Chapter 488: The Worm

"The Red Eyebrows stole thirteen dan of grain from my family. I ought to hack them thirteen times just to break even."

Under Xiang Ziping's command were only a paltry fifty able-bodied men from the hamlet. The most zealous of them was none other than that honest, simple neighbor of his — his wife had just given birth last year. Under Wei rule, taxes were not as crushing as before, and by diligence they had scraped together some savings. Their household had finally begun to taste a little comfort, only to have it all snatched away by the Red Eyebrows.

Small freeholders are that fragile. A single natural disaster or man-made calamity can wipe out the savings of years, even generations, reducing everything to zero.

Along the road they met a man nicknamed "Old Red Brow." They heard he came from Dong Commandery and had been a Red Eyebrow a few years back, yet now he hated the Red Eyebrows to the marrow of his bones.

"When we joined the Red Eyebrows back then, we were driven by the river floods. We had no way left to live."

"But now…"

This former Red Eyebrow bandit spat and said: "After we were defeated back then, His Majesty took us in and reorganized us. We toiled for a year as laborers and were then released. We helped the government troops farm in Wei territory — the rents and taxes weren't too heavy. Save up one more year, and I could have put up a thatched hut and scraped together enough to take a wife. The moment the Red Eyebrows came, they plundered every last grain, didn't even spare the cloth. My savings — gone again! It's exactly like when the river waters swept my belongings away back then."

"They may not have killed me, but what difference is there from killing me?"

That was why he was willing to join the Wei army and raise his butcher's knife against his former "brothers and sisters."

"Indeed, the scourge of the Red Eyebrows is worse than the Great River."

But Xiang Ziping felt that their bunch of civilian laborers would never get the chance to encounter the Red Eyebrow Army, because the main task of the volunteer troops from Henei was not combat, but transporting supplies.

When mules, horses, oxen, and donkeys ran short, they had to rely on civilian laborers with shoulder poles and deer carts. These deer carts were not Diwu Lun's invention — they were small carts from the Ji Province region, already in use since Han times. Unlike ordinary man-drawn handcarts, they had only a single wheel. On these roads, where the ice and snow had just melted and mud was everywhere, one grown man could easily push or pull them. They could carry people or goods, and their transport capacity was several times greater than a man carrying loads on a shoulder pole.

The Fifth Emperor had traveled from Yecheng to Chang'an, and he had slightly modified these deer carts unique to Ji Province and promoted their use. Now they were the Wei army's main transport vehicle — carrying army provisions on the way out, and the wounded and sick on the way back.

The civilian laborers were protected between the vanguard and the rear guard. The moment an enemy drew near, they had to immediately unload the armor from the carts so the soldiers could don it and resist the foe, while they themselves gripped wooden spears and crouched behind the carts to watch how the situation unfolded.

In ordinary generals' campaigns, sending scouts out ten li was considered good enough. But now, with Diwu Lun personally leading the expedition, scouts were sent out several dozen li. The Red Eyebrow Army could forget about sneaking up on them.

Even the scout squads rarely encountered the Red Eyebrows. Occasionally they spotted a few dozen Red Eyebrow bandits pillaging a hamlet, but the moment the bandits ran into Wei troops, they immediately fled eastward.

Diwu Lun forbade his subordinates from rash pursuit. His "rabble" thus advanced unimpeded all the way to the foot of Yecheng's walls, effortlessly lifting the siege of the northern capital.

"As the defender of Wei territory, I allowed the Red Eyebrows to cross the river, bring calamity to the counties and villages, and alarm the imperial environs. I am guilty. I beg Your Majesty to punish me!"

The first Wei Cheng Yin, Pi Tong, removed his cap and came out of the city to confess his fault. He was unlucky enough — Wei Commandery had been perfectly peaceful during the years when Geng Chun and Ma Yuan managed affairs. How was it that in the single year it was handed to him, such a huge breach occurred? The Red Eyebrows moved as if through uninhabited land, even groping their way to the edge of Yecheng. Pi Tong was no good at warfare, and his pleas for reinforcements had gone unanswered. The only thing he could do was notify every county to shut its gates tight and minimize the damage.

Someone had to shoulder the blame for this matter, right? The two chief generals directly involved — Ma Yuan and Geng Chun — one was an elder of the family by marriage, the other a relative by marriage. Each had his own justification. Who should be punished? In the end, he reckoned it would still be himself, the one not of the inner circle, who would take the fall.

Who would have thought that Diwu Lun would instead ask in return: "Has the northern capital fallen?"

"It has not."

"Under your governance, has a single county seat been lost?"

