Chapter 2098 - The Spy
A prolonged siege remained utterly impossible—Zhu Mingxia had neither the time nor the resources to play an extended waiting game with the cunning Xiong Wenchan.
Zhu Mingxia had deliberately not mentioned it during the larger conference, but since the enemy clearly intended to burn the city down anyway, he could just as easily strike first with the same devastating abandon: completely seal Wuzhou from all directions, then systematically rain concentrated salvos of Hale rockets upon it from multiple angles.
They had learned long ago from brutal combat experience that a sustained barrage of a hundred or more rockets proved utterly devastating to defender morale—more than sufficient to cause an entire defending army to rout almost instantly in blind panic, abandoning their positions.
But executing such a strategy would inevitably bring absolute calamity upon innocent Wuzhou. Rockets bombarding and breaching the walls while the city interior was packed densely with deliberate incendiary materials would certainly result in an unstoppable conflagration engulfing everything and everyone within.
And then the terrible historical stigma of wanton cruelty would fall permanently on the Council of Elders' reputation, not on Xiong Wenchan where it belonged.
Now the four of them gathered in private had to vote on this precise moral and tactical issue: Should they deliberately delay the assault and passively let Xiong Wenchan play the role of butcher and war criminal, or should they aggressively seize the initiative on the battlefield, leveraging their overwhelming superior weaponry to deliver a thunderbolt strike and swiftly capture Wuzhou before the Ming could execute their plan?
First to speak his mind was Zhu Mingxia's old subordinate and trusted comrade, Zhu Quanxing, who pragmatically supported using massed rocket bombardment without hesitation. He argued bluntly, "It's not as if we haven't deliberately set fires before in this war. When we burned down the Wuyang Postal Station complex during the Guangzhou assault, I don't recall the people of Guangzhou holding any particular grudge against us afterward. As long as we move with maximum speed and ruthlessly exploit the psychological chaos caused by the rocket barrage to take Wuzhou quickly before they can react, their elaborate arson plan has absolutely no chance whatsoever of succeeding. We'll be in control before they can light the first torch."
Xu Ke disagreed strongly with this coldly pragmatic assessment: "Back then, the native population saw us as nothing more than foreign pirates and barbarian raiders. Now we've successfully established ourselves as the legitimate successors of Chinese civilization and rightful governance. We simply can't afford to descend to the same inhuman depths of deliberate cruelty as a desperate man like Xiong Wenchan. Our legitimacy depends on being better."
In truth, Xu Ke personally had no desire whatsoever to see the historic city of Wuzhou reduced to smoking ashes and rubble. Over these long years since the collective transmigration, he had witnessed far, far too much pointless death and human suffering already. But when it came to critical military matters with moral dimensions, he always hoped to position himself firmly on the side of justice and principle, even when tactically costly.
Zhu Mingxia weighed both arguments carefully before responding: "We can and should strive to avoid deliberately setting fires if any alternative exists. But if fire becomes tactically unavoidable in the chaos of assault, the initiative to light it absolutely must rest with us, not with a cornered enemy. Our soldiers mustn't be allowed to die in vain because of the enemy's treacherous schemes and traps. Only through achieving a swift and utterly decisive victory can we realistically hope to minimize total casualties among both innocent civilians and our own troops! That's the hard calculus we face."
"Shijie!" Jiang Suo let out a sharp, anguished cry and sat bolt upright with a violent start, his heart pounding.
"Sir! Are you alright?" A concerned soldier came running over quickly. "What's wrong? Another nightmare?"
Jiang Suo slowly came back to his senses, his breathing ragged, staring blankly at the dying campfire flickering before him in the pre-dawn darkness. He had been having the nightmares again, as he did nearly every night.
The scene in the recurring nightmare was always horrifyingly the same, unchanging:
Shijie—his beloved senior martial-sister Qingxia—was hanging limply from the crude gallows hastily erected in the dirt threshing ground outside Master Luo's sprawling estate. The woman Jiang Suo had loved with all his heart had become nothing but a cold, lifeless corpse swaying gently in the wind, her beautiful face contorted.
Jiang Suo had long since lost count of how many times he had helplessly dreamed of this exact terrible scene, only to awaken drenched in cold sweat and shaking. Sometimes he would also dream vividly of Uncle Zhou, who witnesses said had been shot cleanly through the head during the purge—his eyeball flying grotesquely out of its shattered socket. Jiang Suo even occasionally dreamed of Master Luo himself, the troupe leader. None of these dreams were ever good ones, never peaceful.
Countless times over the years, the dead of Sanliang Market would stand silently before him in his tortured dreams. Shijie would weep soundlessly, not saying a single word of accusation or comfort. This particular time, Jiang Suo had dreamed of all those dead again in vivid detail. He jerked awake by the guttering fire, and the sheepskin blanket someone had draped over him while he slept slid off his shoulders.
