Even long after riding away from Lexiang, Shamoke kept glancing back over his shoulder.
He could not help himself. Every few dozen paces, his neck would twist around on its own, eyes dragging back toward the camp they had left behind. Like a dog that keeps staring at a bone it was not allowed to finish gnawing on.
The camp outside Lexiang's ruined walls was nothing like anything he had ever seen. A chaotic, mismatched mess. A beautiful, stupid, impossible mess.
Jiangdong soldiers sat cross-legged right beside Wuxi tribesmen, sharing bowls of congee like they had been drinking buddies for years instead of trying to beat each other apart only hours ago. A Yizhou medic knelt over a Wu veteran with a badly fractured lower leg, carefully binding it with splints and clean cloth while the old man hissed and muttered prayers under his breath. Two Wuxi healers stirred a pot bubbling with something that smelled like boiled tree bark and bad decisions, ladling portions out to anyone willing to hold a cup.
And the Jiangdong survivors? They just sat there. Staring at their hands. Staring at the mud. Staring at the sky above. Whatever fire had driven them to swing their blades beside Han Dang had burned out the moment the old man hit the ground. They had nothing left to fight with. Nothing left to fight for.
One young Wu soldier, his left hand gone and replaced by a ragged bandaged stump, watched a Wuxi tribesman press a steaming poultice onto his wounded shoulder. He stared at the dark paste, then up at the tribesman, opened his mouth, then clamped it shut again.
The tribesman looked up. "What? Cat got your tongue?"
"Does it... does it hurt much?" the boy asked softly.
"Hurts like a mule kicking your grandmother right in the shin," the tribesman grunted. "But the swelling goes down by sunrise. You will live to annoy someone else another day."
The boy nodded slowly. Let the man finish applying the paste. He did not say thank you. He did not have to. The understanding between them spoke better than words ever could.
Shamoke watched all this from the saddle. His shoulder throbbed where the deep gash had been stitched shut. His hands still felt sticky with dried blood he could not bring himself to wash off. Han Dang's blood.
Two hours ago, he had knelt in the mud and closed a brave man's eyes for the last time. He had draped his own cloak over an enemy general's body and ordered him buried with full honors. Now those same enemy soldiers sat in his camp, eating his food, letting his healers piece them back together like nothing had ever happened.
It made no sense at all. It made perfect sense. Shamoke could not tell which it was.
A horse trotted up beside him. Zhang Ni, grinning like he had just heard the world's best joke.
"You keep looking back like you left your favorite wife back in that tent," Zhang Ni teased.
"Shut your mouth."
"I am serious, Chief. If you need to rest, rest. Go sit with them. Have a bowl of hot congee. Swap stories. Jiangling is not going to pick itself up and run away."
Shamoke shook his head. "We march now."
"You could easily march tomorrow. The road will not vanish overnight."
"We march today." Shamoke's voice was flat and final. Not because he did not want to stay. Because if he stayed any longer, he would start thinking about Han Dang's face. About the old man's last words. About the way his eyes had finally gone soft and peaceful, like a heavy burden he had carried for decades had suddenly been lifted away.
And Shamoke was not ready to unpack that feeling yet. Not here. Not now.
Zhang Ni studied him for a long moment, then shrugged dramatically. "Fine. But for the record, you are being an absolute idiot. I want that noted in the official history."
Shamoke almost laughed. Almost.
He straightened in the saddle and turned his gaze firmly toward the road ahead. He drew a deep breath that rattled in his chest, then stood high in the stirrups and filled his lungs until they threatened to burst. What came out was not a command or an order. It was a promise. A roar from the very bottom of his soul.
"WIN THIS BATTLE, AND OUR HOMES SHALL KNOW PEACE!"
Behind him, three thousand bloodied, battle-hardened warriors roared back with enough force to shake the dust off the road and scatter every bird from the treeline for miles around.
Shamoke settled back into the saddle and tightened his grip on the reins. He did not look back again.
There was no need. The camp would still be there when he returned. If he returned.
