[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"origin-from-special-forces-to-the-multiverse":3,"chapter-from-special-forces-to-the-multiverse-from-special-forces-to-the-multiverse-chapter-199":6},{"origin":4,"title":5},"chinese","From Special Forces to the Multiverse",{"chapter":7,"nextChapterSlug":19,"prevChapterSlug":20,"totalChapters":21,"novelImage":22},{"id":8,"novel_id":9,"title":10,"slug":11,"index":12,"content":13,"wordcount":14,"created_at":15,"updated_at":15,"volume":16,"translator":17,"content_hash":18},2315249,4527,"Chapter 199: Xin Qiji","from-special-forces-to-the-multiverse-chapter-199",199,"\u003Cp>Yanshan, Piaoquan.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Xin Qiji received the news on the twenty-sixth day of the twelfth month. It did not come from Lin’an, but from Jiankang. His old subordinate from his time in Zhenjiang, Tian Hu—a retired soldier who had been out of service for years—rode a lame packhorse two days and one night from Jiankang to reach Yanshan. This veteran had once fought alongside Xin Qiji against the Jin troops in Geng Jing’s camp, later followed him to suppress tea merchant rebels in Jiangxi, and after being disbanded by the court, returned to Jiankang to run a tea shop for a living. When the northern expedition first began, Tian Hu had written Xin Qiji a letter saying that all the young men in Jiankang had enlisted; the docks rang daily with gongs and drums, and everyone said this time they would truly cross the Yellow River. In his letter, Tian Hu asked Xin Qiji—“Brother You’an, is this really true?” Xin Qiji never replied to that letter. He did not know how to reply.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Now Tian Hu stood in the courtyard of Xin’s home beside Piaoquan, his tattered cotton robe splattered with mud, his wrinkles carved by the cold wind like deep gashes. Xin Qiji led him into the study and poured him a bowl of hot tea. Tian Hu did not drink it; instead, he pulled a crumpled official bulletin from his chest and placed it on the table.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The bulletin was a full copy posted by the Jiankang prefectural office. It contained every clause of the Song-Jin peace treaty: annual tribute of five hundred thousand taels of silver and five hundred thousand bolts of silk; military assistance payment of three million taels; cession of Tang and Deng prefectures; delivery of Han Tuozhou’s severed head to the Jin; the state letter acknowledging “mistaken governance and provocation of conflict”; and the final clause—“If the steppe peoples launch a southern attack against the Jin, the Southern Song must supply grain, military rations, and open the Yangtze waterways to assist the Jin in establishing a second defensive line from the Huai River to the Qinling Mountains.”\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Xin Qiji read the bulletin from beginning to end twice. The first time he read quickly, as if trying to scrape the characters off the paper and cram them into his mind. The second time he read slowly, pausing after each clause, as if dismantling every character to examine its bones. When he reached the joint-defense clause, his fingers lingered on the four words “assist the Jin” for a long time.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Tian Hu sat across from him, silent. He had served Xin Qiji for decades, had seen him rage—rages that sent him leaping to his feet, swords drawn a third of the way, eyes blazing with fire, impossible to stop. But he had never seen Xin Qiji like this. Xin Qiji’s face was not red—it was white. White from forehead to chin, like paper drained of blood. His hand holding the bulletin trembled, but not from fear—from the effort of restraining himself from going mad.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Xin Qiji slowly placed the bulletin on the table, smoothed it with his palm, then stood and walked to the window.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Outside, Piaoquan glowed faintly in the winter dusk, water seeping from rock crevices, drop by drop falling onto moss, sound barely audible. Distant mountain shadows dissolved into blurred ink in the twilight. He stood there, shoulders rising and falling slightly. Tian Hu heard his breathing—deep and slow, as if each inhalation drew the entire winter of Yanshan into his lungs, each exhalation trying to blast the fire within out, but the fire could not escape, for it had already frozen.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>“Tian Hu,” Xin Qiji spoke, his voice unexpectedly calm, “do you remember how many of us were in Geng Jing’s camp back then?”\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Tian Hu hesitated: “I remember. General Zhang, Jia Rui, you, me, and…”\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>“And Wang Shilong,” Xin Qiji said. “Wang Shilong, a hunter from Tai’an, the best archer—could hit a rabbit’s eye from three hundred steps. On the day the Jin surrounded the camp, he held the rear alone, exhausting three quivers of arrows. I asked him if he wanted to break out with us. He said one thing.” Tian Hu lowered his head—he could not recall those words.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Xin Qiji remembered. “He said, ‘You’an, my mother is seventy. I don’t want her to see me kneel before the Jin.’” His voice remained calm, but Tian Hu saw his back trembling—not his shoulders, but his entire frame shaking from the spine outward. “Later I learned the Jin hung his corpse on the gate of Tai’an for seven days. I was twenty-one then. I thought I would never live to see a Song man kneel to the Jin.” He turned to face Tian Hu, his eyes devoid of tears, only ash left after fire burned to its end.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>“But today I saw it. Not one man kneeling—but an entire court kneeling. Tian Hu, do you know what this ‘joint defense’ clause means?” Tian Hu shook his head—he truly did not fully understand.