A few weeks after his return to the temple, a band of raiders about twenty strong reached the temple with supplies stolen from the stores of the various competing armies of the war. They had distributed rice and dried meat among the villages near Zitao’s own village, and they were waiting for the worst of the spring flooding to pass before journeying further up the mountain to take supplies to temples and monasteries higher than their own temple. When they were eating one day Zitao sat with them to listen to news of the greater world.

The dining hall held the same amount of brothers as before Zitao’s journey, but their conversation was more muted than before, and the candles burned fewer and lower on the tables. The loudest conversation was from the raiders, who relished the opportunity for a hot meal, no matter how stingy.

“Yuan Shao says he will march to Xuchang,” one man said as he slurped his soup. “Do you believe it?”

“No,” said a man across the table from the slurper.

“Yes,” said the man next to him at the exact same moment.

The first man laughed. “Well one of you go first then.”

The man who believed it spoke:

“He has to march. He can muster an army a hundred thousand strong and he’ll rule all of China if he defeats Cao Cao.”

“And that’s why he won’t march,” the other man disagreed. “Cao Cao is too clever for Yuan Shao and he knows it. There’s no way he will win.”

This interested Zitao and he interrupted the conversation.

“When do you think they will meet in battle, if they do?” he asked.

“They will probably meet on the Yellow River, but who can say when? How long will it take for them to gather their army? And what if they reach an agreement before then?” the slurper answered.

“Will you join the battle?” Zitao wanted to know.

The agreer laughed. “No doubt we will. We wouldn’t miss a battle like that for our lives. Of course, we won’t be actually fighting in the battle. No, we’ll steal a sheep or two here, a sack of flour there, and if we’re lucky we’ll get to tell some stories to our friends at home. We don’t take part in the battles of lords. We’re just here to protect what needs protecting, and that’s the farmers without food.”

And then Zitao decided, Brother’s words ringing in his head. The monk was right: he couldn’t trap himself by thinking about fighting for someone when he could just fight, and help the innocent in the process. With the upcoming battle he could finally put his skills to real use and start fulfilling his dream of becoming as great as Cao Cao. Perhaps he could even catch a glimpse of the man he so idolized in the heat of battle.

“I’ll join you,” he said.

…

The raiders left for the mountains two days later, and the two weeks that they were gone was how long it took for Zitao to decide how to tell the brothers that he was leaving. When the band ree afternoon, saying that they would leave immediately for the town, all of Zitao’s closest friends bid him a fond farewell, the brothers who had taken care of him since childhood, Brother Yang who had taught him the meaning of honor, Brother who was like a father to him. They told him to fight well, and he promised to do so.

They spent the night at the town and the next morning they set out for a long journey into the southeast, where the war was raging. As they rode along in the misty dawn light, Zitao convinced the leader of the raiders, a man named Yixing, to stop at the crossroads of his village while he visited his family for the first time in many years. It was midmorning and all the mist had burned off by the time they reached the outskirts of Zitao’s village. But as fate would have it as they rode into sight of the crossroads Zitao caught sight of a familiar scene--his mother carrying her woven blankets to market with a young woman and several other older women helping her with the load.

He gave a shout of excitement and rode ahead, paying no heed to Yixing’s wait up! When he reined up at the crossroads all of the women stopped and turned to look at him, squinting in the bright sunlight. Zitao dismounted and threw his arms around his mother’s neck, jostling the blankets tied on her back.

“Mother, it’s your son!”

When he stepped back so she could examine him her face at first was dull, without a glimmer of recognition. But slowly the realization dawned on her and she smiled widely, her wrinkled forehead creasing with a smile as a wisp of gray hair fell into her eyes.

“Zitao, my son,” she greeted, kissing him once on each cheek. “Where have you been all these years?”

Zitao smiled sheepishly. “I’ve been traveling around. There hasn’t been any time...”

“That’s okay,” his mother reassured him. “I’m glad to see you again, especially with the world so dangerous now. Have you become strong enough to fight our enemies yet?”

“Of course!” Zitao replied proudly. “I’m going off to war now.”

The happiness of his mother’s smile was mixed with the sour taste of fear for her son.

