He Lingchuan closed his eyes and bowed his head in silence.
This was not the first comrade-in-arms he had seen off, and it certainly would not be the last.
All of them had spilled their hot blood upon foreign soil.
***
After sweeping this sector, every member of the Broken Saber squad was wounded, differing only in severity.
Because He Lingchuan took the lead, he faced danger the most often. Twice he had nearly been knocked out and ejected straight from the dream realm.
The cost was a hole punctured through his ribs and his right ear sliced off. By comparison, his other superficial injuries were not even worth mentioning.
As A'luo stitched his ear back on, He Lingchuan hissed and gasped in pain.
"What are you yelling about!" A'luo said with a dark scowl, a cloth band wrapped around his own forehead. "Did you think you could just charge into a pitch-black house of that size?"
"Wasn't I trying to create a diversion for you guys?" He Lingchuan grimaced, baring his teeth. He knew he fought far more fiercely in the realm of souls than in reality, taking much greater risks. "Where's the Shituo powder? Give me some to dull the pain!"
Even within the Dafang Pot, every battle was a rare opportunity to temper himself; he needed to properly feel out his own fighting style and rhythm.
If not brave here, then when?
"You can't use too much. That stuff is addictive," A'luo said sternly. "You guys have used far too much lately. Endure it if you can—it's not like you lost an arm or a leg."
Fortunately, these mopping-up engagements soon dwindled to sporadic skirmishes. By the afternoon of the fifth day, the Panlong army had essentially secured control over the entire Xiji capital.
If General Red had used collective punishment to root out resistance, it would have gone much faster.
This was a method commonly used in siege warfare, but it destroyed any goodwill among the populace.
In the interim, the Xiji royal palace had dispatched troops several times, hoping to coordinate an assault from inside and out with these scattered holdouts, but each attempt was repelled by the Gale Army standing at the ready outside the palace walls.
After several rounds of casualties, the palace no longer dared venture out rashly, doing nothing but keeping the gates barred.
After all, each sortie cost anywhere from several hundred to over a thousand men without achieving a breakout; the price was simply too steep.
While the days dragged on like years for Huyan Zhao, the Xiji palace city remained besieged for ten days.
The relief forces he repeatedly assured his subjects were on their way remained nowhere to be seen.
Meanwhile, General Red's offer of granted territory had shrunk by another third compared to before.
Huyan Zhao was on edge and distraught.
The palace walls were formidable, provisions abundant, and wells dotted the grounds everywhere. In particular, the grain reserves had been provisioned to sustain three thousand men holding out for forty days. When his old man had built and stocked it under that standard back then, a chorus of courtiers had opposed it, calling it a waste of resources.
Looking back now, the old man had been wise.
Yet no matter how wise the old man had been, it could not withstand thirteen thousand people cramming inside all at once—more than four times the intended capacity.
More mouths meant more food consumed.
With so many people trapped inside unable to leave yet gorging day in and day out, Huyan Zhao's heart bled.
Worst of all was the severe shortage of medicine.
There were over four thousand wounded in the palace city, with more than nine hundred severely injured, and two to three hundred had already died over the past few days due to lack of medicine or improper care.
Resentment filled the palace, and morale plummeted.
Furthermore, there was a gruesome trouble that even the late king had never anticipated:
Human and animal waste.
Over thirteen thousand people and more than two thousand warhorses combined into a manure factory running at full throttle.
In the past, the palace city had dedicated night-soil collectors hauling it out of the city daily, but now no one could leave.
Huyan Zhao ordered the soldiers to fling the waste from atop the city gates to bombard the Panlong army.
Yet after a dozen men were shot dead, the soldiers refused to do it anymore.
Risking their lives just to dump night soil was simply far too pointless—not to mention the process of collecting it. It was better to just find some random corner in the palace...
As a result, the stench of blood drifted everywhere throughout the palace grounds, flies and mosquitoes swarmed in every corner, and the spirits of the Xiji people sank steadily lower.
At present, He Lingchuan sat on the roof of a civilian residence alongside Willow, Hu Min, and the others, eating roast chicken while looking out toward the palace city not far away.
"The lights on the gate tower have gone out," Hu Min chuckled. "Looks like they've even started rationing their lamp oil."
The Broken Saber squad had performed outstandingly during the Dragon Throat Pass mission. On top of the usual military merit rewards, He Lingchuan had wrangled an extra perk from the quartermaster: two roast chickens every day for the team. With nothing to do tonight, everyone had gathered to feast on chicken, substituting water for wine.
Door Plank laughed. "Whenever the wind shifts, the stench from the palace wafts right out. Nobody wants to go near it. I wonder how the Xiji folk can sleep day after day with their heads practically resting on a dung heap."
Willow pinched his waist with a vicious twist. "We're eating! Why bring up something so revolting?"
Hu Min added, "I heard a few deserters jumped out of the palace over the past few days. Some were shot dead on the spot, while a few made it across to surrender. General Red made them sit right in front of the palace gates eating meat and drinking wine for everyone inside to see. One sat too close and got carried away eating, and he ended up getting shot dead by the defenders."
Willow asked him, "You've been in the Gale Army the longest. Did sieges usually take this long in the past?"
"Ah, some were longer, some shorter." Hu Min considered. "The longest one took us over forty days of siege before the city fell."
Willow let out an "oh" and asked no more.
He Lingchuan took a bite of a drumstick. He was the only person here who had attended the pre-battle council in Gange Hall, so he basically understood what General Red was calculating.
