Two weeks after the mass surrender, the great Siberian valley had become a vast, frozen purgatory. The eighty thousand surrendered Russian soldiers were now prisoners of war, huddled in makeshift, open-air camps, their ranks thinning daily from the relentless attrition of starvation, frostbite, and despair. They were a defeated army, a ghost of their former power, their fate to be decided by a distant Emperor in Beijing. The strategic victory was absolute.
But the war in the valley was not yet over.
At the far western end, nestled in a series of steep, rocky ravines and fortified gullies, a small, fanatical remnant had refused to surrender. They were five thousand men, the hard core of the Tsar's army in the east: grizzled Siberian riflemen who knew the land, proud Cossacks who had never known retreat, and a core of Tsarist loyalists from the elite Imperial Guard regiments. They were led by a fire-breathing, white-bearded General named Turko, a man who saw surrender not as a strategic option, but as a profound spiritual and moral sin.
They had fortified themselves in a natural redoubt, a fortress of rock and ice, and they were waging a bitter, hopeless, and surprisingly effective guerrilla war. They launched suicidal, lightning-fast raids on Meng Tian's supply lines, appearing out of the snow-dusted forests like phantoms, only to melt away again. They were not a strategic threat—they could not change the outcome of the campaign—but they were a festering wound. They were a political embarrassment, a symbol of defiance that prevented the Emperor from declaring a total victory. And they were a drain on resources, forcing Meng Tian to keep ten thousand of his own exhausted troops tied down in a thankless mopping-up operation.
The pressure from Beijing, delivered via encrypted telegraph, was becoming insistent. The Emperor's new Southern Expedition required troops. The Siberian situation needed to be "concluded." The glorious victory of the Winter Coffin was being tainted by the continued, stubborn existence of this pocket of resistance.
Meng Tian faced a problem he had not encountered before: not one of strategy, but of morale. He convened a council with his new, aggressive young commanders. Their assessment was grim. To clear out General Turko's fanatics would require a bloody, mountain-by-mountain fight, a series of costly infantry assaults against well-defended positions.
"Marshal," the newly promoted General Wei argued, his face etched with fatigue. "My men have marched three hundred miles through a frozen hell. They have won a victory unlike any in the history of the Empire. Now you want to ask them to die clearing out a few thousand desperate rats from their holes? They have won the war. They see no honor in dying in the peace."
Meng Tian recognized the dangerous truth in his general's words. He could order the assault, and his men, disciplined as they were, would obey. But their spirit, the very thing that had carried them through the impossible march, would be broken. He would be trading the lives of his victorious veterans for a pile of frozen rocks and the corpses of a few fanatics. It was a poor equation.
The old Meng Tian, the honorable general who had tried to save his men in the first Siberian campaign, would have sought a clever, tactical solution. But that man was a ghost, a memory. The new Meng Tian, the Shinigami, the cold pragmatist forged at Port Arthur, saw the problem not as a tactical puzzle, but as a simple, brutal question of resource allocation. He needed to eliminate five thousand hardened enemy soldiers, dug into a fortified position, with the minimum possible cost to his own forces. The answer, therefore, could not be found in manpower. It had to be found in technology.
He dismissed his generals and summoned his chief engineer, a quiet, unassuming man named Feng, who had received his doctorate in chemistry from the University of Heidelberg in Germany.
"Engineer Feng," Meng Tian began, his voice flat and clinical. "Some months ago, I reviewed the preliminary reports from Doctor Chen Linwei's scientific research division in the capital. There was a memorandum on the byproducts of certain industrial dye manufacturing processes. Specifically, the production of chlorine gas for bleaching textiles."
Feng's eyes widened slightly. He understood immediately where this was heading. "Yes, Marshal. I am familiar with the process. It is a simple, if volatile, chemical reaction. The gas is a powerful pulmonary irritant. Highly toxic. Heavier than air."
"Could our field workshops manufacture it?" Meng Tian asked.