“Be safe,” she said. “But make me proud.”

Zitao nodded. They talked for a few moments more, and he was introduced to the willowy young woman his mother explained was his little sister all grown up. Zitao yearned to visit the rest of his family--his father and Fahong, as well as a new little brother, still living in the same house, Zhuang living in the next village over. But Yixing rode up and reminded him that they had a long way to travel, so Zitao reluctantly mounted back up, waving to his mother and his sister as they parted ways.

The next weeks were hard and hungry, traveling for the greater part of each day in the saddle so blisters formed and broke into callouses on Zitao’s legs and hands. Yixing never wanted to risk a fire for fear of attracting attention from one of the armies prowling the area, but they had nothing to cook anyway. The stale bread, dried meat, and cold vegetables were a far cry from the fare he was accustomed to at both the temple and on his travels into the splendor and decadence of the southern cities. But he forced it down his throat nonetheless. At night they slept on the ground, taking turns at guarding their supplies, with only thin blankets to cushion their bodies on the hardened dirt. They woke before dawn to eat, mount up, and begin plodding along the uneven dirt tracks until after sunset, when they ate and slept so they could begin the whole process all over again. The long days spent in the saddle sent Zitao’s muscles twitching with impatience to be standing and walking on their own--he was so used to a daily exercise regime that the inactivity made him itch with discomfort. The short nights spent on the ground created cricks and cramps in his back and shoulders, sometimes making it painful to turn his neck or raise his arms, and chafed the skin on his arms and legs when he turned over onto the rough ground in the middle of the night.

The worst part wasn’t all that, though. The worst part was everything they saw on those long days in the saddle, on the sides of the road and going up as smoke on the horizon. And that was death, fear, and the cracking sound of dreams breaking, the pitch too high to be heard by the human ear.

They passed buildings reduced to foundations sinking into the marshy, unplowed ground. Personal belongings were scattered everywhere and crushed into the ground, scraps of cloth with emotional significance and little gourds with painted faces that served as dolls. Hostile armies had trampled and salted the fields so nothing would grow, while the armies that were supposed to protect those fields looted them and slaughtered the animals for food. Refugees with no homes flooded towards the cities in ragged waves of bare feet and filthy hair, pushing wheelbarrows with the last remnants of their homes stacked precariously inside.

Sometimes someone would resist--resist the army, the world, the unfairness of it all--and be cut down with a of steel, to lie dying on the side of the road. Sometimes people would give up, seeing the futility of it all, and simply sit on the side of the road, holding their faces in their hands as they rocked back and forth on their legs. Yixing ordered the raiders to end the suffering of the dying and to help back up the defeated. Zitao felt a bit of bile rise in his throat every time he heard the sickening noise of a sword plunging through the fragile skin of someone’s throat, spilling blood onto the already dead grass.

After a few days of riding with the refugees they overtook the farthest ahead, and they no longer had to listen to the crying and swearing, lamenting the lords that were supposed to protect them. And the whole time Zitao prayed to whomever he knew that the war would not reach his family, would somehow miraculously stop short of the village outskirts to keep his childhood in a safe, protected bubble. This should have made him feel guilty, he knew, but it didn’t.

…

After months of riding, their journey lengthened by the frequent stops they made to raid supply lines and deliver food to temples and hospitals, they reached the Yellow River. Zitao lost count of the number of people he killed, whether in mercy or in the heat of battle. He stopped thinking about the consequences of his actions or why he was doing what he was doing, and his life became like a story Brother Yang sometimes told, with Zitao only a vaguely amused observer.

At the river two armies were encamped, their commanders involved in strange calculations that involved one army moving slightly to the right, then the other moving slightly to the left, then both coming to a standstill. Yixing instructed them to wait just out of sight of the battle, under the cover of trees and foliage, until they spotted an opening in the defenses guarding the supply lines. That waiting took another agonizing month, lounging in the wet soil with only each other for company as Yixing took a select few with him to barter for food in nearby towns.

