Five li outside the northern wall of Zhenbei, the north wind howled fiercely.
In the slave camp where the Helian people were tasked with hauling corpses, old slave Tie Zhu pulled his tattered sheepskin coat tighter, hunched his back, and used a long wooden pole to hoist the body of a just-deceased Hu soldier, straining to drag it onto the wooden cart.
Beside him was a newly captured young refugee from the Central Plains, a lad named Aniu. His lips were purple from the cold, and his hands trembled as he helped lift the corpse’s feet.
“Uncle Tie…” Aniu stared at the dark brown, sticky paste smeared over the body, its pungent odor stinging his nose. “All those officials up there, why do they go through all this trouble, slathering this weird stuff all over the dead? What in the world is it for?”
Tie Zhu heaved the corpse onto the cart and wiped his face with the back of a hand covered in frostbitten sores.
“What else could it be for!” Tie Zhu jerked his chin toward the nine towering trebuchet frames in the distance. “See those leather pouches? They’re using the dead as ammunition!”
“Using the dead as rocks!?” Aniu stood frozen.
“Rocks can smash walls and hurt people if they hit them. But flinging corpses over—they just splatter into mush. What good does that do?”
Tie Zhu snorted coldly and squinted at him.
“You’re still too green, boy. The paste on those dead men—that’s a lethal poison, the real deal. I heard one of the overseer chiliarchs muttering that the Khan is sick of the heavy losses in the siege. He means to lob those poisoned bodies into Zhenbei Pass itself.”
“The moment that toxic water touches the ground, it seeps into their wells and rivers. Every southerner in that city drinks that water, and without spending a single soldier, they’ll rot from the inside out.”
Aniu’s legs went weak with terror. He nearly collapsed into the snow.
“This… this is an underhanded scheme that would curse their whole bloodline!” Aniu’s voice shook, his eyes full of horror. “They won’t even spare their own dead—using them all for poison. Will the Eternal Sky ever forgive them?”
“The Eternal Sky just sits up there on high. It doesn’t bother with filth like this.” Tie Zhu lifted the cart’s handles and started pushing forward. “Keep your trap shut. Don’t go getting your mouth torn open by the chiliarch’s whip.”
“In this godforsaken place, we’re nothing but ants! Every extra breath we draw is a win…”
…
Xu Qinghuan dismissed all the generals who had gathered in the main hall for council.
They took their orders and hurried out of the courtyard, off to carry out the tasks of sealing the city and requisitioning medicine.
She stood alone behind the latticed window, gazing through the half-open gap at the grey, overcast sky.
Out on the covered corridor, fine snow swirled in circles.
Two soldiers on guard duty hugged their spears, stamping their feet in a sheltered spot.
“Old Wei, what do you reckon those barbarian dogs outside the walls are really up to this time?” The younger soldier breathed warm air into his cupped hands. “Going through all that trouble—smearing black mud on the bodies of the dead, man and beast alike—and then heaving them into the city with those catapults.”
The one called Old Wei was missing half an ear. He spat hard, his face pale with a sickly tinge.
“You weren’t on the north rampart last night, so you wouldn’t know! What else could it be? Those leather pouches are packed with boiled-down poison paste made from rotting human flesh! One of the old army medics on the wall said that if it so much as touches your skin, it eats its way right through your guts.”
“Those animals plan to dump that filth into the water wells of Zhenbei Pass, to wipe out our whole bloodline!”
The younger soldier crouched down beside his spear, buried his head in his knees, and shook so hard his shoulders trembled.
“My wife just gave birth to a healthy boy a few days ago.” His voice twisted with barely suppressed sobs. “If that poison reaches the water channels of the inner city, how is my infant supposed to survive…”
Old Wei said nothing.
His rough, cracked hand gripped the spear shaft tight, knuckles gone blue with cold.
Xu Qinghuan listened to the whispered murmurs outside but did not push open the window to scold anyone.
The fear in the common soldiers seeped up from the very marrow of their bones.
Her mind began racing, calculating how fast the poison would spread.
Last night, the wind had blown south. The toxic water shattered against the city wall, turning into white fumes and yellow liquid that flowed into the drainage ditches of the outer city.
The first to fall would be the laborers fetching water at the wells at dawn, or those who touched the broken brick fragments.
The second wave would take the militia troops tasked with guarding and hauling.
If the poison flowed through the underground water veins and contaminated the inner city’s water source… within half a month, these forty thousand soldiers and all the civilians within the walls would rot into a pile of festering, plague-riddled bones.
Zhenbei Pass, the iron anvil of the northern frontier, would become a ghost city that even the flies could not survive.
How could this be countered?
Every poison in this world has its antidote.
But that requires countless rounds of refinement and compounding.
In an age where even boiling water required repeated, sternly enforced orders—how could anyone produce a miracle cure? How could anyone create medical techniques capable of neutralizing such utter lethality?
It was a pipe dream…
Xu Qinghuan smiled bitterly.
That old Daoist in Clear Wind Temple—what manner of sorcerer was he?
With just a few cracked clay pots, a handful of withered herbs and venomous insects, he had somehow fused the toxins of several plagues into a single substance, brewing up this twisted, heaven-defying monstrosity!