"In its crude form? With the right chemical precursors, yes. It would not be difficult," Feng replied, his voice barely a whisper.
"And could it be weaponized? Delivered via a standard 75-millimeter artillery shell?"
Feng hesitated for a moment, the monstrous implications of the question settling upon him. "The dispersal mechanism would be… tricky. But not impossible. A simple bursting charge, designed to rupture the casing rather than detonate it…"
"Excellent," Meng Tian said, cutting him off. The ethical debate was a luxury he did not possess. "Draw me the plans."
He sent a top-priority, heavily encrypted telegraph to the Ministry of War in Beijing. It was not a request. It was a demand for a list of specific, industrial chemical precursors to be shipped to the front by special express train, under his sole authority. The request was so unusual that it went all the way to the Emperor himself, who approved it with a single, telegraphed word: "Proceed."
A week later, the special train arrived at the nearest captured railhead. It was not carrying food, ammunition, or reinforcements. It was carrying hundreds of heavy, steel drums filled with volatile chemicals. Under a heavy guard of Meng Tian's own White Foxes, the drums were transported to a secluded field workshop. For three days and nights, Engineer Feng and his team worked frantically, their faces covered with oilskin masks, as they carefully mixed the chemicals and filled hundreds of artillery shells of a new, unmarked type.
The shells were brought to the artillery positions overlooking General Turko's fortified redoubt. The artillery crews, hardened veterans who had seen every horror of war, looked at the strange, silent shells with a nervous apprehension. They were given new orders, orders that made no sense. They were to wear special protective cloaks and crude, gas-soaked face masks. They were to fire the shells, and then immediately retreat a half-mile to the rear.
Meng Tian waited for the perfect weather conditions. On a cold, clear morning with a steady, gentle wind blowing from his positions down into the Russian-held ravines, he gave the order.
The artillery fired. But the sound was wrong. Instead of the familiar, sharp crack of a high-explosive detonation, the shells burst over the Russian lines with a series of soft, ugly, almost liquid "plops." Thick clouds of a heavy, yellowish-green gas billowed from the impact points. Heavier than air, the gas did not dissipate. It clung to the ground, sinking into the ravines, pouring into the Russian bunkers and fighting positions like a slow, silent, toxic river.
The scene that followed was a vision from a new and terrible kind of hell. There were no sounds of glorious battle. No rifle fire, no machine-gun chatter. Only the whisper of the wind carrying the sinister, yellow-green clouds deeper into the Russian lines. And then, after a few moments of silence, the faint, horrifying, choked screams began. The sounds of men drowning on dry land, their lungs burning and filling with fluid.
Meng Tian watched the entire thing through his high-powered binoculars from a ridge a mile away, his face utterly impassive, a scientist observing a clinical experiment. He watched as the gas clouds swirled and dissipated over the course of an hour. He watched as the screaming stopped.
The five thousand fanatical, defiant holdouts were not defeated. They were not captured. They were exterminated, gassed like vermin in their holes.
When a reconnaissance team, clad in protective gear, finally entered the Russian positions hours later, they found a scene of silent, pristine horror. The bodies of the Russian soldiers lay where they had fallen, their faces contorted in masks of agony, a yellowish foam on their lips. Their weapons were still clutched in their hands. The redoubt was untouched, but its defenders were all dead.
Meng Tian had just, for the first time in the history of modern warfare, used a weapon of mass destruction to achieve a military objective with zero casualties to his own side. The news of this strange and terrifying "yellow wind" that killed without a mark, that left bodies intact but stole the breath from their lungs, would spread like wildfire through the ranks of the surrendered Russians and, eventually, to the rest of the world. It would add a new, horrifying, and inhuman dimension to the growing legend of the Shinigami.
The Siberian front was now, finally, and completely, secure. His army of hardened, victorious, and now deeply terrified veterans was free. The question that now hung in the cold Siberian air was: where would the Emperor point this terrible, remorseless weapon next?