“Take this! This move is a tough one!”
“If West Route Garrison falls, within two days, the Khan's five thousand iron cavalry will ride straight through and strike our flank from behind.”
Tie Lanshan's voice was hoarse, carrying the weariness and fury of a sleepless night.
“By then, the defensive line we worked so hard to build will be worthless. Zhenbei Pass will become an isolated island, caught between advance and retreat.”
“Our twenty or thirty thousand troops in the city, plus all the old, the weak, the women and children — all of them will become meat on the butcher's block for the Helian blades.”
Xu Chengguang's sword-like brows were tightly knit. This young general, born of a noble house and seasoned by countless battles, now felt a deep sense of helplessness.
“Marshal Tie, siege trebuchets of this kind weigh ten thousand catties. These are not things the grassland barbarians could ever have crafted themselves.”
Xu Chengguang pointed out the most perilous crisis at hand.
“Ashina Gudu had this siege weapon hauled ten thousand li from the Western Regions just for this all-or-nothing war. No matter how thick the old walls of West Route Garrison are, they cannot withstand boulders weighing hundreds of catties slamming against them day and night.”
“Chen Changfeng dangled bait on the central route to lure us into guarding the gates; Ashina Gudu, meanwhile, uses heavy siege engines to smash the western walls. It's a lethal scheme, head and tail working in concert.”
Xu Chengguang let out a sigh and continued to lay out the battle situation: “If we leave the city to rescue the west, who knows how many elite cavalry are lying in ambush out in the desert. Once we leave the protection of these strong walls and charge into that trap, we'll be annihilated. If we don't go, and the West Route Garrison falls, they'll swing around and encircle us — we'll be sitting ducks waiting for death.”
“This is an open scheme.” Tie Lanshan said helplessly. “He's forcing us to march to our deaths. Chen Changfeng calculated precisely that we cannot defend both ends at once. He's using the life of West Route Garrison to trade for the gate of Zhenbei Pass.”
Caught between a rock and a hard place. On every side, an abyss.
At this moment, Tie Lanshan was bitterly frustrated, because no matter how hard he racked his brain, he couldn't shake the feeling that he was missing something...
...
Meanwhile, within the Imperial Envoy's residence, east of the General's Mansion.
Xu Qinghuan sat upright in her grand wooden chair, the lamp wick trimmed brighter, casting light across her pallid, stern face.
She held a writing brush in her hand, sketching countless hypotheses on the map, only to black them out one by one.
A feint on the central route, the breach of the western walls, Zhao Cheng's role as a buried spy being cast aside as a sacrificial piece.
Every move Chen Changfeng made was out in the open — arrogant, blatant — yet it had cornered the tens of thousands of defenders of Zhenbei Pass into a dead end.
Five years of relentless refinement by Tie Lanshan had produced a defense plan that was virtually flawless.
“Where exactly did things go wrong?”
She murmured to herself, the tip of her brush hovering mid-air, refusing to come down.
In this whole chess game, there had to be one fatal weak point that could be exploited.
That Han strategist operating beyond the pass — where exactly had he hidden this killing blade within Zhenbei Pass?
She pushed through a thousand scenarios in her mind, but the intricate battle maps and intelligence reports tangled into a hopeless knot, impossible to unravel. This feeling of being trapped and outmaneuvered was something she had rarely experienced since arriving at the northern frontier.
Ever since she entered this mess, she had relied on her foreknowledge of the plot and methods beyond her time to seize advantage at every turn. But now, facing a master strategist like Chen Changfeng who played by no conventional rules, all those advantages had evaporated.
He was building an insurmountable wall with honest military tactics and the calculus of human hearts.
Just then, the beaded curtain rattled in a hurried burst.
Qingque, carrying a storm lantern, swept aside the curtain and stepped in briskly. Her hair bun was disheveled, frost still clinging to her shoulders. She walked straight to the long desk.
“Miss, an urgent letter from the capital.” Qingque handed over a leather tube soaked through with sweat and frost.
“Goodness, it took several relays to finally get it through to the border.”
A letter from home?
In this dire hour of war, where life and death hung in the balance, an ordinary letter from the capital thousands of li away seemed glaringly out of place — almost absurd.
Xu Qinghuan set down her brush, took the tube, and pulled out several thick sheets of rice paper.
As the letter pages unfolded, she was met with Xu Youde's careless wild cursive, the ink pressing deep into the paper.
“My girl! Your father has truly made his mark in the capital! Your second brother, that wild child, has earned astonishing military merit up north — he can shatter a barbarian's heavy armor with a single punch! Now that the war report has reached the capital, I was walking down the street, and even those haughty civil officials moved aside for me. Every official in court, high or low, greets me with respect and calls me Earl Chengyi. The ancestral graves of our Xu family are truly belching green smoke to the heavens today!”
