Chapter 281: When a State Is About to Fall

Heifu had guessed right: the Qin army's four-sided encirclement of Shouchun, with its immaculate formations and elite soldiers, had indeed terrified the King of Chu, Fuchu.

He was not planning to defend the gates and die for the altars of state; rather, as Wang Jian had anticipated, he might once again move the capital and flee. Wang Jian deliberately delayed crossing the Huai River to give him false hope, while ordering Meng Wu, Li You, and others to cross first and cut off his escape route, trapping the King of Chu in Shouchun.

Though he hid within the temporarily safe deep palace and high walls, even in his dreams Fuchu seemed to hear the Qin army felling trees on the hills across the Fei River. Watching the siege engines being completed day by day, arrayed to the west and south and ready to launch an assault at any moment, Fuchu felt more and more that his time was running out.

The Minister of War, the Right Deputy, and others also urged him: "Though Chu is now in peril, it is still not as dire as Zhao Wuxu at Jinyang or Tian Dan of Qi defending Jimo! South of the Huai and in Jiangdong there are still loyalist forces; if we hold out for a few months, there may yet be a turning point…"

They hoped the King of Chu would personally ascend the city walls to inspire the soldiers to fight to the death, that the palace women would be organized into the ranks, and that all the treasures, food, and drink in the palace would be distributed to feast the troops.

Yet Fuchu said with some despair: "Chu's elite troops have already been buried north of the Huai by Xiang Yan, and Lord Changping has yet to dispatch the Jiangdong loyalist forces. The soldiers and able-bodied men within the city total less than fifty thousand — how can they withstand the Qin army of over a hundred thousand?"

The Left Deputy and others urged him to surrender, but considering that the fates of the previously surrendered kings — King An of Han, King Qian of Zhao, and King Jia of Wei — had all been rather poor, Fuchu still hesitated.

Just as he was caught in this dilemma, the spirit medium whom the King of Chu had always favored suddenly seemed to go mad, rushing out of the temple with a great laugh and prostrating himself before the king. When he raised his head, there was a trace of madness in his eyes.

"Great King, Shouchun is saved! Chu is saved!"

The assembled ministers and nobles looked at one another, but the King of Chu hurried anxiously to the spirit medium, helped him up, and asked with hope: "Have the ghosts and spirits answered?"

"They have!"

The spirit medium pulled the King of Chu to the outside of the palace chamber and pointed at the distant sky, now overcast and flickering with bursts of thunder. "Great King, look! The deity is among them! Its body flows with iridescent light, dazzling and brilliant without end!"

The King of Chu strained his eyes wide but could see only a mass of ordinary dark clouds. Where was any deity?

"The Lord Within the Clouds has departed again." The spirit medium let out a sigh of regret. "Great King, you must bathe and purify yourself for three days, then have a hundred invocators perform rites atop the city wall. Only then can the Lord Within the Clouds descend once more…"

"Can the Lord Within the Clouds… truly save Chu? Can he save me, the unworthy one?" The King of Chu no longer knew what he ought to believe. He was like a drowning man, desperately grasping at every straw.

"He can!"

The spirit medium declared with absolute conviction: "The Lord Within the Clouds rides a dragon chariot and wears the robes of an emperor, shining with the same light as the sun and moon. As long as the Great King provides sufficient offerings, your servant will surely summon the Lord Within the Clouds and cause him to send down heavenly thunder and torrential rain to annihilate the hundred thousand Qin invaders outside the city!"

…

While the King of Chu placed his hopes in ghosts and spirits, atop the walls of Shouchun the people of Chu were still trying to save themselves. Their resistance was extremely tenacious, and they managed to hold off several waves of assault…

On the Qin army's side, apart from the traditional ant-attack scaling and the use of shielded battering rams to break the gates, Heifu also witnessed nearly every siege method of this era: tens of thousands of men hauled earth and stone from afar and built five earthen mounds west of the city, even taller than the walls, then positioned crossbowmen atop them to shoot arrows and bolts into the city in coordination with the assault.

But the Chu troops had completely blocked up all the gates. Even destroying the gates was useless; the tightly packed earth and stone behind them still had to be cleared away, so the Qin army could not fight its way in for the moment.

And those assaulting the walls could not gain a firm foothold, repeatedly driven back down by the Chu soldiers fighting with the desperate courage of an army in mourning.

