The moment Chang Xing’s rebel army came pouring out of Dongye City, Yu Jiuling turned tail and ran, taking his men with him.

Li Chi had been watching. The moment he saw Yu Jiuling running back, he immediately called out, “Move quickly — we need to run faster than Ninth Sister!”

Dantai Qi: “…”

The rest of them wheeled their horses and bolted back toward camp.

As they galloped back, they blew the signal horns. The Ning Army soldiers in camp had been making preparations every day — the moment the horns sounded, they too immediately turned and ran.

Before all this, Li Chi had issued a standing order.

In this engagement, the horn call for advance would serve as the signal to retreat, and the drum roll for withdrawal would serve as the signal to charge.

Although they were running back, the horns they sounded were the advance call.

Chang Xing surged forward with his large force, assuming Li Chi was fleeing in disarray — but when he heard the advance horns, he thought Li Chi was calling for a decisive battle.

Their original assumption had been that Li Chi intended to draw them out of Dongye City for an open-field battle — because that was Li Chi’s only viable path to victory. There was no other option they could think of.

“Shatter their formations and burn their camp!”

Chang Xing swept his blade forward.

The Ning Army had only a little over ten thousand men. If they charged them head-on, could they possibly lose?

His four great generals each led a force, bearing down on Li Chi’s Ning Army camp like a cresting floodtide.

Li Chi and the others charged back into camp and took one look. Li Chi immediately let out a sharp curse.

The soldiers had truly been swift in executing orders.

By the time they had retreated back, the camp was nearly empty. The soldiers had followed the pre-arranged plan and withdrawn from the other side.

Li Chi and the others couldn’t afford to linger — the enemy surging behind them was a roaring tide, and lagging even a moment could mean being swallowed by the wave.

After entering camp, Li Chi called out, “Light the fuses.”

Soldiers who had been waiting for this order immediately ignited the fuses — thick hemp ropes, soaked in oil, that caught fire and burned in a fast, straight line.

As the rope burned forward, it connected to a row of bed-crossbows along one side of the camp. Costly as those devices were, Li Chi abandoned them without a second thought.

The fire raced along the rope, and the bed-crossbows and mounted bolt-throwers discharged all at once.

A volley of bolts — large and small both — swept out in a dense, sweeping wave.

The rebel troops pressing in from behind were scythed down by a layer in an instant. The frontmost rank of rebel soldiers had no time to even react — like wheat cut by a scythe, they toppled in a clean, uniform line.

Li Chi and the others didn’t even look back. A series of mounted bolt-throwers, over a dozen crossbow carriages — all left behind without hesitation.

And this created the impression for Chang Xing’s rebel forces that they were still holding the camp.

As Li Chi’s people withdrew from the camp’s rear, the rebel troops had already broken into the forward side.

One of Chang Xing’s great generals, Yin Rong, was afraid of charging too slowly and losing merit to the others — he was the first to lead his force crashing into the camp.

As his soldiers sprinted forward, the ground suddenly collapsed beneath them.

The Ning Army had dug numerous deep pits, each with spears planted point-up at the bottom.

Rebel soldiers fell one after another, impaled and killed.

At that precise moment, the fire reached the far end of the fuse and the cord snapped taut, toppling a wooden post. The post fell, pulling up a rope buried in the ground.

An entire rank of the rebel cavalry was tripped all at once — men and horses going down in a tumbling chaos.

Yin Rong was charging forward when the lead troops — hundreds of them — fell into the pits and were killed. He had extraordinarily fast reactions and was himself no poor fighter. The instant he felt his horse’s foreleg drop into empty air, he launched himself from the saddle.

He pushed off from the horse’s back in mid-air, flipped once, and landed steadily on the ground.

He landed in another pit.

Yin Rong went pale with alarm — but his reflexes were truly beyond ordinary. He drove his spear downward with both hands and used it like a pole to brace himself against the pit floor, stopping his fall.

Sweat broke out across his forehead at once. He thought: that was disgracefully close.

Just as he was about to shout for someone to pull him out, someone behind him who wasn’t paying attention planted a foot squarely on his back.

