Chapter 631: An Omen of Ill Fortune

Tong Pass.

Kang Yaomin, Commander of the Xi'an Left Guard, pressed a scavenged sachet over his nose and stumbled around the rat carcasses littering the ground, casting a despairing gaze at the fortress behind him, piled high with grain and fodder.

Two months ago, Kang Yaomin had still been in a daze at the Xi'an Left Guard, so idle he was nodding off.

Supreme Commander Chen Qiyu issued an order appointing him Grain Transport Supervisor, commanding four hundred banner troops of the Left Guard to move all the court's grain stored in Xi'an Prefecture into Tong Pass.

You can't imagine how excited he was back then — the moment he heard the order clearly, he practically did a carp flip on the spot: a big job had arrived!

Kang Yaomin was no ordinary man; an official post like Guard Commander was the ultimate goal that a million military households across the realm spent their lives striving for.

But for Kang Yaomin?

His entire clan placed tremendous importance on cultural education — becoming a military officer would be considered a misstep down the wrong path.

The Kang clan was a very prominent great family in Xi'an Prefecture, and an even more illustrious name in Wugong County.

Their founding ancestor was originally from Henan, a merchant of some wealth who moved to Wugong County at the end of the Song dynasty, bought fields and land, recruited refugees, and built a tradition of farming and scholarship; the second-generation ancestor served as a Confucian Instructor, and the third-generation man was a County Magistrate in the Yuan dynasty.

By the fourth generation, the family had grown truly powerful — a man named Kang Ruji, who passed the Classics Clarification examination and held the post of Confucian Instructor, but happened to catch the moment when Zhu Yuanzhang was selecting renowned literary scholars of the realm to tutor the crown prince and princes; this old ancestor of the Kang family was chosen to enter the Prince of Yan's mansion and serve Zhu Di as an Army Advisor.

The office to which this post belonged at the time was called the Princely Chancellor's Residence, and the full title was Advisor on Military and State Affairs, equal in rank to State Chancellor.

Kang Ruji served in the Prince of Yan's mansion for a few years, but was transferred out to serve as a County Magistrate before the Jingnan Campaign broke out; later, when Zhu Di launched the Jingnan Campaign, he summoned Magistrate Kang to his encampment, promoted him on the spot to Vice Minister of Justice, and kept him in the capital to assist Zhu Gaochi.

After Kang Ruji passed away, when Zhu Gaochi ascended the throne, he posthumously honored him as Minister of Works.

His eldest son inherited the post of Director of the Upper Forest Park, rising to Vice Minister of the Court of Imperial Sacrifices in Nanjing; his second son inherited the post of Vice Director of the Upper Forest Park, rising to Right Chief Minister of Transmission; his youngest son went into trade and was bestowed a thousand gold pieces, with an imperial decree exempting him from taxes wherever he did business and from inspection at all passes and ferries.

The primitive accumulation of a dragon-following clan was complete.

From then on, generation after generation produced renowned scholars and officials — those who studied became Masters of Guanzhong, those who practiced medicine became Medical Instructors, those who held office became County Magistrates and Prefects; in short... this clan seemed to have inherited some trait for turning calamity into good fortune.

At the end of the Song and start of the Yuan, when the realm was engulfed in war, the Kang founding ancestor recruited refugees in Wugong County to clear wasteland and farm.

In the early Ming, when half the realm was consumed by the Jingnan War, Kang Ruji, who had served as State Chancellor in the Prince of Yan's mansion, was very earnestly serving as a County Magistrate.

They loved scholarship, excelled at avoiding disaster, muddled through where they could, and at the same time lacked any drive to climb higher.

It even reached the point that in Kang Yaomin's grandfather's generation, there emerged a man named Kang Hai, a supreme multi-hyphenate.

In scholarship, he was the Presented Scholar Principal Graduate of the fifteenth year of the Hongzhi reign — first in the realm.

In poetry, he was one of the Seven Early Masters of the Great Ming, championing a return to ancient poetic forms.

In friendship: in the third year of the Zhengde reign, Li Mengyang offended Liu Jin and was thrown in prison; he slipped Kang Hai a little note reading: "Duishan, save me."

Kang Hai went to pay a call on Liu Jin and drank with him all through the night; the next day, Li Mengyang was released.

In the fifth year of the Zhengde reign, Liu Jin's crimes came to light and he was executed by slicing — three thousand three hundred fifty-seven cuts; Kang Hai, implicated as Liu Jin's fellow townsman, was stripped of his post and reduced to commoner status.

