Dusk pressed heavily over the vast grassland, howling winds whipping dry blades of grass and lashing violently against the thick felt of the Ashina Khan’s tent.
A gray steppe eagle cut through the darkening sky, slipped in through the dome’s skylight, and landed inside the tent that represented the supreme authority of the grasslands.
It circled once, dragging a faintly pungent cold breeze, before settling steadily on a massive shaman staff carved with intricate beast bones in the corner.
Tied tightly to the eagle’s left leg with a leather cord was a brass tube stained with traces of blood and dirt.
Inside the royal tent, several blazing copper braziers hissed, tongues of flame greedily licking a whole lamb skewered on an iron rack, sizzling with dripping fat. The thick smell of roasted meat and sour wine mingled in the air.
Dozens of noblemen from the royal court lounged in every direction, tearing mouthfuls from greasy chunks of meat and bragging wildly about how much plunder they’d seize if they broke through the southern passes—gold, cloth, and women.
The moment the eagle landed, the raucous noise inside the tent ground to a halt.
The Great Shaman’s claw-like, withered fingers fumbled to untie the brass tube. A guardsman respectfully took it and handed it to the Great Khan, Ashina Hongfang, seated at the head.
Ashina Hongfang set down his gold-and-jade-inlaid carving knife, accepted the still-warm brass tube, and peeled off the stopper without a word. He shook out a strip of coarse cloth, barely three fingers wide, and scanned its contents by the firelight.
The flickering flames danced across his scarred, fleshy face, revealing not the slightest trace of emotion.
“A fast report from Mr. Chen at the vanguard camp,” Ashina Hongfang said, lifting his eyelids and letting his gaze sweep over the noblemen below, who had already perked up their ears. He read the words aloud, one by one: “The vanguard is stalled. The enemy has deployed their One-Armed Death God, bearing down on us.”
No sooner had the words left his mouth than he tossed the cloth strip toward the nearest brazier.
The flames licked upward, threatening to devour the scrap of cloth carrying earthshaking news.
It was the Right Luli King, Ashina Gudu, seated on the left, who reacted first.
“Stalled? My vanguard force has three hundred elite riders! Aletan is the finest warrior in the royal court!” Ashina Gudu’s dark, ruddy face instantly flushed a hideous liver-purple. He shot to his feet and kicked over the iron rack holding the half-roasted lamb carcass with his leather boot.
Red-hot coals scattered across the ground along with bubbling lamb fat, hissing and sending up clouds of white smoke.
“A cripple without his right arm smashed more than twenty of our heavy cavalry? How the hell is that heaven-sent divine intervention?” Gudu spun around, stabbing his greasy finger straight at the figure in the blue robe sitting in the corner, and roared curses: “Chen Changfeng! You swore that someone inside Zhenbei Pass would hand over their city defense maps. We just needed to send men to take them and claim a legendary triumph! And now? No trace of any map! Aletan is dead! Our men’s souls are all scared out of their wits by your lies after a few ghost stories!”
Fuming with rage, Gudu drew the ornate curved sword studded with turquoise from his belt. The blade’s tip leveled squarely at Chen Changfeng’s nose.
“Faithless dog of the Great Qian! You laid this trap deliberately to destroy our grassland’s finest warriors!”
This was the final straw. Over a dozen tribal chieftains and ten-thousand-household commanders inside the tent, already nursing grudges against this Han Chinese strategist, roared along in fury.
“There’s not a single decent southerner among them!”
“He’s been in cahoots with those Great Qian officers all along—deliberately spreading false news to drain our troops!”
“Great Khan! Strip him of his strategist rank! Let’s hang this southern traitor from a lantern as a sacrificial banner today, to summon the spirits of our brothers who died on the barren shores!”
A relentless clatter of metal rang out as gleaming curved blades slid from their scabbards one after another.
Those hot-tempered generals slammed the flat of their swords against the hardwood table, making it clear that if Ashina Hongfang so much as nodded, they would charge forward and tear Chen Changfeng apart on the spot.
At the very center of this storm, Chen Changfeng sat as steady as a mountain, cross-legged behind a low table.
He didn’t even lift his eyelids. In his hands, he held a clean, white cloth, leisurely wiping the rim of a silver wine goblet.
...
Chen Changfeng knew in his heart.
