Chapter 1005: Journey to Nanjing (5)

Nanjing was a major city located downriver on the Yangtze.

But Nanjing wasn’t just any major city. It was a ridiculously, absurdly huge major city—so huge that if you insisted on slapping “great” in front of it, you’d have to call it a great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great city.

Because it really was a city big enough to deserve eight “greats.”

You could tell just from the name. There was Beijing in the north, and Nanjing in the south. That alone told you the status it held.

And meanwhile.

The Yangtze flowed on.

“The Yangtze’s endless waters roll and roll.” It was one of the poems the people of the Central Plains loved most—by Du Fu, the Poet Sage.

The pleasure boat riding atop that Yangtze also never stopped drifting onward, and before long, far ahead, the view of a huge city appeared—its riverside packed tight on both the left and the right.

So big you couldn’t take it in with human eyes all at once. A cityscape so gigantic it didn’t fit inside a single frame of vision.

Qing had thought Jagwi County had become a fairly decent city in its own right, but looking at that... Jagwi County suddenly felt like nothing but the backwoods.

And after such a long voyage, the Seol Family Trading House’s pleasure boat finally arrived at one of the greatest metropolitan hubs under heaven.

Its name was—

Wuhan!

Because Nanjing was still far away.

Strictly speaking, Wuhan wasn’t the name of a single city but a regional name—more precisely, it was what you called the three cities of Wuchang, Hanyang, and Hankou together as one.

Add the populations of those three cities up, and Wuhan’s population came to roughly one hundred thousand.

Someone might say, In a primitive ancient era like this, how could one city possibly have a hundred thousand people living in it? That’s ridiculous.

But what could you do?

It did.

At this point in history, the Central Plains population made up more than a third of the world’s population—meaning one out of every three people on earth was from the Central Plains.

Rice’s staggering ability to support huge populations, the brute-force yields that came from land that never seemed to tire, and then a long period of peace layered on top—

That was how you got a population explosion.

Anyway, Nanjing was still far away.

...Because it was far too early to say they’d reached it. Only five days had passed.

Even that was thanks to timing: a large pleasure boat with no heavy cargo, late spring when the current was generous, and spring winds blowing from the west—this was the fastest season. That was why they’d reached Wuhan in five days.

And from Wuhan to Nanjing, they still had at least another ten days or so to go.

Qing hesitated for a moment.

Should she stop in Wuhan briefly or not?

In the current martial world, when you said Wuhan, you meant the Zhuge Family, and when you said the Zhuge Family, you meant Wuhan, didn’t you?

It had been a while. Should she go say hello to Hyang, and maybe take a look at that loudmouth Zhuge too...?

Mm. No.

Qing put the thought away almost immediately.

Because right now, getting Yoye back to normal was urgent—and things like that, the so-called “dark past” of a rebellious phase, were better when fewer people knew about them.

So that loudmouth Zhuge was... probably not.

And so, they passed Wuhan, and the boat flowed along with the river again.

This time, truly toward Nanjing!

*****

Dawn had low saturation.

A time when all the colors beneath the sky looked bleached, when every shade settled into nothing but light gray and dark gray.

Across this ash-colored dawn grassland, there was only smoke rising from fires.

A warrior’s meal was supposed to be noisy by nature, but for some reason, despite the countless tents, what lay over the camp in this early dawn was nothing but a tense silence.

It was the silence of dawn before a campaign.

How much time passed like that?

By the time the sun carefully lifted its head over the jagged outline of the Great Khingan Mountains, ten thousand cavalry were already lined up in quiet formation on the wide grassland in front of the tents.

Ten thousand Mongol cavalrymen, hard as iron.

And what were Mongol cavalrymen, really?

They weren’t merely well-trained riders. Each and every one was a martial master who had honed martial arts to an extreme degree.

For Mongol warriors who worshiped warriors, martial arts were basic qualifications—something you trained from childhood as naturally as breathing.

