SHADOWS OF THE VALLEY
Chapter 6: Northern Reach and the Silent Vow
Date: June 10, 1936
Location: The Northern Foothills, Approaching Red Army Controlled Territory, Shaanxi
The landscape changed as they moved north. The stark, water-scarce loess badlands gave way to greener, rolling hills dotted with pine and scrub oak. The air felt different—still tense, but with a new political charge. They were entering the ragged, fluid periphery of territory influenced by the Chinese Communist Party's Red Army. Li Fan felt the historical gravity of it, a pull as tangible as the weight of his pack.
His small team—Zhao Quan, Chen Rui, and the still-chastened but fiercely loyal Zhang Wei—moved with heightened vigilance. The two Mauser rifles with scopes, taken in the Twin Pillars ambush, were slung on their backs, their most valuable trade goods. The rest of their plunder was safely cached across three sites, the map to which was divided between Li Fan and Liu Feng. The unit was dispersed, a necessary evolution that felt like an amputation.
They were hunters now in a different game. Not for food or immediate survival, but for men. The skirmish with Captain Ma's composite unit had been a declaration of existence. To survive the inevitable response, they needed to grow from a platoon to something more.
"Contact front," Zhao Quan whispered, raising a closed fist. He pointed to a thin column of smoke rising from a hidden hollow a kilometer ahead.
Li Fan glassed the area. No uniformed patrols. A small, poor hamlet, maybe five or six households. "We'll bypass. Our target is the refugee trails north of the Luo River. That's where we'll find the dispossessed, the deserters, the men with nothing left to lose but their chains."
Zhang Wei hefted the heavy Type 11 machine gun he now carried with proprietary pride. "And if they're Kuomintang deserters? Or bandits?"
"Then we evaluate," Li Fan said. "We look for skill. We look for grievance. We look for the ones who haven't yet turned their hunger on the innocent. We are not building a gang. We are building a blade. The steel must be of good quality."
As they skirted the hamlet, Chen Rui, on point, suddenly froze and dropped to a knee behind a boulder. He made a sharp gesture: enemy, close.
Li Fan slithered forward. In a rocky creek bed below, two men were arguing over the meager contents of a gutted rabbit. They were scarecrow-thin, their clothes hanging in rags. But their weapons were military: a well-kept Hanyang 88 and a Czech Vz. 24 rifle. Deserters, likely. Their faces were hollow with hunger, but their eyes held a desperate, cornered ferocity.
Before Li Fan could signal a plan, the argument turned violent. The man with the Vz. 24 shoved the other, who stumbled and dropped his share of the rabbit. The first man raised his rifle butt to strike.
"Hold here," Li Fan murmured. He stood up, deliberately making noise, and walked into the open, his hands away from his body but his rifle slung in a ready position. "The rabbit isn't worth a cracked skull, brother."
Both men whirled, leveling their rifles with shaking hands. "Stay back! We have nothing!"
"I'm not after your rabbit," Li Fan said, his voice calm and steady, the voice of a man in control of his next meal. He kept walking slowly. "I'm after men who know how to use those rifles. Men who are tired of fighting for nothing and starving for it."
The man with the Vz. 24, clearly the more dominant, sneered. "Another warlord's lackey. You want us to die for a bowl of rice?"
"I am no man's lackey," Li Fan said, stopping ten meters away. "My men and I take what we need from those who have too much. We move like ghosts. We train harder than any army in this province. We have full bellies and full magazines." He gestured to Zhao Quan and the others, who now emerged from cover, their disciplined movement and good equipment silently underlining his words. "The price is loyalty to the unit, and discipline. The reward is purpose, and a chance to strike back at the world that made you into this."
He saw the flicker in their eyes—not just at the mention of food, but at the words purpose and strike back. These were men stripped of everything, including dignity.
"Prove it," the second man, the one who'd been shoved, said quietly, his voice raw. "The garrison at Heishan Fort, a day's walk east. They took my sister for 'questioning' two months ago. She hasn't come back. They beat my father to death when he asked." His knuckles were white on his Hanyang 88. "They have a storehouse. They eat meat every day."
Li Fan studied them. A personal, burning grievance was the best motivator, and the most dangerous. It could make a man fearless or reckless. "What are your names? Your real units?"
The first man, after a long pause, lowered his rifle a fraction. "Xu Hong. 29th Infantry, 3rd Company. We weren't deserters. We were left for dead after a retreat. No rations, no orders."
The second: "Lin Mao. Same company. My sister…"
Li Fan nodded. "Xu Hong. Lin Mao. I am Li Fan. This is Zhao Quan, Chen Rui, Zhang Wei. The garrison at Heishan—how many men? Layout?"
Lin Mao's description was detailed, fueled by hate. A fortified village with a stone watchtower. Maybe twenty men. A local warlord's petty fiefdom, brutal but sloppy.
Li Fan made a decision. It was a risk. It was a deviation from the recruitment plan. But sometimes, to gain men, you had to show them what you were.
"We will scout Heishan Fort. If it is as you say, we will hit it. Not for glory. For its supplies, and for your sister, if she is there. You will follow my orders without question. You will watch, and you will learn how we operate. If, after, you wish to stay, you will undergo training. If not, you take a share of the supplies and go your way. Agreed?"