The natural laws of this world were a lump of dough in their hands, to be kneaded as they pleased.
Really, now—where was the science in this? Where was the law!
Had she not seen it with her own eyes, who would have thought that beneath the watchful gaze of the Great Qian Empire, such foul dealings could fester in plain sight?
And the dignitaries above—were they truly blind, or simply pretending to sleep?
Especially that old emperor.
An overwhelming sense of helplessness surged up from the depths of her heart.
She closed her eyes and slowed her breathing.
She let her consciousness sink layer by layer, reaching toward the system buried deep within her soul.
In that vast emptiness, she laid out her terms.
“System, lend me a way to save this city—right now. Whatever miraculous remedy, just open the back door for me.”
She pleaded silently, offering an enormous price.
“The karmic debt of these tens of thousands of lives—count it as heavy interest. Whatever I owe later, I’ll repay double.”
She waited.
Only the wind, clinking against the eaves-bells.
The system, which rarely bothered to respond even on the best of days, proved utterly stingy at this critical moment of life and death for an entire city.
It coldly severed her attempt to take a shortcut.
No response meant refusal.
Xu Qinghuan opened her eyes. The last glimmer of hope in them went cold.
It was as she had expected.
Back in the capital, when she had tried to rewrite the fate of her second brother, Xu Wuyou, and yank at the threads of destiny, the backlash alone had nearly cost her half her life…
And now, here were tens of thousands of living, breathing people.
Even if she could somehow acquire that city-saving medicine on credit, the price would strip the flesh from her bones and boil it down to oil—and stuffing every shred of her three souls and seven spirits into the bargain still wouldn’t be enough to pay that astronomical debt.
No help from outside. She would have to find her own way out.
She turned and walked with weary steps toward the polished bronze mirror set in the middle of the hall.
The mirror was burnished until it could reflect a face clearly.
In its surface stared a pale, cold countenance. Dark circles weighed heavy under the eyes, and her hair was disheveled from a night without sleep.
“If the sky falls, I still have to protect my own skin first.”
“I absolutely cannot die here!”
She made faces at herself in the mirror, silently swearing an oath.
No way. If she ended up kicking the bucket in this no-name poison fog at Zhenbei Pass, then all the effort she’d poured into the capital, every investment she’d made in the Eastern Palace, every escape route she’d laid for the Xu family—it would all have been for nothing!
What difference is this from losing your save file at the final stage of a game and having the power go out? You have to stay alive to keep playing the sneaky game!
The moment she finished thinking this, a sudden sharp pain throbbed in her right temple.
Xu Qinghuan frowned, quickly raising two cold fingers to press against her wildly pulsating temple. She rubbed it several times, but the piercing ache refused to fade.
While massaging her head, she felt deeply puzzled.
Last night at North City Horse Path, that "Plague Mother" toxin had drifted through the air for half the night like something out of a Resident Evil movie.
Last night at North City Horse Path, the Plague Mother's toxic fog had saturated the air for half the night.
Those sturdy armored soldiers and the laborers who had merely gotten a whiff of the droplets—the quick ones developed bloated bellies and open sores within two or three hours, while even the slow ones were vomiting yellow pus by the next day.
She, a frail scholar who hadn't worn any heavy armor protection, had stood in the wind for so long—so why was she now only suffering from a mere headache?
She looked down at her own hands—pale and tender, not even a trace of dead skin, not the slightest hint of rotting or blackening.
She was deeply perplexed: Why haven't I caught the disease yet? Did the virus pick and choose its victims?
But I didn't even transmigrate with my physical body!
If it were a physical transmigration, one could force an explanation by saying this modern body of mine had been vaccinated and carried its own antibodies.
But this is a soul transmigration! So am I saying this borrowed local character just happens to come with a built-in "invulnerable to all poisons" cheat code?
She let out a cold laugh and released her hand from her temple.
Yeah, right. She wasn't some Mary Sue heroine from a feel-good fantasy novel, and she didn't have an invincible halo.
Lucky escape? Not a chance.
Betting her life on "beggar's luck" was the kind of stupid move only someone missing half their brain would make.
She smoothed her disheveled sleeves and strode away from the bronze mirror, walking over to the sprawling sand-table war map set up in the central hall.
On the table's surface, an intricate jumble of military markers covered every inch.
Outside the city, black tokens densely clustered. Inside the city, red tokens sparsely scattered.
Xu Qinghuan lifted her sleeve and swept her arm across the table.
The defensive pieces representing rolling logs, boulders, and heavy crossbows all scattered to the floor.
Against a poison that could melt flesh and dissolve bone, those clunky weapons were no more useful than paper.
Chen Changfeng was dead set on bypassing the wall's defenses entirely, planning to corrode Zhenbei Pass from the inside out.
Xu Qinghuan reached out two fingers and picked up a poison token carved with a crimson lotus from the container. She slowly rotated it between her fingertips, feeling the rough grain of the wood.
"Chen Changfeng, do you have any more trump cards? Since you dare to bet everything on one roll of the dice, this official will play with you to the very end."