Seeing that the people of Chu inside the city had erupted with a desperate, life-or-death ferocity as their state perished, Wang Jian was in no hurry. He merely ordered his troops to shoot fire-arrows into the city at night. In the night sky, the fire-arrows looked like a sky full of fireworks falling into the city, but those inside had already demolished the buildings near the walls, and with waterways crisscrossing the city, putting out fires was easy, so this only served as harassment.

But that was enough. Siege warfare is a contest of stamina and patience, not brute force. When you outnumber the enemy ten to one, encircle them; when two to one, assault them. The Qin troops outside the walls were twice the number of the defenders on the walls. As long as they harassed them in shifts, wearing them down physically and mentally until their morale collapsed, a breach would eventually appear. Wang Jian had no desire to rush and suffer heavy casualties.

He also had laborers fell large quantities of timber on the hills and transport them to the far bank of the Fei River, where the Army Supervisor and Cheng Shang along with other Qin Mohists worked urgently to construct "flying stones" — that is, traction trebuchets.

The flying stone was an invention from the era of the Wu-Yue struggle for hegemony, said to have been created by Fan Li. A stone was placed on a large beam, and a mechanism was released to strike the enemy. The flying stone weighed twelve jin and, when fully charged with power, could travel over two hundred paces to wound the foe. Its drawbacks were that it was extremely cumbersome and its accuracy was touch-and-go.

In Heifu's view, trebuchets were actually more effective against Western brick and stone walls; against solid rammed-earth walls they were less useful, mainly employed to destroy corner towers and arrow towers. The stones constantly flying overhead also had a certain psychological intimidation effect on people.

That day, the trebuchets had been fully constructed. The throwing arms were made from old tree trunks, bound with iron hoops to prevent splitting. The base frame had wheels, allowing them to be pushed along flat ground to adjust attack distance and angle. Their appearance was rugged, with the aesthetic beauty of wooden machinery. After modifications by the Qin Mohists, their power was greater than the "flying stones" of the south from over two hundred years ago, capable of hurling stone projectiles weighing twenty to thirty jin a distance of two hundred paces!

They were soon to be pushed out from behind the earthen mounds by laborers, and Heifu and his men had been ordered to form up in front of them as guards.

But just then, the sharp-eyed Xiao Tao came to report that there was a disturbance on the city wall!

"A disturbance?"

Heifu followed him to the front of the formation, to a spot one bowshot from the wall, and indeed saw some chaos atop the wall. Unlike the solemn guard of previous days, it was somewhat noisy and bustling. Finally, the armored soldiers bearing blades withdrew from the wall and were replaced by a group wearing multicolored feathers and weimao caps…

"Invocators?!"

Heifu rubbed his eyes. He was not mistaken; they were indeed shamans, dressed very similarly to the priestesses who danced on boats during the Shangsi Festival at Jiangling.

Were they here to curse the Qin army? Heifu knew that when Qin and Chu first turned against each other and went to war, the kings of both states had gone to their ancestral and spirit temples, presented offerings, carved stones with curses, and beseeched all manner of great gods to curse the enemy.

But now, with the Qin troops at the foot of their walls, what use was it to clasp the feet of the gods at the last moment?

After that group of invocators ascended the wall, they first solemnly knelt and bowed toward the clouds in the sky, presenting offerings of cattle, pigs, sheep, and the like — all cooked food, simmering in great cauldrons with an aroma so fragrant that not only the Chu soldiers who had drunk only thin gruel for days, but even the well-fed Qin soldiers, began to swallow their saliva one after another.

After a bout of mysterious, muttered incantations, the main performer took the stage. A shaman wearing sacrificial robes — a lotus coat, tied with an angelica sash, wearing an orchid crown and adorned with lu-li pendants, his face painted in five brilliant colors — walked to the edge of the wall, swept a contemptuous gaze over the dense mass of Qin troops below, then struck a stone chime as a signal and began the sacrificial dance…

"Bathed in orchid broth, washed in fragrance; robed in splendid colors like fresh blooms. The spirit, coiling and curling, now lingers; dazzling and brilliant without end."

For a moment Heifu could not fathom what the Chu people were trying to do, so he said to Ji Ying: "Go, bring Chen Ying here."

By the time Heifu's guide Chen Ying arrived, the invocators on the wall had just begun to sing in unison: "The spirit, glorious and resplendent, now descends; whirling aloft, it rises into the clouds."

The moment Chen Ying saw this display, his face stiffened, and he said with some disbelief: "They… are summoning the Lord Within the Clouds, Pingyi, to descend. Most likely they want to ask the Cloud Lord to aid them in battle."