The three wounded soldiers released by Xu Zhan would soon spread like wildfire among the lower ranks of the entire right-wing army: a ghostly general called the “Iron Mace Executioner” had emerged at Zhenbei Pass.
If the troops’ morale wavered, even the scouts wouldn’t dare to venture far at night.
At this rate, before they even caught sight of the walls of Zhenbei Pass, this war would be unwinnable.
...
The curses surrounding him, which nearly demanded his skinning and dismemberment, along with the murderous aura close enough to threaten his face—he treated them all no differently than a draft sneaking through a crack in the door.
Only when the uproar in the tent finally eased did Chen Changfeng halt his movements.
He carefully folded the cloth and set it aside, then slowly pushed himself up from his knees.
Facing the blade tips nearly brushing his clothes, he simply walked around the table and approached the still-smoking brazier at the center.
Without hesitation, he reached out his hand and, with two fingers, plucked a charred remnant of cloth from the edge of the glowing coals.
“A reincarnation of Xiang Yu, the Iron Mace Executioner,” Chen Changfeng said with a faint sneer, holding the strip of cloth. “His Highness flies into a rage at the twenty dead men on the barren shore, yet he has utterly failed to see how weak Zhenbei Pass truly is at its core.”
Ashina Gudu laughed in bitter fury. With a flick of his wrist, the curved blade’s edge advanced half a foot, nearly brushing Chen Changfeng’s neck.
“Weak? A crippled one-armed man wipes out several dozen of our heavy cavalry, and you, blind fool, call that weak?”
Chen Changfeng turned his head, completely ignoring the blade near his throat, and instead took a big step forward—meeting Gudu’s sword tip head-on.
The sheer force of that step was so imposing that it even forced the notoriously hot-tempered Right Luli King to step back half a pace.
“Your Highness is mistaken—this is not the strength of Great Qian, but rather its decline,” Chen Changfeng said, casting the scorched cloth back into the brazier, watching it turn to ashes in the flames.
“In war, victory hinges on troop formations and strategy, on soldiers and supplies. If Xu Qinghuan had enough force to swallow our vanguard, why would he go to such lengths to set up this deadly ruse? Had he truly fielded a full army, he would have taken advantage of Aletan’s unsteady footing and marched out of the city to devour the relief troops in one bite!”
Chen Changfeng turned, his gaze sweeping coldly across the grassland nobles who had raised their blades.
“Sending a desperate, crippled general to perform a lone act of reckless courage, deliberately leaving a few survivors to carry the tale, even spreading absurd rumors of a demonic fiend—gentlemen, I ask you to think with your heads: what is this for?”
Chen Changfeng slammed his palm down on the empty table beside him.
"This is like burying one's head in the sand! It's a ploy to cover up their fatal weakness: stretched-thin troops and completely hollow city defenses! Xu Qinghuan calculated that you're naturally suspicious by nature, that the low-ranking soldiers fear ghosts and spirits, and he wants to use a so-called Death God and a few fabricated ghost stories to pin our hundred-thousand-strong army outside the Great Wall, wasting time and delaying the inevitable!"
As these scathing words of analysis hit home, the clamor inside the tent died down by half. Several of the seasoned commanders who had actually led troops in major battles exchanged glances. Their previously tense wrists relaxed, and the curved sabers in their hands slowly lowered.
They knew in their hearts that Chen Changfeng's grasp of the Great Qian army's standard tactics had indeed struck the vulnerable point.
But Ashina Gudu clenched his molars tightly, refusing to swallow this bitter humiliation.
"Stop spouting those sour Han words to confuse the masses!" Gudu shouted, his neck stiff with rage. "How did those twenty men in heavy armor die? Did the wind blow them down? Now our soldiers are scared out of their wits—what are you going to use to fight with?"
Chen Changfeng's sneer became even more pronounced. He spun around and closed in on Ashina Gudu again, firing off a series of questions that each drew blood.
"You feel sorry for losing a few dozen men? Since when did you, descendants of wolves, care so much about a little cost like this?"
Chen Changfeng yanked the worn leather pouch from his waist and, with a clatter, overturned it onto the table.
The charred iron caltrops brought back from the northern battlefield, along with the thick iron casing of a half-destroyed fire-thunder jar, spilled out across the surface.
"Then tell me—what is this? And what about the rootless flame that the Great Shaman recently exhausted his efforts to divine? That heavenly calamity bound to burn the grasslands to ashes—what is that?"