Yin Rong only had time to get one curse out before he was driven down.

He had faced life-and-death situations more than once in his days as a wandering man of the martial world, so his reactions were considerably faster than most people. Even as he fell, he managed to twist sideways — and somehow squeezed himself between two rows of spears.

He reached the pit floor with only a few slashing cuts to show for it.

Yin Rong looked up at the fool who had stepped on him. The man had already been run through by four or five spears.

His body was still twitching, blood streaming steadily down the spear shafts.

Yin Rong carefully rose to his feet and cursed: *you deserved it.*

Just as he was about to shout for someone to pull him out again, the sky above him suddenly went dark.

A horse had lost its footing, and fell straight down.

Yin Rong may have let out some particularly foul language at that moment — but his voice was quickly muffled under the horse.

The horse had been run through by countless spears, but in the short term was not yet dead, and its four hooves flailed wildly.

How hard does the hind kick of a war horse land?

Yin Rong now knew.

Because the first kick landed squarely on his skull.

The sensation was very vivid. But by the second kick, there was nothing left to feel — because the first had already killed him.

A pity, truly. As one of Chang Xing’s four great generals, Chang Xing had promised him a fief of his own when the time came.

As a regional power commanding hundreds of thousands of troops, Chang Xing’s trusted lieutenants were naturally numerous — and not truly so feeble as all that. That four had earned his favor and trust showed their abilities were genuinely not weak.

Yin Rong had simply run out of luck.

Yin Rong, Xiao Mao, Wan Zai, Ren Jian — all four were men of genuine battlefield courage.

Many rebel soldiers fell into the pits and died. Those who pressed further forward had men rush into the Ning Army’s tents to see if anyone had been left behind.

One man flung open a tent flap. The flap pulled a cord. The cord knocked over a lamp. The lamp fell onto a pile of blasting powder that had been carefully laid in advance.

The last time Li Chi had gone to Anyang, he had used this same blasting powder from fireworks to burn down the Anyang army’s supply warehouses. That experience had led Li Chi to think that this material might prove very useful in the future.

When it comes to setting fires, there are only two states: before the first time, and after countless times.

Though the elders, when educating children, would often caution them not to play with fire — because playing with fire leads to bedwetting.

The blasting powder caught, and before long the tent was ablaze.

This was not a matter of one or two tents. Within the span of just two quarters of an hour, fires were burning everywhere throughout the entire camp.

Rebel soldiers who had charged into the Ning Army camp found that the troops at the front had just reached the far side of the camp when fire broke out behind them.

The men outside who had not yet charged in did not dare move forward. Those trying to pull back found the men behind them jammed in solid, making retreat impossible.

And the soldiers caught inside the camp — pressing forward and pressing back — descended into complete chaos.

Nobody knew how many men died before they finally discovered there were only a few fixed passageways through the camp that could be used. Everything else was riddled, in a jagged and interlocking pattern, with pits.

To hide the pits, the Ning Army had hauled all the excavated earth into the tents. The tents were full of dirt mounds — and the dirt was packed over the blasting powder.

All this time, the Ning Army soldiers had not slept in the tents at all.

It was through those few fixed passageways that the Ning Army had quietly filed out — and the rebel army had learned which paths were usable only at the cost of countless lives.

They pressed on through those passages, but by the time they broke through the wall of fire, only a fraction of them remained.

The main force was entirely blocked on the other side of the camp. Those who had made it through numbered only a few thousand.

These men came charging out of the inferno, and met a dense rain of arrows head-on.

The Ning Army had never truly fled in disarray. They had already formed a standing arrow formation on this side of the camp.

The Ning Army’s arrow formation far outstripped the rebel army’s in destructive power.

The volley of arrows that came sweeping in was as dense as a swarm of locusts filling the sky.

The rebel soldiers who had just been singed and scorched by fire had not even had time to exhale before they looked up and saw a black cloud descending on them.

Arrows fell in a torrent, and countless men were shot down.

A few breaths after the first volley, the second arrived.

These few thousand rebel soldiers had nowhere to hide — the Ning Army’s arrow formation in front of them, a sea of fire behind them.

