Several Hu soldiers in tattered sheepskin coats dragged carts with large iron hooks, each step sinking deeper into the mud.
Black-purple frozen blood seeped from under the cart beds, trickling down through the cracks between the planks.
The slave laborers working the winches nearby hugged their arms, shivering in the biting morning wind.
A tall, thin slave pointed his chin at the trebuchet frames at the front of the slope, asking the man beside him with a tremble.
"Hey, you see that? The chiliarch took down all those big wooden troughs they used for throwing stones, replaced them with those deep-mouthed leather pouches hanging there."
"War's going fine, so why swap in those weird oxhide slings for what?"
Another old slave, his face covered in frostbite, wiped his nose with his sleeve and glanced sideways at the corpses piled high on the cart bed.
"What else d'you think? You figure those big shots hauled up all the dead from the camp—the ones who died of wounds, the skinny horses that croaked of sickness the other day—just to give 'em a nice burial spot with good feng shui?"
The tall one froze, staring at the corpses slathered in black medicinal paste, his back teeth grinding.
"No way... That leather pouch is too soft, can't hold a hundred-pound stone. Unless... unless they're planning to hurl these dead bones like rocks?"
"Saying you're dumb, and you really don't use your head."
The old slave spat a gritty wad of phlegm onto the ground, pointing at the distant outline of the wall's fortifications.
"See that sticky medicine paste on those corpses? Smell that—stings ten times worse than a dead rat nest!"
"Our king ain't planning to smash bricks with stones. He's gonna fling these rotting, sore-ridden corpses straight into the inner city of Zhenbei Pass!"
"Toss 'em in? Then everything inside the pass... it all gets poisoned?"
"Poisoned ain't the half of it! They say that black paste eats through skin on contact, and if it lands in a well, it ruins the whole city. The king's plan is to make every southerner holding the pass rot from the guts alongside these stiffs!"
"That way, the job's done for good! Wipe Zhenbei City off the map—no one's ever rebuilding a fort on this pass again!"
The Hu commander at the front suddenly whipped his wolf-hide lash, the tip cracking sharply through the air.
"Enough yapping! Get those oxhide pouches strapped tight! Pull the winches taut, now!"
...
At dawn, a fierce wind tore down the northern horse ramp of Zhenbei Pass.
Wang Shuan clasped his hands behind a jagged, spiked defensive timber, half his body tucked behind the thick shield panel, one eye fixed on the slope beyond the walls.
Zhang San crouched to his right, gripping a half-length spear with an iron tip, barely daring to breathe.
Just as the two were starting to nod off, from the enemy trebuchet position outside the city came the sound of heavy wooden winches grinding.
The noise was deep and slow, stroke after stroke, rattling a man's bones—yet not a single cart hauling millstone-sized rocks was visible rolling beneath the catapult frames.
"This is cursed!"
Wang Shuan twisted his head and exchanged a look with Zhang San.
"No Hu bastards hauling stones, so why are all nine of those tall frames stretched to full tension?"
Zhang San opened his mouth to speak, but in the pale dawn light beyond the wall, the nine throwing arms whipped forward without warning from back to front.
Nine immense black-brown oxhide pouches soared from the trebuchet tops, clearing the outer moat, and lunged straight for the northern parapet.
"Take cover!"
Wang Shuan didn't even have time to finish yelling—he threw himself flat into the stairwell niche along the horse ramp, both hands clamped over his head.
The expected thunder of thousand-pound stones smashing brick never came.
The nine black-brown pouches, midair, had their iron rings at all four corners spring loose simultaneously.
The hides spread open in the wind, and whatever they'd been carrying burst free, scattering like a handful of flowers dumped across the hundreds of yards of northern wall.
It wasn't stone. It wasn't brick.
It was hundreds of mutilated corpses—Helian dead with their limbs hacked off—mixed with bloated, reeking carcasses of sick horses!
Thud! Thud! Thud!
Great chunks of flesh rained down, slamming onto the horse ramp and into the packed defenders.
Several half-frozen Hu corpses landed dead ahead of Wang Shuan.
Their bodies burst apart on impact.
The rotting gases compressed in their bellies, along with a layer of black, sticky sludge, exploded outward in every direction.
A stench of decay so thick it was nearly solid surged out...
Wang Shuan felt the smell slam into his nostrils, his stomach lurched, and a mouthful of sour bile shot up to the root of his tongue.
Three steps to his right front, two armored soldiers of the Great Qian, both holding crossbows, had no time to dodge—a half horse leg smeared with black poison paste slammed into them.
"What in the hell is this!"
One soldier shoved hard at the dead horse limb pinning him down.
But the moment that poison-slicked hoof touched his arm, the black fluid seeped through the gaps in his cloth armor.
The moment it touched skin, it didn't even grant him half a blink.
"Ahhh!"
The soldier fell back on his rear like he'd seen a ghost, both hands clawing frantically at his shoulder.
His skin, perfectly intact moments before, turned to charred, mottled dead flesh where the black paste had touched.
Great yellow-green blisters swelled up from under the skin one after another, then burst within a breath.
Stinking yellow pus gushed from the split flesh, the dermis beneath liquefying into pulp.
Another man caught splashes of the yellow fluid across half his face.
