In the side courtyard of the Zhenbeiguan General’s residence, the autumn wind rattled the old elm tree beneath the eaves.
Leaves swirled through the window lattice and landed on Xu Qinghuan’s desk, half covering a secret letter.
The paper scrolls spread across the desk had piled up to the height of a handspan.
On top was a message from Amur at the Yinshan Baiyin Grassland, reporting that the Wanggu and Tara tribes had accepted the knife and salt payment and split up to raid the supply depot and horse pastures of the Kherch Right Wing.
Three routes of intelligence, three battlefields—all weighed down upon this narrow desk.
Xu Qinghuan pinched the military report on the Kherch grain route and stared at it for a long time.
It stated that Chen Changfeng was driving a hundred thousand iron cavalry south, with eight hundred grain wagons forming two convoys, guarded by no fewer than three thousand Kheshig soldiers.
She read this report over three times. Finally, she flipped it face-down on the table.
Her fingertip pressed against the back of the paper. She did not open the next one.
For seven or eight straight days, she had slept only two hours each night.
The chessboard of the northern frontier, the game in the capital, the schemes within the enemy camp—all had to run through her mind over and over.
One wrong move, one missed connection, and the cost would be the lives of the common people, the heads of her father and brothers.
After burning the candle at both ends like this, dark shadows had formed beneath her eyes.
She raised a hand to massage her forehead—sore and swollen, unbearably uncomfortable.
The door curtain stirred. Qingque walked in carrying a bowl.
The bowl held a calming herbal remedy, its steam dissipating quickly in the cold room.
“Miss, the army doctor just brewed it,” Qingque said.
She set the bowl on the corner of the desk, hesitated as if to speak, but glanced at the pile of secret letters and ultimately dared not plead any further.
Xu Qinghuan glanced at the murky black medicine but did not move.
A bowstring drawn too tight would eventually snap. She understood this truth better than anyone.
Drinking this bowl of medicine would only forcibly suppress her fatigue. Come dawn, her mind would still be clouded.
Better to go out for a stroll and let the cold wind beyond the pass blow the turbid thoughts from her head.
“I won’t drink it,” she said.
She stood up and randomly pulled a book from the old bookshelf in the side courtyard. “Come with me for a walk.”
It was a tattered copy of Basic Military Strategy of the Great Qian, not even the rawest recruits in camp would bother to glance at it.
She tucked the book into her sleeve, grabbed the black cloak hanging from the screen, draped it over her shoulders, and led Qingque out the door.
Outside the General’s residence, it was dusk.
Zhenbeiguan had been under martial law for three days; the main streets held few pedestrians.
From time to time, squads of patrolling soldiers marched past, the sound of their footsteps carrying far through the empty streets.
Avoiding the soldiers, the two took the back alleys toward the west side of the city.
Qingque lagged half a step behind, her gaze fixed on the book spine poking from Xu Qinghuan’s sleeve.
In all her time serving her mistress, she had seen classified dispatches and top-secret maps, but she had never seen her read such rudimentary material.
She held her tongue for the entire walk, but finally could not resist.
“Miss, this book… even those reckless young soldiers in camp wouldn’t bother with it. Why are you still carrying it?”
Xu Qinghuan pulled the book out and opened it to a page.
It showed a crudely drawn formation of wild geese—the lines were crooked, and the annotations beside it were stiff official jargon.
“Old things can always teach something new,” she said flatly. “Don’t underestimate the fundamentals that seem like bricks and mortar. The bigger the slaughter, the easier it is to trip over the smallest details.”
“Where a grain route is cut at a narrow pass, which side road a splinter force mistakenly takes—on paper, it’s just moving one line in this formation diagram.”
“But if you move it wrong, what fills in beneath it are thousands of human lives.”
She closed the book.
“These root matters—look at them once, remember them once. The day you truly face danger, if you can recall them in your mind, you won’t panic.”
Qingque nodded, half understanding.
She had thought her mistress was merely passing idle time, never imagining that even this randomly chosen, broken book held such deep calculations.
They reached a street corner. Ahead stood a half-collapsed tea shack.
Nobody lingered under it anymore; only a few broken-legged benches lay scattered about.
Xu Qinghuan stopped and gazed at the gray sky over the western part of the city.
The sun had long sunk. The clouds hung low, and the horizon beyond the pass was blurred—impossible to tell whether it was mountain shadows or smoke from beacons.
She looked at the base of the wall. A woman holding an infant was feeding her child a hard piece of wheat cake. The child cried; the woman wept too.
Xu Qinghuan let out a silent sigh in her heart.
Outsiders said she never miscalculated, that she was a ruthless Lady Zhuge—a female strategist without equal. But who knew that deep down, she was merely a commoner who wanted only to give away her family fortune and seek a safe retreat?
She had once tried to tarnish her own reputation to secure a banishment, but the mess had only snowballed, forcing her onto a blazing fire. Now, while the fate of Zhenbei City wasn’t entirely tied to her belt, one false step would still lead to ruin.
Xu Qinghuan suddenly spoke: “Qingque, have you ever heard the story of the ‘gatekeeper’?”
Qingque was startled and shook her head in confusion.
“Once upon a time, a village was flooded. A timid man fled as fast as he could to higher ground. As he ran, the floodwaters backed him up against the highest sluice gate,” Xu Qinghuan’s voice was carried away faintly by the wind. “He only wanted to save himself. But when he looked down, beneath the gate were countless villagers clutching floating debris, waiting for him to open the door to life.”
“If he let go and ran, everyone below would drown. If he held that thousand-pound lever, he would be pinned there for the rest of his life, forced to sleep with one eye open.”
