Tie Lanshan did not look again at the shattered game pieces on the floor.
This old marshal, who had fought for half his life on the battlefield and climbed to the post of regional commander over mountains of corpses and seas of blood, had not even the slightest interest in wasting another word on a turncoat who wavered between two sides and hedged his bets.
“Drag him out.”
“Throw him into the death cell with heavy iron shackles. Without my personally signed orders, no one is to approach the prison gate within half a step. If he dies, is crippled, or even loses a single hair, you will answer for it with your own heads to fill the ranks of military law.”
Zhao Heng acknowledged the order and swung his arm with fierce authority.
Two soldiers, as fierce as wolves and tigers, stepped forward and grabbed Zhao Cheng by the arms, one on each side, dragging him out of the hall.
Zhao Cheng did not plead for mercy, nor did he protest his innocence.
In the final moment before being roughly hauled over the threshold of the main hall, he used the last of his remaining strength to twist his head around and stare fixedly at Xu Qinghuan, who sat upright in the armchair of honor.
Xu Qinghuan took in that venomous glare entirely.
Her expression did not change, not even the rhythm of her fingers lightly tapping the bronze hand warmer was disturbed in the slightest, completely ignoring that malignant gaze which would have made an ordinary person unable to sleep at night.
Xu Qinghuan looked at the bloodstained travel permit, continuing her analysis from where she had left off.
“Zhao Cheng thought himself clever, believing that by offering up a head he could pull the wool over everyone’s eyes and secure a path to advancement. But Chen Changfeng’s gambit was never meant for a reckless brute chasing petty gains like him from the start.”
Xu Qinghuan’s tone was calm, and her words carried their own logical thread.
“Deciphered using the old code, it points to the North Side Gate. But for someone in the know—like the Marshal, or General Xu—who has even a passing familiarity with the intelligence reports from the border and the Ministry of Revenue’s market trends over the past five years, a single glance is enough to see the old code as the bait it really is.”
Tie Lanshan turned and paced, stopping before the long table, lost in thought.
“According to Imperial Commissioner Xu, if we follow this bait to its logical conclusion, the real flaw must lie with the West City Corner Gate.”
Xu Qinghuan picked up the thread, each sentence hitting the mark precisely.
“The terrain at the West City Corner Gate is narrow and cramped—it has always been the weakest point of defense.”
“If we take the bait and judge the North Side Gate to be a decoy, we will certainly transfer the elite troops of our central camp, along with the powerful crossbowmen from the east and south, to reinforce the western fortifications for a stubborn defense.”
Tie Lanshan let out a heavy breath.
He was by no means a mere brute who only knew how to charge into battle; years of practical combat experience allowed him to quickly follow this military logic and grasp the full picture.
“Once the main army shifts westward, the defenses at the North Side Gate will be hollowed out overnight. The Helian army can simply abandon the west, move under cover, and truly smash open the north gate.”
Tie Lanshan’s eyes glinted with sharp insight.
“Deception within deception, trap upon trap. Chen Changfeng deliberately used the old code to expose a weakness, luring us to reinforce the West City Corner Gate. But the gate he really intends to strike is precisely the north gate that was originally written on the travel permit!”
“If so, I need to mass our elite heavily at the North Side Gate, turning his own trick against him?”
When Tie Lanshan threw out this question, he received no answer.
Now it was Tie Lanshan’s turn to be puzzled. What was the matter with Imperial Commissioner Xu? Hadn’t the strategy been decided?
Xu Qinghuan sat there quietly.
The crumpled travel permit lay on the small table, her hand resting on the bronze hand warmer, the firelight casting a warm glow through her fingers.
This pause came without warning, abruptly cutting into the critical moment of troop deployment and life-or-death decision-making.
Everyone felt that her young profile, lit by the lantern, showed no ripple of emotion, yet it conveyed an extreme tension like the oppressive calm before a heavy rain and the dark clouds that obscure the sun.
Tie Lanshan also halted his movements.
A veteran battlefield commander’s intuition always outpaced rational thought. He followed Xu Qinghuan’s gaze toward that tattered piece of paper and felt an indescribable chill creeping over him.
What had gone wrong?
This entire elaborate chain of deduction had gone far too smoothly!
It was as if someone had laid out a broad, smooth road through the ice and snow in advance, just waiting for them—the so-called commanders and generals—to willingly step onto it.
