Chapter 1

Liu Chengzong waded restlessly into the shallow Wuding River, lifted the hem of his fleece-lined red armored skirt, crouched down, and with trembling hands pressed his waterskin into the river.

The February river water, laced with ice flowers, was bone-chillingly cold; pouring down his throat made his teeth ache from the cold, and an instant later it felt as though his entire throat was being squeezed shut.

He rose, stepped back a few paces, and narrowed his eyes, his gaze crossing the dry riverbed and withered grass on the opposite bank to the barren, bald ridges of the layered hills farther away.

The drought had transformed northern Shaanxi beyond recognition.

After a long while, once the panic in his belly from hunger had eased slightly, he pressed a hand to the hilt of his goose-quill saber at his waist and trudged, one deep step and one shallow, across the cracked sandbank riverbed toward the official road.

Tied to a dead tree by the official road was a Mongolian dappled horse.

The horse was very well-behaved, just a bit thin, which made its head look enormous; a few months ago its long forelock had still been white, and its name had been Three Fat.

Later, however, its owner had a mad fit, used red cinnabar dye to turn its forelock crimson, and changed its name too — now it was called Red Flag.

Red Flag carried quite a load on its back; bridle, saddle, and saddlecloth went without saying, and on the left side of its rump hung bow and arrows, while on the right were tied two wild geese.

Beneath the geese was a lean, black-haired Shaanxi sighthound, whose fate was the same as Red Flag's — before, it had been called Gray Tiger; later it was changed to Little Whirlwind.

Little Whirlwind's coat was wet and bristling, its whole body shivering from the cold, yet its nose still kept twitching to sniff the scent of the wild geese, clear drool trickling from the corner of its mouth into a puddle on the ground.

Liu Chengzong had a problem.

He had two sets of memories.

Not long before, after a high fever broke, besides the memories of the past eighteen years, an extra set of memories from four hundred years in the future had appeared in his mind.

The two sets of memories intertwined, full of contradictions, severely disrupting his normal life.

Take this mount, for example.

Before, when he saw this black-haired Mongolian horse, his first reaction was to call out affectionately, "Three Fat," and toss it a handful of fodder.

Now, not only had he dyed the little horse's hair red, but the moment he saw it he would call it Red Flag, and he even felt like hanging an engine on it.

Liu Chengzong guessed that regarding what had happened to him, perhaps the soul of the owner of those memories had been devoured by him... because he really was very hungry, having not eaten his fill for months on end; never mind a soul in his head — even if a ghost stood before him, he might very well have eaten it.

Now he very much enjoyed finding a place to sit quietly whenever he was free, recalling the bizarre and dazzling world of four hundred years later in his mind, learning strange new knowledge, and had even thought about going to experience a life without hunger.

Unfortunately, every time he finished his daydreams, he still had to return to drought-ravaged northern Shaanxi.

His straight-seam cowhide boots, belonging to a frontier cavalryman, trod upon the cracked yellow earth; collapsed, half-fallen houses long unrepaired and cave dwellings sealed up with adobe bricks made the official road seem especially desolate.

A dead old elm, stripped of its bark, still stubbornly stood upon the ground, its broken branches scattered all over the ground with no one bothering to pick them up.

Liu Chengzong dropped the reins, crossed the official road, walked to a collapsed house beside the road, picked up a large adobe brick, and smashed a gap into the sealed adobe wall of a cave dwelling; peering inside through the twilight glow, he crawled in.

Before long, he first passed out a pottery water jug; inside the jug were half a candle, a length of hemp rope, and a blackened whetstone.

When he crawled back out of the hole, a filthy water ladle was tucked at his lower back, and an ancestral tablet was clamped under his arm.

As for the most valuable item, it was in his hand, wrapped in a piece of gray cloth — a bronze mirror whose surface could no longer be wiped clean.

As Liu Chengzong walked toward the large elm tree across the road, he muttered under his breath, "I reckon your descendants aren't coming back. Let me, Liu the Lion, take you all to Yuhe Fort, so you don't end up as firewood for the roving bandits when they come back."

He was neither a beggar nor a bandit; he held the rank of Licensed Scholar and had an enviable proper job.

He was an active-duty frontier soldier of the state, attached to Yansui Garrison, one of the Great Ming's nine great northern frontier defense districts, and his direct superior was He Renlong, the Commander of Yuhe Fort.

His post was Elite Retainer Vanguard; he had trained in martial arts for six years, served in the army for a year and a half, rode a wind-whistling swift horse, and could draw a hundred-catty heavy bow — the elite of the elite.