Dismissed and sent home, he composed musical dramas, played music, and nurtured Zhang Yupeng and Wang Lanqing, forming a troupe that laid the foundation for the Western Route of Qinqiang opera.

The zaju drama "The Wolf of Zhongshan" was staged — he wrote it.

Making art costs money, and what to do when the money ran short? He went into trade, becoming a nationally renowned Yangzhou salt merchant.

Kangshan Thatched Hall in Yangzhou was originally a nameless earthen mound formed from dredging waste when managing the Grand Canal; because Kang Hai sojourned there, it gained the name Kangshan, and later when Dong Qichang inscribed the plaque "Kangshan Thatched Hall," the name became official.

In between playing music and doing business, he also did some proper work, compiling a "Wugong County Gazetteer" that was judged as: "Of local and national histories, none is finer than this"; thereafter, most compilations of local gazetteers took this Wugong Gazetteer as their model.

Even now, the Kang family still boasts last year's newly minted Presented Scholar Kang Wanmin, and the Imperial Academy Student Kang Yumin, whose calligraphy is acclaimed as one of the Two Excellences of Guanzhong.

These two brothers embodied the Kang clan's temperament of having nothing to do with war.

Against the great backdrop of clanging and banging warfare inside and outside the passes, the two brothers spent the better part of their lives at home deciphering the Xuanji Diagram, and from that diagram of a mere eight hundred forty-one characters, they managed to read out seven thousand nine hundred fifty-eight poems.

Kang Yaomin was the younger brother of these two talents, though the age gap with his two elder brothers was considerable, so they never really played together.

He himself was also a Licentiate, but with state affairs raging fiercely, the social climate during his formative years shifted toward abandoning the civil for the martial, so he sat for a military post, and the court assigned him as Commander of the Xi'an Left Guard.

Of course, in this generation of the Kang family, Kang Yaomin was not the only one with the aspiration to mount a horse and serve the nation — there was also his younger brother Kang Jinmin, who took the same path, receiving the post of Chiliarch and serving as Garrison Officer of Yuhe Fort in Yulin Garrison.

But human fate, ah — it's hard to say.

Though the four Kang brothers differed in career paths and life philosophies, at this juncture in time, all of them were cast beneath the shadow of Liu Chengzong's iron hooves.

The newly minted Presented Scholar Kang Wanmin was among the gentry procession traveling from Wugong County to Xianyang for a banquet; the calligraphy master Kang Yumin was at the family home in Wugong, sweeping his couch to welcome the Field-Clearing Commandant from the Marshal's Headquarters.

Garrison Officer Kang Jinmin of Yuhe Fort was busy repairing those scenic spots and historic sites where Liu Chengzong had once lived.

Commander Kang Yaomin, meanwhile, was inside Tong Pass, his heart deeply preoccupied with the great army of the Marshal's Headquarters.

Though the mountains are high and the waters wide, the road far and the cart distant, even if Liu Chengzong could not hear him, Kang Yaomin stubbornly sent the Grand Marshal his fondest wishes: "Come on over, damn you — let the poison finish you off, you rotten coward!"

When he received the mission to escort grain and fodder into Tong Pass, Kang Yaomin never imagined that this towering fortress city would become the place where his bones were buried.

In fact, Kang Yaomin had already died once inside Tong Pass.

It began when word came from Henan Prefecture that bandit troops had already attacked Nanyang; the Seal-holding Commander of the Tong Pass Guard was on high alert and demanded that Kang Yaomin's four hundred banner troops also join the fortress's defense, lest the stockpiled grain be seized by the bandits.

Over four thousand banner troops and more than ten thousand soldiers and civilians brought out every usable weapon and stood in full battle array inside and outside the fortress.

But the anticipated bandits did not come — what came instead, surging mightily from Shanxi and tailing closely across the Yellow River, were the rat hordes; they covered the mountains and plains, everywhere, like mass after mass of writhing black clouds pressed against the ground.

Yet to the defenders of Tong Pass, there was really no difference between rats and roving bandits.

Both were petty thieves out to eat their grain.

Tong Pass was piled high with grain and fodder from top to bottom; to protect these supplies, the banner troops of the pass brought out their most treasured skills and used methods fit for national warfare to deal with the swarming rats.

Frankish cannons, fierce-fire oil cabinets, Ten-Thousand-Man Destroyers, River-Dragons, flying thunder bombards — all were fired out with thunderous fury.

