Chapter 780: Bitter Fruit

Outside Yulin City, Liu Chengzong of the Marshal's Headquarters was brimming with pride and satisfaction.

Meanwhile, the Emperor Chongde of the Daicing Gurun had to swallow the bitter fruit of defeat and return to Shengjing City with a heart full of resentment.

The Eight Banners had mobilized over sixty-three thousand troops in full force, but on the day the battered remnants straggled back to Shengjing, a headcount tallied only thirty-eight thousand and change, with countless warhorses, camels, and mules lost.

The moment the troops re-entered the Liaodong border wall, news of the defeat spread to the outskirts, immediately causing a huge uproar in Shengjing City. People rushed through the streets and alleys in great agitation, desperately asking whether their kin were still alive in the ranks.

In the days that followed, from Liaoyang to Jianzhou, word of the deaths spread far and wide, and every inch of land east of Liaoyang was filled with the sound of weeping.

For a time, ten thousand households donned mourning white. One widow received thirteen death notices in a row; others were told only that their men were missing—no one alive, no corpse found. Even having a family's queue brought back was considered a stroke of fortune.

Since the era of the Old Khan, even when every household had worn mourning, the Later Jin had never suffered a blow as devastating as this one.

The non-royal Prince Geng Zhongming was killed in battle; Kong Youde went missing; Prince Consort Hoxoi was blown up on the spot; Gūsa-i Ejen Ma Guangyuan was beaten to death; Dudu, the Old Khan's eldest grandson, was taken captive; Li Yongfang's son Yingge defected. Below the Gūsa level, Jalai and Niru commanders died in numbers beyond counting, and some Niru were even struck from the rolls entirely.

For a time, the Daicing Gurun presented a deeply fractured face.

Among the common Banner households, people were stunned by the colossal military failure. Orphans and widows in mourning white were everywhere; in some Niru, seven or eight households with a dozen women among them could not muster a single able-bodied man.

Yet at court, the very first major act Hong Taiji performed upon returning to the capital was to be carried by sedan chair, leading the Eight Banners nobility to the ancestral temple for a grand Heaven-worshipping ceremony, reporting a great victory to Nurhaci.

In truth, by this time, Hong Taiji's health was in grave danger; he could barely walk, and even thinking had become difficult.

Most domestic affairs were handled by Dorgon and Daišan in consultation. Hong Taiji generally said very little, only responsible for nodding or shaking his head.

With Hong Taiji suffering this defeat, the Aisin nobles all had grievances, and things long suppressed began bubbling to the surface.

Although, given that the two Yellow Banners still stood and the two White Banners lent support, no one dared go too far, some talk still spread that Hong Taiji had been excessively ruthless toward his brothers and sisters.

Hong Taiji clearly felt that his control over both his own body and the Eight Banners had sharply declined because of this war, and he was willing to make concessions. So he held a perfunctory council, proposing that since Amin had been locked up for a long time and had recognized his mistakes, he could be released.

This actually had nothing to do with Amin; the Daicing Gurun's imperial clan was not so short-handed that they needed to let him out.

It was merely a gesture of goodwill from Hong Taiji, signaling that he would not be so vicious toward his siblings in the future.

As a result, the very day Amin was released, he jumped out to dictate policy, suggesting that with troop strength so depleted, they should not attack Joseon but instead emulate the Old Khan's wisdom: first purge the Han people within the realm of their wealth, goods, and grain to get through this winter, and then talk.

This colossal idiot caused Emperor Chongde's illness to worsen drastically.

Under the leadership of clan head Daišan, the Aisin nobles reached a consensus: they appreciated the Emperor's kind intentions, but as for Amin's goodwill—they'd rather not have it. He deserved to stay locked up!

Having enjoyed freedom for all of half a day, Amin was promptly sent back to his estate by his own younger brother Jirgalang to continue his confinement.

But this mindset was by no means Amin's alone.

With the military defeat, the pasturelands and farming estates controlled by the Daicing Gurun shrank drastically.

The troops of the Khorchin Left Wing and other tribes who had returned east with the Eight Banners lost their garrison posts in the eastern Khingan Range and were forced to encamp near Shengjing. The two princes, Ukšan and Manjusri, pestered Dorgon daily for troop supplies, grain, and fiefs.

Where was Dorgon supposed to find spare grain and land for them? He sent them back beyond the border wall time and again.

But the lands beyond the wall were now occupied by the Marshal's Headquarters' Darkhan army. Several thousand armored ruffians from south of the Gobi, with no proper occupation, roamed freely on horseback, killing anyone they saw.