The two men exchanged a long look. It was Xu Hong who finally gave a curt, military nod. "Agreed."
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Date: June 14, 1936
Location: Heishan Fort, Eastern Sector
The fort was, as Lin Mao described, a bullying outpost rather than a military asset. The stone watchtower was unmanned at night. The guards on the palisade wall dozed. The arrogance of local power.
Li Fan's team, now seven, observed from a wooded ridge. He had run them through a hasty but thorough rehearsal: a silent night approach, wire cutters on a weak section of the fence Lin Mao identified, priority targets (the guardhouse, the barracks), and the location of the storehouse.
"This is not an assault," Li Fan briefed them in the final dusk. "This is a surgical removal. In and out. Silence is the weapon. Knives and clubs only unless absolutely compromised. Xu Hong, Lin Mao, you are with Zhao Quan on the storehouse. Chen Rui, you're on overwatch here with the scoped Mauser. Your only job is to eliminate the tower guard if he wakes and raises an alarm. Zhang Wei, you're with me. We clear the guardhouse."
He looked at the two new men. "You follow Zhao Quan's lead. You touch only what he tells you to touch. Understood?"
They nodded, their faces grim in the twilight.
The approach was a textbook infiltration. The wire cutters, taken from Captain Ma's patrol, snipped through the rusty fence with a dull snap that was lost in the wind. They flowed into the compound like black oil, two teams diverging.
Li Fan and Zhang Wei approached the small guardhouse by the gate. Two men inside, playing mahjong by the light of a single oil lamp, their rifles propped in a corner. Li Fan pointed at himself, then the left-hand guard. He pointed at Zhang Wei, then the right. He held up three fingers, folded them down one by one.
On zero, they moved.
Li Fan's combat knife took his target in the throat from behind, a hand clamping over the man's mouth. He lowered him silently. Across the table, Zhang Wei's man was tougher; he struggled, knocking over a stool. Zhang Wei, remembering his training, used his superior weight and a brutal knee to the spine, then a swift, silencing cut. It was messy, but quiet.
Meanwhile, Zhao Quan's team reached the storehouse. The lock was heavy but old. Xu Hong, with a blacksmith's instinct, used a pry bar from his pack and with one powerful, focused wrench, snapped the hasp. Inside: sacks of grain, salted pork, and, in a locked inner room, two terrified women. One was Lin Mao's sister, emaciated but alive.
The emotion threatened the timeline. Lin Mao choked back a sob, embracing his sister. Zhao Quan, with firm pressure, separated them. "Later. Now, move." They began stuffing sacks into carry-sheets.
A dog barked, once, sharply, from near the barracks.
"Exfiltrate. Now," Li Fan hissed into the darkness. The teams converged at the fence, laden with supplies. Chen Rui slid down from his overwatch position, his rifle unfired. They vanished back into the woods just as shouts of confusion began to rise within the fort.
They marched through the night, putting ten kilometers between them and the fort before collapsing at dawn in a hidden ravine. The haul was immense: enough food for two months, medical supplies, bolts of cloth, and two Lee-Enfield rifles from the guardhouse.
Lin Mao wept quietly as he held his sister, who was wrapped in a captured blanket. Xu Hong stood apart, staring at the piled supplies, then at Li Fan. His expression was one of profound shock. The efficiency, the silence, the sheer competence of it was something he had never seen, not even in the regular army.
"You… you truly are different," Xu Hong finally said.
"We are shadows," Chen Rui said, with a quiet pride that hadn't been there two months before, as he cleaned his unused rifle.
Li Fan sat down opposite Xu Hong and Lin Mao. "You have seen our methods. The offer stands. The training is harder than anything you've known. The discipline is absolute. But the man next to you will never leave you behind. And we strike where it matters."
Xu Hong looked at Lin Mao, at his sister, then at the determined faces of Zhao Quan, Zhang Wei, and Chen Rui. He stood up straight, a remnant of military bearing returning. "My life was over. You gave it back a purpose. I will stay."
Lin Mao simply nodded, his loyalty now unbreakably pledged.
They were nine.
That evening, as the others organized the cache, Li Fan took first watch on the northern ridge. He looked out across the darkening hills, towards where the Red Army's heartland lay. In his original timeline, he was a member of the Communist Party of China, his loyalty to the nation and its people forged in a different fire. Here, in 1936, the Party was surviving the Long March, its ideology a beacon for millions like Xu Hong and Lin Mao.
But he knew the complex, often brutal road ahead. The internal struggles, the great victories, and the costly lessons. He could not simply march in and announce himself. His value, his duty to the future he swore to serve, was not in blind allegiance to the 1936 entity, but in shaping a tool of unparalleled sharpness. A tool that could, when the time was right—perhaps not until the war against Japan truly unified purpose, or even later—be placed in the hands of the cause that would ultimately lift the nation. A tool that could reduce the butcher's bill in the coming Korean mountains, that could teach special operations doctrine decades early.
He made a silent vow, to the stars over Shaanxi and to the red flag of his memory: I will build this company. I will teach them to be the best soldiers this land has ever seen. And when history calls for them, they will be ready. Not for warlords, not for personal glory, but for the people. This is my Long March.
Below, in the ravine, his nine shadows moved with quiet purpose. The platoon was forming. The company was a dream in the distance. The path was set.
End of Chapter 6