But this mighty fortress, built to defend against terrifying upright apes, proved to have little miraculous effect in stopping these little gray-furred creatures.

The rat horde effortlessly filled in the moat, piled layer upon layer of corpses beneath the city walls, swarmed up onto the fortress through venomous fire and blazing oil, threaded through every street and alley inside and outside the fortress, and scattered their fleas into wells, houses, and granaries.

Plague raged in their wake; in a mere nine days, one commander was killed in battle, eight hundred banner troops were slain, countless soldiers and civilians were laid low, and the entire fortress city was paralyzed.

Kang Yaomin also died at that time — a most gruesome death, the boils on his head, neck, and armpits bursting open, coughing and vomiting flesh and blood like a rotten watermelon, the contaminated clothes on his body stripped off and burned, his corpse thrown on the ground without even a straw mat to wrap it.

Just like the majority of those who dropped dead at the same time, and no different from those rats lying dead in the streets.

With a vast number of deaths in a short time and even more people falling ill, the fortress, barely clinging to its last breath, no longer had the energy to care for the tedious formalities of the mortal world.

It was common to see a single coffin stuffed with a family of three or even four brothers; newly made coffins could not keep pace with the dead, and eventually even the coffin-makers died.

People first used straw mats, then curtains, felt rugs, and bedding; when these too were exhausted, every deceased soul who departed the world of the living went as clean and bare as when they arrived.

In truth, Kang Yaomin's situation was among the better ones.

The four hundred banner troops of the Xi'an Left Guard under his command had already collapsed in battle against the rat swarms; fortunately, he still had household servants and trusted men he had brought from home to handle his final affairs.

Two household servants who still had some mobility after falling ill dug him a grave in the city — really just a small pit inside a larger pit.

Because of the drought, the water pond at the corner of Tong Pass city had turned into a muddy mire, and after the plague struck, it became a mass burial ground.

The household servants dug three feet into the earth there to make a resting place for them. Regrettably, before the grave pit was even finished, the two servants digging it lost their strength as well, and could only hastily shove him and several servants who had died of illness inside.

In the mere time it took to cover them with a couple handfuls of yellow earth, one of the two servants coughed blood and died; the other drew his blade and slit his own throat — there wasn't enough room in the pit, and he truly had no strength left to dig himself a grave.

On the third day after his death, Kang Yaomin woke up in the heap of corpses.

This sort of thing was very common.

After all, in this era, people's means of examination were pulse and breath. A person of weak constitution who failed to pull through would enter a state of suspended animation; once those two vital signs were gone, gone meant dead.

But that did not mean there was no possibility of waking up.

That was precisely why there was a custom of not burying the dead immediately, but holding a wake for several days before interment for peace.

Leave them there and watch a while longer.

The situation facing the Tong Pass Guard, however, was somewhat more complicated than usual.

Over ten thousand soldiers and civilians crammed inside the pass city, fighting a desperate battle against the rat swarms to protect the grain. The moment the plague's incubation period ended and it erupted on a massive scale, it shattered the chain of command.

The physicians who took pulses had all damn well died.

A person walking along, collapsing to the ground — that was as good as gone.

Kang Yaomin was still feverish; in fact, because his ruptured wounds had come into contact with soil and foul water, his fever burned even hotter than before.

But he was still alive. The swellings on his neck, armpits, and groin were also somewhat smaller than earlier, though he could not be certain if this was because the wounds had ruptured and the tainted blood had drained out.

There was no time to grieve for his dead household servants, still less any way to lament the corpses covering the ground throughout Tong Pass. Kang Yaomin stumbled and staggered his way back to the official compound.

And even at this moment, the defending troops of Tong Pass were still fighting.

After the Seal-holding Commander died, the Tong Pass Guard had no commander in the official sense, only a heap of hereditary commanders without substantive appointments.

Among them, Commander Zhang Eryan was the most resolute and widely respected. The man excelled at mounted archery and close combat, a fierce general worth ten thousand men on horseback, but he had unfortunately also fallen ill with a high fever and was in no condition to manage affairs.

It was another commander, Sheng Yida, over sixty years of age, who, after the plague struck, seized the window between the first and second waves of outbreak. He ordered the guard's military households to distribute herbal decoctions, prohibit gatherings, wash and sun bedding, open windows for ventilation, fumigate with mugwort, and bathe. At the same time, he conducted sacrifices to ward off evil, and pasted talismans to repel pestilence on every household's door and the gates of the official compound.