"Also not…"

"Have you engaged the Red Eyebrows in battle and lost troops or officers?"

No, not that either. Pi Tong had simply abandoned the countryside to the Red Eyebrows, strengthening his defenses and stripping the fields.

Diwu Lun smiled. "Then you have not violated any statute. It is those who lose a battle, surrender a city they defend, abandon their post without leave, or desert their troops and flee who must be severely punished. You, sir, at most bear the minor fault of allowing bandits to penetrate deep into your territory."

"But the Red Eyebrows did not spring up from within Wei Commandery. After the Great River froze over, the two banks became passable without hindrance. The main Ji Province force was in the north, the State Commandant's grand army in the south. Relying on your single commandery alone, concentrated in one spot, how could you possibly block bandits who split into dozens of bands? Had you divided your troops to intercept them, they would easily have broken through, and the bandit scourge would have deepened."

Diwu Lun said: "A sheepfold's wall is breached by a rare, bitter gale, letting hungry wolves into the fold. Should we blame the herding dog outside, who is contending with an even larger wolf pack, or the lead ram inside the fold, who shielded the flock and kept the hungry wolves from succeeding? In my view, there is no need whatsoever."

Having spoken, he drew closer, clapped Pi Tong on the shoulder, and said in a low voice: "I understand your difficulties completely."

"I have said before: I do not reckon gains and losses by a single city or a single pool. The priority is the total annihilation of the Red Eyebrow main force. The campaign is not over — you need not reproach yourself too harshly."

Pi Tong breathed a sigh of relief. His loyalty to Diwu Lun, in his heart, rose by at least several percentage points. But as a formality, he was still docked half a year's salary as a disciplinary measure.

"Where are the Red Eyebrows now?"

"Three days ago they groped their way to the vicinity of Yecheng, tens of thousands strong. But they surrounded it without attacking. When they heard that Your Majesty's heavenly troops were arriving, they withdrew one after another."

Diwu Lun understood. "It seems Wenyuan was right. The Red Eyebrows' flanking force attacking Yecheng was a feint — their real intent was to lure my main force to the rescue!"

But what the Red Eyebrows hadn't counted on was that what they hooked was an old tortoise like Diwu Lun — crawling along slowly but steadily, shell too hard to bite through. If they didn't withdraw, were they supposed to fight him to the death?

"At present the Red Eyebrows are withdrawing eastward. Most likely they will pass through Qinghe Commandery in Ji Province and return to their old nest in Pingyuan Commandery…"

Diwu Lun certainly could not sit by and watch them escape at their leisure. This meant yet another pursuit.

This was not Diwu Lun's forte. All he could do was mutter to himself: "I hate mobile warfare."

"Fortunately, there is one place the Red Eyebrows are certain to go!"

"Yuancheng!"

…

Diwu Lun had guessed correctly. Chengtou Zilu truly had no interest in him whatsoever.

"Even if our army gathers everyone together, we'd only have fifty or sixty thousand men. Diwu Lun is an emperor — he's bound to have several divisions. His troops won't number fewer than that."

As an old adversary, Chengtou Zilu knew perfectly well that when the Red Eyebrows fought the Wei army head-on without numerical superiority, they rarely had a chance to win — unless the opponent grew impatient and made a mistake.

Therefore, the moment he heard it was the Wei Emperor personally leading the campaign, he immediately turned tail and ran.

What was more, they still had one critical task to carry out!

When crossing the river, Chengtou Zilu had set two rally points for his subordinates: the first was Yecheng, to give the Wei ruler and his ministers a good scare; the second was Yuancheng County.

Chengtou Zilu acted as though he did not even see the county seat of Yuancheng. He led his followers straight for Shalu Mountain outside the city. This was a remnant left by the movements of the Yellow River in remote antiquity. Across the great plain were many undulating, continuous sand dunes, large and small, some rising several zhang high. They were unstable, often collapsing after wind and rain.

It was said that in ancient times, Shalu Mountain stood several dozen zhang high, but during the Spring and Autumn period it collapsed with a thunderous roar, burying even the "Wulu City" at its foot. This event caused great consternation among the states of the Spring and Autumn era. Someone even divined: "Yin empowers the yang; earth and fire multiply upon each other — hence the collapse of Shalu. Six hundred and forty-five years hence, there should be a sage woman."

