The sky had barely turned a pale fish-belly white when the stench of blood on the desolate beach, sharpened by the morning dew, drove its acrid stench straight into the crown of one’s head.
Wu Enqi, the squad leader of the Helian auxiliary troops, covered his nose and mouth, leading a dozen brothers whose hands and feet trembled as they pushed four or five empty flatbed carts, stumbling forward through the deep and shallow ground.
A high-ranking figure from the vanguard camp had given the order: they were to retrieve the bodies of the thousand-man commander Aletan and his brothers who had fallen in battle the night before, at least managing to piece together their corpses.
But the moment Wu Enqi truly stepped into that dry, narrow gully, he could no longer stand straight. His stomach churned violently, and he leaned against a withered tree trunk, vomiting out all the coarse grain cakes he had eaten the night before.
The auxiliary troops following behind fared even worse; several dropped straight to their knees in the mud, retching yellow bile.
This wasn’t a battlefield of combat—it was a butcher’s block for live slaughter.
The ground was nothing but black mud mixed with blood and water, the flesh of men and horses mashed together in a grotesque paste. Not a single intact bone could be found.
Wu Enqi’s hands trembled as he used his horsewhip to pry open a clump of mud-caked matter. Leaning in, he saw it was half a crushed horse leg. The inch-thick steel armor still attached to it had been bent inward into a terrifying, impossible angle by some blunt instrument.
“Squad leader… how do we even collect this…” a young auxiliary soldier whimpered, clutching a hemp sack, his foot slipping on something slick—intestines, he realized—and stumbling backward in panic. “We can’t tell which parts are human and which are horse!”
Wu Enqi wiped the sour bile from his mouth, forcefully swallowing his nausea as he surveyed the scene. Gritting his teeth, he barked, “Forget intact bodies! Go back and grab a few iron shovels. Just scoop it up! If you can fill a sack, that counts as one brother. Hurry up and find Aletan’s token of identification!”
The dozen men steeled themselves, sifting through the pile of shredded flesh. Finally, in a blood-filled pit, they dug out Aletan’s wolf-skin felt cap. Beneath the cap was a completely deformed steel helmet, flattened from the top into a pancake. The red-and-white contents inside had long since leaked out, leaving only a few strands of scalp clinging to the crevices of the iron.
Wu Enqi took one look, and his legs went weak as noodles. He crawled and scrambled away from that pit as fast as he could. He remembered the delirious ramblings of the wounded soldier who had retreated the night before—at the time, he thought they were the ravings of a frightened mind. But now, staring at the shattered heavy armor scattered across the ground, he believed.
One arm, one iron hammer, had smashed twenty fully armed heavy cavalrymen into meat paste.
Just the thought of such a thing could keep a man awake all night.
Half an hour later, the flatbed carts, loaded with broken armor and severed limbs, were pushed back into the rear supply camp.
As soon as the auxiliary troops entered the camp gate, a few old soldiers who had woken up early to feed the horses gathered around. These supply camp men, who usually stayed behind and had seen little real fighting, loved nothing more than gossip.
The veteran Hasi picked his teeth with a skewer, kicked at a blood-stained cartwheel, and after listening to Wu Enqi’s stammering account, burst into loud laughter, spraying saliva all over Wu Enqi’s face.
“What a load of your ancestral farts! You auxiliary troops have never even slaughtered a calf, so naturally everything scares you.” Hasi tapped a fire iron against a stone, laughing so hard he swayed. “The people of Great Qian are weaker than the sheep on our steppes, and you’re telling me a one-armed cripple killed Aletan? You think Aletan and his twenty heavy-armored men were mud-piled little brats, lining up to have their skulls cracked?”
The surrounding cooks joined in the mockery, pointing and laughing, calling the auxiliary troops cowards.
Wu Enqi’s face turned blue with rage. Forgetting all about rank and hierarchy, he spun around, grabbed a chest plate stained with flesh from the top sack on the cart, and slammed it at Hasi’s feet.
“Laugh! Go on, laugh!” Wu Enqi’s eyes were bloodshot as he pointed at the armor piece. “This is the heart-protecting mirror of Laosan, the one who charged at the very front—five inches of solid steel! Open your dog eyes and take a good look. Do you think a blade could make a dent like this?”
Hasi’s laughter stopped dead.
He stared down at the twisted piece of iron on the ground. The center of the chest plate had been driven into an impossibly deep crater, the surrounding metal torn by sheer brute force into horrifying cracks, with bone fragments clinging to the edges.
Hasi swallowed hard, not even noticing the fire iron slipping from his hand.
He bent down to touch the deep hollow, but the moment his fingertip touched the rough fissure, he yanked it back as if zapped by a current. This was no mark of a sword slash or a spear thrust. This was a hit from some heavy weapon, delivered head-on, annihilating all defense through pure violence.
The watching soldiers all fell silent. The area before the camp was so quiet you could hear a pin drop.
In everyone’s mind, a single image emerged: a black-armored warrior, missing his right hand, wielding a several-hundred-pound lump of iron with one arm, charging headlong into the cavalry, smashing each rider flat with a single hammer blow.
…
This silence, by midnight, finally brewed into a full-blown commotion.