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>“It means—” Xin Qiji stepped to the table, lifted the bulletin, pointed at the line, and his voice shattered its calm like a long-held flood finally breaking its dam: “It means that after eighty years, after countless soldiers’ lives, after Han Tuozhou’s head, what Song has gained is not the recovery of the Central Plains, not the washing away of national shame— but to haul grain for the Jin! To build fortifications for the Jin! To serve as the Jin’s shield!”\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>His hand shot upward—the bulletin flew into the air with a rustle. The paper flipped twice, then drifted slowly down, landing on the table’s corner, on the floor tiles, beside the teacup. Tian Hu had never seen Xin Qiji destroy anything.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>“Yuanjia’s hasty campaign—” Xin Qiji suddenly murmured those four words, voice rasping like sand grinding stone. He sank into his chair, one hand propping his forehead, the other limp on his knee. He recalled the poem he had written in Zhenjiang—“Yongyu Le.” Back then, the northern expedition had just begun; Han Tuozhou was brimming with confidence. Standing on Beigu Pavilion, gazing at the Yangtze, Xin Qiji had been filled with dread. He had written: “Yuanjia’s hasty campaign, sealing Mount Juxu, won only a hasty northward glance”—he feared Han Tuozhou’s overconfidence, feared the northern expedition would repeat the disaster of Liu Song’s Yuanjia campaign. But he never imagined the outcome would be worse than Yuanjia’s defeat. Yuanjia’s defeat lost only hundreds of thousands of troops. Today’s treaty, signed by Song, had wagered the entire realm as the Jin’s funeral pyre. His fears had all come true—but in a way ten times more cruel than he had foreseen. What did “a hasty northward glance” matter now? Now they had lost even the right to glance northward—because the enemy did not come from the south, but from the north, and Song now served as the Jin’s supply line, standing as its frontline shield.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Worse still, his dread had never been the Jin’s strength—but the rise of the steppe. Long ago, he had sensed the blood in the north from the Jin’s unusual deployments, pieced together the outline of the Xinming Party from the accounts of returnees. In his memorials to Han Tuozhou, he had written: “The Jin abandon small towns and defend only the great ones—not because they cannot hold them, but because they refuse to waste their strength against us. Their elite are all stationed in the north; the southern front is merely a delaying tactic.” Now every word had been proven true—but the cost was written in black and white in the treaty’s “joint defense against the steppe.” His despair was not because Song had lost—Song had lost too many times; he had grown accustomed to finding the next opportunity amid Song’s failures. His despair was because Song had bound itself willingly to the Jin’s sinking ship.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>He fell silent for a long time, then spoke—not to Tian Hu, but to himself. His voice was so low it was nearly inaudible.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>“I traded ten thousand words on subduing the barbarians for a neighbor’s book on planting trees.” He recited lines from his “Zhegu Tian,” written at the end of Shaoxing, when he had been dismissed from his post as assistant magistrate of Jiangyin and lived idle at Dai Lake, his strategies useless, forced to plant trees to pass the time. “Mei Qin Shi Lun,” “Jiu Yi”—those northern expedition plans he had penned through countless nights—had all been buried in court archives, exchanged for books on horticulture. And now, even that “book on planting trees” could not be had—because the land for cultivation was to be seized by the court to pay debts. He could not even become a simple farmer.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>He rose, walked to his desk. Opened before him was his annotated copy of “The Art of War,” ink long dried, bamboo slips dusted with a thin layer of ash. He pushed the scrolls aside, spread out a sheet of paper, lifted his brush, and held it above the surface. Outside, twilight had thickened into darkness; wind slipped through the window crack, making the oil lamp’s flame sway. He had sat beneath this lamp for forty years—forty years ago, he had crossed south from Shandong, full of vigor, believing the court would restore the Central Plains under his hand; thirty years ago, he suppressed rebels in Jiangxi, won dozens of battles without defeat, convinced the court would summon him to lead the northern expedition; twenty years ago, he guarded Zhenjiang, daily studying maps of the Jin’s northern defenses, waiting for the court’s command. Now he was sixty-two. What he had waited for was not the horn of the northern expedition, but this bulletin. It read: the Southern Song must supply grain and rations to the Jin, assist the Jin in establishing a second defensive line.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Forty years ago, when he killed Jin soldiers in Geng Jing’s camp, if someone had told him that forty years later Song would sign a treaty acknowledging “mistaken governance,” and write into its state letter the obligation to haul grain for the Jin, he would have cut that man down. Now the man’s words were true.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>His brush descended, heavy upon the paper, ink spreading. He copied the “Yongyu Le” he had written in Zhenjiang, word by word. When he reached “Yuanjia’s hasty campaign, sealing Mount Juxu, won only a hasty northward glance,” his hand trembled; when he reached “Forty-three years, still in memory, the beacon fires of Yangzhou’s road,” his eyes finally reddened; when he reached the final two lines, he paused long, then pressed his brush down hard—“Who now asks: Old Lian Po, can you still eat?”