"Isn't the Lord Within the Clouds a deity for praying for rain?" Heifu was baffled. If the Chu people wanted to borrow the power of ghosts and spirits, they had picked the wrong god. Why not summon the Great Master of Fate to simply collect all the Qin troops outside the city?

Chen Ying explained: "South of the Huai, the Lord Within the Clouds is not only the god of clouds and rain, but also the god of thunder and lightning. Perhaps they want to trigger heavenly thunder to strike down and destroy the Qin army…"

"Heavenly thunder?"

Heifu could not help but double over with laughter. Over all these years, he had confirmed that he was not in some xuanhuan or xianxia plane, but in genuine, actual history. Apart from the inconceivable fact of his transmigration, everything else was perfectly normal.

Yet these Chu shamans inside the city thought they were the demonic sorcerer Zhuge Liang from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, able to borrow the east wind, deploy the Eight Trigrams Formation, and even light the Seven-Star Lamp to buy Chu one more second of life?

At first he found it laughable, but as he laughed, it began to feel tragic and lamentable.

He looked at Chen Ying, whose expression was complicated. "Do you believe it?"

"I do not…" Chen Ying lowered his head. He deeply admired his mother's foresight. The king inside that city had become muddled to such an extent that he would rather let the soldiers on the walls go hungry than deny the invocators the finest meat to sacrifice to the ghosts and spirits. Truly, he was not worth dying for.

The wise naturally did not believe, but this display, once put on, still made many people feel there was something real to it.

Heifu noticed that many Chu people atop the wall were kneeling in reverence, seemingly also placing their hopes in the shamans' rites. Indeed, when people fall into despair, is it not perfectly normal to pin their hopes on supernatural forces?

If he remembered correctly, when the Jin soldiers besieged the capital, the Song court and its ministers had also tried to rely on the "scattering beans to make soldiers" trick of a charlatan to defeat the enemy, which ended up as an eternal laughingstock. Yet when one looked again at the horrors of the Jingkang Humiliation, one could no longer laugh…

"As expected — when a state is about to fall, there are sure to be evil portents!"

Not actual monsters, but the fear in people's hearts, which allows wicked men and treacherous villains to exploit the opening and practice their deceptions.

And below the wall, quite a few honest, superstitious Qin soldiers were also looking up worriedly at the sky to see if the clouds were truly gathering and turning black. For a moment, a hush fell, and the invocators on the wall, thinking their methods were working, danced and chanted with even greater vigor.

"Dongmen Bao!"

Heifu shouted loudly for his Second Battalion Commander.

"Tell Foreman Zhang and Cheng Shang to bring all the completed trebuchets up here!"

He drew his sword and pointed it at the demonic dance atop the wall.

"Aim at that bunch of witch doctors! Give them a few volleys — true god or false god, man or demon, we'll know soon enough!"

……

Half a quarter-hour later, just as the witch doctors were about to complete their ritual, the heavenly thunder they had long awaited truly arrived!

Accompanied by a dense, muffled crash! Those massive, crude trebuchets below the city walls, using the counterweight force of the laborers' pull, hurled a skyful of stones. After cresting their apex they plunged down sharply — dozens of black dots streaked through the air toward Shouchun City!

As Heifu had ordered, they were all aimed at this section of the city wall where the witch doctors were massed. Though the aim was terrible — nine stones out of ten missed, either falling short and plunging with a splash into the moat, or overshooting the wall to land inside the city — a few lucky stones, neither left nor right, landed squarely among the witch doctors, who could not dodge without interrupting their long spirit-summoning dance...

These stones, weighing ten to twenty jin, were nothing like arrows. In an instant, the dull thud of stone striking wall and the screams of the crowd merged into one. The altar at the center took a hit and collapsed with a crash. The lucky witch doctors suffered broken bones and snapped tendons; the unlucky ones had their heads burst open like blossoms!

After several deaths, the witch doctors could no longer bother with their shamanic dancing. Ignoring the spirit medium's attempts to stop them, they clutched their heads and fled in panic — like a swarm of buzzing flies suddenly scattered by the violent strike of a flyswatter...

That day, outside the city the sound was like rolling thunder, stones fell from the heavens, demons fell silent, gods scattered and fled. Inside the city, panic raged — none were not terrified!

And the Qin army, seizing this very moment, launched an all-out assault on the Chu capital. Shouchun's outer wall thus fell!

(End of chapter)