The page was full of crude, market-slang boasting — pure pride and showing off at the family's reversal of fortune.
Xu Youde's arrogant, slightly mercenary face sprang vividly to life before her eyes.
Thinking of her father and her elder brother, Xu Qinghuan couldn't help but break into a nostalgic smile.
Below, the letter continued into endless pages of concerned nagging.
“It's cold up north. Don't be standing in the wind all day like some gate sentry, girl.”
“Your father's had several cartloads of fine snow-fox pelts prepared for you. Don't you dare shortchange your own health. If you lose even half a catty, I'll hold you personally responsible!”
The words were rough, but they carried real, flesh-and-blood affection.
Here in the north, amid the glint of blades and the reek of blood, this relentless chatter melted some of the chill that had gathered deep in her heart.
At the very end of the letter, Xu Youde casually mentioned some bit of trivial news from the capital.
“That Xu Zijin, the one who was writing books at our house — he's now caught the eye of the Grand Secretary, and he's packed his bags to take the autumn imperial exam.”
“That fellow's got some tricks. Even that sour scholar's stench of his vanished completely after a private meeting with the Grand Secretary!”
Seeing this, Xu Qinghuan recalled the original story and understood immediately.
Xu Zijin — this was his moment to soar!
Originally, Xu Zijin had gained Xu Jie's attention through a poetry gathering.
At that gathering, Xu Zijin's poem on the pure stream had been uniquely elegant, handling the philosophies of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism with effortless skill.
Xu Jie had taken a second look at the scholar, and gradually, they had grown close.
“How strange!”
“Don't you worry. I'm watching him in the capital. He won't cause any waves.”
At this, Xu Qinghuan shook her head almost imperceptibly.
Xu Zijin — the ordained child of destiny in the original plot — all of his main-story glory had long been claimed by this group of “villains” and side characters who surrounded him.
Now he was just taking the autumn exam, reduced to a laughing stock in the eyes of her father.
Turning to the next page, the handwriting changed — sharp and forceful.
It was, of course, her elder brother Xu Wuyou's hand.
There wasn't a word of longing. The opening was a terse report of safety, but then, abruptly, his tone shifted into loud complaints about the affairs of the old estate.
Xu Qinghuan knew his temperament well. Since childhood, he could never express his “affection” as openly as their father did.
Still, love always hides in the mundane.
“I don't know why, but the house has been overrun with rats. All night long, there's a skittering and scratching in the rafters and below the floors. It's been driving everyone mad.”
“These past few days, I brought in the city's pest-catchers with their tools to dig up the floors and root the vermin out. But wouldn't you know it — once we pried up the bricks by the base of the wall, we saw the ground below was riddled with holes those creatures had burrowed out.”
“It's nothing but a web of hollow tunnels! Had we discovered this any later, even the foundations of this old mansion would have been eaten away.”
As she read these lines, Xu Qinghuan stopped.
The words “the house,” “rats,” and “many holes burrowed into the ground beneath” tugged at something in her mind—like a thread waiting to be pulled.
Xu Qinghuan understood!!!
Outside Zhenbei Pass, the enemy wanted to dig a tunnel straight into the city. What a massive undertaking that would have been.
The ground beneath the northern frontier was mostly granite—there was no way such an operation could escape the eyes of the watchmen on the city walls.
So Tie Lanshan and she had, from the very beginning, completely ruled out the possibility of the enemy tunneling their way into the city.
But what if the tunnels weren’t being dug from the outside in?
“The rats just keep showing up at home.”
“The ground beneath is riddled with holes already.”
This was never about the Helian people out there.
That “giant rat” was an agent Chen Changfeng had planted inside Zhenbei City long ago!
Chen Changfeng never played his chess pieces outside the board.
He had set up this group of hidden “rats” five years ago—or even earlier.
They operated deep within Zhenbei's territory, right under Tie Lanshan’s nose, in forgotten, shadowed corners, turning into genuine rats that gnawed, day after day and year after year, at the very foundations of this isolated fortress.
No wonder Chen Changfeng had dared to use Zhao Cheng’s head as a gambit, deliberately dangling old terms to lure the garrison away from their posts.
Because he had never intended to ram those cast-iron city gates!
As long as the elite defenders were drawn to the walls, those internal “rats” would breach the long-planned deadly passageway and let the wolves outside straight into the sheepfold. They had hollowed out the ground long ago!
The fog of the deadlock that had shrouded her mind for days was suddenly split open by this seemingly absurd family letter.
This Zhenbei fortress—its very roots were rotten all along!
Big brother! You truly are this young lady’s lucky star!
