The soil on the northern slope was as hard as black iron.
A thin layer of ghastly white frost clung to the pile of corpses, and from a distance, it looked like a scattering of sleet left behind by a late spring chill.
Tumen crouched at the edge of the corpse mound, clutching a dried-bristle brush. His hands trembled like leaves in a gale.
He was only sixteen, driven here three days ago from the slave camp. Young as he was, he had never witnessed such a slaughterhouse.
He saw the bodies all around him—some with half their skulls sheared off, others with chests caved into pits, the dried blood frozen into black-purple shards of ice.
This hellish scene rattled him so badly his teeth chattered uncontrollably.
"What're you gaping at like a fool!"
Just then, the overseeing general, Morigen, cracked his whip and shattered Tumen's terror.
"Wrap the cloth on! Cover your mouth and nose tight, damn you! Only your eyes stay exposed!"
At the officer's command, Tumen frantically grabbed a strip of coarse linen soaked in vinegar and trembled as he and the slave beside him bound each other's faces.
Once covered, he mustered his courage and stole a sideways glance at the dozen or so waist-high black wooden barrels sitting in the snow.
The lids were half open, and wisps of a nauseating, putrid stench seeped through the cracks.
Thick black sludge clung to the inside walls of the barrels, like boiled-down soup of charred bones.
"May I ask, sir..." Tumen suppressed his gag reflex, his voice muffled through the thick cloth, "What... what is that?"
Morigen didn't even lift his eyelids. He reached behind him, pulled out his curved saber, and slammed it hard against the barrel.
"Hah! You'd be better off not asking about such things! But listen well: when the time comes, dip your brush in it thick and paint it over these dead bastards! Move your hands fast, and if you're not done before dawn breaks, I'll chop you into pieces and stuff you in the barrels myself!"
His tone dripped with warning, and no one dared to breathe too loudly. They all scrambled to work.
Crouching next to Tumen was a mutilated old soldier. His face was so disfigured that only a single cloudy eye peered out from beneath the scars.
No one knew his true face.
All they knew was that his surname was He, and the camp called him He San—a veteran of a hundred battles who had survived the Zhishi tribe by sheer luck.
He San cautiously brought his nose to the rim of the barrel and sniffed. Before anyone could ask what it was, he jerked back as if bitten by a viper, clapping his hand over his mouth and hacking into a violent cough.
"This smell..." He San's voice was thick with dread and disgust. "It's like corpse venom rendered from rotting flesh!"
"Uncle He, you've seen the world. Tell us—why smear this filth on the dead? What's the point?"
Tumen leaned in boldly.
He San's lone eye darted around, passing over the layers of night to fix on the battlements of Zhenbei Pass.
"From what this old man reckons, it's to cut off the city's lifeline."
"Lifeline?"
"You and I both know that everyone in Zhenbei Pass, soldier and civilian alike, depends on the river spring upriver for food and drink."
He San's voice was thin as a thread.
"They cover these dead men in corpse venom and toss them into the upstream water source. The poison flows down, and anyone in the city who drinks it will have their guts rot through!"
The words sent a chill down Tumen's spine, and the bristle brush almost slipped from his hand.
"That's... that's too cruel for this world..."
"Shut your mouth!" He San shot him a vicious glare. "This old man was just guessing. If you want to live, keep your trap shut."
A Hu soldier beside them, also wrapped in linen, turned pale and shook his head, cutting in.
"Uncle He, you guessed wrong."
This soldier was called Bagan. He had just been reassigned from the supply camp yesterday, tasked with guarding the ox-hide ropes of the catapults.
He tilted his chin toward the engineer camp at the bottom of the slope, where torches blazed in frantic motion.
The craftsmen were unloading the shallow wooden trays used for launching boulders from the trebuchets, replacing them with deep, wide leather baskets stitched from raw oxhide.
The baskets were thick and broad, their four corners secured with iron rings.
"See that setup?" Bagan's voice shook uncontrollably. "That's no basket for rocks. That's a basket for... corpses."
Tumen was stunned, his mind unable to catch up.
"Hold people?"
"The Khan plans to launch these poisoned corpses like catapult stones—send them flying alive into Zhenbei Pass!"
The moment Bagan's words landed, the air went dead silent. Only the north wind howled, carrying shards of ice that scraped against the backs of their necks like knives.
Tumen had never heard of such a tactic. He was frozen, numb with shock.
"That... that can't be right?" an even skinnier slave shivered like a leaf in a storm. "How can dead men be used as boulders?"
"In all the world, what strange battle tricks haven't there been?" He San grunted, the scar across his face twisting even more grotesquely. "I've rolled through piles of corpses for half my life, but using the dead as catapult ammo? That's a first for me too."
Crack!
The overseer's whip snapped again, slashing hard across the back of a dazed slave.
The man let out a pitiful scream and crumpled to his knees in pain.
"Damned lot! What are you staring at, slackers! Get to work!" Morigen roared like a starving wolf. "Dawdle any longer, and the next whip will shred your faces!"
Tumen was scared out of his wits. He scrambled to pick up his bristle brush and shoved it into the black sludge.
When he pulled it out, the bristles were caked with thick, viscous poison, dripping black threads.
He gritted his molars and pressed the brush against the nearest corpse.
It was a Helian soldier with half his lower leg severed, the body frozen stiff as a board.
The moment the bristles touched the festering wound where the leg was cut off, Tumen jolted as if struck by lightning, nearly jumping out of his skin.
The frozen flesh instantly charred black and withered, like fat thrown into a blazing fire.
Beneath the skin, a dense layer of sickly yellow blisters swelled up like the poison glands on a toad's back, one after another inflating and bursting.
Pus sprayed everywhere!
"What kind of vile poison is this?!"
The slaves around him saw the horrifying sight too. Some collapsed, their legs gone weak, retching on their knees.
The stench of rotting flesh mixed with lethal venom turned into a tangible miasma that drilled straight into their nostrils, stabbing their brains like needles.
"Don't stop! Keep painting!"
Morigen's whip whistled through the air, and this time it cracked hard across He San's shoulder blade.
The old soldier swallowed the metallic taste of blood rising in his throat, silently picking up his brush again.
But everyone could see that his hands—hands that had gripped swords through a hundred battles—now trembled like guttering candle flames.
Tumen was dragging a half corpse when his foot slipped. His inner forearm scraped straight across a jagged shard of exposed bone sticking out from the severed flesh.
The skin tore open, a gash of blood welling up as droplets dripped down his arm.
The color drained from Tumen's face. A scream was already climbing his throat, terrified he'd been touched by the corpse venom.
He stopped, intending to tend to the wound.
But the moment he turned his head, the corner of his eye caught something even more horrifying:
Not far away, a young slave had splashed a single drop of the black poison onto the back of his hand.
The young slave went berserk, dropping to his knees in the mire and clawing furiously at his own hand, shrieking in agony as he did.
The others watched as he tore the very skin off—poison and all—right down to the bone.
Soon, only gleaming white bone and raw, bloody flesh remained.
Tumen watched this horror unfold, his throat raw as he tried to cry out for help.
But the thought of those whips and blades made him swallow the scream, chewing it down into his belly.
He bit hard on the tip of his tongue to force himself awake, and in a flash of lightning ripped the coarse cloth strip from his waist, binding it tightly around the bloody gash on his forearm.
The wind howled around him, and with his head bowed, he swallowed that deadly secret into the endless gust.
