Lu Yao was no fool. While clashing with Wu Shaoyi, he had pieced together the truth—it was almost certainly that corrupt official He Chunhua pulling strings behind the scenes, provoking Wu Shaoyi and Pei Xinyong into joining hands against him.
Wu Shaoyi already harbored an old grudge against him and was easily provoked, so driving a wedge between them had taken little effort.
Lu Yao pointed toward the mid-slope along the western path. "Pursue them! Once you catch up, kill without mercy—except for that corrupt dog!"
He gave a sinister grin. "Leave the corrupt official to me."
Light suddenly returned to the world.
Sweat dripped into his eyes. He Lingchuan rubbed them and suddenly realized the eastern horizon was pale with dawn.
The day's first ray of morning sun struck the cliff face, bathing him in its glow.
He Lingchuan panted, hardly able to believe that his thirty-odd men had held out for another two hours relying on a dozen-odd wrecked wagons!
No, not thirty-odd men anymore. Only nine were left. The heavily wounded could no longer walk either.
The long saber in his hand still dripped with blood—some from the bandits, some splattered from his own soldiers.
Watching their comrades fall one after another, a soldier had earlier slipped away while everyone was distracted, quietly retreating to the rear to mount a horse and flee.
Seeing this, Zhao Qinghe roared in fury and yanked him from the saddle.
He Lingchuan rushed over from behind and, without listening to any excuses, severed the man's head with a single slash!
When enemies meet on a narrow road, the brave prevail.
Spare a deserter, and you destroy courage.
Sure enough, as the head rolled across the ground, the mood on the field shifted entirely. The imperial soldiers looked at He Lingchuan with eyes full of awe and reverence. In his heart, however, there was neither grief nor joy; lifting his saber, he turned back to slaughter the enemy.
After gathering up Wu Shaoyi's remnants, Lu Yao naturally led them in pursuit of the imperial troops, only to be blocked halfway up the mountain by He Lingchuan and his men.
This was terrain He Lingchuan had meticulously calculated. As long as the wagon barricade held, no matter how many rebels there were, only twenty or thirty at the front could engage; everyone behind was completely jammed.
Because of this, the bandits' assault had reached an unprecedented fever pitch.
Unable to shove the wagons aside, the bandits tried chopping through them.
After all, their ranks were not lacking in men of great brute strength.
Little did they know that the He family's lifestyle favored luxury that was understated yet substantial. When it came to carriages, that meant exceptionally solid craftsmanship. The undercarriages were built with aged redwood from Saber Mountain, soaked in medicinal concoctions before being polished through more than a dozen meticulous steps. Ordinary blades chopping into the wood only nicked small notches, and pulling them back out risked having the steel wedged tight.
The wooden panels could even withstand wildfires.
After all, they had been built to haul the He family's vast wealth for one or two thousand li; how could they not be sturdy?
Even if the draft horses were run lame, the wagons would remain unscathed.
The bandits chopped at these wagons until tears nearly welled in their eyes. What was more, He Lingchuan and the soldiers were no soft targets—how could they let them chop away with abandon?
Thus, the bandits were forced to hold an axe in one hand and a shield in the other, constantly using their shields to ward off the flurry of spears and arrows thrusting and shooting through the gaps between wagons, only finding time to hack a few blows here and there.
Nor were they lacking clever scoundrels who, seeing the fierce resistance from the soldiers, merely went through the motions of swinging their axes, slacking off rather than risking their necks to chop in earnest. Consequently, their progress was abysmally slow.
Watching this made Lu Yao's blood boil. After disciplining several subordinates, he simply grabbed a greataxe to take them on himself.
His strength was immense, and his chopping far outpaced his men, but swinging a heavy axe left him vulnerable to openings.
In truth, he possessed protective astral qi and had not feared Wu Shaoyi in the slightest, yet he was deeply wary of the imperial soldiers' wild, stabbing spears.
The reason was simple: these soldiers were imbued with origin power!