He rode forward. Toward Jiangling. Toward whatever fate had waiting.
---
High atop Jiangling's walls, Jiang Wan stayed right where he was. He had not stood up in two whole hours. His legs had gone numb sometime around the first watch.
But the heavy weight pressing down on his chest for days? That had finally lifted. He could feel it clearly. Like a boulder wedged behind his ribs had just been pried loose and tossed into the river below.
To the north, the Cao army was retreating. Not a panicked rout. Not a chaotic scramble. They moved in good order, banners still snapping in the wind, formations still holding tight. Yet the gaps were impossible to miss. Whole sections of the line had simply vanished. The kind of absence that told you thousands of men had been chewed apart and spat out somewhere south of here.
Jiang Wan let out a breath he had not realized he had been holding.
To the west, the battle at Lexiang had clearly run its course. The details were too faint to make out from this height, but the command banner still flying against the fading light was definitely not Jiangdong's. It stood taller, rougher, and bore colors he did not recognize.
That meant it belonged to friends. That meant Han Dang had fallen. That meant the southern approach was sealed shut.
"We have won."
He closed his eyes, opened them, and looked again. The banners still stood. The Cao army kept retreating. This was not some fever dream or a trick played by exhausted eyes. It was real.
Working out the odds on paper and watching them unfold before your own eyes were two completely different experiences. He had spent the last seven days calculating, planning, running numbers through his head until the figures blurred together into nonsense. Now the result was simply here, written in churned mud, empty ground, and the retreating backs of the enemy.
Jiang Wan allowed himself exactly three seconds of pure relief. Three seconds where he was not an Administrator, was not a strategist, was not the man holding a city together with math and sheer stubbornness. Just a man sitting on a wall, feeling the sun on his face, breathing air that did not taste of smoke and blood.
Then he opened his eyes and turned his gaze south.
That warm feeling curdled instantly.
One last problem remained.
Down on the beachhead, Lu Meng paced like a caged beast. He stormed back and forth screaming orders until his voice cracked, waving his sword wildly at the walls. Even from this distance, Jiang Wan could see the desperation radiating off him in waves. The man was unraveling. His officers flinched every time he turned toward them.
Jiang Wan leaned forward slightly and rested his chin in one hand.
For Lu Meng, only one path remained open.
Watching the man work himself hoarse on the sand, Jiang Wan felt something he had not expected. Not triumph. Not hatred.
Pity. Small, distant, and tinged with sadness.
Damn this broken world.
He sat back comfortably, smoothed the wrinkles from his robes, and poured himself a fresh cup of cold tea from the pot at his side.
---
"Utterly wiped out?" Lu Meng repeated. His voice shook. Not with rage, not yet, but with something far worse. The sound of a man hearing his own death sentence read aloud and begging the judge to say it again just to be totally sure.
The messenger kept his forehead pressed hard against the ground. Every part of him trembled. He stayed so still he barely seemed to breathe.
"Han Yigong!" Lu Meng bellowed.
The name tore out of him like a wound splitting open. Then his voice crumbled, dropped to something worse. "Yigong..."
He stood frozen. His hands clamped into trembling fists at his sides. The messenger stayed face down.
After a long, heavy moment, Lu Meng's jaw locked tight. He swallowed whatever grief threatened to overwhelm him and buried it deep beneath the only things he had left: purpose, mission, duty.
One small comfort kept him from falling apart completely. Geography. Lexiang stood on the southern bank of the Yangtze. He stood here on the northern bank, stuck besieging Jiangling. The relief force would need time to cross the river. Time to gather boats, organize the troops, sort out the crossing. He still had days.
But he was not fooling himself. He was backed into a corner with nowhere to run. And a cornered rat fights harder than a wolf in the open. If this was where it ended, he would make sure the bastards remembered his name.
He straightened up, drew himself to his full height, and turned to face his officers. When he spoke, his voice rang out across the beachhead.
"We shall honor Yigong's bravery! We shall fight to the death to repay Lord Sun's kindness!"
