Chapter One: Yuhe Fort

Liu Chengzong waded anxiously into the shallow, meandering river, lifting the hem of his fur-lined red armor skirt and crouching down to plunge the water skin into the icy flow with trembling hands.

In the second month of the year, the river was rimmed with ice flowers; the water was bone-chilling, so cold it made his teeth ache, and as it slid down his throat, it felt as if an invisible hand clutched his windpipe.

Rising, he stepped back a few paces, squinting as his gaze drifted past the dry riverbed and withered grass on the opposite bank, reaching toward the distant, undulating ridges of barren mountains.

The drought had changed the face of northern Shaanxi.

Only after a while, when the faintness from hunger in his belly subsided a little, did he press a hand to the hilt of his wild-goose-feather saber and trudge across the cracked sandbanks of the riverbed, heading for the official road.

Beside the road, a dried-up tree was tethered to a Mongolian piebald horse.

The horse was docile, though a little too thin, making its head look oversized. A few months ago, its long forelock had been pure white, and it was called Three-Fats.

But later, its owner had a fit of madness and dyed its forelock bright red with cinnabar, and its name was changed accordingly—to Red Banner.

Red Banner carried quite a load: bridle and saddle, of course, but also a bow and arrows slung on its left haunch, and two wild geese tied to the right.

Beneath the geese lay a lean, black-haired Shaanxi greyhound. Like Red Banner, its fate had also changed; once called Cang Biao, it was now known as Little Whirlwind.

Little Whirlwind’s fur was bristling and soaked, shivering from the cold but still sniffing hungrily at the scent of the wild geese, clear drool dripping from its mouth and pooling on the ground.

There was something wrong with Liu Chengzong.

He bore two sets of memories.

Not long ago, after a fierce fever, another set of memories—dating from four centuries into the future—had melded with the eighteen years he already possessed.

These two memories tangled and conflicted with each other, severely disrupting his life.

Take this horse, for example. Before, when he saw this black-maned Mongolian horse, his first impulse was to call it Three-Fats and give it some fodder.

Now, with its forelock dyed red, he found himself calling it Red Banner, and even half-wished he could fit it with an engine.

As for what had happened to him, Liu Chengzong suspected he had swallowed the very soul that memory belonged to… After all, his hunger had become so constant that, having not eaten his fill for months, he felt that if a ghost appeared before him, he might well devour it.

Now, he liked nothing better than to find a quiet spot and sit, sifting through the strange and dazzling world of the future in his mind, learning odd new knowledge, and even wishing he could live in that world where hunger was unknown.

But every time his daydream ended, he returned to drought-ravaged Shaanxi.

The boots of a border horseman stamped down on the cracked yellow earth. In the distance, half-collapsed, ramshackle homes and adobe-sealed cave dwellings rendered the official road desolate.

The dead old elm tree, stripped of bark, stood stubbornly in place, its fallen branches scattered on the ground, untouched.

Liu Chengzong let go of the reins, crossed the road, and walked to the ruined house by the roadside, picking up a large adobe brick. He smashed a gap in the mud-plastered door of the sealed cave dwelling, peered inside through the dusk-lit opening, then crawled in.

Soon, he emerged carrying a clay water jar, which held half a candle, a length of hemp rope, and a block of black whetstone.

When he crawled out, he had a dirty ladle stuck in his waistband and an ancestral spirit tablet clamped under his arm.

As for the most valuable item, he cradled it in his arms, wrapped in a gray cloth—a bronze mirror whose polished face could never quite shine.

As he walked toward the large elm across the road, Liu Chengzong muttered, “Looks like your descendants aren’t coming back. Let me, Liu the Lion, take you to Yuhe Fort, so the bandits don’t come back and burn you for firewood.”

He was neither beggar nor bandit, but a licentiate with an enviable, respectable post.

He was an active-duty soldier in the nation’s border guard, under the northern Ming outpost of Yansui Town, directly commanded by He Renlong, the garrison chief of Yuhe Fort.

