It was the depth of midnight, and the sky was as black as ink, with not a single star visible.
Three li beyond the north military road of Zhenbei Pass, a long-abandoned official kiln lay crouched in the cold wind.
Zuo Bamu strode up to the mouth of the kiln, yanked the stopper off his leather wineskin, and tilted his head back for a long, greedy gulp.
Liquor spilled down over his rough, unshaven stubble.
He tossed the empty wineskin to the centurion beside him and, with one arm, drew the saber from his waist.
Around him, three thousand elite Helian soldiers—stripped of heavy armor and clad in light furs—stood in tight ranks.
No one spoke. Every pair of eyes was fixed dead on their commander.
“Warriors of the Eternal Blue Heaven,” Zuo Bamu said in a low voice, running his tongue over his cracked lips, the green glint in his eyes utterly unshielded.
“A few days ago, we lost face before this broken pass, and the Khan has been nursing a fire in his chest. Military Advisor Chen schemed for five years to carve us a highway straight to heaven.”
“Tonight, we crawl in from beneath the earth and smash straight through the guts of Zhenbei Pass!”
The centurion wiped the wine from the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand, grinned wide, and picked up the thread:
“Rest easy, Commander of Ten Thousand! The southerners’ main force has been tricked into rushing to the north gate by the Grand Marshal’s feint. Over in the mule-and-horse market, it’s nothing but fresh recruits who’ve never tasted real blood.”
“Three thousand of us get in there, and we’ll butcher them down to the last blade of grass!”
“The Khan’s order!” Zuo Bamu thrust his long blade forward. “Whoever is first to break through the defenses and storm the Commander-in-Chief’s mansion gets ten thousand head of cattle and sheep, and a thousand southern slaves! And any man among you who turns into a limp-wristed coward on the field—I’ll personally chop off his skull and use it for a chamber pot!”
A low, guttural growl rolled through the ranks. Three thousand eyes burned with the sickly green light of starving wolves in the dark.
Zuo Bamu said no more. He bent down and plunged headfirst into the pitch-black mouth of the kiln.
A long train of Helian elites followed him in, linked end to end like a string of loaches, snaking into the darkness.
The underground tunnel was cold and damp, wide enough for only two men to pass abreast.
They relied entirely on the torches and phosphorescent stones held by the men at the very front to light the way.
Soldiers accustomed to riding and galloping were forced to stoop and hunch.
Someone muttered a low curse in frustration, and the centurion beside him instantly drove a fist into the man’s back.
The cursing died in his throat, leaving only heavy breathing and the sound of swallowed spit.
Half an hour passed.
According to the blueprints, they had already crossed beneath the blue-stone layer at the base of the city walls, and now stood truly under the mule-and-horse market of Zhenbei Pass.
The path opened up ahead, splitting into twelve branches that spread outward.
Zuo Bamu halted, pressing his ear flat against the earthen ceiling and holding his breath to listen.
Above, all he could hear was the howl of the wind—not even the clang of a night watchman’s gong.
He turned his head and whispered out the orders: “Split into twelve columns! Look for the stone slabs marked with a wolf’s head—that’s the exit. Hunchback Zhang’s men will be up there hanging red lanterns to signal us. Once you pry open the slab, seize the rooftops nearby and set fires to start chaos!”
The column commanders acknowledged their orders and led their men into different branch tunnels.
Zuo Bamu himself carried his blade and led his three hundred fiercest personal guards up the central main route.
The higher they climbed, the steeper the slope, and the looser the soil above them—they could even smell the stench of mule and horse dung seeping down from the surface.
The leading decurion raised his dagger and struck it against a thick blue-stone slab with a sharp clang. At the slab’s edge, a wolf’s head carving was clearly etched into the rock.
The decurion turned and made a hand gesture to those behind. They had arrived.
Zuo Bamu gave a slight jerk of his chin.
The decurion bent his knee, arched his back, and braced himself hard against the stone slab. With both arms straining upward, he pushed with all his might. The slab let out a grinding, teeth-clenching groan, and loose dirt and lime crumbled down all around.
Finally, a crack was pried open.
The decurion poked half his head through and peered into the darkness, searching for the agreed-upon red lanterns.