The generals and officers around him lowered their heads and bowed in solemn agreement. But their eyes told a different story. Lu Meng either missed it or chose to ignore it. The looks on those faces were cold, sharp, and calculating, every single one of them doing quick, grim math in their heads. Counting the dead. Counting the days left to survive. Counting just how much longer they could keep throwing good men against a wall that refused to crack.
Under Lu Meng's command, the Jiangdong offensive grew even more frantic. Charges came faster, harder, and far less coordinated. Men who had already stormed the walls three times that day were shoved straight back into the line. Men with bandaged arms, men whose eyes had gone hollow from what they had seen, all were driven forward again and again. And Lu Meng himself began drifting slowly toward the walls without even noticing. It was an unconscious habit, one step here, half a step there, like a man leaning toward a warm fire without feeling the heat rising around him.
Ever since that disastrous night raid on Gong'an, where his forces had been humiliated by those massive ballistae, Lu Meng had made it his business to master every detail of those weapons. Their range. Their reload speed. Their lethal reach. Within five hundred paces nothing walked away. At their absolute limit they could strike anywhere from eight hundred to a thousand paces. So Lu Meng had drawn a clear line in his mind: one thousand two hundred paces. That was his number. His safe distance. He would command from behind that line and let his men take all the risks up close.
To keep morale high, to show his soldiers their commander stood right there with them, Lu Meng had moved his command post to the very edge of that safe zone. Exactly one thousand two hundred paces from the city. Close enough to spot the defenders on the ramparts, close enough to feel like he was leading from the front, yet far enough to keep his head attached to his shoulders.
His shouted orders grew harsher and more unhinged by the hour. The weary men of Jiangdong wanted nothing more than to turn around, march back to their boats, and tell Lu Meng exactly where he could stick his "repay Lord Sun" speech. But the military enforcers stood behind them, blades out, eyes flat and cold, waiting for the first man to hesitate. So the soldiers swallowed their curses, kept their heads down, and charged blindly into the kill zone, clinging tight to whatever scrap of survival they could scrape out beneath Jiangling's walls.
"General Lu." An officer appeared at his shoulder, face pale, voice careful and measured, the tone of someone delivering news he knew would not land well. "General Zhengdong has retreated."
Lu Meng waved a sharp dismissive hand without even bothering to look around. "Go, go, stop wasting my time with him!"
The officer beat a hasty retreat.
Zhang Liao. That smug faced son of a turtle. The way he looked at me, like I was something stuck to the bottom of his boot. He dared call me "Lieutenant General" with that ugly smile of his, like the title was nothing but a bad joke. Then he walked past the charred wreckage of my bridge and said, "Jiangdong truly spares no expense," like he was just chatting about the weather. I wanted to smash that smirk right off his face with my bare hands. Wanted to drag him off his horse and beat him senseless. Now that bastard just rides away. Just because of one little setback. Bah. What a coward. A backstabbing bitch who never keeps his word. Were we not supposed to be allies? Cuih. All you Cao dogs really have no idea what honor or trust even means.
The thought made Lu Meng's teeth grind together until his jaw ached. Made his vision swim with hot unreasoning fury. Desperate to outrun the heavy weight of it all, he took one step forward. Then another.
The distance between him and the walls shrank. One thousand one hundred and ninety-nine paces. One thousand one hundred and ninety-eight.
He did not notice. Why would he? Two small steps. The difference between one thousand two hundred and one thousand one hundred and ninety-eight was nothing at all. A rounding error.
It was more than enough.
High atop the walls, something shifted. Something that had waited with endless patience for a target to drift just a little too close.
The Jiangdong soldiers charging ahead heard it first. A sharp crack cutting through the air. Not a bowstring snap. Not a horn blast. Something mechanical. Something no ordinary bow should ever be capable of making.
Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.
A heartbeat later the air split apart.
Boom.
And from the rear of the command position, Lu Meng screamed.
Up on the city walls, the crew manning the ballistae wore looks of obvious disappointment.
