Chapter 182: The Central Front Stalemated

Dengzhou is not Tangzhou.

Li Yi saw this clearly during his reconnaissance on the fifth day of the third month. Dengzhou sits at the confluence of the Tuan and Diao rivers, surrounded by water on three sides; its walls, reinforced during the Dading era of the Jin, are faced with blue bricks and packed earth, rising thirty-five feet high, with an arrow tower every forty paces along the ramparts. Worse still outside the city—the Jin troops had dug a new moat south of the city, filled it with Tuan River water, and behind it built a low wall, behind which stood dense rows of sharpened wooden stakes, painted black, appearing from afar like a leafless grove of dead trees.

Li Yi rode his cavalry around the high ground south of the city for half an hour, his heart sinking with each passing moment. He pointed his whip southward and said to his deputy: “This is not the posture of a force preparing to abandon the city.”

On the eighth day of the fifth month, Xue Shusi arrived with the main force of the central army beneath Dengzhou’s walls. He did not rush to attack. The central front’s tactics differed from the eastern front—the eastern front was a hammer, smashing open a breach and charging in; the central front was a chisel, striking steadily, inch by inch. Xue Shusi established his main camp five li south of the city, spending three days first fortifying his position: digging moats, building earthen walls, erecting arrow towers, laying out caltrops, turning his encampment into a miniature fortress. Only then did he tour the city with his officers. By the time they finished, every face was grim. Dengzhou’s defenses were stronger than Lingbi’s, and the central army’s siege engines were inferior to those of the eastern front—only two heavy trebuchets, the rest light marching crossbows, with far shorter range and lesser power. More critically, intelligence reported that Dengzhou’s commander was Wanyan Kuang, a Jin royal clansman who had spent ten years in the northern frontier garrisons; even excluding the troops withdrawn from Tangzhou, he still commanded at least six thousand men. Six thousand men defending a strong city, with ample grain and unbroken water supply, could hold out for two or three months without issue.

Yet Xue Shusi had fewer than thirty thousand troops truly usable for siege operations.

The first probing attack began on the eleventh day of the fifth month. Xue Shusi committed two thousand men to a feint assault from the south, aiming to map the city’s defensive firepower. The two thousand never reached the moat—the Jin troops had lined the low wall with countless archers and crossbowmen; arrows rained down thick and accurate, felling entire ranks the moment the Song soldiers neared the moat’s edge. Worse still, the Jin deployed two bed crossbows atop the walls—bolts as thick as spears, each capable of piercing two shields at once. One squad leader was pinned to the ground by a bolt; his shield was pierced clean through, and the soldiers behind him recoiled in terror.

“Retreat.” Xue Shusi lowered his flag, his face unreadable. The two thousand men withdrew; casualties were counted—thirty-seven dead, over a hundred wounded. This was only a probe.

For the next seven days, Xue Shusi employed every siege tactic imaginable. The trebuchets pounded day and night, but with only two machines, their stones merely dented the walls—no collapse was possible. He attempted tunneling—two hundred miners from his ranks secretly dug from behind the camp toward the walls; on the fourth day, the Jin discovered them and dug a cross-trench inside the city, flooding it with water. The Song miners were drowned when their tunnel collapsed into the flooded trench—dozens who failed to escape were suffocated underground. He tried fire—concentrating the oil jars seized from Tangzhou, he sent men under cover of night to douse the city gate with oil and set it ablaze; but the Jin had anticipated this—the gate was sheathed in three layers of iron, packed with wet clay; after burning all night, only the outermost iron layer was charred.

By the eighteenth day of the fifth month, the Song army had not even touched Dengzhou’s walls. Casualties had mounted to nearly four hundred. Morale in camp began to sag. Soldiers feared not battle, but fighting without ever seeing the enemy—enduring arrows, stones, and crossbow bolts day after day, never laying eyes on the foe; this slow, grinding attrition was the true killer of spirit.

Wanyan Kuang stood atop the southern gate tower of Dengzhou, watching every Song assault. He was not as fierce or brutal as Heshilie Zhizhong of Lingbi, but his calm was another kind of terror—he never counterattacked, never pursued; when the Song retreated, he did not even open the gates. He merely inspected the defenses once each morning and evening, walking the full circuit of all four walls, personally checking every battlement, every crossbow, every pile of boulders. In hand, always, a small teapot, sipping slowly as he walked, like an elderly official strolling his own courtyard. His most repeated words to his men: “No rush. When they rush, we do not.”

This “no rush” was more agonizing than any ferocity. Heshilie Zhizhong in Lingbi fought to the death—you could fight him, and whether you won or lost, it was over with a sense of release. Wanyan Kuang refused to fight—he crouched behind his walls, sipping tea daily, watching you run back and forth beyond the moat like a spectator to a play unrelated to him. You did not attack, he ignored you. You attacked, he repelled you with the barest effort. You lost men, he did not even clear the battlefield—the corpses lay exposed, rotting, their stench poisoning the Song besiegers themselves.

Xue Shusi sat before his map all night in his tent. He had a solution—if he sacrificed all casualties and threw every man into a frontal assault, Dengzhou might still fall. Thirty thousand against six thousand—even if half died, the city would break. But then what? The eastern front had already suffered nearly three thousand casualties at Lingbi; if the central front lost another few thousand elite troops, even if Dengzhou fell, the northern expedition’s strategic strength would be crippled. He was not Guo Ni—Guo Ni was a general, and generals cared only for winning the battle before them. Xue Shusi was a commander—he had to think beyond Dengzhou, beyond the city itself. Taking Dengzhou was not about holding Dengzhou—it was about opening the road to Bianjing. If you shattered your fist on the way, what would you use to strike at Bianjing’s gates?

He rose and stepped outside. The Nanyang Basin had grown hot by mid-May; the camp reeked of horse dung and sweat. In the moonlight, Dengzhou’s silhouette crouched heavily in the distance, its torches along the walls like a row of wolf’s eyes. He suddenly understood one thing—Wanyan Kuang was not trying to hold Dengzhou—he was using Dengzhou to stall him. One day delayed, one month delayed. Until the Jin could redeploy forces from the northern and western fronts; until the eastern army bled itself dry at Suzhou and Xuzhou; until the Song treasury was exhausted, the peace faction in court rose, and Grand Tutor Han’s resolve wavered—Dengzhou was a nail, not driven into the central army’s foot, but into the very timeline of the northern expedition.

On the twentieth day of the fifth month, Xue Shusi sent a military report to Lin’an. He worded it with extreme caution—neither concealing the difficulty of the siege, nor suggesting the central army had lost its strength. In the end, he used four words: “The campaign is stalemated.” Then he detailed Dengzhou’s defenses, Jin troop strength, and his own strategy—shift from direct assault to prolonged encirclement, sever Dengzhou’s supply lines, starve Wanyan Kuang into submission.

At the end of the report, he added a telling passage: “I observe the Jin’s military strategy: abandoning frontier outposts, concentrating main forces to defend key passes—not out of cowardice, but to conserve strength and await opportunity. As long as Dengzhou stands, Bianjing remains unattainable. I shall exert every effort to break it, but I also urge the court to compel the eastern and western fronts to advance in concert, to divert Jin forces from the western theater.”

He sealed the report with red wax, handed it to the courier, then returned to the map, staring at the Tuan River north of Dengzhou. The Jin’s supply boats came through there. He pondered how to cut it off. Dengzhou’s battle was not one of slashing bloodshed—it was one of slow, simmering heat. Such battles test not the valor of soldiers, but the patience of the commander.

And patience, precisely, was the scarcest commodity since the northern expedition began.