445.
Progress was slow.
All that remained was the final battle—the capture of Yingtian.
The vast currents dividing the Central Plains gathered toward a single city.
Zhang Shicheng had changed noticeably.
Before, he had refused to commit troops no matter how many times he was pressed.
Now he sprang to his feet, raising his voice.
"I will take Yingtian!
This time, I will do it!
I will!"
That transformation caught Jin Youliang's full attention.
The Zhang Shicheng who once hesitated, calculating gains and losses, now stepped forward of his own accord.
Beside Jin Youliang, Yun Dam murmured quietly.
"There are moments when a man changes.
Now that Your Majesty has gained strength, his heart is aligning itself with that strength."
A subtle expression crossed Jin Youliang's face.
Caution and expectation breathed together within it.
Inside Yingtian, the remaining forces loyal to Zhu Yuanzhang were preparing for a fight to the death.
Rumors spread that an obscure general had proclaimed himself regent and declared that he would "continue the Zhu imperial line," even going so far as to enthrone someone as emperor.
Studying the map, Yun Dam said,
"This will not end quickly.
It will take time.
They may endure for months, but that endurance will lack form."
Park Seong-jin cast his gaze toward Yingtian in the distance.
"The momentum inside the city is thin.
The flow of military qi is turbid.
Its breath is too short to last long."
Yun Dam smiled.
"If that is your judgment, Seong-jin, then it is the most accurate."
As preparations for the final battle of Yingtian continued, Yun Dam met nightly with Jin Youliang's strategists.
They spoke of the shape of the nation after the war.
Within tents whose lamps never went out, Jin Youliang's advisers, Goryeo civil officials, and envoys from Zhang Shicheng gathered.
Together, they drafted the first outline of a reordered realm.
More than thirty large maps were spread open.
Liaodong, the Yangtze, Henan, the steppe—everything lay before them in sweeping view.
Yun Dam pressed a finger gently to one spot.
"Here—Yingtian.
This would be a suitable capital for the new Han dynasty."
Ju Deuk-myeong asked cautiously,
"What of Jinling, the former capital of the Song?"
Yun Dam shook his head slowly.
"It is a place layered with the pain of former dynasties.
A new dynasty must begin with a light heart.
It must rise where people's gazes do not linger too long."
"Hm…"
Jin Youliang looked down at the map.
After a moment of quiet thought, he spoke.
"…Yingtian, then.
That will do."
With that single sentence, the site of the new dynasty of the Central Plains was chosen.
Preparations continued at a measured pace.
It took months to ready the campaign against Yingtian.
Two months were spent reorganizing Zhang Shicheng's forces.
With supply lines and grain transport added, three seasons passed.
During that time, the world held a strange calm.
No one rushed to draw their sword.
Movements remained subdued.
All under heaven seemed to be holding its breath, watching Jin Youliang's decision.
Standing before the army tents, Park Seong-jin studied the flow of the sky.
"The current is changing."
Yi In-jung approached.
"Toward the better, Seong-jin?"
Park Seong-jin gathered his thoughts.
"Yes.
We are heading toward the last."
That night, a final council convened in Jin Youliang's command tent.
It was the campaign against Yingtian.
The battle to extinguish the last embers of the Zhu imperial line.
The battle to raise the new banner of the Han dynasty.
The preparations accumulated quietly, slowly.
The sky over Yingtian had long been steeped in the smell of smoke.
Once known as Jinling, a city pressed down by the shadows of dynasties since the Song, it had now become the final breath of the Ming.
When news spread of Zhu Yuanzhang's defeat and capture, Ming generals scattered across the land, remnants of leaderless armies, and mercenaries hired by wealthy clans all gathered at Yingtian for one simple reason—
they had nowhere else to go.
The sounds of soldiers pouring in grew louder each day among ruined camps and streets.
"This is… the end."
They were people with no path of escape.
A place they entered of their own will, knowing it would be their final stand.
Inside the gates, defeated soldiers from every region shoved and jostled to claim positions.
"I wanted to be remembered as the last loyalists of the Zhu imperial house.
We already fled once.
Even if we live, our lives are over.
Let us finish it here."
Their eyes were resolute.
More than grief for a lost king, a deeper resignation filled them—
the sense of walking into the darkness where their entire lives were being extinguished.
The remaining Ming generals, the followers of Chang Yuchun, warriors trained under Liu Bowen, Xu Da's light infantry units, and the private troops who once upheld Zhu Yuanzhang as emperor—
they all shared a single resolve.
"Yingtian will not open.
We die here and preserve the soul of Ming."
As the words spread, several commanders looking down from outside the gates threw back the drapes and shouted,
"If we endure here, our descendants will still have a place."
The defeated soldiers howled in unison.
"There is nowhere to go alive.
Let us finish it here."
The commanders sealed every gate.
On each watchtower rose the final banners of the Ming.
All eyes under heaven turned toward this single small city.
Yingtian had been the strongest defensive city in the south since the Song.
Its thick walls and terrain woven with mountains and water made infiltration difficult.
Surrounded by water on all sides, land advances were slow.
Jin Youliang's forces encircled it from four directions, but Yingtian did not open easily.
Where ships floated, approach by land was nearly impossible.
Cannon fire from the water left only thunder and flame.
When arrows rained down, denser volleys returned.
When siege towers were dragged forward, explosives detonated beneath the walls, shattering them to pieces.
When stones were rolled toward the gates, boiling oil and boulders poured down from within.
"Was the Ming army truly this fierce…?"
Jin Youliang's generals swallowed hard.
Yun Dam murmured,
"A city defended by those prepared to die is always like this."
The siege dragged on.
Inside the walls, grain stores were exhausted.
In cooking pots once used for rice, roots and tree bark now boiled.
Soldiers with faces reduced to bone leaned on one another as they guarded the walls.
A soldier who had been unable to stand for days raised a tattered banner and cried out,
"If Yingtian falls, we are finished.
Hold on to Ming."
Another soldier, vomiting blood, continued,
"Ming did not protect us for many years.
Still, the end of our lives is here."
The surrounding soldiers fell silent.
More than the name of loyalist, they wished to meet their end where their lives had been bound.
On the thirtieth day of the siege, Yingtian's evening sky bled red.
Layers of smoke rose, staining the heavens.
Someone whispered,
"It will break soon."
The ending did not reveal itself easily.
Each day, the remaining Ming forces grew more ferocious.
They broke into armories, seized stones and pickaxes, and surged toward the gates.
They were no longer remnants.
They were warriors who had chosen their end.
Men who had decided how they would die were not easily approached.
Words failed.
Persuasion meant nothing.
Their resolve and madness weighed heavily upon Yingtian.
At Jin Youliang's main camp encircling the city, generals gathered to report.
"It is not easy to press the walls.
The Ming forces counterattack day and night.
Their numbers have fallen, but their momentum has grown fiercer."
Jin Youliang placed his hand on the map.
"Those who have chosen the end are stronger than those who still live."
Yun Dam nodded.
"What now defends Yingtian is not Prince of Huai Zhu Yuanzhang,
but the last heart left behind by the Ming."
Park Seong-jin spoke quietly.
"…This is not a siege.
It is the funeral of a nation called Ming."
There were no brilliant tactics, no dazzling stratagems in Yingtian's final stand.
Only the last blaze of will from those facing death burned atop the walls.
Everyone could feel that the fire would not last long.
That night, the banner bearing the character "Ming", fluttering under the moonlight atop Yingtian's gate, began to tear away, strand by strand, in the wind.