These four giant weapons were nothing like the standard models. Sleeker, longer, forged almost entirely from solid iron instead of the usual mix of wood and iron. Their specialized bolts were slimmer, crafted from steel spliced with fine wood, and gleamed with a cold deadly edge. Huang Yueying and the master artisans brought over from Gong'an had built every single one by hand right here during the siege. But they were still experimental, and one of them had snapped clean in half before it even fired a single shot.
Of the three bolts that actually flew, one slammed into the dirt ten paces short of Lu Meng and shattered into splinters. Another clipped his shoulder plate hard enough to spin him sideways. The third punched straight through his left thigh and kept going, burying itself deep in the mud twenty yards behind him.
The target was still on his feet, and the operators were far from happy about it.
Jiang Wan, on the other hand, looked completely at ease. He clapped his hands together once and beamed like he had just watched a perfectly staged play.
"The siege of Jiangling is officially broken! Every one of you has earned great merit today!"
One of the younger operators could not hold his tongue. "Administrator Jiang, the enemy general is still alive. We cannot rightly claim the victory yet."
Jiang Wan strolled to the edge of the battlements and let the cool river breeze ruffle his sleeves. He glanced down at the chaos unfolding on the pontoon bridge below and shook his head, looking thoroughly pleased with the world.
"Lu Meng is as good as dead."
Down below, all Lu Meng felt first was a sudden biting numbness in his leg, like someone had pressed a solid block of river ice hard against his thigh. Then his whole body wrenched sideways, twisted by a force he could not name, and he crashed face first into the mud. Mouth full of grit and slime.
Only then did the sound catch up, the delayed, earth-shaking crack of the heavy bolts. Three sharp reports rolling in like thunder, arriving long after the pain, like an afterthought written in iron.
Heavy ballistae. Elite bolts. The experimental prototypes.
Panic clawed at Lu Meng's chest, but panic was a luxury he could not afford. His brain was already running the numbers, and the result screamed with terrifying clarity. His left leg hung bent at a grotesque, unnatural angle. Not just broken. Not just fractured. Pulverized. The bone had been shattered into jagged gravel beneath the skin. Even if he lived. Even if he found the finest physician in all Jiangdong. He would never walk again. Never ride at the head of an army. Never stand at the prow of a ship with the wind filling his sleeves.
He would be less than half a man.
And something deep inside Lu Meng refused to accept that. Something small, vicious, and fiercely proud reared up in defiance.
Blinded by the pain, his fury erupted. Not grief. Not fear. Pure, hot, unreasoning rage.
"Help me up!" he screamed, spitting mud and blood. "Once we breach Jiangling, I swear I will chop that Administrator's head off and hang it from the north gate!"
The officers around him stared down without a sound. At his thigh spurting blood in a bright spreading fountain that turned the mud sickening crimson.
Not a single hand reached out. Not one knee bent to offer support. No one stepped forward to lift their commander. They simply stood and watched, their faces flat and empty, the look of men watching a dog thrashing in a ditch and wondering if it was worth soiling their own boots to step in.
A few even took a cautious half step back.
Blinded by pain and consumed by rage, Lu Meng missed the shift in the air. He did not see the way their eyes had hardened. Did not feel the sudden chill settling around him. He just kept screaming until his voice cracked raw and hoarse.
"Help me! Help me! Are you all deaf? I am your commander! Forward! All of you! Forward!"
"All of you, attack!"
The officers formed a loose half-circle around him. Not to shield him. Not to rally to his aid. Just to watch. To wait. To make sure no one else stepped in to spoil the moment.
Somewhere in the churned mud and blood and chaos of the retreating front line, a conscript heard that word.
And Zhou Hei heard it. Something inside him, something that had been holding together by a single fraying thread for weeks, finally snapped clean in two. Like a rope giving way under a weight it was never meant to carry.
He remembered the mud. The thick, sucking, grey stinking mud of the riverbank that seeped through his boots and turned his toes to ice. The kind that grabbed your ankles and refused to let go.
