Chen Changfeng laid the sheepskin scroll flat on the table.
His movements were as unhurried as ever.
But what he had not anticipated was this:
That faint smile of absolute certainty, just beginning to creep to the corner of his lips,
froze solid the instant his eyes landed on the first line.
First, he saw the glaring golden wolf seal.
The lines were crisp, the cinnabar ink dark red. It was unmistakably the personal seal of the Great King, Ashina Gudu.
His gaze continued downward.
Blood-red handwriting, half in barbarian script and half in Han characters, slammed without warning into his field of vision.
"Ten-thousand-chieftain Badu has fallen."
"The great yak-tail banner of the central camp has been snapped."
"All nine trebuchets have been burned to ashes in the ordnance camp."
"The arsonists: two hundred riders. Not a single one lost."
Chen Changfeng stood rooted to the spot.
The words he had spoken earlier, standing in the center of this great tent before all the barbarian generals — phrases like "it will fall without a fight" and "at most two days" —
had now all turned into a figment of imagination!
Impossible. How could this be!
The fingers of his left hand, gripping the edge of the scroll, began to tighten unconsciously, pressing crease after crease into the leather.
...
But the barbarian generals in the tent had not noticed anything amiss with Chen Changfeng at all.
They were still squabbling heatedly over the women inside Zhenbei Pass and the market districts of the city.
The deputy general Batu yanked out the skinning knife from his waist and slammed it onto the long table before him.
"The men under my command died the most filling those ditches! So the mule-and-horse market in the west of Zhenbei Pass,
along with all the raw iron and cloth stored inside it — after we breach the city, it must belong to my tribe!"
"Bullshit! Your tribe barely lost anyone, and you dare to swallow up the western district alone?"
Another tribal leader stood up, cursing at the top of his lungs.
Noise filled the tent, back and forth,
but soon that spirited atmosphere began to fade layer by layer.
Because they started to notice that Chen Changfeng's demeanor was off.
One by one, the men stopped arguing, and all eyes turned to the center of the tent.
They took in the sight of their blue-robed strategist, a man who ordinarily never showed a single ripple of emotion on his face.
Right now, Chen Changfeng stood frozen in the middle of the felt rug, clutching the sheepskin scroll in his hand, staring blankly into the distance.
Ashina Dubi, seated at the head of the tent, furrowed his brow.
He kicked out violently, toppling the bronze cauldron that held the roasted whole lamb, sending it clattering across the ground.
Then, taking two long strides, Ashina Dubi walked straight up to Chen Changfeng and snatched the sheepskin scroll from his hand.
He too looked down first — at the scarlet mark at the bottom of the scroll.
Yes, it was the golden wolf seal, the personal military seal of the Great King Ashina Gudu — no doubt about it.
Only after confirming the seal's authenticity did Ashina Dubi shift his gaze back to the beginning.
He read slowly, because the scroll was written in a mixture of barbarian and Han characters, his eyes crawling painfully across the words.
And as his gaze swept over the phrases "Badu is dead," "all nine machines destroyed," and "two hundred riders broke through" —
this supreme commander of the central route army, for once, showed a rare look of anxiety, tinged with a hint of panic.
Not a single sound remained in the entire central army tent.
The barbarian generals who had just been arguing about the western market so fiercely now all held their breath.
The silence inside the tent was deafening.
Ashina Dubi ignored the stares of the crowd. He kept reading.
At the very end of the scroll was the military order stamped with the death-seal of Ashina Gudu himself:
"The western army's vigor is spent, all siege engines lost.
If the central army cannot completely flatten Zhenbei Pass within three days, then all tribes under the Left Luli King shall have their winter tents confiscated.
They shall be stripped of their lush tribal pastures!
Each tribe shall forfeit three thousand war horses!"
Ashina Dubi's breathing turned heavy and ragged all at once.
Loss of tents, he could endure. But seizing pastures and fining horses — that was ripping the very sinew out of the entire central army.
Without pastures, without horses, his tribe would face the coming white blizzard with nothing but starvation and freezing death.
True, in such circumstances, the Great King could not possibly impose the harshest punishment upon the Left Division.
But this was still a matter of the Left Division's dignity — of their faith in Eternal Heaven!
Ashina Dubi clutched the sheepskin scroll in his fist, seized Chen Changfeng by the sleeve, his voice carrying an uncharacteristic urgency.
"Master Chen! What are we to do!"
Chen Changfeng still did not respond.