Someone might sneer, How would Mongol barbarians even learn martial arts?

But the truth was, the Mongols had their own indigenous martial discipline—somewhere between sorcery and martial arts—and that was part of how they’d once dominated the world.

And back when they ruled the world, the Central Plains had been under Mongol rule too—so they seized all sorts of divine arts from the Central Plains and pushed their own development even further.

Of course, Central Plains martial arts weren’t all that appealing to the Mongols as a tool.

Because Central Plains martial arts built inner imagery in Taoist and Buddhist colors and obsessed over “enlightenment,” and to the Mongols, that sounded like floating-cloud nonsense. Like, what the hell are you even saying?

But the underlying principles were superior to almost any combat art of the age, so they took what was worth taking and grafted it onto their native Mongol martial discipline.

And so, a properly trained Mongol warrior’s martial arts were never lacking even compared to a martial artist of the martial world.

And there was more.

A martial artist of the martial world was just an individual, each person showing their own strength.

As a collective army—an organized force—there was no great development.

But the Mongols were warriors by nature, and warriors were an army.

If ten thousand martial artists gathered, that was nothing more than ten thousand martial artists.

But if ten thousand Mongol warriors gathered, they became a single unified army.

Especially because of the hallmark of Mongol martial discipline: the bow.

Mongol arrows shot with energy didn’t travel in an arc—they flew in a straight line, with enough power to punch through iron plating from over a hundred jang away.

A unified cavalry force, firing those arrows freely while mounted.

Even calling it “invincible” wasn’t enough.

And Mongol warriors didn’t consider it shameful to run when things turned unfavorable.

They would riot around, shooting arrows like maniacs—and the moment it looked even a little bad, they’d wheel their horses and flee.

That filthy style of battle was enough to become the nightmare of the entire world.

And those horrible bastards could shoot arrows backward while galloping on horseback.

If you left them alone, they’d charge in, shoot arrows, and loot.

If you tried to fight, they’d run—while shooting arrows behind them—so the more you chased, the more you only kept losing.

And if you gave up chasing and pulled back, that was when they turned around and charged again while shooting—

Masterful horsemanship that fused rider and horse as one.

The superior mobility of bastards who lived on horseback.

The superior logistics only possible because they lived on horseback.

Overwhelming firepower projection in both power and range.

A filthy war ethic with nothing resembling fair play—enjoying things like using captives as shields and flinging enemy corpses like projectiles.

And on top of that, once they dismounted, each individual was basically a superhuman who had trained martial arts.

Add all of it up, and from the opponent’s perspective, a single sentence burst out on its own:

Fuck, these assholes fight war so goddamn dirty.

That was exactly what this army was—

The ten thousand Mongol warriors currently moving south across the grassland, led by Suh.

Reaching the forested zone at the southern edge of the grassland, where the Lesser Khingan Mountains began, the Mongol warriors lined up in a neat single file and climbed a mountain path that had already been cut open in advance.

And so the sun rose higher, then slowly sank again.

They handled lunch and dinner on horseback, slept at night under blankets, and when the sun rose again, ate dry rations on horseback while climbing the mountain path—

Two straight days.

And at last, a massive wall appeared, blocking the Mongol warriors’ line of march.

The Great Wall.

Not the main trunk that later generations would call the Ten-Thousand-Li Great Wall—only a branch line.

But people called anything built to keep barbarians out “the Great Wall” anyway.

But.

That barrier had a huge hole punched right through it.

That was how the Mongol barbarians crossed the Great Wall.

Clearing a warrior’s path was the work of the warrior’s family—women of the clan, the elderly, the disabled, and other non-warriors settled in, secretly smashed and dug, and made a passage.

So did the Central Plains soldiers just stand there and watch them punch holes in the Great Wall?

They didn’t.

Because they didn’t know.

The Great Wall stretched ten thousand li. How could people possibly watch every part of something that long?

Especially when the wall ran through uninhabited places—cliffs, areas with no water—remote stretches that were realistically hard to maintain.