His position was that of a household retainer and vanguard, six years training in arms, a year and a half in service—riding swift horses, drawing bows of a hundred catties—elite among elites.

But even the best cannot stand against an empty treasury.

Yuhe Fort could no longer sustain its people. It lay closer to the Mongolian steppe beyond the Great Wall than to the city of Yan’an, and was defenseless against drought.

Last year, despite careful irrigation, the borderland’s crops withered and died. The farming folk hanged themselves or abandoned their fields to flee south.

The old elm survived the drought but not the starving masses; its bark was stripped clean by beggars, leaving a bare, lifeless trunk that soon withered.

“What a pity.”

Standing beneath the old elm, Liu Chengzong looked up at its barren branches, not a single bud in sight, licked his cracked lips, and led his horse onward.

Yuhe Fort was not far now. The sunset’s fiery clouds cast the castle’s shadow in stark relief. Had this tree lived, in a month it would have been time to eat elm-seed cakes with white flour.

Yet, it wasn’t the death of the tree he truly mourned; the tree was dead, but those unknown souls who’d survived by eating its bark yet lived.

What grieved him was that Yuhe Fort had neither flour nor elm seeds—only four hundred hungry border troops and just enough millet to keep them half-fed for a month.

Soon it would be time to recruit refugees to sow the one hundred forty-five qing of military farmland, but there were neither seeds nor oxen.

This year, most of the fields would lie fallow; that was a certainty.

It was no surprise the land was deserted. Liu Chengzong had served here as a soldier for over a year, and the farming population had turned over twice—each wave smaller than the last.

In the seventh year of Tianqi, he and his elder brother were driven from the martial exam in Yan’an and recruited by He Renlong into service at Yuhe Fort, just as the border farmers fled en masse to central Shaanxi.

The farmers toiled all year, only to reap less grain than they’d sown. How could they not leave?

By last spring, a new group of refugees from the mountains toiled for a year, only to suffer the same fate—some fled south, others joined the bandits in the eastern hills.

In these times, land was not scarce in northern Shaanxi.

The soil was poor, the harvests meager—sevenfold return on a bushel of millet was the mark of a master. Military fields abounded at Yuhe Fort, awaiting hands to till them; any peasant willing to come could sow all he wished.

But this land, plagued by drought nine years in ten, could not hold its people.

Nor could Yuhe Fort.

When He Renlong recruited him, it was with the promise of double pay and double rations for a household retainer: one tael and five qian of silver per month, and two shi of millet.

A shi was a measure of volume; with millet’s small grains, two shi was nearly three hundred jin.

Add to that the monthly silver—scarce and precious in Shaanxi, where the government’s “one-whip law” demanded all taxes in silver, making it hard currency. During summer and autumn tax season, a tael of silver could buy three shi of millet.

It was an excellent wage.

Two years ago, Liu Chengzong’s father, a provincial degree-holder, had served as a ninth-rank tax officer in Yan’an—a proper imperial official, earning just five shi of millet per month.

But his pay, like those future jobs offering twelve hundred to twenty thousand a month, was illusory; the latter part didn’t count.

Fifteen months defending the borders for the Zhu family, even bringing back a Tatar scalp in the autumn campaign, yet the court not only failed to provide rations, but also withheld pay and rewards.

The meager hundred jin of millet had to cover everything—salt, vegetables, sauce, cloth—every need exchanged for food. There was barely enough left to eat, let alone to feed Red Banner and Little Whirlwind. The pressure was immense.

By now, the imperial house owed him sixty-two taels and five qian of silver—equivalent to forty-three thousand seven hundred and fifty copper coins.

No wonder Liu Chengzong, under the pretext of hunting, seized the chance to rummage through abandoned homes for anything that might help make ends meet.

Today’s find—a clay jar of odds and ends—put him in rare good spirits. Patting Red Banner’s big head, he said with satisfaction, “Big Head, you’ll have your fodder tonight!”