Fifteen days later, they arrived at the Xiaguan Docks in Nanjing.
In stark contrast to the ghostly desolation of the Gan River, this place felt like a bustling world from another time. The Yangtze River opened wide, its surface teeming with activity. Thousands of sails competed for space: massive Grain Tribute Boats (Cao-chuan) laden with taxes for the north; ornately decorated pleasure barges painted in five colors; and even a few black-hulled European carracks flying foreign flags, weaving through the waves.
The docks were a cacophony of human labor. Porters chanted as they stacked mountains of Ming specialties—silk, tea, and porcelain. The air no longer smelled of rot; it was a complex perfume of high-grade cosmetics, rich wine, roasted meat, and the damp scent of the river.
This was Nanjing, the "Secondary Capital" of the Ming. Even as the northern half of the empire was being eaten alive by famine and war, Nanjing remained trapped in a beautiful, gilded dream.
"My god, this is where people are meant to live!" Old Zhang stared, open-mouthed, at the glittering shoreline. His mute grandson, who had been cowering in the bilge for days, now pointed at the magnificent city gates, dancing with excitement and making incoherent sounds of joy.
Shen Li sat on the swaying deck, unmoved by the opulent display. From her tunic, she pulled a heavy silver coin—a Spanish Piece of Eight she had earned with blood in the mercenary companies of the West. She paid off the remaining fare and pressed an extra coin into the old man's hand.
"Zhang, stop here. Do not go any further north." Shen Li's eyes, shadowed by her bamboo hat, were grim. "Take this money. Take your grandson back to the Jiangxi countryside. Find a deep forest and hide for a few years. No matter what world-shaking noise you hear from the outside, do not come out easily."
Old Zhang froze. He couldn't understand why this mysterious traveler spoke with such finality in the face of this city of gold. But looking into eyes that seemed to have witnessed the end of the world—eyes as cold as iron—he didn't dare ask. He simply kowtowed with the boy in frantic gratitude and quickly disappeared into the boiling crowd.
Shen Li changed into a clean blue scholar's robe and donned a square scholar's cap, maintaining her disguise as a traveling male intellectual. Hoisting her heavy leather trunk, she steadily merged into the stream of people entering the city.
She had not come to Nanjing for the romance of the Qinhuai River, nor to pay respects to the imperial majesty of the Ming Xiaoling Mausoleum. In an empire standing on the precipice of the "General Crisis of the 17th Century," she was here for one thing: fire.
Her custom flintlock required high-quality, granulated gunpowder, and the stock she had bought in Macau had succumbed to the dampness of the Jiangxi rains. More importantly, to survive the coming hellscape on the road to Beijing, she needed raw materials. Using the chemical knowledge she had gleaned in Europe, she intended to secretly brew "great weapons" capable of deterring the scavengers and warlords that lay ahead.
Following the vague clues from her memory, Shen Li navigated the labyrinthine alleys of Nanjing to a corner in the south of the city. There stood an unassuming Catholic church. A wooden plaque above the gate read "Hall of the Lord of Heaven," but starkly contrasting with the red walls and green tiles were traditional posters advertising "Exorcisms and Healing."
The courtyard behind the church was tranquil. A red-bearded Jesuit priest, dressed in Ming scholar's robes, was intently adjusting a brass telescope mounted on a stone table.
"Pater Thomas?" Shen Li called out softly from the shade of a pagoda tree. She spoke in perfect Latin, laced with an unmistakable German accent.
The priest spun around as if struck by lightning. His blue eyes widened in disbelief. In this Eastern empire where few outside the faith understood Western learning, hearing such fluent, classical Church Latin was nothing short of a miracle.
"You are...?" Father Thomas pushed up his spectacles, scrutinizing the lean scholar before him. His gaze finally settled on the distinctive European leather medical trunk in Shen Li's hand. "The make of that trunk... I saw similar ones at the university in Vienna. Child, are you a believer returned from the Holy Roman Empire?"
"I am returned from hell," Shen Li said, skipping the pleasantries and stepping forward. "Father, I need saltpeter and sulfur. The highest purity. I also need a significant quantity of mercury."
Father Thomas frowned deeply. As a Jesuit missionary, he knew exactly what these substances created. "Child, saltpeter and sulfur are the seeds of destruction. The Lord teaches us: Thou shalt not kill."
"The Lord also said, 'Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's,'" Shen Li pressed a hand on the stone table, her gaze cutting like a knife. "Father, you know better than those Ming officials—who only talk of metaphysics—what is happening in the North. The rebel king Li Zicheng does not believe in your God. The Manchu banners do not believe in Christ. If this fire crosses the Yangtze, your holy temple and the lambs you wish to save will all be ground to dust in the flames of this 'General Crisis.'"
