As fortune would have it, the stories did take effect.

Liaocheng sat at the very northern edge of Qingzhou, close to the Jizhou border. It was not a place the Sang sea raiders had often harassed, so while the townspeople had heard that the Sang were cruel, their knowledge was not intimate — and besides, stories about things far away are just that: stories. Even when they are all true, they remain distant.

Wang Senmao told the three hundred men of the enforcement unit — all of them men who had known hardship — what he had personally witnessed. Those three hundred rough-lived men were already shaking with fury.

These stories were no longer distant. They felt as close as the next street over.

They too were ordinary men from ordinary families. Hearing of those villages slaughtered, children gutted by Sang raiders’ blades, women violated to death — these men clenched their fists one by one.

Wang Senmao told them to pass the accounts of the Sang peoples’ atrocities on to everyone — to tell them all that anyone who still held onto some hope of being spared would end up being slaughtered and violated in the same way.

These men all had wives and children. When they imagined their women being defiled by the Sang, when they imagined infants still in swaddling clothes being speared on a pike, they truly felt it to the marrow.

That night, after the three hundred had scattered and spoken to everyone, the walls fell into a long, extraordinary silence.

A silence so deep it felt suffocating — as though even time itself had stopped.

After a long stretch of quiet, one young man rose to his feet, his eyes already filled with hot tears.

“Kill every last one of those bastards!”

He let out a roar.

No soaring rhetoric. No lofty principles. Only the most primal cry.

And so it was that men — real men — stood to the fore.

The next day, when the Sang assault came again, the men on the walls were clearly different.

The day before, when the Sang arrows flew up onto the walls, many of the men had huddled with their heads covered, too afraid to move — like birds that bury their heads in the grass when danger comes, perhaps believing that if they cannot see it, it will not find them.

Today, these men with red-rimmed eyes were fearless.

Even Old Schoolmaster Zhang himself walked out from the gate tower, picking up smaller stones when he couldn’t manage the larger ones, handing them to the men defending the walls when he couldn’t throw them far himself.

From morning until midday, the Sang forces managed to clamber up onto the walls.

A few Sang soldiers leaped over the parapet, swinging their blades and charging forward in a frenzy.

At that moment, a powerfully built figure charged headlong in — like a lion throwing itself into a pack of wolves.

In his hand was an iron mace some three and a half feet long. With a single blow, he caved in the skull of the Sang soldier before him.

“Die, you animals!”

The man drove a kick outward with tremendous force, and sent the nearest Sang soldier sailing off the wall. A wail of agony rang out as the man plummeted to the ground outside.

Tang Qingyuan, seeing the Sang forces had broken through on this side, rushed over to support. As he ran, he recognized the powerful, broad-framed man — it was the middle-aged martial artist who had confronted him in the yamen.

The man had a remarkable build — at least two hundred catties, those bowl-sized fists landing like a blacksmith’s heavy hammer.

The few Sang soldiers who had climbed onto the walls were dealt with by him in short order.

Yet just the day before, when the Sang forces launched their first attack, Tang Qingyuan had seen this same man hiding in the crowd, his face white as a sheet, hands and feet trembling. When the Sang arrows flew onto the walls, he had retreated into the gate tower — and with him had gone Old Schoolmaster Zhang.

Perhaps the truths he had heard the night before had jolted something loose in his blood. The man standing here now seemed like an entirely different person — or perhaps a different soul.

Another Sang soldier leaped up with a high bound, throwing himself at the martial artist, and the two men went down together.

The Sang soldier pinned the martial artist down and drove his blade toward him. The martial artist seized the blade bare-handed — completely heedless of the cuts — and with the other hand locked onto the Sang soldier’s throat. The knuckles on that massive hand stood out like cords against the skin.

Moments later, the Sang soldier went limp. The martial artist flipped over and pinned the man beneath him, his bowl-sized fist rising and falling again and again into the soldier’s head.