He remembered A'Gen, the scrawny sixteen-year-old boy who had vomited into the shallows on the first morning. The boy who had looked up at Zhou Hei with wide terrified eyes and whispered that he could not go on, that his legs would not move. That boy was already dead, swallowed whole by this cruel, meaningless war.
Zhou Hei looked at Lu Meng. Looked at the ruined leg pumping blood into the dirt. Looked at the officers standing back in their clean boots. Looked at the dark spreading stain swallowing the ground whole.
He looked down at the cheap ring-pommel sword in his hand. The kind of weapon that felt like it might snap in half if swung at a stiff reed. The scrap of iron his landlord had tossed him before shoving him onto a boat bound for war. Not even a proper soldier's blade. A farmer's tool, handed to a farmer, and expected to do a soldier's work.
He picked it up.
He walked forward.
The officers saw him coming. Not one moved to block his path. Not one raised a hand to stop him. They just watched, their faces slack with the hollow exhausted relief of men who had been waiting for someone else to do what they all secretly wished they had the courage to do.
Zhou Hei stepped into the half-circle and looked down at Lu Meng.
"General, I will help you!"
His voice was steady, calm. The kind of calm that only comes when your soul has already walked out the door and left your body behind to finish the work.
Lu Meng breathed a sharp sigh of relief. He forced himself to ignore the blinding fire in his leg and fixed his burning gaze firmly on the city walls ahead.
"Good. Help me up, boy. Once we breach Jiangling, I will..."
Zhou Hei drove the sword straight through Lu Meng's back.
It was not a clean thrust. It was not the practiced strike of a warrior. It was a farmer's blow. Awkward, desperate, two-handed. Driven by weeks of mud and fear and dead friends and the stench of copper and bowels and a sixteen-year-old boy who never got to go home.
The blade punched through lamellar plates, pierced deep into flesh, and burst out through Lu Meng's chest with a wet sucking sound.
Lu Meng stared down in disbelief. His eyes fixed on the bloody steel tip protruding from his own chest.
Damn. I will never conquer Jiangling.
In a final frantic spasm, Lu Meng shoved Zhou Hei away. The effort cost him his last shred of balance. He collapsed backward into the muddy water. The impact sent a fresh spray of crimson splashing across the ground.
From where he lay, looking up at the faces around him, Lu Meng finally saw them clearly.
He saw mockery. Disdain. Relief. Cruel satisfaction.
Standing over him, hands still clutching a cheap sword never meant for war, was a farmer. Not a general. Not a colonel. Not even a proper soldier. Just a man in mud-caked boots and an ill-fitting breastplate, dirt under his fingernails, eyes hollow and burning with the quiet fury of someone who had been told to go forward one too many times.
Zhou Hei looked down at Lu Meng. His lips moved. No sound came at first. Then, soft as a breath, barely a whisper:
"I just wanted to plant my turnips, General."
Not one of the officers had lifted a finger to stop it. They had watched it happen. They had let it happen.
Somewhere ahead, the battle still raged. Men still fought and died. But to Lu Meng, the world had fallen into total stillness. In his final moments, sharp clarity rushed over him.
He did not waste his last breath asking why. He already knew. This end had been coming for a long time. He had just been too busy shouting to hear the footsteps approaching from behind.
He turned his face toward the east, toward the direction of home, and whispered his final two words:
"Lord Sun..."
His eyes drifted shut. His hand, which had been reaching for something just out of grasp, fell limp into the mud. And stayed there.
Zhou Hei stood over the body, the sword still shaking in his grip. He stared at it. Then at the dead general. Then at the officers watching him in heavy stillness.
He let the weapon drop. It landed in the ground with a soft wet thud.
"Right," he said, his voice calm. "New plan. I am going home."
He turned on his heel and walked away. Not a single man moved to stop him. Not a single voice called out to detain him.
Behind him, the officers stared at Lu Meng's body lying still in the mud. One by one, they began to turn their thoughts to the stories they would tell. To the reports they would write. To the way they would frame the day so that none of them would ever be blamed for anything.
Zhou Hei did not care. He was already picturing his turnip patch.