Chen Changfeng's voice grew louder, shaking dust from the tent's ceiling. "And now you talk about retreating? You want to wait for the horses to fatten up on autumn grass? Wait until next spring?"
"Open your eyes and look at these iron shards! In three months, the Great Qian's armory, working day and night, can produce three thousand more repeating crossbows! They can equip thirty thousand more jars of that terrifying hellfire that even water can't put out!"
Chen Changfeng grabbed the fire-thunder jar fragment roughly and shoved it against Gudu's chest.
"By then, your prized Iron Buddhas—those heavy-armored warriors you believed to be invincible—will be nothing but iron-plated coffins stuffed with minced meat before those firearms!"
Dead silence fell over the tent.
Ashina Gudu's mouth hung open, all the crude grassland curses stuck in his throat.
Chen Changfeng couldn't be bothered with this prince, who had more muscle than brains.
He strode to the tent entrance and yanked aside the thick felt door curtain.
The night wind of the grassland instantly howled in, making the torches and braziers inside sway wildly, light and shadow cutting across every face.
He extended an arm and pointed south, toward the direction of Zhenbei Pass.
"Gentlemen, this war was never about stealing iron pots for cooking meat from inside the pass, nor about grabbing a couple of carts of winter grain or a few fair-skinned women!"
Chen Changfeng spun around, his gaze pressing down like a weight on every powerful chieftain.
"This is a fight for the survival of the grassland people!"
“Before those wildfires have a chance to spread beyond the Great Wall, we must throw our entire army at them and stamp them out root and stem. If that sleeping dragon called the Great Qian ever catches its breath and distributes those world-shattering fire-weapons to the hands of three hundred thousand frontier soldiers…”
Chen Changfeng paused, then ground out the last half of his curse-like prophecy through clenched teeth.
“Our Helian tribe—generation after generation—will all be reduced to slaves of the Southern Dynasty!”
Those words, like the sharpest awls, stabbed deep into the hearts of these unruly nobles of the steppe.
No one dared make another sound.
All the arguments, reluctance, and fury were choked in their throats by that brutal vision of extinction.
The way they looked at Chen Changfeng no longer held contempt—instead, their eyes revealed a growing dread of their own future fate.
At the highest seat, the Great Khan Ashina Hongfang still sat motionless, his massive, mountain-like frame firmly planted in his beast-skin throne.
But his right hand, which had been endlessly toying with a string of bone prayer beads, came to a complete halt.
His breathing grew heavier, his broad chest rising and falling like a bellows stretched to its limit.
A full half-incense stick’s time passed.
Then came a harsh, jarring crack.
Ashina Hongfang had crushed the hardest skull bead in his grip, powdered bone sifting through his wide fingers and falling to the ground.
“Mr. Chen is right…” Ashina Hongfang finally rose, looking down from his imposing height over everyone in the tent, his tower-like figure radiating an overwhelming pressure.
“Our Helian tribe and Great Qian are already locked in a fight to the death.”
The Great Khan of the Helian twisted his face into a ferocious snarl.
“I will go to the foot of the city wall myself and see whether that cripple called Xu Zhan, with only one iron staff, can block the hooves of my hundred thousand horsemen.”
Once the Khan’s command was given, there was no room for turning back.
Even the court nobles who still harbored reservations about firearms and the Death God could only pound their right fists against their left chests and solemnly obey the Great Khan’s military order.
One by one, they lowered their heads and filed out of the tent.
Chen Changfeng deliberately lingered at the back of the crowd.
When the heavy curtain fell shut behind him, cutting off the firelight and warmth of the royal tent, he was already swallowed by the boundless night of the grassland.
A gust of cold wind struck his face. Chen Changfeng couldn’t help but shiver.
He stood in the biting wind, gazing into the southern night sky at a few dim stars.
A corner of his mouth lifted, and he began to laugh silently.
Soon, his entire body was trembling with uncontrollable laughter, his eyes brimming with unrestrained madness and obsession.
This chariot of the Helian—one that had already lost any road of retreat—had finally, by his own hand, been pushed over the edge of a bottomless cliff.
Now, it would all depend on whether Chen Changfeng could shatter the hundred-year dragon vein of Great Qian and rebuild the Helian,
or be blown to dust and bone by the roaring thunder of their fire-weapons.