\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Lian Po was old; the King of Zhao sent an emissary to see if he could still eat, to learn if he could still fight. Lian Po ate a dou of rice and ten catties of meat before the emissary, donned armor, mounted his horse, proving his worth. But what of Xin Qiji? He could still eat, still drink, still swing a fifty-catty iron spear. But the treaty was signed; grain must be hauled for the Jin; fortifications must be built for the Jin—what war could he fight now? Whom would his sword cut? Whom would his “Art of War” serve? No one came to ask. The King of Zhao at least sent an emissary to Lian Po. Song’s court did not even ask. He had waited a lifetime—for the court to acknowledge “mistaken governance and provocation,” for Song’s people to haul grain for the Jin. What use was it if he could eat? If he could ride? If he could kill? Even if he could eat, there was no battlefield left.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>He finished the last character, laid his brush on the inkstone, and suddenly smiled. The laugh was light, brief, like a dry winter branch snapping underfoot. Tian Hu stood at the door, motionless, not daring to move or leave. He watched Xin Qiji slowly rise, walk to the wall where the map hung. The map was Xin Qiji’s own, drawn over decades, revised again and again, ink lines layered thick, some places worn thin. Xin Qiji raised his hand, fingers resting on the Huai River line, pausing a moment, then slowly moving north—to the Yellow River, to the Yan Mountains, to the blank region of the Jin’s northern frontier. He had marked that region vaguely, for he had no better intelligence. He knew only that there, a force called the Xinming Party existed—red banners, firearms, cavalry like walls. He stared at that blank space a long time, then turned, walked to the door, gazed at the old pine tree in the courtyard. The pine had been planted the year he moved to Piaoquan—twenty years now, grown twice his height. Moonlight fell on its branches, dusted with thin frost.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>“Tian Hu.” He called.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>“Your servant is here,” Tian Hu instinctively straightened his posture.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Xin Qiji turned to face him. In the moonlight, his face was no longer the color of ash—it had kindled something again. Not hope—there was no such word left in this era’s space for him. It was something hard as granite, unyielding.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>“Carry these words for me—to everyone you can reach: former frontline comrades, old friends from the martial world, junior officers—anyone who still remembers how to write ‘Great Song.’ Tell them four things.” He extended four fingers, bending them one by one.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>“Do not forget the steppe. The Jin are not our enemy—not yet. The true enemy lies to the north, that red banner. Whoever forgets this is the next traitor who will bring down the state.”\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>“Do not trust the Jin. ‘Lips and teeth’—those four words are written on paper. When the Jin cannot hold back the steppe, they will unhesitatingly shove Song forward as their shield. At that moment, the treaty will save no one.”\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>“Do not become slaves. Shi Miyuan’s treaty is not merely about ceding land and paying tribute—it has pulled out the backbone of Great Song. From now on, we cannot raise our heads before the Jin, nor before the power behind them. But the backbone grows on our own bodies—not a court decree can tear it out. I, Xin Qiji, will not kneel. Neither must you.”\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>He finished the first three fingers, paused, then bent the last.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>“Do not forget—I am still a subject of Great Song.”\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Tian Hu’s tears fell. This veteran, who had fought half his life, broken three ribs, been captured by the Jin, forced to drink chili water, and never shed a tear, now stood in the winter night of Yanshan, staring at the white-haired old general before him, tears streaming uncontrollably.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>“General Xin…” Tian Hu knelt, bowed his head, “Your servant remembers. Take care.”\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Xin Qiji waved his hand—just as he had waved to Lu You decades ago by Jinghu Lake—not a denial, but a weariness seeping from his bones. Then he turned back to the study, closed the door. The oil lamp flickered from the draft, then steadied. He walked to the map, gently circled the vague blank region of the Jin’s northern frontier with his finger, then picked up his brush and wrote four characters beside it.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>“Red Banners Flutter.”\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>He put down his brush, sat in his chair, and gazed out at the winter night of Yanshan. The night was silent—so silent he could hear snow slipping from the pine branches. The water of Piaoquan still dripped, drip... drip... like an endless hourglass. The northern expedition was dead. Song’s backbone had been torn out by Shi Miyuan, snapped in two—one half sent to the Jin, the other buried beside the Huai River. But Xin Qiji was not yet dead. His old bones could still hold out for a few more years. Until the day, whenever it came. Until his eyes saw red banners surging from the north, until his ears heard the thunder of iron horses and icy rivers—or until he could hold out no longer—on whatever day, he would keep his eyes open.\u003C\u002Fp>",2679,"2026-06-20T13:48:22.834Z",1,"Qwen3-Next 80B","5cb41b953f4ac35a6a8a5bfbe49c8e15565bf69293f9507bd43194fd599550d6","from-special-forces-to-the-multiverse-chapter-200","from-special-forces-to-the-multiverse-chapter-198",205,"https:\u002F\u002Fnovelzhen.com\u002Fimages\u002Fcovers\u002Ffrom-special-forces-to-the-multiverse-cover.jpg"]