“Honk honk honk honk…”
A strange laugh suddenly rang out across the dead-silent battlefield.
It sounded like a big old gander being strangled.
At the foot of the imperial city, where there should have been nothing but bloodshed, slaughter, and severed limbs, the sound seemed utterly bizarre.
At first, only one or two people failed to hold it in.
Then, like cold water dropped into boiling oil, the laughter detonated across the entire battlefield of a hundred thousand men.
“Hahahaha! Oh, my god—hahahaha!”
“Gagagaga! I can’t take it anymore! My stomach hurts! Gagagaga!”
The drug was taking full effect!
The hundred thousand rebels who had been bristling with murderous intent, their faces twisted into savage snarls only moments ago, were all infected by the terrifying laughing-gas virus.
They threw down the heavy swords and spears in their hands, clutched their stomachs, and threw back their heads in wild laughter.
Their deafening, barbell-like guffaws merged into an earth-shaking roar, completely drowning out the thunderous war drums from before.
The enormous battering ram, which normally required the combined strength of hundreds of men to move, was dropped to the ground with a thunderous crash by the burly soldiers, who were laughing so hard they could barely stand.
The massive beam smashed into the earth, sending a tremendous boom rolling across the battlefield.
But the soldiers paid it no mind. They simply clutched their stomachs and laughed as they rolled around on the ground.
The vanguard soldiers who had already climbed halfway up the siege ladders, prepared to risk their lives scaling the walls, suddenly went weak in the hands and feet.
With girlish giggles of “hee-hee-hee,” they slid down from midair like dumplings dropping into a pot.
“Ow, ow, ow! Hahahaha! Stop tickling me!”
“I’m sliding down, I’m sliding down! Honk honk!”
As the laughing powder seeped deeper into their bones, the thick-necked, broad-shouldered brutes began moving their bodies uncontrollably as well.
Their eyes were glazed over, radiant smiles uncontrollable on their lips. In pairs, they linked arms right there in the ranks.
Zhang San threw an arm around Li Si’s broad shoulders, while Wang Mazi affectionately draped an arm over Zhao Si’s back.
In front of the solemn imperial palace gates, a hundred thousand soldiers stood shoulder to shoulder in row after row.
“One, two, three, four!”
Someone in the crowd shouted the count over the wild laughter.
A hundred thousand pairs of thick, armored legs kicked into the air in perfect unison!
Left leg! Right leg!
Shake those hips! Kick again!
Instead of weighing them down, the heavy armor became metallic percussion, clattering along with every movement.
The battle-hardened soldiers began performing a perfectly synchronized can-can right there on the battlefield!
Their dozens of pounds of iron armor clanged and rattled with every kick.
As they danced, they even shouted a synchronized accompaniment.
“Hey! Hey! Hey!”
A few particularly limber soldiers even helped each other perform splits in midair.
The once merciless army laying siege to the city had transformed into the largest male backup-dance troupe the Great Abyss Dynasty had ever seen.
As the hallucinogenic truth serum surged into their minds, an even more catastrophic public humiliation descended upon the sea of red fire.
The commander of the vanguard was a burly man eight feet tall, with a face covered in a thick beard.
Only moments ago, he had been brandishing his saber, intent on chopping off the emperor’s head.
Now, he was hugging one of his magnificent warhorse’s legs and crying so hard his nose was running.
“Waaah, wife, I’m sorry! Hahahaha!”
Laughing hysterically and sobbing at the same time, he began blurting out every secret he had.
“Actually, I’m not the Mighty General! I’m completely henpecked!”
“Waaah, honey, the private stash I embezzled over the years is all hidden beneath the third brick in the pigsty out back!”
“There are a full three hundred taels of silver! Whatever you do, don’t let your mother find it! Gagagaga!”
The warhorse snorted furiously and kicked him in the forehead, but he merely rolled around on the ground, grinning with delight.
Nearby, a deputy general was hugging the flagpole of a siege banner.
He twisted his body like a snake, danced around the pole, and screamed at the night sky.
“Commander! I’ve hated your guts for ages! Hahahaha!”
“That pair of red underpants you lost last month? They weren’t blown away by the wind. I took them to wipe my saber! Hahahaha!”