---
By the time Shamoke and Zhang Ni finished the difficult river crossing and rode up to Jiangling's north gate, they found the approach lined with enemy soldiers who looked thoroughly relieved to be surrendering. The heavy weight of the siege had vanished from their shoulders, replaced by the comfort of knowing they would live to see another day.
After confirming their identities, the two generals ordered their men to make camp and were escorted up to the city walls. There they found Jiang Wan seated alone, drinking wine in the firelight.
Only a few cups sat on the table. Directly across from him rested a freshly severed head. Neither Shamoke nor Zhang Ni recognized the face, but they needed no explanation to guess whose it was.
They had never spent much time with Jiang Wan personally, but Ma Liang had spoken of his closest friend often and with great warmth. Because of those stories, Shamoke already felt a gentle sense of kinship with the Administrator.
After exchanging polite greetings, Zhang Ni got straight to the point. "Administrator Jiang, why are you not out celebrating this great victory with the rest of us?"
Jiang Wan let out a soft heavy sigh. He could hardly tell them the truth. That seeing Lu Meng's head brought in by his own mutinous officers had stirred up memories of the terrifying visions once shown in the Lightscreen, leaving him tangled in a mess of emotions too complex to untangle. At this moment, he missed Ma Liang more than ever. If his old friend were here, he would understand exactly what was passing through his mind without needing a single word spoken.
Since putting it all into words would take far too much effort, Jiang Wan offered a gentle excuse instead. "General Zhao is still out pursuing the Cao army. Once he returns, we shall mark this victory properly."
"General Zilong is here?" Zhang Ni gasped, his eyes going wide with shock.
Jiang Wan nodded calmly, and Zhang Ni instantly lost all interest in conversation. He practically vibrated with barely contained excitement, wondering if fortune might grant him the honor of sharing a cup of wine with the legendary General Zhao himself.
Among the common folk of Yizhou, no reputation shone brighter than Zhao Yun's. The man had crushed the treacherous Baishui Army and broken the stranglehold of the corrupt local clans that had bled the region dry for decades. Even the mighty Guan Yu could not claim such standing in their eyes. The cruelty of Cao Cao's army was a distant threat most people in Yizhou had only heard of in stories. But the crushing oppression of the local gentry families? That was a nightmare they had lived through every day for nearly twenty years. Zhao Yun had ended it, and the people had never forgotten.
Down on the field, Zhao Yun's pursuit of Zhang Liao had run its course. He had driven the Cao general all the way back toward Jiangxia, where a strong Jiangdong garrison still stood ready to receive him. The river barred any further advance, and with his own men exhausted and stretched thin, Zhao Yun had no choice but to turn back.
By the time he rode into Jiangling, night had fully fallen. But darkness was no barrier to the city tonight. Jiangling had always been a wealthy trade hub, and after enduring more than a month of terror, the city's merchants felt incredibly generous. They threw open their coffers and poured out their wealth to celebrate the survival of their vital trade routes.
No one bothered to enforce the usual curfew. Bonfires blazed at every major intersection, lighting the streets bright as day. Citizens tossed copper coins into the roaring flames as joyful offerings, a way to give back a fraction of the fortune they had managed to keep through the siege.
Jiang Wan could not resist joining the tradition. He reached into his robes and his fingers brushed against a single five-zhu coin.
It was the lucky token his Lord had given him in their very first year together. Ever since taking up the heavy burden of defending Jiangling, Jiang Wan had worn it pressed close against his chest, a constant reminder of the trust placed in him.
The bronze coin danced nimbly across his long fingers before coming to rest on his thumb. With a sharp flick, he sent it spinning high into the air, catching the golden firelight before vanishing into the heart of the bonfire in a shower of sparks.
Only then did Jiang Wan breathe out a long deep sigh of relief that seemed to rise all the way from his bones.
"My Lord, I have not failed your trust."
As for the prized head the surrendered Jiangdong officers had brought forward, Jiang Wan gave it one look and made his decision.
"Mount it on a fast horse and send it straight to General Guan Yu."