Xu Qinghuan tilted her head slightly, angling her ear toward the lattice door of the warm chamber behind her. The corners of her lips lifted, and she nearly burst out laughing.
She quickly walked a dozen or so paces away, stopping beneath a covered corridor in the courtyard.
Xu Qinghuan took out the letter and examined it carefully.
Beside her, Xu Fu rubbed his hands together and blew out a breath of white vapor. Craning his neck to sneak a look at what she held, he asked with undisguised curiosity, “Miss, didn’t we just say we were going to the rear garden to admire those few wintersweet blossoms? Why have you stopped here in the wind? Could Marshal Tie have sent another urgent letter from the northern border?”
Xu Qinghuan shook her head.
“You may leave.” She lowered her eyes. “Go stand by the courtyard gate. Without my permission, don’t let anyone come within three zhang of the covered corridor.”
“Yes!”
Xu Fu put away his playful expression, walked to the courtyard gate, and turned his back to the corridor. His eyes swept warily across every blind corner of the courtyard.
Only Xu Qinghuan remained beneath the eaves.
She then drew a tightly rolled sheet of parchment from the center of the wax seal. The paper was exceedingly thin.
Xu Qinghuan frowned.
There was not a trace of ink on its surface.
Instead, it was covered in dark-brown, irregularly clotted streaks, deeply embedded in the texture of the parchment.
Her gaze fell on the first line.
The handwriting was crooked and hurried, as though the person writing it had used every ounce of his strength.
Chen Changfeng?
Xu Qinghuan let out a breath and continued reading, word by word.
Soon, her face was covered in question marks.
The entire letter was nothing but curses...
What the hell? Was he sick?
The hatred Chen Changfeng bore after fifteen years of lying low and painstakingly refining poisons—fifteen years of effort reduced to ashes—was poured out in its entirety upon Xu Qinghuan alone.
“Xu Qinghuan, you vile woman!”
“For fifteen years! My master passed down the Plague Mother to me, and I endured miasma gnawing at my bones in a land of extreme yin. I schemed and plotted, all so that one day I could become the greatest player on the board under Heaven! My masterstroke should have turned the four hundred thousand soldiers and civilians of Zhenbei Pass into a pool of yellow water! How did you break it?”
Xu Qinghuan twitched the corners of her mouth and patiently continued reading.
“You actually dared use inoculation—fighting poison with poison—to break the Corpse Paste! That is an affront to the laws of Heaven! How could Heaven possibly allow such a vile, heaven-defying method of yours to remain in this world?”
Xu Qinghuan gave a soundless sneer.
If Heaven truly cared about justice, a beast like you, who refined Corpse Paste, would have been struck by lightning and reduced to ash long ago.
“Zhenbei Pass did not fall, and the poisonous winds of my extermination plan blew back upon us.
“That idiot Ashina Dubi’s fifty thousand royal-tent troops collapsed in a single day! Great King Ashina Gudu panicked! He was scared witless! In full view of both armies, he actually issued the disgraceful order for a complete retreat!”
Xu Qinghuan’s fingers tightened slightly around the parchment.
The previous urgent report, sent over eight hundred li, had only said that the Helian camp had fallen into chaos, with flames soaring into the sky and every sign of an impending retreat.
This letter, however, confirmed the outcome once and for all from the very heart of the enemy camp: the Helian royal court could no longer hold. The siege of the northern border had been completely lifted.
The bloody writing continued, with the lines growing increasingly cramped.
“You think you’ve won? What you’ve won is a living hell! The Helian people retreated, but heavy snow sealed the mountain passes along their route. With you people no longer there to serve as a shield, the tribal chiefs completely turned on one another in their struggle for the meager food supplies!”
“The tent of the Left Luli King was massacred in the dead of night, sixty li into the retreat, by the Jieshi tribe! Ashina Dubi was beheaded by his own people, and his head was hung from a grain cart for all to see!”
Xu Qinghuan’s expression darkened.
With the Left Luli King dead, the balance of power among the Helian tribes had been completely shattered.
The Jieshi tribe would undoubtedly absorb the remnants, igniting another wave of bloodshed across the grasslands.
Those barbarians would absolutely be unable to march south and raid the passes again for the next three to five years.
She continued reading. The contents of the parchment grew more and more horrific.
“Countless Helian warriors did not die beneath the mo dao of your Great Qian. They died beneath the curved blades of their own clansmen, beneath the knives of disordered soldiers fighting over a single mouthful of mutton! Xu Qinghuan, this bloodshed is your doing! You are the one who set off this cannibalistic slaughter!”
Xu Qinghuan read this accusation with an expressionless face, her heart utterly unmoved.
In the final third of the parchment, the handwriting could no longer be called writing. It had become nothing more than clumps of bloodstains.
“I was pinned to the snow by Ashina Dubi’s personal guards. With rusty knives, they hacked off two fingers of my left hand while I was still alive!”
“I rolled about in the snow, screaming in pain! I lay among the corpses for three days and three nights! I gnawed on the rotting flesh of warhorses that had died of disease and covered my head with a dead man’s intestines to pretend I was one of the corpses. Only then did I evade those mad dogs’ search and crawl out of the grasslands!”
Chen Changfeng described his ordeal in a deranged, almost boastful tone.
It seemed he was trying to prove that only someone who had endured such inhuman torment was worthy of the oath he was about to make.
“Xu Qinghuan! I, Chen Changfeng, swear to Heaven that I will return!”
“When I set foot in Great Qian again, I will make you watch with your own eyes as this empire is buried alongside you—for your sake, and for the fingers I lost!”
There was no name at the end of the letter.
Only a bloody handprint, pressed down with the mutilated left hand.
Xu Qinghuan raised her head and stared at the icicles hanging beneath the eaves. With an exasperated roll of her eyes, she sighed, “Well, looks like there’s a Grey Wolf too!”
Not far away, Xu Fu froze on the spot. He scratched his head, his face filled with bewilderment.
“Huh? What’s a Grey Wolf? Is that the name of some new tribal chieftain from the northern grasslands? Is he even fiercer than Ashina Gudu?”