His eyes stared into vacancy, not even looking at the Left Luli King.
He was going over and over and over again in his mind a calculation that simply refused to add up.
His trusted aide stepped forward, glanced at the utterly deflated Chen Changfeng,
then at the raging king, and immediately panicked.
"My King! What on earth has happened!"
The assembled generals exchanged blank looks, none daring to court the king's wrath.
Ashina Dubi's fingers loosened, and the sheepskin scroll slipped from his grasp, fluttering to the carpet.
The great elder of the Zhishi tribe strode forward, snatched up the scroll,
and held it up to the glow of the charcoal brazier, reading its contents aloud haltingly.
Where he encountered Han characters he did not know, he guessed at them from context.
"Ten-thousand-chieftain... Badu... dead."
"The great banner... snapped. The engines... burned. Two hundred... Southerners..."
But the more broken his reading became, the more the blood stench of those words seemed to bore deep into the bones of every listener present.
Gasps of shock rippled through the tent as the report was read aloud.
But they were merely gasps.
There was no terror on the faces of the barbarian generals.
In the minds of these steppe commanders, only one simple ledger existed: the Great King had suffered a major loss in the west, and now he was venting his fury on the central army. If they failed to take Zhenbei Pass, they would be punished.
What they could not compute was that outside the defensive lines of the Great Qian court, there existed a surprise strike force capable of traveling a thousand li to smash an enemy camp — and further, that this force might very well already be on its way.
They only thought: so long as we take Zhenbei Pass tonight or by dawn tomorrow, all punishment would naturally dissolve into thin air.
The old chieftain of the Zhishi tribe spat hard onto the ground, cursing loudly.
"I thought it was the sky falling! It's just a few Southerners sneaking in to torch our camp at night! So they burned nine trebuchets — what of it? The grasslands are full of slaves who can cut timber. We'll just build more!"
Batu joined in, bellowing his agreement, his face dripping with indifference.
"Exactly! What are two hundred men worth?! That Badu was useless, couldn't even guard his own pen! If those two hundred dare to come at our central army, I'll trample them all into the dirt in a single charge!"
A few guards walked in and roughly herded the cowering female slaves out of the tent at spearpoint, the clatter of armor filling the air.
The men called out to Chen Changfeng several more times.
"Strategist Chen! Give us your plan! Should we just throw ourselves at the walls tomorrow?"
Chen Changfeng remained silent.
Because at that very moment, inside his own mind, he was searching for the first piece he had placed on this board days ago.
The grain routes — cut off.
The spies — planted.
The tunnel — dug.
The deadly poison — prepared.
He had calculated the forty thousand soldiers and civilians of Zhenbei Pass down to their very marrow. He had calculated until, at the very end of his calculations, only one gap remained in this entire game board — one gap he could not close.
That was the question—whether the Great Qian court had a solitary army that never appeared in the Ministry of War’s dispatches, unknown even to Xu Youde and Xu Jie, silently striking from behind along the western route.
Now, that solitary army had appeared.
The western route had fallen precisely because of this.
A mere two hundred riders, bearing no banner of the Great Qian, declaring no regimental designation.
They came and went without a trace—struck, killed, and vanished!
A fine sheen of cold sweat slowly beaded on Chen Changfeng’s forehead.
In this tent warmed by dozens of charcoal braziers, he felt as though the very marrow of his bones had turned to ice.
No—this was wrong!
From the western prefecture headquarters to the central army encampment, if these men had ridden through the night.
Fast horses, light riders, carrying no grain or baggage, traveling by night and resting by day…
Since they had withdrawn unscathed, they would never be foolish enough to return to the western prefecture and hole up in a doomed city.
If they had acted, there was only one place they could go.
They could only be heading for the central route!
Chen Changfeng’s eyes shot wide open, his pupils contracting violently.
“Not good!”
He spun around and seized Ashina Dubi’s wrist in a death grip, his fingernails nearly digging into the other man’s flesh.
It was the first time in front of these Hu barbarians that he had completely lost his refined composure.
“Luli King!” Chen Changfeng’s voice cracked, his words pouring out at breakneck speed.
But before he could finish.
The heavy felt curtain stitched from raw oxhide at the tent’s entrance was violently lifted at one corner by a surge of fierce energy that seemed to come from nowhere.
The flames in the dozens of braziers inside the tent bent inward all at once, nearly flattening against the charcoal.
The pale-green Junshan Silver Needle tea, however, had already silently soaked through the snow-white tiger skin.