Xu Qinghuan pulled her cloak tighter. Her gaze fell on the refugees.
“I used to think this story was false. At a moment of life and death, who could care for others? But now…” She paused, her tone revealing a deep exhaustion and clarity: “I realize that I am that man driven by the floodwaters onto the sluice gate.”
“Kherch’s hundred thousand iron cavalry are the water. The hidden arrows and open spears in the court are also the water. It’s not that I want to hold this northern gate. It’s that the torrents of this chaotic era, along with tens of thousands of lives, have forcibly pressed me here. One step back, and everything is lost.”
Listening to this, Qingque’s heart suddenly ached.
She remembered her own past: when war came to her hometown, neighbors and kin all died under the blades of mutinous soldiers. With nowhere to go, she had shaved her head and joined the army.
She had always thought her mistress was someone above the clouds, born to command storms.
But now, hearing this tone, she realized that her mistress had also been driven to a dead end by this cruel age.
Carrying the burden of countless lives, bearing the weight of ten thousand fates—how bitter must her heart be?
Qingque’s eyes grew hot. As she looked at Xu Qinghuan’s back, her earlier reverence transformed into an unwavering loyalty.
But Xu Qinghuan did not turn around. She gazed into the distance and muttered silently: “The barbarians are coming south. The people in the court still have their blades drawn, waiting to use my entire Xu clan to patch up the holes. If I don’t make my move on this chessboard, someone else will flip it.”
They spoke no more. Walking along the street toward the barbican, they suddenly heard a commotion near the corner gate.
Several gate-guarding soldiers had crowded together, struggling to hold back a man.
The man was short, wearing a tattered uniform tunic, with one empty sleeve dangling at his side.
With his remaining right hand, he gripped a wooden railing on the ramp leading to the city wall. Half his face was smeared with mud. One eye socket was deeply sunken, covered by a white film—he was blind.
The one remaining eye was now bloodshot with rage.
“Let me go! I have to go up there!”
The old soldier’s voice had long gone hoarse. “The barbarians are coming! I need to get on the wall, I need to kill barbarians!”
“Old sir, the city wall is under lockdown. Civilians aren’t allowed up!”
A young conscript was tugging at his belt, pulling him down. “Uncle! Ah, with your condition, you’d only add to the chaos up there!”
“Chaos?”
The old soldier’s single eye seemed ready to spit fire.
“How did I survive the White Wolf River? My brothers, a hundred thousand of them—all buried in that river! The ice froze into crimson slush!”
“I owe them a debt. If I don’t repay it today, when will I ever?”
He struggled wildly, the half of his body with the missing arm unable to find purchase, but he still rammed himself against the railing like a madman.
“Brother Zhang, why must you do this…”
The squad leader in charge of the wall hurried over, his voice thick with helplessness. “That life of yours was clawed back from a pile of corpses back then. You barely kept it till today. Why are you so dead set on feeding it to the blade?”
“What good is keeping this life!”
A turbid tear rolled from the old soldier’s single eye, mingling with the grime on his face and carving muddy tracks down his cheeks. “Keeping this broken body, eating free meals for twenty years!”
“The brothers from White Wolf River come to me every night!”
“They ask me, Zhang Laosan, why are you still clinging to life? Why haven’t you come to avenge us?”
As he spoke, his legs gave way, and he fell heavily to his knees on the rampart path.
“I need to go up… let the barbarians taste it—this old bone of mine, Zhang San, can still draw blood…”
The soldiers couldn’t bear to drag him off by force anymore. They just surrounded him, at a loss for what to do.
Xu Qinghuan stood not far away. She did not step forward, nor did she speak.
She simply watched.
She watched the empty sleeve, the sunken eye socket, the fingers scraping blood from the mud.
The name “White Wolf River”—she had seen it countless times in military reports and secret letters.
It was just a place name, an old battle from a hundred years ago.
But at this moment, that place name suddenly took on flesh and blood.
It was the old soldier’s missing arm. It was his blind eye. It was the nightmare that had haunted him, night after night, for twenty years.
The war had not yet truly begun, but its portent was already pressing down on every brick and stone of this city.
Pressing down on the infant in the refugee’s arms. Pressing down on this old soldier’s severed limb. Pressing down on the stack of secret letters, a handspan high, on her desk.
The wind howled back through the gate passage of the barbican, whipping dust into everyone’s faces.
The old soldier kept muttering about White Wolf River, about the brothers buried beneath that frozen river. His voice grew weaker and weaker.
By the end, it was impossible to tell if he was cursing or weeping.
Xu Qinghuan stood there for a long time.
The reluctance and emptiness she had felt in her heart moments ago—stirred by the old soldier’s cries—now sank completely.
What rose in its place was a cold, hardened resolve.
A century-old debt.
This debt was owed by the Heren people. It was remembered by the hundred thousand ghosts of White Wolf River. It was being carried on half a life by this old soldier kneeling before her.
Chen Changfeng wanted to use the barbarians’ blades to settle his Chen family’s private grudge.
But in this world, how many people were there like Zhang Laosan—burdened with blood debts that could never be repaid, waiting for someone to collect them on their behalf?
She had always thought that the conflict between Great Qian and the Heren had nothing to do with her, a person from a different world.
She had always felt that she was being pushed along by the chaos.
But now it seemed that some roads had to be walked, even if no one pushed you.
There was no retreat. So she would not retreat.
“Let’s go.”
Xu Qinghuan turned around and tucked the “Fundamentals of Great Qian Military Strategy” deeper into her sleeve.
“Back to the residence.”
Qingque acknowledged the order and followed closely at her heels.
Behind them, the old soldier’s weeping curses were finally swallowed by the northern wind from beyond the pass.