Those blind spots were supposedly checked and repaired by northern garrisons who periodically marched out and inspected them.

But still... the Great Wall was simply too long.

And so, through the hole blown open in the Great Wall, the Mongol warriors finally set foot in the territory of the Central Plains.

There was just one problem.

One hole.

Ten thousand warriors.

Just crossing through it took an entire day—a disaster in its own right.

But in any case, they crossed the Great Wall.

Once they did, the terrain softened noticeably, and the Mongol warriors began descending the mountain between tall conifers rising on both sides.

And then, finally, the view in front of Suh—leading at the head of the column—opened wide, revealing a vast plain with nothing to block the sightline, stretching to the far distance.

The Liao River Plain.

The greatest granary of the northeastern Central Plains.

It already felt different from a barren grassland where only short grass grew.

Unlike the steppe, the moist, rich black earth was enough to feed Liaoning Province’s two million people and still have surplus to sell—northward, and southward by boat, as a traded commodity.

Looking at it, awe settled into Suh’s expression—

And alongside it, a thick anger.

Just one mountain range. Just one Great Wall.

And the difference was this enormous?

And with so many crops growing across every inch of visible land... why did those base livestock of the Central Plains refuse to sell even a handful of rice...?!

But the suffering days of having no grain—the miserable days of surviving on stinking meat and more meat—

They were over now.

“Warriors! We march for Beijing!”

Before ten thousand mounted warriors, Suh raised his voice and declared the strategic objective of the invasion.

In other words, he only revealed the objective after they had crossed the mountains °• N 𝑜 v 𝑒 l i g h t •° and stepped into enemy territory.

Naturally, confusion appeared on the warriors’ faces.

Beijing?

Of course, they’d suspected this campaign wasn’t an ordinary one.

Ten thousand had gathered here.

You didn’t send invitations across the clans and invite famous great warriors just to go steal a little grain.

So they’d guessed something like: they were going to aim for Shenyang, the greatest city in the northeastern Central Plains, and pull off a real score.

But—

Beijing?

With ten thousand warriors, Beijing was certainly something you could attempt.

But if you meant to strike Beijing, there was one massive problem.

“My brother Suh, I do not doubt your valor. Still, I must ask—how do you intend to cross Shanhai Pass?”

Shanhai Pass.

High walls five jang tall cut across the land of the Central Plains, and ten fortresses—large and small—were placed in an interlocking arrangement to provide mutual defense.

An impregnable fortress.

Shanhai Pass completely blocked the narrow plain that connected Liaoning to the Central Plains, and it was the most horrifying obstacle that prevented Mongol barbarians from invading the Central Plains.

“That is nothing to worry about. Brothers who share the Teaching of Blood have already seized Shanhai Pass. When we stand before it, the gate will open on its own and welcome the people destined to become the masters of blood.”

Shocking news.

We already ate it.

The warriors’ morale shot straight into the sky.

“We will capture the king of the Central Plains, reclaim the ancestral lands of our people, and that will be the rebirth of the Great Yuan Empire and the Great Mongol Empire!”

“WAAAAAAAH!!!”

As if nothing had happened, the Mongol warriors were swept up in ecstasy, faces flushing red as they unleashed a thunderous roar.

Yes—this was it.

This was what it had to be.

Look at that declaration just now.

Drag down the king of the Central Plains, stand tall as the Great Khan of the Great Yuan Empire and the Great Mongol Empire.

Open a new era for the people as Mongol Great Khan—even without being of the Golden Clan.

Wasn’t that the ambition most fitting for a young hero?

And the ten thousand warriors gathered here would pass down their names for generations as the strongest warriors who flung open the gates of the Mongol Empire once more.

And it didn’t end there.

Their clans would also rise at a stroke into the mainstream of the new Mongol Empire and enjoy the status of great nobles.

The Mongol warriors’ chests swelled, vast and heavy......