All he saw above were dead black eaves, with not a single ghost of a shadow.
“Commander of Ten Thousand, there are no red lanterns,” the decurion pulled his head back down and reported in a hushed voice. “Hunchback Zhang’s people have shown their faces, and not a trace of them.”
Zuo Bamu’s right eye suddenly twitched violently, twice.
Something was wrong! Hunchback Zhang had been lying low for five full years. There was no way he slept through the one moment that mattered. And the silence up above—not even a night watchman’s bell—in this pitch-black darkness, it reeked of evil.
But there was no path forward or back now.
Three thousand troops were stuffed into the tunnel pipe, and the men behind were still pushing forward without end. No one could retreat even half a step.
“To hell with the lamplit lanterns!” Zuo Bamu spat out a mouthful of muddy saliva and roared in fury. “Hunchback Zhang must have been delayed by something over by the walls.”
“The army is in a dead-end alley—everyone lifts the covers NOW! Charge out and cut down every living thing you see!”
Above the ground, in the mule-and-horse market of Zhenbei Pass.
The streets and alleys lay pitch-black.
But beside the dried-up wells, in dead-end alley corners, and behind the abandoned stables… the twelve tunnel exits had all been turned by the Great Qian Imperial Guards into slaughter troughs filled with blood and water.
Yang Cang, clad in heavy armor, crouched behind a broken wall beside one of the dried-up wells.
A hundred crossbowmen of the Imperial Guard formed a crescent-shaped death formation, every trigger pulled taut to its last notch.
Fire-arrow bolts were aimed dead at the well, not a single sound made.
To the side lay bundled firewood and a dozen great clay jars filled with flammable oil, all within easy reach.
Over a hundred armored soldiers held their breath, waiting for their prey to walk into the trap.
A cold wind scraped past the rim of the well.
At last, the blue stone at the bottom of the dry well was heaved aside with great force.
That Helian decurion kicked the flagstone open and clambered up, gripping the well curb with both hands. But barely half his body was out of the shaft when his steel blade hadn’t even cleared his head.
“Loose!” Yang Cang’s hand sliced down hard, his cold, sharp voice splitting the night.
Bowstrings snapped in rapid succession.
Short bolts poured out like a swarm of locusts.
The army’s craftsmen had calculated the measurements well in advance: five hundred arrows wove a dense iron net in midair, all landing in the three-foot gap above the well mouth.
The decurion didn’t even manage a full scream—more than twenty crossbow bolts punched through his chest, neck, and face in an instant.
Bones shattered in a continuous crunch, and the sheer force hurled him backward, slamming him hard against the well curb.
The dozen or so barbarian soldiers right behind him had barely surfaced halfway from the opening when they slammed headlong into the second wave of arrows.
They never even saw their enemy—just got shot into pincushions on the spot. Their bodies piled up, immediately clogging half the well mouth.
Zuo Bamu pressed close to the rear.
Warm, rank, bloody water poured down over his head and shoulders, trickling past his neck guard and into his back.
“Fall back! It’s an ambush!” he roared at the top of his lungs, shoving desperately backward.
But the barbarian soldiers down below had no idea what was happening above. They only assumed their comrades up front had cut a bloody path through.
On top of that, the echoes in the tunnel were savage, and the screams above were drowned out by the wild howling of the men behind.
At this point, there was no stopping it!
“Charge! Take the southerners’ gold!”
The men below had bloodshot eyes, shoving upward like a herd of maddened bulls, brutally shoving Zuo Bamu and the corpses in front of him right back up to the well mouth.
Another batch climbed over their own dead comrades’ bodies, howling as they lunged over the well curb.
What greeted them was a third merciless volley of repeating crossbows.
The Daqian soldiers’ eyes were cold and hard, their hands quick as they reloaded and fired.
Wave after wave of Helian warriors were shoved up from underground, like chunks of meat sent to the chopping block, shredded without mercy by the arrows.
The corpses piled higher and higher, pressing right up against the edge of the well curb. Sticky, dark blood seeped through the brick cracks, running back down into the tunnel.
Across the entire livestock and horse market, all twelve exits—without exception—had turned into mass graves where Helian soldiers fed their lives into the pit.
