Where Immortals Once Walked

He Lingchuan closed his eyes and lowered his head in silence.

This was not the first comrade he had watched leave the world.

And it certainly would not be the last.

They had all spilled their hot blood onto foreign soil.

* * *

After sweeping this zone, every member of the Broken Blade Squad was wounded. The only thing that differed between them was the severity of their wounds.

Because He Lingchuan had taken the lead again and again, running into danger the most. He had nearly been taken out on the spot twice.

The price was brutal. He had a hole punched clear through his ribs, and the part of his right ear shaved off. Compared with that, the other surface wounds were not worth mentioning.

When A’Luo stitched the part of his ear back on, He Lingchuan hissed in pain.

“What are you yelping for?” A’Luo snapped, face dark. He himself had a strip of cloth wrapped around his forehead. “Do you think a huge pitch-black room is something you can just charge into?”

“I was trying to draw fire for you, trying to make a feint!” He Lingchuan bared his teeth, suddenly aware that he fought far more fiercely here in the dreamscape than in reality, with a much looser sense of restraint. “Where’s the Stone Lump Powder? Give me some to numb the pain!”

Even inside the Generous Pot, every battle was a rare trial. He needed to explore his own fighting style and rhythm, testing what worked and what did not.

If not now, then when?

“You can’t use too much. The stuff’s addictive.” A’Luo was rigidly earnest. “You’ve been using it too much lately. Endure it if you can. It’s not like you lost an arm or a leg.”

Fortunately, after that, the clearing fights became more and more scattered. By the afternoon of the fifth day, the Panlong army had essentially taken control of West Ji’s entire capital.

If the Red General had used collective punishment to flush out resistance, it would have been much faster.

That was a common tactic in city assaults, but it destroyed civilian goodwill.

Several times, West Ji’s royal palace sent troops out of the inner city, trying to coordinate with the scattered forces in the outer city from inside and out. Each time, they were beaten back by the Gale Army, which had been waiting in tight formation outside the palace gates.

After taking losses again and again—hundreds at a time, sometimes over a thousand—without breaking out, the palace side no longer dared to sortie. They simply stayed behind closed gates.

In the endless, crawling days that followed, the palace city of West Ji remained under siege for ten full days.

There was not even a shadow of the reinforcements Huyan Zhao kept promising his ministers and people.

And the territory the Red General had offered him in negotiation had shrunk to another third of the last.

Huyan Zhao was in a constant state of agitation.

The palace city’s walls were solid, its food stores deep, and wells were everywhere. In particular, the grain reserves had been stocked to the standard of three thousand defenders holding out for forty days. Back when the old king had ordered the palace built to that specification, a bunch of ministers had objected, saying it was wasteful.

Now, it looked like the old man had been farsighted.

However, even the wisest old king had not accounted for 13,000 people cramming in at once.

This was more than four times the intended number.

More people meant more mouths.

And with all those people trapped inside, unable to leave, still wanting to eat like they were at court, Huyan Zhao felt his heart bleed with every meal.

Worst of all, the medicine supplies were critically short.

There were more than 4,000 wounded inside the palace city, and over 900 of them were severely injured. About 300 had already died in the past few days, either because medicine ran out or treatment was botched.

Complaints filled the palace, morale sank lower by the day, and there was one horrifying problem even the old king had forgotten to account for: human and animal waste.

There were currently 13,000 people and more than 2,000 warhorses staying in the palace city; they were a manure-producing machine running at full throttle.

In the past, the palace had a dedicated night soil crew that hauled waste out of the city every day. But now, no one could go out.

Huyan Zhao demanded that soldiers dump the waste over the walls and gates, using it as a weapon against the Panlong army.

But after a dozen men were shot dead doing it, no one wanted to do the job anymore.

Risking your life just to pour out filth was simply... not worth it. And that did not even mention the process of collecting it in the first place. It was better to just pick a corner somewhere inside the palace city.

So the palace was filled with the reek of blood and sewage. Flies and mosquitoes swarmed everywhere, matching the steady collapse of West Ji’s mood.

Right now, He Lingchuan was sitting on the roof of a civilian house with Willow, Hu Min, and the others, eating roast chicken while staring toward the palace city not far away.

“The lights on the gatehouse are out,” Hu Min chuckled. “It looks like they’re even saving lamp oil now.”

The Broken Blade Squad had performed brilliantly at Dragon Throat Pass. In addition to their standard merit rewards, He Lingchuan had wheedled a special perk out of the quartermaster: two roasted chickens a day for the squad. With nothing else to do tonight, everyone gathered for a whole-chicken feast, using water in place of wine.

Doorboard laughed. “When the wind shifts, the stink from the palace drifts right out. Nobody even wants to get near it. I don’t know how the West Ji people manage to sleep day after day with a pillow of shit under their heads.”

Willow pinched him hard at the waist, twisting cruelly. “We’re eating. Why bring up something that disgusting?”

Hu Min added, “I heard some deserters have been jumping out from the palace city the last few days. Some get shot on the spot. A few managed to slip over and surrender. The Red General made them sit right in front of the palace gates, eating meat and drinking wine, so the people inside could see. One guy sat too close and got too absorbed in his meal, then he got shot dead too.”

Willow asked, “You’ve been with the Gale Army the longest. Did sieges used to drag on this long?”

“It depends,” Hu Min said after thinking. “Longest one I saw, we surrounded a city for over forty days before it fell.”

Willow made a quiet “oh,” and did not ask further.