The Sang soldier’s nose was destroyed under the blows, his eye sockets split open, his eyes pulverized.

Both those great hands ran with blood.

Another Sang soldier came charging from behind, gripping his blade with both hands, bringing it down in a chopping blow toward the back of the martial artist’s head.

Tang Qingyuan arrived just in time. He launched himself up and drove his foot into that Sang soldier’s neck — a sharp crack rang out, and the neck appeared to snap on the spot.

Tang Qingyuan landed, and in the same motion ran his blade across the man’s throat.

He reached out and pulled the martial artist to his feet: “Stay alert!”

The middle-aged martial artist appeared to be trembling again — but not from fear this time.

He looked at Tang Qingyuan, and in his gaze was a kind of sincere remorse. Tang Qingyuan patted him on the shoulder: “Get your hand wrapped first, then keep fighting.”

“Right.”

The martial artist replied, looked down at his left hand — the palm had been cut open in a long gash that would certainly leave a scar — yet every time he saw that scar in years to come, his heart would surely ring with a glory that knew no bounds.

That was the kind of pride most worth being proud of, the kind of honor most worth holding dear — not the swaggering self-importance of the past.

Someone bandaged his hand for him. He bent down and picked up the iron mace he had dropped, looked at it, then tossed it aside and picked up a long saber.

Only then did he notice: the person who had just bandaged his wound was Old Schoolmaster Zhang.

The old man gave him a firm, deep nod. The martial artist gave an equally firm nod in return, then turned and charged back toward the edge of the walls.

From midday to sunset, the Sang forces managed to clamber onto the walls seven times — and seven times they were driven back.

Whenever Sang soldiers climbed up, there were always men who fought without regard for their own lives, throwing themselves forward to push the ladders down regardless of the cost.

A full day of fighting — and when the sun finally sank at day’s end, the Sang forces had no choice but to pull back to rest.

This time, the cheering that erupted on the walls far surpassed what it had been the day before when the Sang first withdrew.

This time the cheering went to the edge of something raw and wild.

“Come back any time you like!”

The same young man who had let out that roar the night before was now clutching a blood-caked Sang soldier’s head in his hand, letting out a howl toward the outside of the city.

After this battle, Tang Qingyuan’s confidence had returned.

Fortune was on their side. The townspeople’s fighting spirit had been drawn out.

If they had been fighting the Sang regular forces on open ground, the townspeople would certainly have been no match — they would certainly have been routed.

But this was a siege defense. They had the natural advantages of the high ground. And with each person now fighting with the spirit of their people burning in their blood, they had managed to fight the savage Sang navy soldiers to this kind of standoff.

Once again failing to breach the walls — for the Sang, that feeling was extraordinarily complex.

Eighty thousand naval troops — a force that could run rampant across the Sang lands without challenge.

Yet here in this Central Plains, first they had been stopped by three or four thousand border soldiers at Dacheng Pass; then stopped by a group of poor commoners at Tuoshan County; and now, at Liaocheng, they again could not gain even a foot of ground.

“How can this be?”

Chunbian Chili, great general of the Sang navy, had nothing but that question in his head.

His operatives had told him that the Central Plains people were sheep — meek and docile, conditioned to submission, conditioned to being controlled.

They had no courage to resist. Every time, they passively accepted whatever fate was dealt to them.

Yet what Chunbian Chili was seeing and what he had been told were completely at odds.

Three times now. Had even one of those three times seen only weak resistance, he might still have put some faith in his operatives’ words. But three times — every time, what he had faced were ordinary people with murder in their eyes.

“Rest tonight. Let the men eat a full meal.”

Black Martial Prince Kuokedi Dashi was quiet for a moment, then ordered: “Continue the attack at first light tomorrow. Each unit takes turns pressing the assault. Until the city falls, we do not retreat. Even if we must fight continuously for days and nights on end, Liaocheng will be taken.”

“Yes, sir!”

