Yellow Armor Soaring to the Sky

In the wind blowing from the salt-alkali land, Huang Chao smelled a mixture of rust and chrysanthemum. He touched his left shoulder blade - there was a dull pain there again, like a piece of ice melting in the bones. The nightmare from last night was still before my eyes: Chang'an's Zhuque Street was paved not with bluestone slabs, but with layers of poetry manuscripts, each one with his poems written on it, each one soaked brown with blood. In the distance, Wang Xianzhi was ordering troops and raising flags. Huang Chao took out the broken mirror fragment he got from the fortune teller from his arms and looked at the dim sun. There was no face in the mirror, only a line of small characters that kept twisting: "The incense array reaches the sky and penetrates Chang'an." He knew that it was not a prophecy, but a bet. Bet on these 600,000 hungry brothers whose eyes are green, bet on the "new law" mentioned by the crazy female Pei family in Hedong, bet on those strange machines that Mo Heng has not yet built - bet on whether this three-hundred-year-old house in the Tang Dynasty will be knocked down by them, or whether they will be buried inside. "General, let's go!" Li Jiuru's broken voice broke his thoughts. Huang Chao put away the pieces and got on his horse. The ice pain in my left shoulder was now as hot as coal.