Battle of Shukai Plains & Conquest of Zhao

With Zhao's northern provinces lost, the final confrontation between Qin and the prime minister Riboku unfolds across the Battle of Shukai Plains and the subsequent invasion of the Zhao heartland — the campaign that will end one of the seven kingdoms and bring the unification war into its decisive phase.

The Shukai Plains arc and its successor campaigns represent the closing movement of [Kingdom](/manga-series/kingdom)'s second great act. Qin, having broken Zhao's northern administration in the Gyou arc, launches a series of operations into the Zhao heartland with the explicit objective of removing Zhao from the war as a sovereign state. Riboku — the strategist who has stood as Qin's primary antagonist since the Coalition arc and whose tactical patience has frustrated Qin's ambitions for decades of in-universe history — finally takes the field in a personal command that he has avoided for most of the series. The arc is structured around the long-deferred confrontation between Riboku and the Qin command structure that has spent the previous arcs being shaped specifically to defeat him. Ou Sen's tactical patience, Mou Bu's frontline aggression, the Hi Shin Unit's flexible mid-scale combat, the alliance with the Mountain Folk, the Yotanwa's personal participation in the campaign, and the strategic intelligence apparatus that the king has built since the Aisen arc all converge on Shukai Plains as the test of whether Qin has finally assembled the instruments necessary to defeat the man who held the Coalition together. The campaign is ongoing in the manga as of 2026, with successive arcs continuing the conquest of Zhao through the capture of additional cities and the gradual collapse of Zhao's political institutions. The historical outcome is known to readers — Qin will conquer Zhao in 228 BCE on its way to the unification of all seven kingdoms in 221 BCE — but Hara has used the historical inevitability to focus the arcs on the cost rather than the outcome of the war, and the eventual death of Riboku and fall of Handan have not yet been depicted in the manga.