Before the Wind Turns
Mounted on horseback, Yao Zhang straightened his back and watched the wind beyond the valley.
The air after a battle was always thick.
Today, it felt especially heavy.
He could not explain why.
His body had reacted first.
The soil beneath the hooves was firm.
At a time when moisture should have lifted, the ground felt pressed down, as if holding its breath.
Yao Zhang was a general.
He had lived decades on battlefields, fighting by numbers, distances, and speed.
Because of that, he knew.
This feeling was not fear.
It was timing.
The stillness that comes before something vast arrives.
He adjusted the reins and instinctively checked the spacing of his troops.
Forest to either side.
A gentle slope ahead.
A narrow defile behind.
All familiar ground for battle.
Yet today, that familiarity had hardened directly into unease.
Yao Zhang turned his head toward Park Seongjin.
The warrior was looking somewhere else entirely.
They stood in the same place, yet seemed to look in different directions.
Not at enemy.
Not at ally.
But at something that had not yet arrived.
So it begins again, Yao Zhang murmured inwardly.
He had seen that look before.
Not the eyes before a fight begins.
The eyes that appear once the direction of the fight has already been decided.
Yao Zhang thought of the number.
Five thousand.
It was always too small.
So he had shouted louder, moved more precisely, driven his men harder.
Today was different.
Five thousand did not feel small.
They had won a complete victory with almost no losses.
Yao Zhang knew why.
The center of this force was not himself.
Park Seongjin.
Yao Zhang gave a bitter smile.
To say his pride as a general was untouched would be a lie.
Yet at the same time, he accepted it.
This battlefield was turning around that warrior.
He asked himself what his role was.
The answer was clear.
To block what must be blocked.
To open what must be opened.
To buy time for that warrior to move.
That was enough.
Yao Zhang steadied his breath and prepared to give orders.
He did not issue them yet.
He was waiting for Park Seongjin to move first.
The grain of the battlefield was already flowing that way.
He checked the wind again.
Northward.
Then turning east.
Toward Poyang Lake, he thought.
He knew where the edge of this fight lay without needing explanation.
Yao Zhang turned his horse.
The soldiers followed naturally.
There was still no command.
Yet the army was already in motion.
Realizing this, Yao Zhang smiled quietly.
"A strange war," he muttered.
There was no complaint in his voice.
No fear.
Only certainty.
In this battlefield, it was far more effective for him to be the shield rather than the blade.
The blade, clearly, was that young warrior.
Though Yao Zhang was a man of fierce competitive spirit, he could not deny Park Seongjin.
*Seongjin turned his horse toward the right-hand ravine.
It was not the original route, but his senses pointed there.
The moment he entered the forest, the grass whispered.
The wind pressed forward.
A distortion in the current passed him, like the sound of many people crying at once.
"There," he said quietly.
"Force is gathering."
This was not prophecy.
It was sensation— something felt directly through the body.
Zhu Yuanzhang's reinforcements were already moving from afar.
Other groups were also racing at full speed toward Poyang Lake.
Before reaching Hukou, a broad river wind rose to block Seongjin's path.
Its grain was sharp and damp, like a blade.
Within it mixed human cries, the thunder of hooves, and the scent of blood from a war not yet arrived.
Seongjin closed his eyes.
"This is the place," he said.
"The ground of a great battle."
Hukou was a bottleneck of waterways.
A vital point where force converged.
Where currents gathered, and two claims to dominion collided and twisted.
Seongjin's pulse began to beat slowly, deeply.
"Zhu Yuanzhang's momentum is rising."
The aura of a victor.
An unnameable sensation ran along his spine.
"This place is unstable."
He took a step forward.
"…This place must be set right."
At that moment, the river wind swelled his garments.
Seongjin turned.
From the western sky, a black current rolled down.
The scattered wind gathered into one, twisting its tail before him.
It was the moment when fate's joint shifted.
He understood it there.
"The battle of Poyang Lake— the outcome will turn."
"Everything will be decided here."
Such a shift does not happen on its own.
Someone must overturn it.
Seongjin placed his hand on the hilt.
"That someone can only be me."
This was not prophecy.
It was the sensation of his destiny locking into the mechanism of heaven.