The guiding principle: whether it works or not, use it all first!

As the saying goes, with age comes cunning. Sheng Yida was over sixty — what hadn't he seen? When plague came, never mind anything else, first do all these necessary preparations, and only then talk about detailed analysis.

The Sheng family of Tong Pass was extremely unique among the hereditary commanders of the Ming dynasty.

Their family's uniqueness lay in having risen from a guard hereditary post, yet distinguishing the lineage through civil scholarship and attaining eminence via the imperial examinations.

In two generations, they produced a Vice Commissioner-in-Chief, a Regional Vice Commander, a Capital Garrison Assistant Commander, a Commander, and simultaneously a father and son who both became jinshi, successively serving as Vice Minister and Minister.

Commander Sheng Yida's father, Sheng Ne, was the third son in the family. The eldest brother inherited the commander post and was later promoted to Vice Commissioner-in-Chief of the Nanjing Chief Military Commission; the second brother passed the military examination and served as a Capital Garrison Assistant Commander; he himself passed the jinshi examination and rose to Vice Minister of the Ministry of Personnel, and was posthumously granted the title of Minister of Rites.

The present Commander Sheng Yida was Sheng Ne's eldest son. His second brother, Sheng Yihong, who passed away a few years ago, had likewise passed the jinshi examination and served as Minister of Rites.

Thus, the Sheng family currently had many cultured people. Among the younger generation, there were not only military students skilled in bow, horse, and mounted archery, but also quite a few xiucai degree holders.

Sheng Yida knew perfectly well that his deployments were useless against this plague.

Because aside from tricks like sacrifices and pasting talismans that sought psychological comfort, all the other measures were those used in the past against seasonal epidemics.

So-called seasonal epidemics were, in fact, simply influenza during the changing of seasons.

The ancients were not ignorant of infectious diseases. Quite the contrary — precisely because medical methods and understanding of viruses were not as developed as in later ages, their impression of infectious diseases was all the more profound.

It was just that people at the time used a different framework. They did not call it infectious disease, but simply yi — pestilence.

The character yi itself fundamentally means "all the people are sick."

It is composed of the sickness radical and shu. Shu was a military weapon from the pre-Qin period. At that time, bronze was still very precious; common citizens mostly used wooden staves in battle, and only nobles on war chariots used bronze implements. This weapon — a wooden staff fitted with a bronze band and a three-edged spearhead — was an undisputed killing tool.

So much so that nearly all characters containing the shu radical relate to injury, assault, slaughter, and death.

Such as throw, strike, kill, perish, destroy, and die.

To put it simply, yi means: this illness kills very efficiently.

But one illness is not the same as another. Seasonal epidemics involve dry mouth, coughing, and a sore throat, whereas this plague involved headache, fever, swollen neck, and mumps. No matter how many doses of Lonicera and Forsythia Powder you took, it was useless!

However, Sheng Yida's measures were not aimed at eradicating the plague, but at boosting the military households' confidence and rebuilding the organizational capacity the plague had shattered.

The military households were terrified and panicked, their hearts divided. It was fundamentally impossible to block a plague where one person falling ill infected an entire room, and one room falling ill infected an entire village.

On this point, Sheng Yida's measures were extremely effective.

The Tong Pass Guard, under assault from the plague, quickly swept away its demoralized state. The remnant and defeated troops were reorganized, and they even discovered the patterns and key points of this plague.

People who came into contact with rats or plague-infected individuals would typically begin to show symptoms within three, five, or seven days. Those with mild infections could hold on for several days or even pull through; those with severe infections would pass away within about three days.

Two clan sons of the Sheng family, Zhaozhi and Kuizhi, dug out the medical texts of Zhang Zhongjing from the Han dynasty and shouldered the heavy responsibility of treatment after the physicians had died. They prescribed medicine to the sick military households based on clinical symptoms, and it actually had a certain effect.

Even though they had no idea what this illness really was, nor how it was contracted, still less the principles behind the treatment.

In any case, if a soldier had a high fever, they'd just give him a dose of Zhang Zhongjing's Greater Bluegreen Dragon Decoction for cold damage.

If he vomited pus and blood, Zhang Zhongjing's Cimicifuga and Turtle Shell Decoction would be given to resolve the toxin; if it couldn't resolve it, they'd just increase the dosage of realgar.