The Han army faced a similar situation. Shang Kexi, leveraging his position as the sole survivor among the Three Compliant Kings, took the opportunity to gather many defeated veterans from the forces of Kong Youde and Geng Zhongming, encamping at Liaoyang and plotting to retake Haizhou—but with little success.

The Guanning Army's Zu Dashou had entrenched himself at Niuzhuang and refused to leave. His vanguard commander, Wu Sangui, had even advanced into Haizhou, sending men to Gaizhou, Fuzhou, and other places to hunt for youths—anyone between thirteen and twenty-eight, Jurchen or Han alike, all were shaved bald and pressed into military service.

Wu Sangui didn't want anyone over twenty-eight. Those older were simply tied up and thrown to his uncle in the rear—sent to farm military colonies if fit for that, or made into household retainers if not.

He only wanted Liao youths younger than himself—young lads with simple minds and strong limbs, who, given enough pay, would fight fiercely no matter the foe.

Any older, and their minds would already bear the imprint of the Ming army or the Jin army; once they had minds of their own, they'd start shirking and cutting corners.

Although Shang Kexi, seizing the opportunity of Shi Tingzhu's absence and the deaths of Ma Guangyuan and others, had used his instinct for opportunism to briefly become the leader of the Han army, he still lacked the ability to wrestle with Wu Sangui and retake his old home of Haizhou.

As a result, the eight-thousand-strong Han army, like the Mongol troops, was encamped outside Shengjing.

Over ten thousand men had no place to live and not enough to eat. Military discipline plummeted, and incidents of robbery, murder, and plunder occurred one after another.

What's more, having been defeated by the Marshal's army, the Han troops were no longer so afraid of the Eight Banners. When low-ranking officers suffered humiliation at the hands of Jurchen officers, they would dare to draw their blades on the spot, leading men to storm into Niru estates in retaliation.

After looting, they would either flee toward the Joseon border or slip beyond the border wall.

Nor was it only Han and Mongol soldiers who acted this way—Eight Banners troops also took part in these internal feuds and fled outward.

The entire Daicing Gurun, the Manchu nation that Hong Taiji had painstakingly forged over the ten years since his enthronement, was on the verge of falling apart.

But for Hong Taiji, the fortunate thing was that none of the surrounding powers were willing to accept these people.

The Liao troops of the Ming army occupying Haizhou, the Marshal's Headquarters' Darkhan army prowling east of the Khingan Range, and the mobilized border troops of Joseon's Six Garrisons—when they saw people crossing the border in small numbers, they killed them on sight, indiscriminately.

The Daicing Gurun's territory shrank rapidly. The occupied lands were all war zones, and the occupying forces were all the sort who'd grab an advantage if there was one and run if there wasn't—bullies who preyed on the weak and feared the strong.

For them, the cost of distinguishing a genuine surrender from a false one was simply too high.

What did common soldiers understand of grand strategy and broad vision?

Spurring their horses and brandishing their blades, they charged. Those who stretched out their necks to be slaughtered were Eight Banners soldiers with poor combat skills; those who turned and fled were Eight Banners soldiers who had lost their nerve… all of them were military merits.

As for whether they were Han Chinese or not—go wave that severed head and explain it to the inspecting censor checking the kills.

Seeing the situation grow ever more chaotic, the Khorchin Left Wing's Prince Ukšan and Prince of the Second Rank Manjusri decided to lead over five thousand men out beyond the border wall and return to Čoloman City. But no sooner had they left the wall than the Darkhan army's Shandan, leading two thousand cavalry, forcibly drove them back inside the Liaodong border.

It wasn't that Shandan and Little Jamso were so formidable; in a real fight, the Darkhan army might not have been a match for the Khorchin Left Wing.

But Ukšan had already lost his nerve for battle. The men he had on hand were the Khorchin Left Wing's last troops, and he dared neither to fight nor to risk them.

So it was that the Daicing Gurun, on the verge of collapse, was forcibly held together by butchers from all sides, compelled to piece itself back together and rally with unprecedented unity around the half-paralyzed Hong Taiji, greatly enhancing Emperor Chongde's prestige.

There was no helping it—Han and Mongol commanders like Shang Kexi, Jin Yuhe, Ukšan, and Manjusri were the ones who least wished to see Hong Taiji fall.

If Hong Taiji fell, the once-unbreakable Manchu alliance would instantly disintegrate back into the primordial Eight Banners, and then they would be the first to be butchered.