But no matter how elite, he could not withstand the court's failure to issue military pay.

Yuhe Fort could no longer sustain human life; this place, crossing the Great Wall to reach Mongol territory beyond the frontier was closer than going to Yan'an Prefecture, and it had no resistance whatsoever to drought.

Last year, the crops in the military farmlands outside the fort, even though carefully irrigated, were still scorched to death over large areas; the common folk who farmed the land either hanged themselves or abandoned their fields and fled south to escape the famine.

The old elm had withstood the drought, but it could not escape the starving people struggling to survive; its bark was stripped completely clean, leaving a bare, moistureless trunk that quickly withered and died.

"What a pity."

Standing beneath this old elm, Liu Chengzong looked up at the branches that had not produced a single new bud, licked his cracked lips, and continued leading his horse forward.

Yuhe Fort was not far now; the fiery clouds on the horizon silhouetted the shadowy outline of the distant fort. If this tree were still alive, in another month it would be the fine season for eating elm-seed buns with wheat flour.

A pity — not a pity that this tree had died; though the tree was dead, the people he had never met who ate its bark could live.

What he pitied was that inside Yuhe Fort there was neither wheat flour nor elm seeds, only over four hundred famished frontier soldiers and just enough millet to keep them half-full for a month.

Now that spring was about to begin, they were supposed to recruit refugees to plant those one hundred forty-five qing of military farmland, but they had neither seeds nor oxen.

That the military farmland would lie mostly fallow this year was a foregone conclusion.

Fallow land was nothing strange; Liu Chengzong had been a soldier here for over a year, and the common folk who farmed the land had already been replaced twice, the number of people dwindling each time.

In the seventh year of the Tianqi reign, he and his elder brother had been driven out of the provincial military examination hall in Yan'an Prefecture and were recruited as retainers by He Renlong, who had served as the deputy examiner; when they arrived at Yuhe Fort, it was just in time for that year's mass exodus of military farmsteaders fleeing to Guanzhong.

The farmers toiled for a whole year, yet the grain they harvested was less than the seeds they had sown in the ground — if they didn't leave, what else could they do?

By the start of spring last year, another batch of refugees came from the mountains and toiled hard for another year, but in the end it was the same old story: they either fled south to escape the famine or went into the eastern mountains to become bandits.

In northern Shaanxi of these years, there was no shortage of land.

The soil of northern Shaanxi was barren, requiring extensive planting for meager harvests; sowing one dou of millet and reaping seven was considered expert. Yuhe Fort had plenty of military farmland and needed people to till it; as long as commoners were willing to come, there was a vast amount of land for them to farm.

But this land, plagued by drought nine years out of ten, could not keep people.

Yuhe Fort could not keep people either.

When He Renlong recruited him, it was agreed that retainers would receive double pay and double rations: a monthly salary of one tael and five mace of silver, and a monthly grain ration of two shi of millet.

A shi is a unit of volume; millet grains are small, so two shi amounted to nearly three hundred catties.

Add to that the monthly salary of one tael and five mace of silver — silver circulated little in Shaanxi, and the government's Single Whip Law mandated that commoners pay taxes in silver, so this was hard currency; during the summer and autumn tax seasons, one tael of silver could easily be exchanged for three shi of rice.

Excellent treatment.

Liu Chengzong's father, a Provincial Graduate, had been a tax official of the lower ninth rank in Yan'an Prefecture two years prior — a proper court-appointed official — and his monthly salary was only five shi of rice.

But, well, his military pay was like those recruitment ads in his future memories that advertised monthly salaries from twelve hundred to twenty thousand — the latter figure didn't count.

In reality, after guarding the frontier for the Zhu family for fifteen months and even taking a Tartar's head during the autumn defense, the court's grain rations were not only insufficient, but his military pay and reward silver were also withheld and not issued.

That hundred-plus catties of millet not only had to feed him, but salt, vegetables, sauces, and cloth — all his food, clothing, and daily necessities had to be traded for with grain; what was left wasn't even enough for him to eat, and he still had to find ways to support his warhorse Red Flag and his hunting hound Little Whirlwind — the pressure was immense.

By now, the Zhu family's emperor already owed him sixty-two taels and five mace of silver, equivalent to forty-three thousand seven hundred fifty official Tongbao copper coins.

This was why Liu Chengzong took the chance while out hunting to poke around abandoned, uninhabited houses and scavenge a few things to supplement the household.

He brought out a pottery jar of rejects, which put Liu Chengzong in a great mood. Patting Red Flag contentedly, he said cheerfully, "Big Head, you've got your night fodder sorted!"