Farther away, several infantrymen who normally called one another brothers were pointing at each other’s noses.
“Brother Wang! Actually, on the day your sister-in-law gave birth, I hid in your wardrobe all night! Gagagaga!”
“Li the Fourth, you bastard! I’ll tell you something too—the ten-year-old bamboo-leaf wine you treasured? I secretly poured it out and replaced it with piss! Honk honk!”
Even the cooks responsible for logistics had been affected.
A fat man held up a massive iron ladle and bounced around among the crowd like a maniac.
“Brothers! I’m sorry! Hahahaha!”
“Half the grain we’ve served these past three months was moldy sand! I secretly sold the good stuff to buy liquor! Hee-hee-hee!”
The cavalry commander, normally a figure of awe, tore open his armor.
Under the eyes of thousands, he bashfully covered his face and laughed hysterically.
“Actually, I don’t like riding horses! What I love most is hiding under the covers at night and embroidering mandarin ducks playing in the water!”
“I’ve even secretly tried on Cuihua’s red bellyband! It made me look so slim! Hahahaha!”
The siege, which had begun as a tragic and bloody battle filled with iron and slaughter, had been utterly transformed beneath Su Yaoyao’s pink rain.
There was no longer any army of a hundred thousand wolves and tigers, nor any grand ambition to overthrow a dynasty and claim the throne.
All that remained was a massive, open-air, hundred-thousand-man dance concert of public humiliation!
Some people were doing the splits on the ground. Others were dancing the can-can.
Some were sobbing as they confessed to being the old Wang next door, while others were laughing hysterically and exposing one another’s darkest secrets.
The battlefield had become a realm of utter chaos and absurdity, a hundred thousand times livelier than the variety shows at the pleasure quarters.
The Imperial Guards who had been prepared to die for their country, having resolved themselves to make the ultimate sacrifice, stood atop the towering imperial wall and stared in stunned silence.
They still gripped their swords, slick with sweat, ready to meet the flash of enemy blades.
Instead, the enemy below the walls was putting on a hundred-thousand-man acrobatics spectacular for them.
“What… what on earth is going on?”
The commander of the Imperial Guards rubbed at the glass in front of his eyes and stared in disbelief at the enemy army dancing wildly below.
He even wondered whether the unbearable tension had driven him to hallucinate.
Clang!
The steel saber slipped from his hand and struck the ground.
A moment later, a chorus of clangs rang out across the wall as saber after saber fell.
The Imperial Guards stared at the enemy below, their weapons dropping from nerveless fingers.
They looked at one another, feeling as though their entire understanding of the world had been destroyed.
Could a battle actually be fought like this?!
At that moment, General Lin Zhenxiong, standing atop a bronze chariot at the front of the formation, was enduring the most desperate and devastating moment of his life.
He was a grandmaster-level martial artist, with an immense reservoir of true qi within him.
The instant he inhaled the powder, he sensed that something was wrong.
He immediately bit down hard on his tongue and forced all his inner power into motion, desperately suppressing the drug surging through his body.
The poison gas had been temporarily restrained, but…
Yet the scene before him felt like a set of rusty, blunt knives hacking viciously at his heart.
He watched the hundred-thousand-strong army he had painstakingly built over ten years, pouring in countless amounts of gold and silver.
The invincible iron army he had placed all his hopes in, the force he had planned to use to sweep through Taiji Hall—
Now it had become a humiliating circus!
He could hear his most trusted commanders shouting loudly about which courtesan at the brothel they had fallen in love with.
He could see the vanguard performing a bizarre, indecent dance in perfect unison.
It was over.
Everything was over.
The minds of these hundred thousand men had been thrown into chaos.
Military discipline had collapsed, and all authority had been lost.
Even after the drug wore off, this army would have become a laughingstock throughout the world, never again able to muster the slightest fighting spirit.
Overwhelming humiliation, fury, and despair swelled madly in Lin Zhenxiong’s chest.
His twisted face flushed the color of pig’s liver, the veins on his forehead bulging like earthworms. Forcibly suppressing the effects of the drug with his inner strength, he watched the hundred-thousand-strong army he had painstakingly built turn into a circus—and was so enraged that he spat out three mouthfuls of blood.