"It's nothing serious. Any movement from the Australian positions?" Jiang Suo wiped his sweaty brow with a trembling hand. The sky overhead was still pitch black and starry, but the bright morning star had already appeared low on the eastern horizon. In no time at all, maybe an hour, dawn would break and battle would come.
"They've established their main camp on Changzhou Island across the water. No sign yet that they intend to conduct an amphibious landing and attack the city directly."
"Keep watching closely. Report any significant movement to me immediately, no matter how small."
The highly trained Australian scouts had crept stealthily up to the defensive position at the summit of Bangshan hill at dusk the previous day, quietly dispatching several of his sentries with knives before being detected. But they had been spotted by concealed secondary lookout posts he had carefully placed as backup, and the alerted garrison had immediately returned accurate fire. According to the reports filtering back, several enemy scouts had been hit by the volleys, but characteristically no bodies had been left behind for identification. Jiang Suo knew with grim certainty that dawn was mere minutes away now. Very soon, the Australians would launch their main assault in force. And the critical Bangshan position—strategic guardian of the entire Gui River waterway—would naturally be their first priority target to seize.
"Bring me something to eat quickly." His stomach was already growling audibly with hunger. The soldier acknowledged the order with a nod and soon returned bearing several lumps of cold, rock-hard "battle rice" wrapped in dried reed leaves.
He had no chopsticks available, so Jiang Suo simply shoveled the dried, stiff rice directly into his mouth with his dirty fingers, chewing mechanically as he fixed his gaze tensely on the dark approaches at the foot of the mountain, watching for movement.
Jiang Suo felt as if he had somehow crossed into another lifetime entirely, living multiple lives compressed into a few short years. He had once been merely a traveling performer and martial artist with a popular troupe. Later, through no choice of his own, he became a prisoner of the Australians after the Sanliang Market incident. Later still, he became one of their common soldiers through conscription. And now, through the strangest twist of fate, he stood directly against the Australians, ready to fight them head-on as an enemy. In just a few tumultuous years, Jiang Suo had experienced more dramatic reversals than most sheltered people experienced in an entire comfortable lifetime.
Five long years had passed since that terrible day. The once-beautiful face of his beloved Qingxia had grown frustratingly blurry in Jiang Suo's fading memory; all that remained crystal clear was the final horrible twitching of her body as she was methodically strung up on the gallows, struggling for breath. He didn't know where Yunniang and the other surviving troupe members had been sent by the Australian authorities after the purge. Master Ban, the troupe's elderly patriarch, had vanished without a trace—whether he was even still alive somewhere, Jiang Suo had absolutely no idea and no way to find out.
As for himself, after the Australians had seized him and subjected him to the dreaded "purification" process, he had been exiled under guard to a remote village on Qiongzhou Island's southern coast. There in that isolated place, winter never came; it remained always a sweltering, humid summer. Half the villagers were fellow exiles like himself, political undesirables or criminals; the other half were voluntary migrants from the war-torn north seeking stability.
The work assigned was simple in concept but physically grueling in execution. They dried salt on the scorching beach, fished the open sea in small boats, and harvested seaweed from the rocks. Though a dirt road connected the village tenuously to the outside world, it was usually completely deserted—only the pitch-black utility poles and the mysterious iron telegraph wires strung between them stretched off into the distance toward civilization. Standing at the village entrance and looking outward, all that met the eye was the endless gray ocean. Once each month, the Australians' supply ships would arrive punctually, bringing sacks of grain, mail from distant places, and daily necessities, then hauling away the salt and various sea goods they had painstakingly gathered. Life was genuinely hard but oddly peaceful in its rhythm.
The villagers naturally did not look down on him socially as a political exile, which surprised him. Because he knew more than a bit of practical martial arts, they democratically elected him captain of the village militia for defense. In that isolated little village, Jiang Suo worked hard without complaint, and the simple people gradually grew fond of him—and he, despite everything, grew unexpectedly fond of the village atmosphere and community. Once, when sea pirates attacked the village seeking plunder, he helped organize the villagers to resist effectively and held out desperately until Australian naval reinforcements arrived. If it truly came to laying down his life for those particular villagers who'd shown him kindness, Jiang Suo realized he would not hesitate.
If not for those terrible dreams that haunted him relentlessly night after night, Jiang Suo might genuinely have settled down permanently and taken root in that peaceful village. The village head's daughter was clearly fond of him and made her interest obvious, and the pragmatic head was more than happy to take him as a son-in-law despite his exile status. If not for those cursed nightmares, Jiang Suo would likely have married contentedly in that little village, fathered healthy children, and lived out his remaining days in quiet, comfortable obscurity far from the chaos of history.
But the village was thoroughly steeped in the Australians' pervasive ideological presence. This was unquestionably Australian territory. The village head was a "cadre" officially appointed by the Australian administration. Whether political exiles or not, all migrants were required to shave their heads in the Australian style and wear standardized "Australian clothing" rather than traditional garments. The official notices and propaganda newspapers printed by the Australians were prominently posted on the walls of the village administrative office. Even the very words they habitually used to speak to one another had become the "Newspeak" vocabulary systematically introduced and promoted by the Australian authorities.