The fact that the Eight Banners, having just suffered a heavy blow, dared not clash with the Marshal's army again in the short term was one thing—but the Eight Banners soldiers were not afraid of the Han Banners and Mongol Banners.

However, this chaos did not last very long.

Daišan and Dorgon resolved the trouble Amin had caused and immediately set about allocating pasturelands for the Han Banners and Mongol Banners, even sacrificing some of the Eight Banners' own garrison posts and estates to do so.

What was sacrificed, naturally, were the holdings of the Blue Banners, which had suffered the heaviest losses in the campaign east of the Khingan Range.

Hooge's displeasure was of no use. He had been practically beaten into a commander without an army on the battlefield; as a feudal lord, without troops, he had no voice.

Emperor Chongde did hem and haw his opposition, but before he could finish speaking in his slow, deliberate way, Dorgon cut him off and finalized the decision.

Dorgon knew what Hong Taiji wanted to say, and he also knew that Hong Taiji was not speaking in Hooge's favor simply because Hooge was his son, but because the Blue Banners had borne the brunt of the final casualties in battle and deserved compensation and care after the war, not to have their estates confiscated.

If they did this, in the future, no one in the Eight Banners would dare fight to the death.

But the problem now facing Dorgon was that the two White, two Red, and two Yellow Banners were even less willing to accept their estates and fields being distributed to the Han and Mongol armies.

The Han and Mongol armies, their morale already crumbling, could not accept further foot-dragging either.

Therefore, the only option for now was to temporarily assign the Blue Banner's garrison territory to them, drive the Han and Mongol banner troops to retake Haizhou, and then let the remaining six banners deliberate slowly on how to compensate the Blue Banner.

At least for now, the Eight Banners still had one hope left: Joseon.

Just at this moment, Ajige finally returned.

Ajige's return had not been easy.

Realizing the northern route was impassable, he relied on scattering silver to buy passage from Ming troops, traveling from Tianjin Garrison to Wuding Prefecture, plundering nearly a thousand large and small civilian vessels along the coastline, their sails stretching for dozens of li across the sea as they fled eastward.

Fearing interception at sea by Shen Shikui of Dongjiang Garrison, they dared not take the island-hopping route from Dengzhou to Jinzhou. Over two hundred ships were lost during the voyage, and only a little over nine hundred vessels reached Gaizhou.

He thought he would be safe once ashore, but as it happened, he landed right as the siege of Haizhou was underway.

Ajige, full of pent-up rage from drifting at sea and with nowhere to vent it, immediately launched his troops at the besieging camp. The enemy dared not meet his blade, collapsing without firing a single arrow.

Having driven off the besieging army, Ajige, still hungry and furious from the journey, promptly ordered men to ride to the city walls and demand that Shang Kexi prepare meat, wine, and food to feast his troops.

The response he got was a volley of cannonballs.

The Liao troops on the wall who understood Jurchen roared with laughter: "Shang Kexi's been chased off by you!"

Shang Kexi had painstakingly scraped together his forces, mustered his courage, and come to Haizhou trembling with fear to wrestle with Wu Sangui. He had just set up his siege camp when he saw a fierce band of riders charging from the west. Assuming it was Zu Dashou leading troops to aid his nephew, he fled eastward in terror.

Coming from the west, and so ferociously — it had to be the Guanning Army!

Ajige never dreamed that outside the city was Shang Kexi, while inside the city was Wu Sangui!

Ajige dared not assault the city either. Though his men were elite troops, months of flight and displacement, escaping death through enemy territory, and then losing men and officers at sea had left them utterly devoid of fighting spirit. He simply bundled Shang Kexi along and headed straight for Shengjing.

When Hong Taiji, Daišan, Dorgon, and the others received the news, they were both shocked and delighted.

The delight, naturally, was that Ajige had returned alive; the shock was that Ajige's return could not have come at a worse time.

Because as long as Ajige had not returned, the number of his twenty thousand elite troops remained fluid — it could be twenty thousand, or it could be zero. As long as it fluctuated, there was still hope.

But once Ajige returned, that number was fixed, and another several thousand men were gone.

The earlier funeral rites were not yet finished, and now more had to be arranged.

Yet none of these losses of men and officers were the fatal blow to Hong Taiji.

His fatal blow was this: the entire city of Shengjing was steeped in an atmosphere of mourning, every household draped in white hemp — and yet, in the guest residence of the Joseon envoys, a string of firecrackers went off.

The Joseon officials in Shengjing had been cut off from their provisions by Daicing Gurun ever since they failed to perform the proper rites at Chongde's enthronement, and they had no way of getting firecrackers at all.