And so, over five hundred years later, a family surnamed Wang moved from Qi territory to Weisu Hamlet in Yuancheng County. Their descendants bore a daughter named Wang Zhengjun. She had a nephew named Wang Mang. The year Wang Mang became Duke Who Pacifies the Han was exactly the six hundred and forty-fifth year after the collapse of Shalu…

No one knew whether this legend had existed since antiquity or whether old Wang Mang had someone fabricate it. In any case, the Xin Emperor, who had initially risen to power on his aunt's coattails, solemnly revered Shalu as a sacred mountain, a symbol of the Earth virtue.

When Diwu Lun was still a Xin official and took charge of Wei Commandery, one of his major achievements was protecting Shalu and preventing the Red Eyebrows from damaging it. He even proposed to Wang Mang: carve a statue of His Majesty the Emperor on Shalu Mountain…

But before this plan could be implemented, Diwu Lun rebelled. What the Red Eyebrows saw today was still just Shalu, cordoned off like a treasure, and within the enclosure, Wang Mang's ancestral tombs and temples. Diwu Lun had discontinued the sacrifices and incense offerings, but he had not vandalized them.

Chengtou Zilu addressed the crowd: "Many years ago, when the Great River burst its banks, Wang Mang, to protect his ancestral tombs and Shalu Mountain, refused to block the breach. As a result, the people of Dong, Qinghe, Bohai, and Pingyuan Commanderies were swept away by the flood!"

Most of Chengtou Zilu's followers were residents from both banks of the Yellow River. When the great flood came, they had no forewarning at all, until the dikes suddenly collapsed and the torrent was upon them. Their possessions, their fields, their homes — all were consigned to the flowing waters. The surging waves shook the earth; their cries shook the heavens. The grief, the terror, the wretched misery of that scene was still fresh in their memories. As it was brought up again today, many wiped away tears.

No one knew how many were buried in the bellies of fish on the spot. They themselves survived only by clinging to trees, climbing onto rooftops, floating on timbers, or boarding boats.

But the suffering did not end there. In the days that followed, even more died. Most lacked clothing and food. The befuddled, corrupt Xin authorities refused to provide relief. Plague and disease ran rampant.

Even more terrifying was the salinization of the land after the floodwaters receded. It truly extinguished everyone's last hope! For years on end, the commanderies along the Great River suffered frequent famines. Grain harvests often yielded only ten or twenty percent. In some counties, the autumn crops failed completely!

They were diligent. They endured bitter hardship. And what did they get in return?

When people couldn't survive locally, they had no choice but to flee — those who didn't drown became refugees… For them, begging, drifting as wanderers, toiling as laborers, selling their children — every desperate means of scraping by had to be tried, yet hunger and cold hounded them like shadows.

In the end, driven to the wall, they could only dye their eyebrows red and join the resistance, relying on plundering the wealth of other regions, seizing the grain of the guilty and the innocent alike, to fill their own bellies. And so it went for years.

But unlike Fan Chong's hundreds of thousands who hoped to find a "promised land" in strange parts, the Great River Red Eyebrows had never strayed far from home. They still pinned their hopes on the Yellow River calming down, on recovering the prosperity and peace of the past two centuries.

Surely there had to be some way to restore everything to how it once was.

The Yellow River had never been this unruly before. Its flooding and wild shifting must have a cause!

"Heavenly disasters are the outward sign of chaos in the human realm. Everything is because of the Xin, because of Shalu."

No one knew exactly when, but a certain belief had gradually spread. Chi Zhao had used it to rally the scattered common folk, and that was what led to the reckless assault on Yuancheng several years ago.

It was a pity that just after crossing the river, they were defeated by Diwu Lun. Chi Zhaoping threw herself into the river, but her doctrine and ideals were inherited by Chengtou Zilu.

Chengtou Zilu lacked his predecessor's flair for ritual. He donned Chi Zhaoping's exorcist mask, smeared human blood only on the brow area, and raised a torch.

Tens of thousands of Red Eyebrow warriors raised their torches in turn — these they had prepared by stripping every tree in the vicinity.

"On this march north, though the Red Eyebrows have taken grain, we have not burned a single city. Shalu alone cannot be left standing!"

The first to be destroyed were the temples and tombs of Wang Mang's three ancestors. His great-grandfather was posthumously titled "the Childlike King of Yuancheng," his grandfather "the Qing King of Yangping," and his father "the Manifest King of Xindu." Originally ordinary grave mounds, they had been repaired and expanded by men sent back after Wang Mang became Emperor.

Now the coffins were hacked apart by Red Eyebrow blades, the temple halls and corridors set ablaze with roaring fire, the tombs themselves excavated and emptied, the grave goods plundered to the last piece. The corpses of Wang Mang's three ancestors were drenched in Red Eyebrow piss, trampled under ten thousand feet, and finally cast together into the flames to be reduced to ashes — drawing wave after wave of cheers.