Origin power specialized in breaking through an opponent's true power and divine abilities, unless the opponent also had origin power to counter it.
Lu Yao seethed with anger. If the Holy Master were still alive, they too would be able to channel origin power. How could this toy of an obstacle or these weakling soldiers stand against him for even a single bout?
As his rage mounted, so did the ferocious power of his strikes.
When the first wagon barrier was on the verge of splintering apart, He Lingchuan swiftly ordered, "Fall back behind the second barrier!"
Indeed, imitating the battles from his dream, he had taken advantage of the time Lu Yao spent absorbing Wu's routed forces to construct a second and third wagon barricade.
His men scrambled over nimbly, but when the bandits finally smashed through the first barrier and Lu Yao shoved the wrecked wagons aside to charge through, they were all dumbfounded.
How could there be another one?!
And so it repeated again.
He Lingchuan commanded with impressive poise, and the soldiers looked to him as their backbone. He fought on the front line himself, never forgot to rally everyone's spirits, and the wagon barricades genuinely alleviated the immense pressure on their side... Only because of this had they barely held out until now.
Of course, that soldier's head he had personally lopped off had crushed any remaining thoughts of desertion.
Only by balancing benevolence with severity could one bind men's hearts.
Yet as dawn broke across the sky, this third barricade was also nearing its breaking point.
With limited resources at hand, the soldiers had built the third barrier using the villagers' oxcarts and horse carriages. Different grades meant different quality; the villagers' carts were nowhere near as durable as the He family's, proving far more brittle and frail.
Some wagon carriages were slapped together with nothing more than a single layer of thin planking—an undisguised display of shoddy corner-cutting. A rebel thrust a spear straight through the wood, nearly punching a bloody hole in Maotao's arm.
Jerking his arm back in fright, he shouted to He Lingchuan, "Eldest Young Master, we can't hold!"
Zeng Feixiong had explicitly instructed him and Zhao Qinghe to direct the battle, yet somehow, command had long since shifted into He Lingchuan's hands.
Driven by Lu Yao, short and nimble bandits swarmed over like wild monkeys, clashing with the defenders at close quarters.
Corpses lay scattered across the ground, both bandits and soldiers.
Fighting like this, it had once again fallen into a rhythm He Lingchuan knew intimately.
Across the wagon, Lu Yao's blood-red eyes glared fixedly at him. "You'd better run fast! Once I catch up, I'll hack off your heads—father and son both—and turn them into wine flagons!"
He Lingchuan touched his own head, glanced at the red sun cresting the eastern peaks, and sighed. "Mount up, withdraw!"
Unlike in his dream, he had no intention of fighting to the bitter end this time.
A dream was a dream; reality was reality.
One could indulge in iron-blooded valor in a dream, but in reality, the dead did not come back to life.
Finally, the order to retreat had come! The imperial soldiers let out a long breath of relief, tears nearly springing to their eyes, and scrambled onto their horses without hesitation. The sorcerer in their ranks ran fifty feet up the path, dropped into a squat, pressed both hands to the ground, and began chanting.
Under Zhao Qinghe's coordination, everyone's origin power was transferred to him.
The radiance enveloping the sorcerer flared intensely.
Immediately after, the ground beneath his palms began to freeze over with a sheet of ice, spreading steadily downward.
Indeed, even though He Lingchuan wanted to retreat, he had to leave a bit more trouble for his pursuers.
"Faster, hurry!" He Lingchuan urged repeatedly. "We're right beside the lake—moisture is thick here! It should be much faster!"
Seeing the barricade on the verge of collapsing, sweat poured even faster down his back.
"My true power is limited; this is as far as I can go..." the sorcerer gritted his teeth. His arts were trained for killing people, not paving roads!
Limited true power? Jolted by the reminder, He Lingchuan immediately fished an item from his bosom and shoved it into the sorcerer's mouth. "Can you use this thing?"
It was a deep green profound crystal.
At the crucial moment, Eldest Young Master He was the one who had the goods.
Chapter 123