The wooden gate collapsed into the muddy ground, the dust it stirred still settling.
Arslan was a starving wolf freed from its chains, leading two hundred death warriors over the outer fence.
On the southern grounds of the White Grass Pasture, row upon row of haystacks piled high like mountains.
Animal hides hung from the surrounding wooden fences to block the wind.
Several Helian guards, wrapped in sheepskin coats, were huddled in a sheltered corner dozing, their spears cast aside.
Arslan lay in the grass, his eyes fixed on those unsuspecting enemies, his tongue licking his cracked lips, tasting the metallic sweetness of blood.
The autumn air was dry and the wind swift—a perfect season for setting fires.
"Move in!" Arslan barked, his voice carrying the pent-up rage of three years.
Dozens of death warriors swiftly pulled out glass bottles filled with thick, black oil from their belts.
That was the “trump card” given by that ruthless woman from the south.
Several glass bottles arced through the night sky, landing deep within the withered hay and shattering.
Immediately after, a dozen lit fire sticks were tossed in.
Boom!
A ghastly white “demon flame” surged upward, igniting everything it touched.
The north wind swept through the Yinshan Gorge, stirring up a whirlwind that carried blazing wisps of hay toward the surrounding felt tents.
The fire rolled, its gaping maw lunging into the heart of the pasture.
Only then did the Helian garrison soldiers jolt from their sloth.
"Fire! Put it out!"
Bronze gongs clattered urgently, shattering the ravine’s stillness.
Ill-dressed old soldiers, clutching buckets and spears, stumbled out of their quarters in chaos.
One old soldier slung a wooden basin of water toward the flames.
But the ghastly white hellfire not only refused to die, it spread along the water’s path. The moment it touched a sheepskin coat, it sizzled through skin and flesh with a sickening hiss!
The soldiers scrambling to fight the fire fell into the mud, rolling and howling, unable to shake off the death-dealing flames.
What awaited them were the Great Qian broadswords emerging from the shadows.
The Kiyat death warriors had long since dispersed into the grass and darkness, moving in groups of three, slipping through every gap.
A Helian squad leader had just raised his spear to light the way ahead when a blade sliced from the right flank, neatly severing his hamstring.
He screamed and collapsed, but before his body could roll, another warrior’s knife-tip pierced his throat, snuffing out the howl in the mud.
"Enemy attack! Form ranks to meet them!"
A Helian centurion shouted, trying to rally the scattered defenders.
Arslan, his broadsword ready, had already locked onto him from a dozen paces away.
He drove his legs forward and lunged straight at the centurion.
Two Helian armored soldiers crossed their spears to block him.
Arslan didn’t dodge or yield. He clamped his left arm around the incoming spear shaft, letting the tip tear through his leather armor and carve a bloody groove beneath his ribs.
His right-hand broadsword, propelled by momentum, cleaved through the first enemy’s torso. Then the blade turned swiftly, slicing upward to rip off another soldier’s jaw and half his skull.
The centurion raised his curved blade in a desperate downward strike.
Arslan sidestepped the blade, seized the centurion’s chest guard with his left hand, and reversed his broadsword, plunging it ruthlessly into the centurion’s armpit—where no armor protected.
Hot blood sprayed across Arslan’s face.
He shoved the corpse away and roared to the heavens like a beast.
Flames lit up half the ravine. Under the twin onslaught of unquenchable demon fire and assassinations, the pasture’s defenses completely collapsed.
Meanwhile, Amur led another two hundred men, skirting the firestorm, charging straight for the northern gunpowder cellar.
This was the pasture’s heavily guarded treasure, stockpiling all the saltpeter and gunpowder the Left Wastes had plundered in recent years.
The guards of this cellar were not the common soldiers on the perimeter, but a squad of heavily armored Helian elites.
Fifty veteran heavy infantry, all retired from the Left Luli King’s personal guard, wore two layers of cold-forged scale armor.
Their iron-reinforced wooden shields stood half a man high, covered in rawhide, built specifically to stop arrows.
In front of the cellar entrance, spears bristled like a steel hedge, a solid barrier blocking the way.
“Loose arrows!” commanded the old clansman at Amur’s side.
Dozens of Kiyat archers drew their bows, and a storm of three-edged armor-piercing arrows rained down.
