart on the spot.

The fighting did not stop for this. That night, the Chinese Army troops holding the hilltop finally withdrew, driven off by cannon fire the Jurchens had managed, with great effort, to haul into position. But the road a li beyond was soon occupied again by Chinese Army soldiers, who dug it up and buried mines in it.

A hundred thousand men were crammed onto the winding mountain road, like some monstrously oversized serpent trying to squeeze through too narrow a passage, and every Chinese Army attack was like driving a nail into the serpent’s body. Because of the terrain, none of these engagements were especially large in scale, but each one brought this great serpent nearly to a complete stop.

Both sides were suffering enormous losses, but as time passed, what settled over the Jin forces was an anxiety that deepened by the day. By this point, from commanders down to common soldiers, everyone had come to realize: the hunters had become, entirely, the hunted. The bloated, unwieldy Jin army had grown desperate to escape, while the outnumbered Chinese Army forces had latched on like a maggot burrowing into bone, determined to tear this prey apart, piece by piece, down to the skeleton.