At that point, however, the detachment with which he had lived the past few months of his life wore off, and Zitao began to think--worry, really--about everything that was going on. How was his family and everyone he cared about faring back at home? Was he making so much of a difference by simply riding with the raiders and not actually fighting? What happened to all of his previous aspirations of being great and becoming like Cao Cao?

Sometimes when Yixing returned to camp after a long day of searching for food, he would sit next to Zitao as the rest of his men gambled for ideal sleeping spots and promises of loot. During those times they would often speculate about how long it would be until the battle began. Yixing had come from a wealthy family in the city and was raised to become a powerful general like his grandfather and uncles, which explained the eerie precision with which he conducted all of the raiders’ movements. When his father, who had chosen to become a scholar, had died, Yixing had run away from home and wandered for months before becoming the raiders’ leader. So he knew exactly what was going through Zitao’s mind and exactly why it was so excruciating--it was the inevitable conflict of what he had wanted his entire life, to be like Cao Cao, and the true reality that had to be dealt with, that the world just didn’t work that way.

Zitao was still thinking and still beating himself up when the actual battle began. Apparently, an informer of Cao Cao’s had told him the location of the enemy’s supply lines, leaving him free to attack while his allies were fighting the rest of Yuan Shao’s armies elsewhere. In the middle of the night the first soldiers crept over the bare ground, and all the anticipation and hate, which had been building up in the months before the battle, was unleashed.

And it was hell. The battle raged for days in all directions, as the armies joined and almost merged in an attempt to kill the most of the other. There was no orderly procession of opponents to deal with in a clean, chivalrous manner. Instead one man tried to kill another, only sometimes a third would join the fight, or a fourth, and then four men would try to kill one and protect another, until everything was so confused that slashes and parries were blind and without aim. All anybody wanted to do was to defend himself and kill someone else, no matter whether he was friend or foe.

The first small scuffles occurred in the dark of night and the graying of the morning, but when the battle finally reached the sleeping raiders day had broken, and the wet rays of sun that came along with it. And it was vaguely strange for so beautiful a day to hold so horrible a thing as the battle. The ground drank up the blood of the dead and dying, while the air was thick with carrion birds cawing in the distance, war cries, and the moans of the dying accompanied by the screams of the soon-dead. It smelled like desperation.

Yixing tried to keep his men in line, but the ones most dissatisfied with his leadership soon melted away into the chaos, and the others were overwhelmed with battle no matter how hard they tried to get away. Several had their horses cut out from underneath them, and Zitao ended up carrying a passenger behind him as he tried to follow Yixing’s charge. With so many foot soldiers and the raiders being mounted, there wasn’t much battle between the two. The raiders either trampled their opponents or scattered them, their swords occasionally meeting midair as they passed too quickly to make solid contact. Zitao himself avoided a potential fight where a soldier could be picked off by a distant archer instead, and something inside his gut died every time he thought of what he used to want.

The battle had broken in the completely wrong direction, and all of Yixing’s plans were thrown off by that simple fact. Their only way out of the path of destruction was through the battle itself, hacking their way through the battle-weary fighters in the hopes that they would reach the other end together.

Zitao was glancing over his shoulder and checking the progress they had made through the battle when a shout from ahead tore his attention from behind him. The man riding behind him swore at the sight and leapt off of Zitao’s horse, heedless of the bristling sea of steel around them.

Barely ten feet ahead of them Yixing’s horse had taken an arrow to the chest, collapsing onto its front legs and screaming as its life bled out of it. The rider himself was half-crushed beneath the horse’s body, heaving for breath as the weight of the horse slowly crushed his lungs.

“No!” Zitao heard from around him as the raiders watched their leader die before their very eyes.

The man that had dropped from Zitao’s horse was fighting his way towards the dying horse, struggling to heave the animal off of Yixing’s body. But it was thrashing too much to move at all, and its screaming sounded as if its very soul were being torn into pieces. Nothing could be done and nobody would do anything, watching paralyzed as if they couldn’t believe what was happening.

And suddenly Zitao couldn’t stand it. People close to him had died before, but the monks had died of age or natural causes, and there was no one to blame for their being ripped from Zitao’s life. It was nothing like this. Yixing was the only one like himself, the only one who understood what he was feeling, and the only one Zitao had confided in for the past weeks and months. He had done nothing wrong, even tried to do something right for once, and yet the world and the stupid war had decided that enough was enough and decided that he could no longer live. Yixing had tried to achieve justice, but the only thing he got in return was an early grave, and this was unacceptable to Zitao.