Chunbian Chili bowed in reply. He knew there was nothing else to be done now.

The only hope was that those ordinary civilians could not hold on for that long. People who were far removed from anything like soldiers — in terms of both physical stamina and sheer force of will — would inevitably reach a point of mental collapse.

If it truly came to unbroken days of continuous combat, even for battle-hardened soldiers it was an agony difficult to endure. How much more so for a group of ordinary people.

Chunbian Chili thought on this, his expression grim and his face drawn.

On the walls, Tang Qingyuan — sitting with his back against the parapet — smiled. It was not the unbridled laughter of the townspeople around him, but that faint upward curl at the corners of his mouth was his deepest sense of relief.

“Fortune is on our side.”

Wang Senmao settled in beside him, as if speaking to himself — yet his tone carried a profound admiration for Tang Qingyuan, and an equal sense of relief at what this fighting spirit had proven.

The other scout, Du Guang, sat down as well. He had been wounded, already bandaged, his right arm unable to be raised — but his saber was still in his hand, switched now to the left.

“Brother.”

He sat down and first let out a long, long breath — the kind of involuntary release that comes from complete and utter exhaustion.

Then he called out the word *brother.*

Du Guang turned his head to look at Tang Qingyuan, and grinned: “I admire you.”

He said: “If we hadn’t come to Liaocheng, if we had just kept riding, the people of this city would all be dead. And once the Sang held Liaocheng, even more people would die in the days to come.”

Tang Qingyuan looked at the wound on his right arm: “How is it?”

Du Guang shook his head: “Nothing serious. The arm’s still attached.”

He set the saber down in his left hand, reached out his right: “We did something truly incredible. In the future, when I have children, I’ll have something to brag about over and over again.”

Tang Qingyuan’s hand came to rest on his. Wang Senmao’s hand came to rest on theirs. Three hands, stacked together — like a mountain.

In this world, some people look ordinary — but at the moments that matter, they become towering.

Perhaps at this very moment, even if someone had seized Chunbian Chili by the ear and told him that the person who had rallied a force of civilians to stop his army of tens of thousands was three ordinary soldiers, he would absolutely not have believed it.

He was a renowned Sang general, his army undefeated in hundreds of battles, his reputation towering in Sang lands — and with it, a deep and powerful confidence.

He would not accept such a reality. Could never accept that three small, ordinary people had stopped his great army.

“Hungry!”

Tang Qingyuan said with a laugh as he stood up: “I’m going to scrounge up something to eat.”

He had barely said the words when he saw Old Schoolmaster Zhang coming over, carrying a basket. Behind Old Schoolmaster Zhang, a great crowd of townspeople followed.

“All three of you…”

Old Schoolmaster Zhang set the basket down, then stepped back two paces and clasped his hands in a deep bow: “Let me first offer you my apologies.”

He bent at the waist in a full bow.

Tang Qingyuan reached out and steadied him: “Among our own people, there are no knots that can never be untied. From the moment we stood on the walls together, that knot should no longer exist.”

The old man’s shoulders trembled. He lifted his head to look at Tang Qingyuan, and in his aged eyes, tears were swirling.

“I have spent the better part of my life teaching, and believed myself to be doing the work of nurturing the young — something to be proud of, something to hold dear. But today I finally understand: it is only today, only through you, that I have truly been taught what it means to be a person.”

He shook his head at Tang Qingyuan: “Please release my hand. Accept a bow from the people of Liaocheng.”

With that, he stepped back and moved to bow once more. Tang Qingyuan reached out to steady him again — but behind the old man, the townspeople had already dropped to their knees in a great wave.

The powerfully built middle-aged martial artist said in a loud voice: “Bow to our benefactors!”

A crowd of townspeople, prostrating themselves.

“Please, everyone, you mustn’t do this.”

Tang Qingyuan called out urgently: “Rise, all of you — rise quickly. We wear the soldier’s uniform. This is what we do.”