Father Thomas fell into a long silence. As someone with access to the Jesuit intelligence network, he knew that northern China had already become a hell on earth due to plague and war.
"Beijing... is already an abandoned island," Thomas sighed, speaking slowly in accented Mandarin. "A carrier pigeon arrived yesterday. The rebel vanguard has passed Xuanfu. The Emperor of the Great Ming... I fear he will not last three months."
Three months. The gears of history were turning even faster than Shen Li had anticipated.
"That is why I need the 'fire,'" Shen Li stared at the priest. "Not to save this incurable dynasty, but to carve out a path of survival for a few living souls like myself amidst the chaos."
In the end, Shen Li opened her trunk. In exchange for the vital supplies—ten pounds of refined saltpeter, three pounds of sulfur, and a priceless, privately drawn Jesuit map of troop dispositions north of the Yangtze—she traded two scalpel blades made of tempered steel, sharp enough to slice a cicada's wing, and a detailed Latin manuscript recording European methods for dealing with the Black Death, including bloodletting and high-proof alcohol disinfection.
When she walked out of the church, night had fallen.
Nearby, along the banks of the Qinhuai River, red lanterns on the pleasure barges lit up one by one, painting half the river in the colors of a bloody sunset. Though the north was engulfed in flames, the sound of silk and bamboo instruments here never ceased; decadent songs drifted on the wind.
She stood on the Changgan Bridge, quoting a Tang poem that felt tragically prophetic: "The merchant women know not the hatred of a lost kingdom; across the river, they still sing the songs of a fallen dynasty." Below, the river reflected faces heavy with makeup, drunk on life and oblivious to impending doom.
In a wine shop by the bridge, a group of young scholars from the reformist Donglin Faction were in high spirits, slamming tables and pontificating loudly.
"That Li Zicheng is just a bandit king from Guan-zhong! As soon as our righteous army from Jiangnan arrives, we can pacify him with a single proclamation!" "Precisely! The court is corrupted only because of the remnants of the Eunuch Party obstructing us. Once we righteous gentlemen cleanse the government, destroying the Manchu barbarians will be simple!"
Shen Li sneered. This was the so-called backbone of the Ming. They were still unwilling to wake from the dream called "The Sages' Books," utterly unaware that thousands of kilometers away, their countrymen were reduced to trading children for food.
Suddenly, a wretched commotion broke the illusion of prosperity. In the shadows under the bridge, several refugees in rags were kneeling on the ground.
"Selling myself as a slave! Just five dou (about 50 liters) of rice! Save my wife and daughter!" A man was kowtowing frantically on the stone pavement. Behind him, two young girls huddled in straw, shivering. The man looked like he had once read a few books, but now, to survive, he was selling his dignity.
"Five dou? Your wife and daughters are skinny as ribs! Three dou at most, no more!" A salt merchant's steward, fat and dressed in silk, sneered, kicking the woman's knee with the toe of his boot.
Shen Li stopped. Looking at this scene, she remembered the twenty-one years she had spent in the European hellscape of religious wars, famine, and plague.
She walked over without a word. Amidst the gasps of the crowd, she tossed down a heavy silver coin that glinted coldly in the lamplight.
"Take the money and go."
The man froze, staring at the rare foreign silver on the ground. In this time of rampant inflation, this single coin was enough to buy several dan (hectoliters) of life-saving grain. He kowtowed frantically in the direction Shen Li had gone. "Benefactor! Benefactor, what is your great name?"
"Go south. Go as far south as you can," Shen Li didn't look back, nor did she leave her name. "Don't look back at this Jinling (Nanjing). This place is not of the human world."
In this Nanjing, piled high with gold and powder and rich scents, Shen Li felt a cold deeper than any European battlefield. It was the despair that radiates from a civilization rotting from the root.
She tightened the bundle on her back. It was heavy, filled not only with raw materials for gunpowder but with the capital to challenge this collapsing era.
She walked through the laughing scholars, through the drunk and dreaming gentry. Against the current of everyone's gaze, she walked alone toward the ferry that led north of the river.
On the other side lay the true hell.
"Goodbye, Dream of Jinling."
Shen Li stepped onto the northbound ferry. As the bow sliced through the river water, the myriad lights behind her blurred into a hazy patch of brilliance. Ahead lay endless darkness, and the city of Beijing, soon to be drowned by the flood of history.