Disregarding anything around he, he half-fell, half-climbed off his horse and drew his sword so its blade glinted in the sunlight so like another blade from so long ago. He had never fought in his mock battles and practices as he did then, each cut slicing through flesh and armor with a savage strength behind it, each step a fluid movement that required no thought or effort to dodge attacks or avoid obstacles.

When he reached the horse that was crushing Yixing the man had gotten the help of two others and was trying to pull the now dead horse off of their leader, every muscle straining against their bloodstained clothing. Yixing’s breath was coming more easily, his eyes unclouding, and for a moment Zitao thought that he could be saved. He let out a sigh of relief and let his sword fall to his side, his arm swaying loosely as he stumbled closer to Yixing.

But of course nothing was that simple. Just as Yixing was pushing himself up from the ground and reaching up for a hand to pull himself to his feet, a soldier with a great warhammer rode past, the hooves of his horse crushing Yixing’s chest even as the warhammer in his hand caved Yixing’s head in.

…

“Do you want to buy some crabs, mister? I caught them just this morning with my father, out on the lake.”

Zitao looked down at the small voice coming from his side. It was a young boy, his frame bending with the weight of the crabs he carried in a basket on his back. His eyes were bright with some strange emotion Zitao couldn’t place, and his face was smeared with dirt, as if he had been playing in the grass at the side of the road, which was muddy with the spring thaw.

A sudden sense of déjà vu overwhelmed him then, and the fact that he couldn’t place the memory that was so familiar just then frustrated him to no end. His fingers flexed on the hilt of his sword almost on reflex, and he warily wet his lips with the tip of his tongue, ready to spring into an attacking stance at any moment.

“Mister?” the boy asked again, uncertainly now.

“I’m sorry,” Zitao replied, and his voice was a lot deeper than he remembered. “I’m not hungry at the moment.”

The boy shrugged and continued on his way, stopping every so often to poke at something in the dirt with a long branch he held in one hand. Zitao waited until the boy passed out of sight until continuing on his own way, to be sure that he would not be approached again.

The lands that he had just passed through were yet untouched by war, or at least as close as could be, as evidenced by the simple merriment of the boy as he wandered along the dirt road. But as Zitao walked further along that road, further east and north, the fields surrounding the road became less tended and more choked with weeds and plants unhealthy from the poisoned soil. And as that happened something stranger still happened--the lands became more and more familiar. Even though blackened by war, the fields possessed a nostalgic quality that Zitao couldn’t quite shake.

After he had been walking for a long time the boy selling crabs doubled back on the road and waved at Zitao as he returned home for the night. Zitao gave him a stiff little nod, because he still wasn’t quite sure what was going on. He continued walking like he had done for so long, and when the sun was low in the sky, casting long shadows over everything, Zitao spotted a tall tree standing at the border between wilderness and fallow fields. Its long branches extended over a pool of water next to it, and its trunk was full of handholds and thick branches, perfect for climbing. The pool was red and unclear, and he thought that the sun must be setting, its changing colors casting a reflection over the water.

But as he got closer to the pool he realized it wasn’t like that at all. The water was choked with dead bodies, their flesh sliced open to let out streams of blood that thickened and congealed around the bodies, darkening the water. And at the same instant he realized that there was a reason the fields were so familiar.

After so many years, he was home.

…

Zitao’s side hurt from running, but his muscles were tough enough to withstand the distance. The last pieces of leather that served as the soles of his shoes wore off on the road and his bare feet slapped at the small stones on the ground so they cut into the skin, but he didn’t notice. When he was four it had taken him an afternoon to walk from one side of the village to the other. Now it took him only twenty minutes, his head running through explanations for the wrecked farmland and bodies in the water as he ran. Each time his thoughts returned to a single reason for the destruction, but each time he pushed it out of his mind because it was too awful.