"Xiji's late king spent years of the capital's revenue turning that palace city into an iron fortress—truly easy to defend and hard to attack. They say there are over a dozen layers of defensive talisman arrays," he explained to his subordinates. "If we truly wanted to take it by storm, we'd probably have to pile up bodies to do it. That's why General Red wants to substitute siege for assault, securing victory at minimal cost."
Was that all? General Red and Zhong Shengguang's lack of hurry clearly harbored deeper considerations.
Moreover, He Lingchuan had questions of his own:
Why hadn't General Red used the Three Corpse Worms during this surprise strike on the Xiji Kingdom?
He had heard Hu Min describe the retaking of Weicheng, where the Baling soldiers guarding the gate had suddenly gone berserk and turned on their own men—clearly the work of the Three Corpse Worms.
Yet this raid was of far greater significance than retaking Weicheng. Why was there no trace of the Three Corpse Worms on the battlefield?
Those things feared no origin power and were not even affected by ordinary spells; they were one of General Red's trump cards.
Why did she resort to such a clumsy, slow method to besiege and force the surrender of Huyan Zhao and his court?
He Lingchuan had an odd thought:
Could it be that she couldn't use them?
Once, he had asked Sun Fuping a question:
Since the Panlong army empowered by the Dafang Pot was so formidable, why hadn't they fought their way back to the Xiluo Kingdom instead of sitting trapped in the Panlong Wasteland?
Sun Fuping had no answer either.
Instead, it was the black flood dragon in the Panlong Ruins illusion who had told them:
"You cannot take it away. The Dafang Pot is Panlong City, and Panlong City is the Dafang Pot; they have long since become one. Forget mortals—even gods cannot carry it away."
And the Xiji Kingdom lay beyond the borders of the Panlong Wasteland. Was it because it was out of range that the Three Corpse Worms from the Dafang Pot couldn't be brought here?
If General Red and Zhong Shengguang could not take the Dafang Pot with them, then this campaign into Xiji...
Connecting that with General Red's negotiations with Huyan Zhao over the past few days, He Lingchuan felt a strange dissonance. She had always been ruthless and decisive—when had she ever granted someone this many chances?
He Lingchuan frowned.
Another five days passed.
The Panlong army did not waste time either, having long since dispatched several detachments to occupy the rest of Xiji's territory and ease the pressure of fighting at the capital.
During this period, more and more Xiji soldiers scaled the palace walls to flee. They were willing to brave the risk of being shot down by enforcers just to escape, because food inside had long run short. Moreover, amid rock-bottom morale and waning origin power, pestilence began to spread within the towering palace walls.
The palace was already lacking medicine, and now things were even more dire. An ordinary soldier who caught the plague had no chance of receiving treatment.
It was better to risk death escaping for a slim chance at survival.
Another five days passed, and even Huyan Zhao himself grew muddled and numb.
The looks the soldiers directed at him were completely different from twenty days ago. Had a few loyal confidants not guarded him fiercely, a mutiny would have erupted long ago.
Suddenly, a lone rider galloped swiftly to the foot of the walls and yelled, "Little brat Huyan, come out! Your reinforcements are here!"
The guards on the wall jolted and looked down, only to see a hulking man riding back and forth beneath the gates, holding a long spear high in the air. Skewered on it was a disheveled string of severed heads—at least five or six—their hair tied together.
This hulking man was none other than General Nan Ke.
He shouted seven or eight times until his patience ran thin before a pale-faced Huyan Zhao finally climbed up to the gate tower. One glance downward left Huyan Zhao dizzy and sick:
The heads strung on General Nan Ke's spear belonged to the commanders of the Nanping garrison—from top to bottom, the ranks were unmistakable.
Huyan Zhao had been buoying everyone's spirits inside the palace, insisting relief troops would come sooner or later.
Now reinforcements had indeed arrived, just not in the way they had hoped.
With a sharp clang, a soldier on the battlements dropped his saber, the loud ring echoing out.
No one paid him any mind.
General Nan Ke looked up at Huyan Zhao and smiled. "Our General Red gives you one final chance. Surrender now, and you can still rule as a marquis south of the Lugua River. Otherwise—" He raised his spear again. "—this time next year will be the anniversary of all your deaths!"
The Lugua River? Huyan Zhao's lips trembled.
The territory General Red was promising him now was less than a fourth of what she had originally offered.
Had he only known... had he only known!
General Nan Ke added, "By the way, since Huyan Zhao is so obstinate, if anyone inside can take his head and present it, they'll receive the very same reward!"
Gasps rippled across the wall.
Cut off Huyan Zhao's head, and not only would they no longer be trapped, starving, and sleeping beside piles of dung, but they could go south of the Lugua River to live in pampered luxury as a marquis over ten thousand households?
Even several of Huyan Zhao's confidants looked at their master with wavering, shifty eyes.
Life inside the city over the past few days had simply been too unbearable, and the new king had no means of resolving it.
Huyan Zhao felt the gazes directed at him suddenly turn dripping with malice, like wolves eyeing a sheep, like cats watching a fish...
...or like the living staring at a corpse.
If his wits were half a beat slower, these men might tear him limb from limb the very next second.
"Wait—" Seeing someone in the rear raise a spear and aim it straight at him, Huyan Zhao cast all else aside and shrieked in desperation, "I surrender! I surrender!"
If he shouted "surrender" first, he would be safe.
This fellow knows what's good for him, General Nan Ke thought with delight. He boomed, "Then what are you waiting for? Open the gates!"
Chapter 430