Three hundred li behind the Helian Royal Court, at the foot of the Yin Mountains, lay a desolate ravine known as Blindman’s Gully.
The harsh night wind swept in through the gaps in the ravine.
A campfire blazed vigorously beneath a rocky cliff that shielded it from the wind, its dark red flames licking at several dried hunks of poplar wood.
Amur sat cross-legged by the fire, holding a coarse, chipped earthenware bowl in his hands.
He seemed lost in thought, but before long, he downed the bitter, sand-gritty liquor in one gulp.
The strong drink burned his throat like swallowing a lump of charcoal.
The felt curtain of the tent was suddenly pushed aside.
It was Arslan, a trusted confidant from the old Qiyan tribe, now clad in a brand-new suit of fine steel lamellar armor from the Great Qian Dynasty.
Arslan strode to the campfire, knelt on one knee, his eyes burning with a feral, bloodthirsty fervor.
“Young Chief! The brothers outside are all armored now! All eight hundred Great Qian cross-handled swords have been issued!” Arslan’s voice was tight with barely restrained excitement. “The scouts just sent word back—that traitor Helian Hongfang has already led his main army south to attack the passes!”
Arslan reached down and scratched a rough map into the dirt, pointing to the vast region in the west.
“Young Chief, this is the perfect chance for our Qiyan tribe to rise again!”
“The Right Luli King’s forces have all been pulled away. Those few small tribes in the west, always bullied by him, have let their guard down.
“With our five hundred elite armored men slipping over there under cover of night, we can swallow them whole within three days! Like a snowball rolling downhill, we’ll soon have at least three or four thousand battle-ready warriors, and we can plant the Qiyan war banner back on this steppe!”
Amur did not answer immediately.
He looked at Arslan, whose face was alight with zeal, and listened to the sounds of excitement outside the tent—the five hundred clansmen, newly equipped with heavy armor, who were polishing their blades.
A glint of bitter, self-mocking chill crept into Amur’s eyes instead.
Arslan thought this was a gift from the Eternal Blue Sky.
Those clansmen who had suffered for three years in the mud all believed the Young Chief had received a mandate from heaven, that he had conjured these arms and supplies out of thin air.
Only Amur knew the truth.
This was no blessing from the Eternal Blue Sky.
This was the price he paid by selling his life—and his soul for damnation after death—to a butcher from the Great Qian, a man ten times more vicious than any steppe wolf.
All for a bloody mad dog’s leash.
He closed his eyes, and his thoughts were involuntarily dragged back to half a month ago.
That was a vassal tribe under the Right Royal Court.
Three years earlier, the Qiyan tribe had been wiped out. The surviving able-bodied men were mostly sold like lowly livestock to a tribe called the Tatars.
Amur would never forget the scene that day.
He saw a man who had once been the Qiyan tribe’s peerless archer, capable of drawing a three-stone strong bow from horseback and hitting a target at a hundred paces.
The Tatar overseers had driven large, barbed iron hooks through his collarbone, and tethered him like a dog in a stinking pit of mud.
These once-feared steppe warriors were now emaciated, their bodies covered in festering sores.
They lay like beasts in the muddy water, gnawing at the moldy sheep bones the Tatars had thrown away.
Meanwhile, the Helian nobles and overseers, dressed in silks and drinking fine Great Qian liquor, gathered around the pit, lashing their backs with barbed whips soaked in brine for entertainment.
“Run! You Qiyan whelps! Run if you can!” the overseer howled with laughter, his whip cracking across an elderly tribesman’s face, leaving a bloody, mangled gash.
The old man was knocked into the mud. He struggled to get up, but the overseer stomped hard on his knee.
“Old bones, you’re useless! I’ll chop off this crippled leg today and boil it for dog meat!” The overseer drew his curved saber from his belt, raising it high.
Just as the blade was about to fall, at that moment between life and death—
A thunderous crash rang out.
The coarse wooden gate of the slave camp was kicked violently from the outside, splintering into pieces.
Amid the flying wood chips, Amur—who had disguised himself as a lowly herdsman for days—stepped into that earthly hell like a demon emerging from the underworld.
Behind him followed a squad of grim-faced Great Qian death warriors, their bodies radiating killing intent.
Before the overseer could even react, Amur closed the distance in a ghostly blur.
He gripped a heavy horse-slaying saber in his hand. Its edge flashed a blinding white arc in the sunlight.
Thud!
Without a single word of warning, the overseer’s head—its face frozen in mid-laugh—leaped from his shoulders.
Blood splattered across the old tribesman’s face.
A deathly silence fell over the entire slave camp.
Amur waved his hand, and the death warriors hauled forward three heavy wooden chests.
They flipped the lids open to reveal three chests of gleaming Great Qian official silver, shimmering with enough white light to buy the entire steppe.