Halfway to the village crossroads he stopped in his tracks because there was an obstacle in his path. It was a human body, limbs splayed around it at strange, inhuman angles.

“No,” he muttered to himself, eyes widening as he saw the face. “This can’t be happening.”

And as Zitao stared at the body, in huge lungfuls of air to regain his breath, everything that had happened during that year rushed back to him. He remembered the death and gore of the lands ravaged by war, with their floods of hollow-eyed refugees, through which he had ridden pretending not to notice. He remembered the turmoil in his heart before that decisive battle, the turmoil only Yixing understood. He remembered the battle itself, the absolute fury he had felt when he had watched Yixing’s death, the desperate, animalistic strength with which he’d fought afterwards. He had found the man with the warhammer and drove his sword in between the larger man’s ribs, relishing in the squelch as the blade plunged into the man’s heart. He had killed anyone else in his way, and when there was no one he had found a horse and ridden as far away from the battle as possible.

For months he had wandered, through the last weeks of autumn and through the snows of winter, for food first selling his horse, then exchanging the clothes on his back for thin rags, last resorting to banditry to steal his food. He hadn’t minded because his head was a blank; he refused to remember all of the traumatic experiences he had gone through just because it was easier that way.

But now he remembered, and he wondered whether his feet had carried him home with or without thinking. When he looked down he first registered the wetness gathering in his eyes and sliding down his cheeks, before realizing the emptiness that was his heart. He hurt so much, and he remembered that feeling too, as he walked slowly along the trail of bodies that lined the road.

First was Hua, who had taught Zitao the names of the gods, her stomach a red hole where multiple sword s had finally killed her.

Next was Long, who had always bragged about his fighting skills as he played with Zitao and the other children. His head was half-severed from his body, and the multiple showed that he had not died on the first strike of the blade.

Then there was Cui, who had woven clothing with Zitao’s mother, and who always had a tidbit of food for him when he wandered into her home during his adventures around the village. Her thighs were bloody from where she had been before dying from a head wound.

After came Bao, who cried too much, and Fang, who was too pretty for her own good, and Jian, who almost died from illness in his childhood, and Lian, who had only ever had two children, and Gang, who told Zitao stories of the greater world.

And Zitao found it incredibly strange that he could remember all of these people, so distant in his childhood. But then he realized that it was because they were his only childhood, for when he left for the temple and for glory he was no longer a child. The towering figures of his young life had stayed with him through the entire time as the only figures who were not monks or pilgrims, as the representation of everything that he wanted to protect when he became as great as Cao Cao. Now they were reduced to small bodies decaying on the road, and the way they no longer matched his bright, perfect memories of them, that hurt almost as much as the fact that they were gone forever.

When he had almost reached the crossroads Zitao fell to his knees and cried for a long time, because his mother’s body was shielding the bodies of her children, the little brother Zitao had never known, the little sister he had never seen grow up, and the big brother who had never wanted to leave home. Even in death his mother seemed to want to protect her children with her outstretched arms.

Not ten feet from them laid another body, even more different from his memories than the rest. It was Zitao’s father, whom he had not seen in years and years, and Zitao could tell that he had fought with a quiet determination even to his death, his limbs slashed and broken and his jaw locked firmly shut in an attempt to maintain solidarity against his killer.

“I’m sorry,” he choked out, grief sticking in his throat as he remembered the promise he had made so long ago.

In his childhood, when he was only a child with dreams too big for reality and with convictions that had been proven wrong again and again as he grew up, Zitao had promised his father that he would never let him die. As he said it he had been thinking of Cao Cao, a figure which had to him always been the most perfect, most real representation of good and justice. But now he had broken that promise, because his father lay dead before him and he couldn’t do anything about it. Just like he couldn’t do anything about the people that had died in the war, and his friends that had died behind him, and the unfair world where nothing like justice really existed.

In the distance he could smell smoke coming from multiple campfires, and rowdy shouting from what sounded like soldiers. Zitao drew his sword slowly out from its scabbard and placed one foot shakily in front of the other, drawing deep breaths as he stared straight ahead and closed his mind to everything that had happened. And he decided that if no one else would do it, then he would do the right thing, or die in the process.