He Lingchuan tore into a drumstick. He was the only one here who had attended the prewar meeting in the Hall of War, so he largely understood what the Red General was doing.

“West Ji’s old king used years of the capital’s revenue to turn the palace city into an iron barrel, truly easy to defend, hard to attack. I’ve heard there are more than ten layers of defensive talisman arrays.” He explained to his squadmates. “If we really tried to take it by storm, we’d have to pile bodies to do it. So the Red General wants to win through encirclement, trading time for victory at the lowest possible cost.”

But is it really only that?

The Red General and Zhong Shengguang’s lack of urgency suggested deeper considerations.

And He Lingchuan had his own question:

This time, in the surprise attack on West Ji, why didn’t the Red General use the Three Corpses Worms?

Hu Min had once told him about retaking Wei City, how Baling soldiers guarding the gate suddenly went mad and turned on their own men. That had clearly been the Three Corpses Worms at work.

But this West Ji strike was even more important than retaking Wei City. So why did the battlefield show no trace of the Three Corpses Worms at all?

Those things were not afraid of origin energy. They were not even affected by ordinary spells. They were one of the Red General’s trump cards.

So why use the clumsy, slow method—the method of siege and forced surrender—giving Huyan Zhao and his court so many chances?

A strange thought surfaced in He Lingchuan’s mind. Could it be that she can’t use them?

He remembered that he had once asked Sun Fuping, “If the Panlong army, empowered by the Generous Pot, was so formidable, why not simply slaughter their way back to West Luo? Why remain trapped in the Panlong Wasteland?”

Sun Fuping had not had an answer.

Instead, it was the black flood dragon in the illusion realm of the ruins of Panlong City that had said, “You cannot take it. The Generous Pot is Panlong City, and Panlong City is the Generous Pot. They became one long ago. Even gods are unable to take it away.”

Could it be because the State of West Ji is already outside the Panlong Wasteland’s range? Is it because we’re out of the supposed service area that the Three Corpses Worms from the Generous Pot couldn’t be brought here?

If the Red General and Zhong Shengguang aren’t able to take the Generous Pot with them, then this campaign in West Ji...

Linking that with the negotiations that the Red General kept holding with Huyan Zhao these past few days, He Lingchuan felt an odd sense of wrongness. She was usually decisive and lethal. When had she ever given someone so many chances?

He Lingchuan’s brow furrowed.

Five more days passed.

The Panlong army did not waste time. They had already dispatched several units to occupy West Ji’s territory in full, easing pressure on the capital fight.

During this period, more and more West Ji soldiers began climbing over the palace walls to escape. They were willing to risk being shot by supervisors just to get out, because food inside the palace city had run out. And with morale low and origin energy fading, disease began to spread within those tall walls.

The palace city had been short on medicine from the start. Now it was worse than ever. A common soldier who fell ill had practically no chance of being treated.

They felt it better to risk death while trying to escape, as at least then, there was a sliver of hope.

Another five days passed, and even Huyan Zhao himself had grown dazed and hollow.

The way his soldiers looked at him was nothing like twenty days ago. If not for a few diehard loyalists guarding him closely, a mutiny would have erupted inside the palace city already.

Suddenly, a rider galloped up to the walls and shouted, “Huyan brat, come out! Your reinforcements are here!”

The guards on the wall jolted and looked down only to see a burly man riding back and forth beneath the gate, a spear held high. Skewered on it was a string of at least five or six messy heads, hair tangled together in one knot.

The man was General Nanke.

He shouted the line seven or eight times until he grew impatient. It was only then that the pale-faced Huyan Zhao climbed up to the gatehouse. One look down, and his head spun.

The heads on General Nanke’s spear were the commanders of the Southern Ping Garrison—top to bottom, in the correct order.

Inside the city, Huyan Zhao had been bolstering everyone’s spirits with the promise that reinforcements would come sooner or later.

Now reinforcements had really come, but not in the way they had hoped.

With a loud clang, a young soldier on the wall dropped the changdao in his hands. The sound rang out sharply.

No one paid him any attention.

General Nanke looked up at Huyan Zhao and grinned. “Our Red General is giving you one last chance. Surrender now, and you can still hold a marquisate south of the Lugua River. Otherwise—” He lifted his spear again. “This day next year will be the anniversary of all your deaths!”

The Lugua River? Huyan Zhao’s lips trembled.

The land that the Red General was offering him now was not even a quarter of what she had first proposed.

If only I’d known, if only I’d known...

General Nanke went on, “Oh, and since Huyan Zhao is as stubborn as stone, anyone inside the city who brings us his head will receive the same reward!”

A collective gasp swept through the palace city.

Cut off Huyan Zhao’s head, and they would not have to stay trapped inside anymore, would not have to keep starving, would not have to sleep beside piles of filth. They could even go south of the Lugua River and become a marquis with ten thousand households, living with servants waiting on them, food placed in their hands.

Even several of Huyan Zhao’s closest men began looking at him differently, their eyes flickering.

The past few days had been hell, and the new king had no solution worth the name.

Huyan Zhao suddenly felt the gazes on him fill with naked malice, like wolves stalking a sheep, like a cat eyeing a fish. It was as if the living were looking at him as though he were already dead.

If he hesitated even a heartbeat, they might tear him apart alive the very next second.

“W-wait...” Huyan Zhao saw someone in the back raise a spear and point it straight at him. He did not dare think of anything else now and shouted in panic, “I surrender! I surrender!”

The moment he said the word “surrender,” he was safe.

So he’s finally lowering his head. General Nanke was thrilled. “Then what are you waiting for? Open the gates!”