“Chen Changfeng calculated that there would be someone in Zhenbeiguan who could break his code,” Xu Qinghuan finally spoke.
“A Han Chinese man and military strategist who has fused political scheming into his very bones, who forced our army to retreat and run out of provisions—before he made his move, he must not have been calculating merely which gate this travel permit pointed to, north or west.”
“He calculated what the smartest person in Zhenbeiguan would decide upon seeing this flaw.”
Xu Qinghuan pressed two fingers against the paper, dissecting it to the bone.
“He left the five-year-old code not to mislead others, nor to guide his underlings.”
“He deliberately and blatantly placed this flaw before the Marshal, and before people like you and me, who pride ourselves on seeing through everything.”
“What Chen Changfeng wants has never been a single city gate. What he wants is the confidence of the clever…”
These words landed in the main hall without any ornate rhetoric, yet they cut deeper than the freezing north wind.
Xu Chengguang’s originally steady breathing was silently interrupted for half a beat.
Xu Qinghuan gazed at the travel permit, analyzing it layer by layer, peeling back the bloody truth:
“As long as the people inside the pass think themselves clever, seeing through the trick of the old code and recognizing the west gate as a decoy.”
“Then the player of this game will, out of that self-satisfaction, transfer all elite forces to the north gate, station the main focus at the north gate, and block up that so-called ‘real’ breach.”
“Once the north gate is packed with Zhenbeiguan’s heavy forces, the West City Corner Gate becomes an unguarded death trap.”
“He doesn’t care which gate is real. He only cares which gate we, because of this flaw, willingly vacate.”
“After all… he has his people inside Zhenbeiguan City.”
Layer upon layer of reversals.
This was a bloodless war between strategists.
With nothing more than a few lines of speculation, he could slaughter tens of thousands of garrison troops in the city and toy with a hall full of generals in the palm of his hand.
Tie Lanshan’s brow furrowed into a deep crease.
He had spent half his life at war and had seen countless ingenious plots and cunning tricks.
But this move truly probed the ultimate limit of psychological warfare in military strategy.
“Then which gate does he actually intend to strike?”
Tie Lanshan’s voice carried a sense of urgency. “The west city? Or the north gate?”
Zhenbeiguan simply didn’t have enough available troops.
The west gate and the north gate were far apart. Relocating heavy forces was no small feat; once the defense was set, any attempt to redeploy was a fantasy.
Choose correctly, and Zhenbeiguan might still have a chance of survival.
Choose wrongly, and the city would fall, its people slaughtered—trampled into bloody mud beneath the hooves of the Helian cavalry.
A deadly dead end, with only two choices, was laid bloody and bare on the table.
Not a sound remained in the hall.
Xu Chengguang stared at the chessboard before him, trapped in a situation with no good move to make.
West gate, or north gate?
Whichever side he reinforced, the other would become a lamb exposed to the Helians.
Refusing to choose would mean losing both.
This was not only a shortage of troops but a complete suppression in strategic intelligence.
Xu Qinghuan placed her hand warmer onto the table with a crisp clink.
She paid no further attention to the travel permit, nor did she calculate the odds of this two-choice dilemma.
She stood up and paced over to the large map of the Northern Garrison Town hanging on the wall of the main hall.
“The North Gate, or the West Gate.”
Xu Qinghuan lifted her head, gazing at the crisscrossing lines on the city defense map. “This question itself is a poisoned cup of wine handed to us by Chen Changfeng.”
She turned around, her gaze sweeping over Tie Lanshan and Xu Chengguang.
“If we follow his lead and answer, we lose whether we’re right or wrong.”
“The Northern Garrison Town is stretched too thin to cover both ends, with a long frontline.”
“No matter which gate the Marshal piles up with heavy armor and strong crossbows, the other will be completely drained of resources within half an hour.”
“He can simply wait until we finish deploying our forces, then send his scouts outside the city to find out which gate is the weakest, and crash into it with full force.”
This razor-sharp analysis hit harder than a hammer blow to the chest.
In that moment, the woman’s words yanked them out of the fixed mindset of the battlefield.
From solving the problem to outright overturning the problem.
Such a commanding view from above tore up the opponent’s carefully crafted maze from its roots.
Xu Qinghuan withdrew her gaze from the map. Her young face, lit by the flickering charcoal fire, exuded a poised and superior calmness.
“This game,”
she said in a steady, level voice, settling the matter once and for all, “is not about which city gate we fight for!”
