‘A gun!’ barked the Fire Shaman. His stringy hair immediately burst into flame as he conjured up a white-hot fireball between his palms, its brilliance causing shadows to dance amidst the trees.

‘Hold!’ commanded Nurhaci, untroubled; ‘Nikan, you would do well to devote more time to studying the ways of the outsiders.’

He pointed a long, slender finger at the musket in Kichiro’s trembling grip.

‘He hasn’t even lit up the match cord,’ Nurhaci continued, ‘He can’t fire that thing.’

Kichiro stared down at his own weapon and paled, having just realised this himself. Here, he found himself, lost somewhere in Red Earth Country, utterly defenceless in front of two clearly high-Level natives whose stern faces were rapidly growing thick green scales. Before he knew it, a forked tongue slipped out of the fire mage’s lipless mouth while the other lizardman, the one with the long white beard, observed Kichiro with sinister reptilian eyes.

Mother, thought Kichiro, I’m done for. He let the musket fall and dropped onto his knees, despairing once again. But then, an idea struck him. Perhaps, this pair of lizardmen were the rulers of this wild land. If he were to accept their sovereignty and become their subject, they might well spare his life. Immediately, he bowed his head and kowtowed, his forehead bouncing repeatedly against the merciful bed of moss.

‘O lizard kings,’ he cried out, determined to live, ‘I swear allegiance to your highnesses! Be kind and spare your poor servant’s life!’

Nurhaci frowned.

‘Lizard kings?’

‘He must have consumed a lot of berries indeed,’ said Nikan, grinning.

‘We will take this boy and his musket with us,’ said Nurhaci, ‘I want to hear what brought him here.’

Nurhaci trotted his horse up to the kneeling Kichiro, who was slipping back into a berry-addled stupor, and hauled him effortlessly onto his steed. This hunting trip had looked to be uneventful, but it was strange to find a foreigner this far into Red Earth Country. What interested Nurhaci even more, however, was the musket, which he thought must be of modern design. In Red Earth Country and even the northern reaches of the Middle Kingdom, ancient gunpowder weapons in use for centuries, such as fire lances and hand cannon, predominated. Muskets of the sort carried by the footmen of Toyotomi’s armies were exceedingly rare.

Kichiro awoke the next morning covered in warm woollen blankets, the smell of freshly baked bread in the air.

You are now sober.

Kichiro sighed, relieved. It appeared he had survived his ordeal with the berries. He surveyed his surroundings. He found himself in a little room with mudbrick walls. A fire crackled in the corner, and the smoke danced merrily out of the house through a hole in the thatched roof that gave Kichiro a glimpse of the brilliant blue sky. Despite himself, tears filled his eyes. For weeks, he made his way through untouched wilderness and seen not a single soul, but his little pig guarded him all along and now he was saved.

‘You’re awake!’ cried out a voice, as clear and as pleasant as the trickling of a brook.

Kichiro turned to see a tall and slender woman smiling at him. She had black almond eyes that contrasted with her pale white skin; she was clad in a silken dress that spilled over her rather pronounced bottom, and her jet-black hair was tied up in a gleaming bun. Kichiro wanted even more to cry at his good fortune right then, and returned her smile with a wide monkey-like grin.

‘Where am I?’

‘You’re in Glimmering Cave Town, our great Nurhaci Khan’s seat of power in Red Earth Country,’ replied the woman as she heaped hot millet cakes and berries into a little bowl and passed it to Kichiro, who begun devouring his breakfast voraciously, although he first eyed the berries quite suspiciously to the woman’s great amusement.

‘Who are you?’ Kichiro asked, his cheeks still stuffed with half-chewed cake, caring little as to who this great khan might be.

‘I’m a mere servant in the household of Nikan,’ said the woman, smiling again. Kichiro stared at her wide-eyed as she passed him a terracotta bowl, brimming to the edge with fermented mare’s milk. He slurped up some of the milk absent-mindedly, but it was so thick and sour that he almost choked. The servant woman giggled. Stupid foreigner, she thought to herself.

‘Hurry and finish your food,’ she told Kichiro, ‘Nurhaci Khan is expecting you at his court.’

Kichiro felt better than he had for weeks when he walked leisurely in the direction the beautiful servant woman had pointed out to him. All around him were little mudbrick huts with thatched roofs, huddled amidst pines and maples. Suspicious faces peered out at Kichiro from the windows and doorways, shaven foreheads gleaming in the sun and thoroughly amusing him. When he raised his head, he saw great wooded slopes looming above, although the spruces and firs ended at a certain height; the tops of these mountains were bald and grey. The servant woman had told him that Glimmering Cave Town was in the middle of the Freezing Wind Mountains, and it appeared to be at the bottom of a lush valley, a settlement intertwined with the forest itself.