But the wooden shields were thick. The arrows struck with nothing but a thud, unable to pierce the shield wall by even a hair!
“Chieftain’s son, the shields are too thick! The arrows can’t penetrate!” the old clansman grinded his teeth, his fingers bleeding from repeated bowstrings.
Amur’s eyes showed no sign of retreat, only a cunning glint.
He pulled a fist-sized, pitted black iron ball from his leather pouch—the feared “fire-thunder pot” from the Great Qian.
“Use the southerners’ method!” Amur shouted.
The Kiyat death warriors at the front each drew the same black iron ball, pulled the ingenious fuse lock with their thumbs, and hurled the deadly objects with all their strength into the dense shield-and-spear formation!
“Fall back! Get down!” Amur bellowed.
Before the fifty Helian heavy infantry could realize what these black lumps were, a thunderclap rose from the ground!
Boom! Boom! Boom!
Blinding bursts of fire exploded within the shield formation, accompanied by violent shockwaves mixed with countless fragments of iron caltrops and sharp shards of pottery, spraying out in a brutal fan shape.
The cold-forged scale armor, once reputedly impenetrable on the steppes, proved as fragile as thin paper against the fire-thunder pot’s armor-piercing power!
The heavy infantry howled in agony. The iron-reinforced shields shattered into wooden splinters. Limbs and body parts flew amid a rain of blood.
The seemingly unbreakable spear-and-shield formation was torn apart in an instant, leaving a ragged, bloody gap.
Before the smoke cleared, Amur charged into the formation like a demon, his meteor-iron broadsword in hand.
But no sooner was he inside than three curved blades swung at him from three directions, whistling through the air, sealing off all escape.
Amur twisted his body, narrowly avoiding a lethal blow within the storm of flashing blades.
His broadsword traced a vicious semicircle through the air, the edge shrieking as it cut the wind.
Clang!
Harsh steel clashing, sparks flying.
Amur, relying on his blade’s absolute material superiority, cut through two of the enemy sabers and slashed through the throats of two armored soldiers in one stroke.
But the third blade caught him on the left shoulder, opening a wound so deep the bone was visible.
Amur didn’t even flinch. He whirled his sword back, chopping off the man’s sword hand at the wrist.
Outside the formation, the old clansman saw the enemy shield wall crumble and seized the opportunity.
He knelt on one knee, nocked a heavy arrow, and aimed at the Helian officer commanding from behind the shield wall.
The north wind howled, flames wavered.
The old clansman held his breath, his hands as steady as a mountain.
The bowstring twanged. The heavy arrow whistled through the air, sank into the gap in the officer’s faceguard, and neatly pierced his skull!
The officer fell, and the remaining heavy infantry fell into complete chaos.
The Kiyat death warriors surged in like a tide, carving a bloody path through the wreckage with their Great Qian broadswords.
After the fierce battle, a hundred bodies lay before the cellar entrance.
Twenty or more Kiyat warriors fell too, victims of the explosion aftermath and hand-to-hand combat.
Amur stood at the entrance, his left shoulder’s blood dripping down his arm, staining the sword hilt.
He panted heavily, staring into the deep cellar where stacked wooden barrels and piles of saltpeter formed a mountain.
“Pour the rest of the demon oil in,” Amur ordered decisively.
Several warriors shattered the remaining bottles of black oil onto the pile of saltpeter.
Amur accepted a torch, watching the dancing flames as scenes from the past three years flashed through his mind—his people shackled, whipped to death in misery.
Without further hesitation, the torch traced a parabola through the air and landed into the pit.
"Retreat! Head for the hills!"
Amur bellowed, leading the remaining loyal fighters in a frantic dash toward the rocky slope.
They had barely run a hundred paces when a deep vibration traveled upward from the bowels of the earth, numbing their feet.
Then, a blinding white light burst forth from the pit, shattering the darkness around them.
Boom—!
The gunpowder pit erupted, shaking heaven and earth.
A terrifying shockwave swept through like a tidal wave, hurling wooden fences, the remaining grain stocks, and even the corpses of Helian guards into the air.
Amur and his men were knocked to the ground. In their ears, nothing remained but a sharp, piercing ring.
Their nostrils filled with the acrid smell of sulfur and burnt material.
A towering pillar of fire shot straight into the clouds, illuminating half the sky as bright as day.