He dropped his crossbow, hands over his face, rolling back and forth on the ramp, his hoarse screams so raw they made the scalp crawl.
"My face! My eyes! Help! It's poison in the water!"
The skin that touched the poison rotted without stop, his screams growing weaker and hoarser, and in his blood and pus he flailed and clawed, tearing great chunks of rotten flesh from his own face!
White bone visible beneath!
This horrifying sight fell into the eyes of the dozens of defenders who had stood ready nearby—every face drained of all color.
Someone stepped back first, foot landing on a severed Hu hand still oozing black fluid.
The soldier shrieked, scrambling away without a care.
"Don't touch those corpses! That's poison meat!"
"Poison! They're covered in rotting sore venom!"
Panic spread faster than the wind outside the walls.
The entire front line of the northern horse ramp collapsed into chaos.
No one was watching for a follow-up cavalry charge anymore. Every pair of eyes was locked on the shattered, suppurating remains spreading yellow fluid across the ramp.
"Run! Get off this parapet!"
Two young soldiers, transferred from the rear training camp just three days prior, looked at their comrades melting and festering beside their feet—and their hearts burst with terror.
They dropped their heavy crossbows on the ground and bolted down the ramp toward the inner city.
With those two leading, over a dozen more soldiers, guts shaken loose with fear, broke and fled after them.
The whole defense line was about to collapse under the wave of terror.
Then, from the stone steps leading to the North Tower, a fierce, powerful shout rang out.
"EVERY ONE OF YOU, HALT!"
Tie Lanshan carried the heavy saber that had been with him for years, and close behind him followed the imperial envoy Xu Qinghuan, dressed in a black robe, her gaze cold and composed.
The moment these two pillars appeared, the dozen or so routed soldiers who had been scrambling and shoving their way down the steps froze dead in their tracks.
Their mere presence stood like a stabilizing anchor, stemming the tide of panic that gripped the horse path.
Without so much as a glance at the troops retreating behind him, Tie Lanshan strode swiftly to the center of the path.
He slammed the thick-backed saber into the ground.
"Pick up your blades and bows!"
The old general swept his gaze across the soldiers to his left and right, his voice as biting as the icy winds of the northern frontier.
"Anyone who takes so much as half a step back—never mind waiting for the Hu poisons to eat through your flesh—I'll cut your head off right now and execute you on the spot under military law!"
The moment the order rang out, a few of the new recruits who had dropped their crossbows went pale. Trembling, they bent down and clutched their weapons back to their chests.
Tie Lanshan turned his head, staring at the mutilated Hu corpses still oozing yellow fluid, and the two soldiers who had fallen silent, their skin already rotted away.
His eyes twitched at the corners. He turned to the deputy general, Zhao Heng, behind him.
"Pass the order! Everyone falls back three paces. It is strictly forbidden to touch these dead men or their rotting remains with bare hands!"
"Go to the spear battalion and the firewood store—bring me every last one of the longest iron-tipped spears and hooked poles we have!"
"Use the spears to hook them! Every one of these poisoned horses and men—not a single one left behind—heave them all out through the gap in the parapet and into the moat outside!"
With the commander's orders laid out, the troops finally found their footing again.
Wang Shuan was the first to dart out from behind the defensive barricade. He grabbed the long spear from Zhang San's hands, drove the tip into the waist of one of the Hu corpses, and, straining with all his might, hoisted it over the edge.
The body toppled over the broken crenellation and slammed onto the slope below the city wall.
Dozens of the bolder veterans followed suit, taking up three-zhang-long polearms and, keeping their distance, shoved the scattered limbs and torsos off the horse path.
As they worked to clear the corpses, they eyed the black scorch marks left behind by the corrosive poison, and the murmurs swelled.
"Heavens above... I've been eating military rations on the frontier for twenty years, and I've seen the Hu toss dead sheep and cattle into water sources—that filthy trick of theirs."
"But this kind of insidious siege tactic—smearing corpses with poison and firing them like stones—today is the first time I've witnessed anything like it!"
Nearby, an old army medic crouched at a distance, face wrapped in cloth covering nose and mouth, and used a pair of small iron tongs to lift a scrap of fabric soaked in the poison. He shook his head again and again.
"Ordinary herbal toxins could never achieve this! This is clearly corpse-miasma distilled with deadly poison dregs into a vile paste! The slightest touch and the skin rots—don't let a single drop of that yellow liquid splash on any of you!"
"You hear that? Poison that kills on contact, burns flesh on touch—not only have I never seen it, I've never even heard the old-timers speak of such a thing!"
"Pure venom! Chen Changfeng and that Left King Helian—they truly mean to leave us no way out!"
Tie Lanshan standing in the wind, listening to the murmurs of his men, slowly nodded.
The old general turned to Xu Qinghuan beside him, whose expression was equally grim.
"Envoy Xu."
Tie Lanshan's voice carried a weight it had never held before.
"I've held this frontier for half my life, yet I too have never heard of such poison!"
"Look at how violently it acts when it strikes—touching the skin brings pus, touching the flesh brings charred black."
"This kind of appalling venom—even the great plague of ten thousand dead that struck the southern frontier during the founding of the Great Qian dynasty—could not have been more ferocious than what we face today!"