It drove Jiang Suo slowly mad with suppressed rage. Combined with the nightly vivid dreams of his lost Qingxia, he teetered constantly on the edge of complete psychological breakdown. A wild, desperate thought seized him and wouldn't let go: perhaps if he managed to kill a few Australians in revenge, he would finally stop dreaming of Qingxia, stop dreaming of all the people hanged on the gallows in Sanliang Market. The villagers around him were all merely "false-hair" naturalized people, converts and collaborators; the true Australians of real power were the mysterious Elders from the future. And Jiang Suo knew instinctively that only by somehow killing one of those true-hairs might he find lasting release from his consuming nightmares and guilt.
But actually killing a "true-hair" Elder was no remotely easy task! Elders very seldom visited remote, insignificant villages like this one—it was merely one of dozens of similar settlements scattered along the southern coast of Qiongzhou Island, part of the Council of Elders' vast "human resource reservoir" for labor. Besides salt production, the village had almost no meaningful economic output or strategic value. Although from time to time able-bodied men from the village would be conscripted and sent off somewhere inland to fell timber in forests, mine ore in mountains, build irrigation dams, or dig canal systems—engaging in all manner of backbreaking physical labor—even if one might encounter an Elder supervisor on such work details, it was only ever a glimpse from afar across a work site. There was simply no way to get close enough.
After living in the village for several increasingly frustrated years, Jiang Suo gradually learned through observation that there were only three realistic paths to closely approach an Elder: formally enlist in the military forces, successfully pass the competitive civil service examinations, or be recruited for technical work and then steadily promoted through meritocracy. But the rigorous examinations were nearly impossible for someone of his limited classical education, and recruitment followed by promotion seemed equally dim as prospects. The only viable route left was enlisting in the military.
Every year, the village held recruitment drives under Australian supervision, though the actual number of new soldiers accepted was quite small—just a few young men each year. And most of them were routinely assigned to the National Army garrison forces, which Jiang Suo knew from veterans rarely saw actual combat; their primary duties were roughly equivalent to what the county zhuangban local militia had done in the old Ming days. The realistic chances of encountering an Elder in such a posting were only marginally higher than remaining in the village.
Moreover, each time the annual draft was held, Jiang Suo's name was never included on the "eligible list"—because he carried the official status of political exile, and by strict regulation, no exile could legally be drafted into military service until after serving five full years of exile.
But for the ambitious Guangdong and Guangxi Campaign, mass conscription was suddenly opened across the Council's entire controlled territory, and "exiles" like Jiang Suo—those who hadn't yet served their full five years—were unexpectedly included in the expanded draft for the first time. The practical village head thought shrewdly that staying on indefinitely as a mere village militia captain offered no real future or advancement; far better to try his luck in the expanding professional army, where he might earn a proper career and pension. And if he died in combat, well, his daughter could easily find another suitable husband.
And so Jiang Suo enlisted, seeing his opportunity. As fate would have it, because he had been drafted specifically from a coastal fishing village, he was automatically assigned to the elite Naval Infantry rather than regular army.
After several grueling months of intensive training that pushed him to his limits, he was posted to the prestigious Pearl River Task Force, assigned as a marine combat soldier attached to the river detachment. They were stationed at the forward base in Hong Kong, on constant standby to move on Guangdong at any moment.
During those long waiting days of preparation, although Jiang Suo frequently saw Elder-officers moving about the base and even interacted with some, he never once threw caution entirely to the wind and moved against them despite the burning urge. He genuinely didn't understand why he wanted so badly to assassinate the Australians—was it purely revenge for Qingxia's execution, or a desperate attempt to escape the nightmares that tormented him? He honestly couldn't say with certainty.
In all fairness, those Australian Elders were demonstrably good people who genuinely cared for their men and willingly shared in the hardships of common soldiers rather than living apart in luxury. The ordinary people had benefited greatly and materially from their enlightened benevolence and modern governance. Especially his fellow marines—many of them had been pulled back literally from the brink of starvation or death by the Elders' intervention, given a genuine second chance at life and dignity. Killing such people would be an act of the blackest treachery and ingratitude.
But wasn't the Australians' cold execution of his innocent Qingxia just as much a treachery against love and justice?
Jiang Suo felt perpetually torn between irreconcilable loyalties. Several times, when perfect opportunity arose and an Elder was alone and vulnerable, he had hesitated fatally and let the moment pass. Without the consuming urge to kill burning in him, Jiang Suo was objectively a model soldier—hardworking in training, punctual, with a strong sense of discipline, highly regarded and praised by the Elder-officers who supervised him.
But the murderous urge would resurface unbidden, whispering in his mind, and Jiang Suo knew full well the impossible trap: to kill an Elder who appreciated him and treated him well was the worst betrayal, but to let Qingxia's death go unavenged forever was an equally unbearable betrayal of love.
(End of Chapter)