Then came the chilling clatter of weapons.
Eight hundred frost-glinting, hundred-refined steel cross-handled swords were dumped beside the piles of silver!
Stepping onto the overseer’s headless corpse, Amur swept his gaze across the terrified Tatar guards, whose legs had turned to jelly.
“My people of the Qiyan tribe,” he said, “today, I am buying every one of you.
“If anyone dares to say no, this sword will be the funeral deposit for his entire family.”
In the mud pit, the Qiyan tribesmen—still shackled and pierced by iron hooks—stared dumbstruck at their Young Chief, now a ruthless war-god descending into the mortal realm.
From stunned silence to shock, and from shock to frenzied joy—
“Young Chief…” the old man croaked, extending a hand caked with mud.
The next moment, hundreds of broken, crippled, scarred men wept loudly in the blood and filth.
They frantically shattered their rotted wooden fetters with their mangled limbs, clawing their way out of the mud pit heedless of all else.
They knelt at Amur’s feet, pressing their cracked lips to the dirty tips of his boots.
…
Pa!
A piece of poplar wood popped in the fire, snapping Amur back from that bloody memory.
He looked down at the Great Qian cross-handled sword in his hand, running his thumb lightly along the edge.
The blade was razor-sharp, easily slicing open his fingertip and drawing a thread of crimson blood.
He sheathed the sword with a sharp “clang” and rose to his feet.
The sudden movement startled Arslan, made him jerk his head up.
“Young Chief! The brothers have their swords whetted. They’re only waiting for your order to charge west and kill!” Arslan urged impatiently to join the battle.
Amur coldly looked down at him, his eyes holding none of the fervor Arslan had hoped for—only a spine-chilling, icy rationality.
“Raiding for plunder in the west? Gobbling up those toothless fish-fry who can’t even scrape together enough winter fodder for their sheep?”
Amur stepped over the campfire, strode to the crude map, and ground the western route Arslan had drawn into the dirt.
“Arslan, have your brains been stuffed with horse dung from all those years in the sheepfold?” Amur’s words cut like knives. “Even if we swallow every one of those small western tribes, scraping up five thousand men, even ten thousand men—what good will that do?”
“When the Southlands Khan’s hundred thousand iron cavalry have gorged themselves on Central Plains flesh and turn their heads back.”
“Do you truly believe this rabble we’ve scraped together can withstand the Li King’s Iron Pagoda, or hold against the Great Khan’s Golden Wolf Guard?”
“Swallowing up little fish is nothing but dragging a few more corpses to the grave with us while we wait to die!”
Arslan went pale at these words, stammering, “Then… then where do we strike? The blood of these few hundred brothers is already boiling. Since the blade has been drawn, it must drink!”
Amur suddenly laughed.
The smile, flickering in the campfire’s light, looked savage and monstrous.
“To be a mad blade, you cannot care whether you live or die.”
Amur turned and strode out of the tent.
Outside, five hundred fully armed deathsworn of the Qiyan tribe lay silently in the darkness.
Not a single man spoke. Only the heavy sound of breathing and the occasional snort of a warhorse broke the silence.
Amur drew the horizontal saber from his waist and slashed it across his palm.
Blood instantly gushed out, dripping drop by drop into the chipped coarse clay wine bowl in his hand.
“Warriors of the Qiyan!” Amur raised the bowl of strong wine mixed with his blood, his hoarse voice thundering across Blindman’s Gulch.
“For years, we Qiyan have crawled in the mud like dogs and pigs, licking our enemies’ boots just to survive!”
“Now we have swords in our hands and armor on our backs. We will take our revenge!”
He poured the bloody wine onto the earth beneath his feet.
“But our enemies are not those petty minnows to the west, whose bones we cannot even be bothered to chew!” Amur’s bloodied saber pointed straight east—toward the direction of Tongwan City, the great stronghold of the Helian Right Wing Court.
“If we eat, we eat the fattest meat! If we bite, we strike the deadliest throat!”
“The Helian Royal Court has taken their main army away. That inner tent piled high with gold and silver in their court now doesn’t even have a watchdog left!”
“We will raid their right wing camp! Burn their pastures to ash, and pile the heads of their Helian nobles into an altar for our Qiyan tribe!”
These words were like a thunderbolt thrown into a pile of dry kindling.
The wild, bloodthirsty rage that had been suppressed for three full years erupted from the marrow of these living dead.
“Kill!” Arslan threw back his head and let out a piercing, savage howl.
“Kill! Kill! Kill!”
Five hundred Great Dry horizontal sabers thrust toward the night sky in unison.
These madmen, who no longer cared if they lived or died, answered their Young Chief’s blood oath with a roar that shattered the night wind.
Amur vaulted onto his horse, his blade pointing forward.
“March out!”