Before long, the huts gave way to stone-walled houses with terracotta roofs, and Kichiro realised that he was ascending an earthen ramp. Along the route, red tassels shivered in the wind, torches crackled and animal skulls impaled on poles leered at him. In the distance, he saw the ramp end at a little palace, boasting wooden columns painted red and a roof of teal tiling. Grim-faced guards, clad in head to toe in steel-studded leather armour and exuding the aura of high-Level warriors stood on each side of the palace’s great doorway, brandishing long spears.

When Kichiro finally arrived to greet them, he wiped sweat from his brow from the long ascent, and they watched at him with contempt in their eyes.

‘I’m here to speak with the khan,’ he told them.

‘You must be that foreigner that our khan brought back from the hunting trip,’ said the first guard, ‘Enter!’

Kichiro found himself in the throne room, incense smoke wafting through the air. It was dark, but when Kichiro’s eyes adjusted to the twilight, he found a venerable old man with piercing eagle’s eyes perched on a simple wooden throne watching him intently. The khan’s generals stood at his sides, looking quite uninterested in Kichiro’s arrival. To them, the short, monkey-faced youth from the East was a nobody, and hardly worthy of their attention.

‘Welcome to the court of Nurhaci, outsider!’ spoke Nikan the fire shaman, who stood directly to Nurhaci’s right.

Kichiro could feel that all these men, including the khan himself, were seasoned high-Level warriors, and the aura of power they collectively emanated was enough to make him tremble, but he stood proud and upright and bowed deeply to the khan, without deigning to get on his knees.

‘I will forever be grateful that you rescued me from the wilderness, great khan!’ he said, very much sincere. Nurhaci merely smiled and nodded.

‘You must be from the Rising Sun Isles,’ said Nikan, ‘You will show the khan how to operate that musket of yours.’

‘The musket is my father’s,’ replied Kichiro perkily, ‘I grew up in the Morning Peninsula.’

‘Very well.’

A squealing Level 13 pig was dragged out into the yard in front of Nurhaci’s palace and tied up. No matter how much it struggled in the mud, it could not escape. Kichiro felt a bit sorry for the pig, but he proceeded to tip a bullet and some gunpowder from his flask into the barrel, pushed it down with his ramrod, sprinkled some priming powder into the pan and lit the match-cord. Without hesitation, he pointed the barrel at the pig and pulled the trigger. The musket thundered and the Red Tassels flinched. Smoke enveloped Kichiro. The round bullet punched violently into the screaming pig’s soft flesh, shattering bones and smashing its organs.

You inflict 53 HP in damage to the Level 13 pig! The Level 13 pig dies!

‘As you can see, muskets inflict a very high level of damage,’ explained Kichiro to his stunned audience, pointing at the mutilated body of the pig.

Nurhaci stroked his beard silently. Nikan looked unmoved.

‘My fireballs could put an end to a man as surely as this musket,’ he said, ‘And I would be much quicker about it.’

‘How many of your warriors are fire mages, great khan?’ interjected Kichiro. Nikan sent a dirty glob of phlegm into the bloodied mud.

‘This boy has quite the tongue on him,’ he spat.

A giant of a man, bundled in bear furs, spoke up. This was Ayan, one of Nurhaci’s most trusted generals.

‘The Red Tassels are great archers,’ he begun, ‘Arrows fly further than bullets, land where we want them to, and kill almost as well. What good is this musket?’

‘Think ahead,’ replied Nurhaci, a gleam in his golden eyes, ‘Invading the Middle Kingdom is no mean task. We could empty Red Earth Country of men and still lack an army of the size we need to defeat the Bright Empire. At some point, we’re going to have to start recruiting southern city-dwellers.’

Kichiro coughed, astonished. He was already persuaded that Nurhaci was not just any barbarian king, but not even Toyotomi, the ruler of the Rising Sun Isles, succeeded in coming even close to seizing the Mandate of Heaven from the Bright Dynasty. Who does Nurhaci think he is? Ayan gazed at his khan, wide-eyed.

‘You’re right, great khan!’ he said, ‘Southern city-dwellers couldn’t even shoot an arrow into the ground if they tried! But any idiot can learn how to fire a musket!’

He pointed at Kichiro with a thick, sausage-like finger.

‘I mean look at him.’

The generals roared with laughter, and even Nurhaci allowed himself a grin. Kichiro made an indignant monkey face, which made the court laugh even more. He spent months risking trouble in the slums of the Morning Capital to master the operation of his father's old musket. Under the cover of darkness, he would shoot bullet holes into the city wall. After every shot, he would have to flee from the alarmed nightwatchmen and target another part of the wall the next night. On several occasions, he succeeded in splatting rats into bits, first terrifying and subsequently enraging the neighbours.

‘I will have the weaponsmiths take a look at this device,’ said Nurhaci as he weighed the smoking rod in his hands. Then he glanced at Kichiro.

‘Now, I will assign you to your place here,’ he said. Kichiro frowned, unsure as to what the great khan meant. Nurhaci saw his uncertainty and smiled venerably.

‘You did swear allegiance to me, didn’t you?’