Countless burning wooden beams, mud, and stone were flung into the air, then crashed down like meteors, carving smoking craters into the earth.
Half of the pastureland was reduced to scorched earth in this calamity.
The surviving Helian guards, who had never witnessed such a scene of earth-shattering destruction, either died or fled.
They abandoned their armor and weapons, disappearing into the depths of the night, lacking even the courage to look back.
The endless grain stocks and stacks of saltpeter and gunpowder—the very lifeline supporting the hundred-thousand-strong army of the Helian Left King’s court—were wiped out in a single night.
Amur crawled out from under a thick layer of ash, brushing the scorched soil off himself.
He ignored the wound splitting open on his left shoulder, propping himself upright with his horizontal saber at the highest point of the rocky slope.
The towering flames illuminated half his face, caked with blood and soot.
Three years.
Over a thousand days and nights of slavery, a dog’s existence worse than pigs and livestock—finally repaid this night with this field of ashes.
Amur let out a long, foul breath, inhaling the pungent smell of smoke.
But he didn’t find it unpleasant. Instead, he thought it was the sweetest scent in all the world.
This was revenge!
“Young chief…” Arslan climbed up the slope, soaked in blood, half his face blackened by smoke. He grinned widely, revealing stark white teeth. “We did it!”
Amur’s face twitched into something resembling a smile. Tonight was only the first piece of blood debt collected.
Dawn was breaking. The eastern sky began to pale.
The fire over the grassland slowly died down, leaving only a blackened wreckage and scattered embers.
The once-mountainous grain stocks were now nothing but gray ash; the gunpowder pit had become a terrifying crater with white smoke still rising from its depths.
The morning wind carried a chill through the valley, curling wisps of blue smoke away until they disappeared into the vast sky.
Amur gathered his loyal fighters and took a headcount.
Of the five hundred elite men who had set out, thirty-seven brothers lay forever beneath the scorched ground, while over seventy others bore sword wounds or blast injuries.
Though there were losses, the core fighting force remained intact.
These men, tempered by fire and thunder, now had eyes sharper than they had been just a month ago.
These demons who had crawled out of hell looked down at the burnt earth, their eyes filled only with the fierce satisfaction of vengeance.
Amur walked up to a young soldier.
The young man had lost both legs to flying debris from the explosion. He was biting down on a wooden splinter, bearing the pain as a comrade used a red-hot blade to cauterize his wounds.
Amur crouched down and patted him on the shoulder.
“Young chief…” the soldier spat out the wood splinter, his forehead covered in cold sweat. “I didn’t disgrace the Qiyan tribe.”
“Atu, you are a warrior.” Amur untied the waterskin from his belt and handed it over. “You must live to see the Helian court wiped out.”
He stood up, looking around at the bloodstained faces.
“Bury the fallen brothers right here,” Amur gave the order. “Burn any weapons we can’t carry. Leave nothing for the Helians to trace!”
The elder clansmen quickly set to work.
There was no time for mourning, not in the heart of enemy territory.
Every extra moment they lingered increased the risk of total annihilation.
“Young chief, about the Wanggu and Tatar tribes…” Arslan leaned in and asked quietly.
“They took my swords and salt. They’ll go tear into the Helian Right King’s pasture now,” Amur wiped the blood from his saber and sheathed it. “With Ashina Gudu’s base in chaos, the Right King’s army will fall into disarray. We wait until they’ve clawed each other bloody enough—that’s when we clean up the mess.”
Amur turned and looked south.
Toward Zhenbei Pass.
That woman from the Great Jin, Xu Qinghuan—her mind was more venomous than any snake on the steppe.
She had predicted that the main Helian army would march out in full force, leaving the pastureland vulnerable. She had predicted the three-year fury festering in the Qiyan tribe.
With just a shipment of blades, salt, and those terrifyingly overpowered weapons, she had tipped the balance of the entire steppe.
Amur knew full well that he was nothing more than a pawn on the Great Jin's chessboard.
But if he could shatter the Helian court, he was willing to be that pawn.
“Young chief, the men are ready,” the elder clansman reported.
Amur took one last look at the scorched ground, then turned away.
“Gather the survivors, take care of the wounded, and retreat!”
He swung onto his horse, the gesture pulling at his wounded shoulder. He didn’t even grunt.
This blood debt was a start.
Now it was up to you, Commissioner Xu, to make the next move.