Hong Taiji believed that among his own brothers, someone was rejoicing at his defeat.

That single string of firecrackers dealt more damage than Amin ever had.

That very afternoon, Hong Taiji was so enraged he could no longer stand.

Rage surged to his heart. He only managed to grab Dorgon's sleeve and utter two final words: "Don't kill."

Dorgon understood. The "don't kill" Hong Taiji spoke of meant they were not to kill the Joseon envoys — after an incident like this, everyone wanted to kill them.

But in truth, Hong Taiji was deeply wronged this time, because the Joseon envoys' firecrackers had not, in fact, been given to them by any Eight Banners noble.

After the earlier affair with Amin, the consensus among the Aisin nobles was that while Hong Taiji might be excessively ruthless toward his own kin, everything he did was correct.

Just look at Amin — the moment he was let out, he started stirring up trouble.

Right in front of several Han army generals, he could blurt out the idea of first stripping the Han people of their wealth and goods.

To put it bluntly, the Han troops now outnumbered any single banner. If they were given advance warning, who would be stripping whose wealth?

So at this moment, no one would oppose the Chongde Emperor's past policies on fundamental matters.

The Joseon envoys' firecrackers were something they had picked up themselves after the Chongde Emperor's enthronement ceremony — they had gathered unexploded firecrackers from the ground and strung them together.

As for why they would pick them up, it was simply because the Joseon kingdom was poor.

The Great Ming had always deceived them, claiming gunpowder was made by boiling seawater. Joseon did not learn how gunpowder was actually made until the Wanli era, during the war against the Japanese and their aid to Joseon.

But knowing how it was made did them no good. Joseon lacked sulfur, and their saltpeter production and purification techniques could not meet demand.

Annual trade and smuggling combined yielded less than ten thousand jin of gunpowder. Gunpowder was so scarce that the royal court's total consumption for annual festivities could not exceed thirty jin.

So the envoys at the guest residence had picked up the firecrackers discarded on the ground, originally intending to see if they could be of any use after returning home. They never expected that Daicing had suffered a humiliating defeat, and the entire city was in mourning.

Delighted, the Joseon envoys set off that string of firecrackers.

The two envoy officials and their retinue were arrested.

This matter should have been handled by Jirgalang, but Jirgalang was the military governor of Shengjing and thus under suspicion, so it was handed to Dorgon instead.

After interrogating them, Dorgon did not believe the Joseon envoys' answers at all, but he breathed a sigh of relief nonetheless and closed the case directly.

This case was far too difficult to handle.

To put it plainly, with the Chongde Emperor humiliated, every single noble of the Aisin clan had ample motive to set off firecrackers in celebration.

Daišan — his two Red Banners had suffered little loss, and he had been stripped of his chance at succession years ago. Would it be strange if he set off firecrackers?

Dodo — this kind of petty, underhanded mischief was exactly Dodo's style.

And Dorgon himself — he even suspected that he might have sent those firecrackers himself and simply forgotten about it.

So any halfway plausible explanation was good enough to close the case. In these troubled times, what if an investigation actually uncovered something?

Dorgon thought to himself, if they investigated seriously and someone claimed the firecrackers had been sent by the imprisoned Amin, then the firecrackers themselves would become the smallest problem.

Still, once the matter was clarified, Dorgon intended to have these Joseon envoys and their attendants all killed.

Daicing Gurun needed to kill someone to vent its rage.

And these two envoys happened to be the perfect candidates.

But Hong Taiji would not allow it.

When the Chongde Emperor regained consciousness, the vitality in his body seemed to have diminished by another measure. This time, he did not even summon the Eight Banners lords, but simply called together all the imperial kinsmen and the Han and Mongol commanders.

"The Joseon envoys' insolence is too numerous to list. All of this is the Joseon king deliberately fostering enmity, wishing me to initiate hostilities by killing his envoys, so that he may then accuse me of betraying our heaven-sworn alliance. Thus he has instructed them to act in this manner."

"By my consistent conduct, I will never be angered by such a trifling matter. Even if our two nations were already enemies, locked in the chaos of battle, should they send an envoy, there is still no principle that permits killing him. To kill him would not be the righteousness of a sovereign."

"Release those two envoys to return. Since Ajige has already turned back, we should marshal our troops, first take Haicheng, seize ships to create the appearance of attacking the Shen clan on Pi Island, but in truth mass our main army to strike Korea swiftly. Do not take useless strongholds, do not attack border troops skilled in battle — drive straight for their capital, use its wealth, grain, men, and horses, and conquer Korea!"

?? Good morning!