After the third volley, Li Chi raised his hand. “Sound the horn.”

The advance horn rang out at once — and then the Ning Army began an orderly withdrawal once more.

On the camp side, the rebel army began spreading out and flanking from both sides, their numbers like a great river flowing forward.

The Ning Army camp was like a great boulder in the path of that river — not stopping it, but splitting it into two streams rushing around either side.

Before they had even finished flanking around the camp, they heard the Ning Army advance horn.

“Watch for the enemy!”

Xiao Mao, commanding the vanguard in a furious charge, immediately shouted and ordered the troops to halt and take a defensive posture.

They assumed the Ning Army would use this moment of confusion to counter-attack — after all, the rebel army’s rear was in utter disarray. Those blocked by the fire, those tangled up with their own men, couldn’t even maintain unit cohesion any longer.

Xiao Mao’s force was the one that had reacted fastest. After flanking around, they immediately formed up in a defensive array to await the Ning Army’s charge.

But nothing came.

After waiting a good while with no Ning Army in sight, Xiao Mao immediately dispatched scouts to investigate.

The cavalry scouts spurred their horses forward. After about half a quarter-hour they came back, reporting that the Ning Army had already withdrawn far into the distance.

Xiao Mao raged inwardly. That scoundrel Li Chi was truly cunning — using the advance horn as a retreat signal, and managing to deceive them twice.

“Attack!”

Xiao Mao gave the order, and his roughly twenty thousand rebel troops immediately drove forward. On the other flank, rebel general Wan Zai had also looped his force around to converge.

Two forces, like two great serpents, coiled past the burning Ning Army camp and joined into one.

“Have you seen the lord?”

Wan Zai shouted across to Xiao Mao.

Xiao Mao shook his head. “The lord went around to your side. Did you not see him?”

Wan Zai said, “He clearly went around to your side. Are you sure your eyes weren’t playing tricks?”

Xiao Mao said, “The lord is in the rear force — nothing will have happened to him. Let’s keep pressing after the enemy.”

Wan Zai nodded. “Agreed. Let’s see which of us is the one to capture that little bandit.”

And behind their forces, the man named Chang Xing — whom the Emperor of Dachu had enfeoffed as the Prince of the Northern Frontier — was cursing up a storm.

The drawbacks of such rapid troop expansion were now on full display. Despite having over a hundred thousand soldiers, they could not truly be called elite troops. The moment anything went wrong, the moment any problem arose, his generals — who had never had any real experience commanding troops in the first place — couldn’t even keep their own units under control.

Men from one battalion were running into another; soldiers over here had no idea where their own general had gone.

He had thought before about spending a great sum to recruit veteran garrison commanders to come drill his troops for him. But that was far easier said than done — those garrison commanders, even with the lure of heavy gold, would still look down on him.

He ordered his Northern Frontier Prince banner hoisted high, and had men blow the horns continuously to rally his forces toward him.

This had the opposite effect — all his forces from every direction came surging his way, and in the end, the troops he had were completely jammed up against each other by their own men.

Chang Xing knew this approach was useless, yet could think of nothing better.

Right beside him, Wu Naiyu — bound and seated on horseback — let out another cold laugh.

Chang Xing erupted. “You dare mock me still — I’ll kill you first!”

He drew his blade to cut him down.

Wu Naiyu looked at him coldly and said, “The enemy’s whole purpose is to throw your forces into disorder so they can slip away — forcing your vanguard and rear to come apart. Your vanguard troops that have pressed forward have no support behind them. I’m afraid the Ning Army is about to swallow them whole.”

Chang Xing froze.

All this time — and Wu Naiyu had said more to him just now than in all the months before.

Wu Naiyu said coldly, “You have a hundred thousand soldiers and still don’t know how to use them. If I were commanding this force, I’d take all the cavalry right now, press forward and intercept the Ning Army from the flank — first, I could rescue your forward troops; second, I could cut off the Ning Army’s retreat.”

“Very well!”

Chang Xing had no time to think. He shouted at once, “All cavalry units — follow me forward!”

—