The General's Burden

The Northern Campaign Strategy Room was a tomb. It was late, the third watch of the night, and the Forbidden City outside was blanketed in a deep, sleeping silence. But here, there was no rest. A single electric lamp cast a harsh, lonely glow over the colossal map of Siberia, making the painted mountains and rivers seem like the bones and veins of some long-dead leviathan. Meng Tian was alone.

He was surrounded by the artifacts of a war not yet fought: impossibly complex logistical charts, railway timetables that were already obsolete, and casualty projections that read like pages from a book of nightmares. He had been given an impossible order by a god who refused to acknowledge the concept of impossibility. For days, he had wrestled with the numbers, trying to force them into a shape that resembled victory, but they remained stubborn, intractable, screaming a single, silent word at him: catastrophe.

He felt trapped, not just by the Emperor's command, but by the walls he had built around his own soul. His pristine reputation as the "Honorable Admiral" was a sham, a mask he wore at court. Underneath it was the man who had stood in the darkness of a warehouse and listened to another man break. He had traded a piece of his honor for what he thought was control, only to find himself recalled and placed in this gilded cage, tasked with planning a slaughter.

He ran a hand over his weary face. He was haunted. As he stared down at the map, at the city of Chita, the Emperor's designated target, the plaster and paint seemed to dissolve. For a fleeting, nauseating moment, he saw the face of Van der Meer, the Dutchman, his eyes wide with pleading terror. The ghost of the man he had ordered killed had followed him from Batavia. It was his constant companion now, a silent accuser in the quiet moments of the night. Is this the price? The ghost seemed to whisper. Is this what your great Empire is built upon?

He closed his eyes, pressing the heels of his palms against them, trying to force the image away. The pressure in his mind, a combination of exhaustion, guilt, and the immense, crushing weight of his responsibility, was becoming unbearable. He felt a familiar, strange tingling at the base of his skull, a sensation he had only ever felt in the heat of naval combat, in the split seconds before a shell found its mark or an enemy ship made a fatal turn.

In this moment of extreme mental and emotional stress, his latent power, the "Battle Sense" he had used to win the Battle of the Sunda Strait, activated. It had never happened like this before, in the cold silence of a room far from the sea and the scent of gunpowder.

The room around him did not just dissolve; it evaporated. The maps, the charts, the heavy teak furniture—all vanished. He was adrift in a void, and before him lay not a plaster map, but a living, breathing representation of the coming war. It was a vision of terrifying, abstract clarity.

He saw the campaign unfold, not as a series of neat lines and marching troop markers, but as a dynamic, flowing, living entity. He saw his supply lines, stretching out from Manchuria like long, tentative tendrils. They glowed with a faint, sickly green light, the color of fragile life. As they pushed deeper into the vastness of Siberia, he watched them grow thin, stretch, and then, one by one, snap, the green light extinguishing into blackness.

He saw his legions, the Emperor's precious armies, as pools of deep, vibrant blue light. He watched them march into a vast, endless sea of crushing, icy whiteness. And as they entered the white, their blue light began to flicker, to dim, and then to die out, one by one, like candles being snuffed out in a great, indifferent wind. The vision was not of battles or heroism; it was of slow, inexorable extinction.

He saw the Trans-Siberian Railway, the campaign's great objective. It was not a red line on a map. It was a pulsating, vital artery of angry, crimson light, the lifeblood of the Russian presence in the east. And as he focused on it, he could sense it, not as a tactician sees a target, but as a physician senses the health of a body. He could feel its points of strength—the heavily defended junctions, the reinforced bridges—and its points of profound weakness. He saw a series of small, almost invisible nodes along the artery, places that glowed with a faint, bruised purple. A poorly maintained trestle bridge over a deep gorge hundreds of miles from any major garrison. A single, crucial switching station in the middle of an empty plain, manned by a skeleton crew of disgruntled exiles. A fuel depot built on unstable permafrost.

These were the war's secret vulnerabilities, its hidden pressure points. And he knew, with a certainty that transcended logic and strategy, that to strike these points would be to cripple the entire system.

In that moment of terrible, awe-inspiring vision, he finally understood the true nature of his power. It was not just "combat precognition." It was not a simple trick for dodging cannonballs. It was a form of massive-scale strategic intuition. It was the ability to see the flow of a conflict, to sense the qi of a war—its currents of life and its eddies of death. He was not just a general. He was a force of nature.

The vision faded as quickly as it had come. He found himself on his knees, breathless and shaking, his hands braced against the cold, solid reality of the plaster map. He was back in the room, but the world looked different. The map was no longer an unsolvable puzzle. It was a body, and he now knew exactly where to place the knife.

He stood up, a new, terrifying clarity in his mind. The Emperor's plan for a frontal assault was indeed suicide. But a new plan was forming in his thoughts, a radical, surgical strategy. A series of high-risk, lightning-fast raids, conducted by small, elite units—his own marines—targeting the specific logistical nodes his power had revealed to him. Not to seize the railway, but to paralyze it. To bleed the Russian armies dry, to let the cold and the distance do the work for him. It was a plan that was still incredibly dangerous, a gamble of the highest order. But it was not the suicidal march to oblivion the Emperor had demanded. It was a plan that might actually work.

He stood before the map, his mind on fire with this new, radical strategy. He now possessed a plan that could save hundreds of thousands of lives and potentially achieve a victory far more decisive than the Emperor's crude vision of conquest.

But this new knowledge was not a gift. It was a terrible, crushing burden. His plan was born from a secret, supernatural power that he had to hide from his paranoid Emperor at all costs. To reveal a power that rivaled the Emperor's own would be an instant death sentence. Furthermore, his brilliant new strategy was in direct, flagrant contradiction to the Emperor's command.

He was faced with an impossible choice. He could follow his orders, present the flawed, officially sanctioned plan, and knowingly lead the armies of the Great Qing to their doom in the frozen wastes of Siberia. Or, he could present his new, supernaturally-derived strategy, a plan that could win the war, and in doing so, risk exposing himself as a man with his own "Dragon's Spark," a man whose power and independent thought the Emperor would surely see as the ultimate threat.

His gift had not freed him from his cage. It had only made the bars stronger and the choice within it more agonizing.