The spring breeze lifted the fragrance of cherry blossoms and carried it to the summit of Mount Fuji.
Yang Ge stood atop Mount Fuji, gazing across the vast plain beneath the sunset's fading glow. Countless black-and-white images vied to play before his eyes, with that sprawling plain as their screen...
More than half a year had passed since they landed at Hirado Port the previous year, marching northeast and sweeping through the entire Eastern Isles.
The journey itself could hardly be called difficult.
But only those caught within it could understand the torment it held.
And as the organizer and leader of this expedition, all that pressure and anguish had passed upward, layer upon layer, until it finally settled upon his shoulders.
A multitude of mouths could melt gold; three men's claims could conjure a tiger.
The cruelty and gloom of slaughtering cities and destroying a nation, the misery and loneliness of being misunderstood, the courage and torment of constantly steeling himself to press onward-every day, it was as though hundreds upon thousands of people shouted questions into his ears: Was it worth it? Why not withdraw before the rapids swept him away?
To say he had never once felt lost or uncertain along the way would surely have been a lie!
He knew that, so long as he did not take things to their absolute extreme, no matter how the world changed or where the tide of history turned, his name would remain unsullied in the annals, praised by multitudes, rather than recorded as a butcher and chief culprit, condemned in speech and writing by future paragons of morality who would rise together against him...
Yet after every bout of doubt and uncertainty, the answer his heart gave him was always the same:
Worth it!
No retreat!
Now, with