The three temples were razed, and still more men vented years of fury at losing their homes upon Shalu itself. The Shalu hillock, several zhang high on the flat plain, was leveled by human hands almost within a single day…

When the Red Eyebrow warriors had exhausted themselves and sat down on the ground, all that remained of Wang Mang's ancestral temples and tombs was a blackened heap of ruins, and Shalu had been flattened to the earth.

"We have done it." Tears slid from behind Chengtou Zilu's mask. Having accomplished this, he could at last give some comfort to the souls of the brothers and sisters who had thrown themselves into the river.

"Once this deed is done, will the Great River return to how it was?"

Some Red Eyebrow warriors were full of hope. Their years of bitter struggle had not been in vain.

For a moment, the Red Eyebrows' hearts yearned for home. They had to go back and see.

See whether that unruly Great River would obediently return to its old course.

See whether in their homeland, submerged and turned to desolate marsh, a handful of seeds sown in spring could sprout fresh green shoots of grain.

They marched between the old course of the Yellow River and the new. Under the river's ravages, this had become almost a no-man's-land. Villages had long been abandoned and were thick with wild grass.

The Red Eyebrow army spread out across the great Hebei plain, talking and laughing as they set off on the journey home, pushing their deer carts, their formation like a flock of wild geese heading home — the kind that flies in a V.

But the enemy had no intention of letting them return unmolested. Having anticipated that the Red Eyebrow army would do something major at Yuancheng, Diwu Lun had dispatched reinforcements from every direction, steadily tightening the encirclement.

When the Red Eyebrows reached a point just a few li from the Yellow River's new course — where one crossing would take them home — they found their path blocked by an enormous army. It was Geng Chun's Jizhou troops, a force composed mainly of powerful local clans, sworn mortal enemies of the Red Eyebrows and the Tongma.

The Red Eyebrows had already shaken off several pursuing forces, but these twenty thousand enemies before them were the final obstacle standing between them and a return to the good life of the past.

On the great plain, there was no terrain to exploit. Geng Chun deployed his troops in formation across this desolate, flood-scoured wasteland. The Red Eyebrows cast aside the deer carts they had been pushing, drew their crude weapons, and prepared for a desperate fight.

Just as both sides stood with swords drawn and arrows nocked, on the verge of battle, a strange wave of sound rolled across the bleak expanse between heaven and earth.

A long, unbroken rumbling, like muffled thunder rolling, or ten thousand horses at full gallop.

Was it the cavalry of the Wei army?

It was cavalry — but mounted on turbid yellow spray, armored in gray, jagged ice. Like a thousand thousand war chargers advancing in unison, it came sweeping forward in a vast, majestic tide, and the sound swelled even louder, as if mountains were crumbling and the earth splitting, as if the very ground shuddered and quaked!

Birds in the sky began to shriek and scatter wildly. On the ground, rats and hares suddenly fled in a mad frenzy, heedless of the two armies of tens of thousands facing off, bolting straight through the middle of the battlefield.

The Red Eyebrows panicked at once. This scene was all too familiar to them! Every man instinctively turned and ran, only Chengtou Zilu standing frozen, staring eastward.

Wasn't destroying Shalu supposed to calm the Great River, to restore everything?

The Wei army fared no better. When they saw the Red Eyebrows suddenly explode into chaos, they thought the enemy had collapsed without a fight — but soon they too sensed something terribly wrong.

"Damn it, could this be…"

Geng Chun was horrified. He swept his gaze outward — a surging crest, churning with countless shards of ice, was slowly, inexorably sweeping toward them!

It was already late in the first month, and the temperature was no longer low. This was an ice-jam flood, unleashed by the spring thaw — a spectacle unique to the Yellow River!

In the face of heaven's wrath, what did Red Eyebrows or Wei troops matter? The vast formation Geng Chun took such pride in was utterly insignificant before these towering waters. The Wei ranks disintegrated instantly. General and Colonel, Sergeant and Platoon Commander alike scrambled over one another, fleeing for their lives toward higher ground.

Seen from the vantage of the circling crows high above, tens of thousands of men fleeing in panic — their terror, their helpless bewilderment — were no different from the rats and ants scattering chaotically at their feet.

It was as if their squabbling had disturbed the River Countess, slumbering in her winter freeze. She opened her eyes, merely twisted her body with lazy indolence, swept an arm out at will, and lightly stroked her yellow countenance, casting a contemptuous smile at the presumptuous humans:

"You are all insects!"

…

PS: Chapter two coming in the middle of the night.