A young cook from the supply camp, unable to hold his bowels any longer, sneaked out alone into the dry ditch outside the camp to relieve himself.
The night wind howled through the piles of rocks, producing a few sharp gusts.
Just as the cook dropped his pants, the corner of his eye caught a tall human silhouette rising behind a black earth slope, and the wind carried the sound of iron dragging across the ground.
The cook’s taut nerves snapped instantly.
“The Iron Mace Butcher is here! A demon is raiding the camp!”
The cook couldn’t even pull up his pants. He let out an ear-piercing shriek, his voice cracking, lost his footing, and tumbled headfirst into a two-meter-deep pit of human waste, splashing yellow water high into the air.
That single scream was like poking a hornet’s nest. The entire supply camp erupted into chaos.
Hundreds of Helian soldiers who hadn’t slept well rolled out of their tents in panic, their armor on backward, clutching curved swords and spears as they ran wildly through the camp like headless flies, ready to slash at any shadow.
By the time several hundred-man commanders chopped down a few of the fleeing new recruits and lit torches to search the surrounding slopes, they found that the “figure” was nothing but a crooked withered tree, and the iron-dragging sound was merely wind scraping dry grass against rocks.
Hasi fished the stinking cook out of the pit and kicked him hard in the ass with a loud curse.
But the hand holding his own sword was trembling, and the shirt beneath his back was soaked through with cold sweat. No one in the camp dared to truly laugh at that cook. They sat by the campfire clutching their weapons, none willing to return to their tents to sleep.
This panic wasn’t confined to the supply camp. It spread like the deadliest plague across the steppes, riding the wind with terrifying speed toward the front lines and the outlying cavalry.
Fifty li away, on the leeward side of a mound.
A fifty-man scout squad, responsible for perimeter vigilance, crouched in the grass, holding their horses.
The night chill was biting, but over a dozen archers were sweating profusely, beads of sweat streaming down their faces and blurring their eyes. Yet not a single one dared to raise a hand to wipe it away.
The squad leader, Namusu, gripped his saber tightly, his eyes wide as he stared at the swaying tall grass ahead.
Half a stick of incense ago, a very abrupt sound of a dry branch snapping came from the forest ahead. Under normal circumstances, this would amount to nothing at all, but tonight was different—everyone's ears were stuffed with tales of the "One-Armed Evil Ghost."
Another very faint rustle sounded.
Fifty cavalry sabers were raised in unison, bowstrings were pulled to their limits, and everyone held their breath.
Just then, the tall grass was pushed aside, and a gray-white wild goat poked its head out, chewing on half a blade of grass, staring foolishly at the group of Helian cavalrymen who looked like they were facing a grave threat.
The taut tension suddenly relaxed.
Several archers collapsed directly onto the ground, gasping heavily, unable even to grip their bows.
Namusu let out a long sigh. Feeling embarrassed in front of these new recruits, he deliberately slammed his saber back into its scabbard and started cursing loudly.
"Look at you—what a bunch of cowards! A goat scared you half to death? So what if this so-called 'Iron Mace Glutton' really shows up? We've got fifty men here—are you telling me we can't butcher a cripple with no right hand?"
A veteran soldier sitting on the ground gave a bitter laugh and pointed at Namusu's hand as he chimed in.
"Captain, before you say that, could you at least steady your blade? Your scabbard's been banging against your thigh this whole time."
Namusu looked down and saw his own right hand trembling at an embarrassingly obvious frequency. His face flushed, but he couldn't muster a single harsh retort.
By noon the next day, the news had traveled along the southbound march route to the rear units, completely twisted in the telling.
The lowest-ranking soldiers were mostly illiterate, so word of mouth relied entirely on their raw fears, embellished with each retelling.
Someone lowered his voice in the marching column and whispered to a fellow villager: "Did you hear? Last night in Daqian, there was this eight-foot-tall Demon General. They chopped off his right hand while he was still alive, and now he's crawled back to the mortal world to feast on us Helians' flesh to restore himself. No sword or spear can pierce him—they say even Lord Aletan had his brain sucked dry."
Another soldier nodded in agreement, casually hiding the last piece of dried meat from his ration bag into his boot, figuring that if a demon really showed up during a fight, he'd have a handy excuse to slip away.
The squad leader in charge heard the muttering from behind, got so furious he drew his saber outright, strode into the line, and kicked the soldier spreading rumors flat on the ground. Pressing the tip of his blade against the man's neck, he roared:
"Have you all forgotten the Royal Court's military regulations? If I hear any more of this bullshit that disrupts morale, I'll gut you where you stand!"
The squad leader shouted loud enough for everyone to hear, but the blade in his hand wavered uncontrollably to one side by three fingers' width.
The kicked soldier stiffened his neck and shot back:
"Sir, I'm not making this up! The vanguard camp didn't even dare to wash the corpse cart clean. The whole army knows by now—we've run into an invincible demon!"
The squad leader opened his mouth to retort but found that several dozen of his men were staring at him with a very strange look.
That look held little respect for military law—only raw fear of the unknown.
The squad leader sheathed his saber in defeat, trudged forward in silence, and stopped bothering with the whispers running through the ranks.
These scattered murmurs and distorted horror stories eventually did not escape the notice of those higher up.