If the inch pulse was both deep and slow — meaning the pulse was faint and the heart was nearly stopping, about to go into shock — they'd quickly pour Zhang Zhongjing's Ephedra and Cimicifuga Decoction from the Treatise on Cold Damage down him to sustain his life.

As for what the medical texts said about drinking too much being bad for the body — fatigue, edema, a yellowing face, and the like — they simply ignored it. Saving the life came first.

After the two brothers treated them this way, the mortality rate among the sick military households and their dependents dropped markedly. At the very least, many military households with faint pulses on the verge of death were pulled back from the line of life and death. Those who originally would have died in three days were now, after seven days, still writhing and struggling on the ground, groaning in pain.

But people still feared the plague, because even those who had not yet fallen ill and were not in contact with others were still getting sick in droves.

Subsequently, they discovered that the twenty-odd military artisans and their households living near the gunpowder workshop of the city's Armory had not been infected at all.

Elsewhere, corpses littered the fields and every household was in mourning, but these people — nothing at all wrong with them. They had even developed a side business, starting to make coffins, weave hemp cloth, braid funeral wreaths, and paste up mourning staves right there in the Armory.

Asked what the reason was, they didn't know either. They had been in contact with both rats and the sick; they were just tough as nails. Hey — nothing happened!

Just as the Tong Pass Guard was on the verge of restoring order and even probing into the secret of why the military artisans were untouched by the plague, Wei Qian'er's vanguard forces from the Marshal's Headquarters approached Tong Pass.

In an instant, just as they had glimpsed the hope of survival, the order that all of Tong Pass had painstakingly built with united hearts came crashing down — they had already exhausted every ounce of strength just to struggle and cling to life; it was fundamentally impossible to cope with yet another war.

Yet Tong Pass was precisely so critical — it not only stockpiled enormous quantities of grain and fodder, but more importantly, it was the great gate between east and west under Heaven.

Once the rebel army fought past Tong Pass, Henan Prefecture, ravaged by the same plague, could not hold them off. Beyond it there was no defensible terrain. The western troops, strong in men and horses, could drive north straight for the capital, sweep east across Shandong, and threaten Fengyang to the south.

Preventing this from happening was the duty of the Tong Pass Guard, who for generations had received the state's grace and held hereditary military posts.

At this critical juncture, to stop the Marshal's Headquarters rebel army, the Tong Pass Guard's pinnacle of martial strength — Commander Zhang Eryou, long bedridden with illness — struggled to don his armor.

He ordered his household to lead out his horse and fetch his war blade, bow, and arrows, then led three hundred ailing banner troops to kowtow tearfully toward the Forbidden City atop the pass before immediately sallying forth.

In a single day they fought three battles and lost three. Only forty banner troops, led by Zhang Eryou, narrowly escaped the Marshal Army's pursuit and returned to the Tong Pass Guard.

The fallen banner troops, with their lives as the offering, brought the calamity of plague crashing down hard upon Wei Qian'er's head.

The Marshal's Headquarters elite, who had swept through Guanzhong and routed forty thousand Ming troops in three days, halted their steps — they reached Tong and stopped.

A tragic, crushing defeat created a great strategic victory. The banner troops of the Tong Pass Guard wished to celebrate, yet knew not where any celebration could come from.

The significance of the great victory lay a thousand li away, but the cenotaphs of whole families dead in the catastrophe stood right before their eyes.

More importantly, they did not realize that the army halted at the foot of Mount Hua on the other side of the battlefield was just like them.

Just like them, they were soldiers, carrying the same convictions, enduring the same struggles, taking part in the same mad war.

Only four days after Zhang Eryou went into battle, on the wheat-planted tableland west of the pass fortress, pole after pole of crimson banners unfurled along the paths between the wheat-field ridges, and the slow, rhythmic sound of hooves beat like heavy drums.

The red-armored soldiers riding slowly with reins in hand all had bloodshot eyes and swollen necks. Their movements were sluggish and weary, yet they still maintained the impeccably regulation mounted postures from the drill manual — only their faces were blank, their eyes spiritless, their dry tongues licking cracked lips as they rose and fell with the horses' backs, staring fixedly at the towering fortress pass.

First they appeared scattered like stars across the wilderness, then they linked into a single mass, moving against the sunset's crimson glow like an ill omen cast upon the earth.

On the walls of Tong Pass, signal cannons boomed, bells and drums sounded without cease, mingled with the hoarse shouts of the defending troops atop the pass, spreading through the entire fortress.

"Rebel army at the walls!"