At the banquet.

Li Xionghu raised his cup, and everyone rose to their feet. By this point he had already drunk a considerable amount, his face flushed and ruddy.

His mood was good — after all, they had worked out a new path forward, and he could once again see a hope of contending for the throne.

Though Li Xionghu had little regard for these respectable men, he had to admit that when it came to devising strategy and counsel, they far surpassed the unlettered men under his command.

Among those present were no shortage of former Dachu officials — now hunching their shoulders and making themselves small before him. That too gave Li Xionghu a measure of satisfaction.

“Your suggestion is a good one.”

Li Xionghu said with a smile: “If this can be accomplished, you will all be high ministers of the court to come.”

He couldn’t put it more eloquently than that, but at this moment those words came straight from the heart — a man who’s had a great deal to drink tends to mean every word he says.

These men had proposed that he lead his army to strike while Yuezhou had no one guarding it, and retake the foundation from which he had originally raised his banner.

Originally, Yuezhou had been given by Li Xionghu to his sworn brother Zhai Li — but Zhai Li had since defected to the Mandate King Yang Xuanji. Taking Yuezhou back was therefore a clear opening.

Once Yuezhou was secured, he could entrench himself there, rebuild his forces, use the wealth of both Yuezhou and Yangzhou to raise a great army, and once again contend for the realm.

Li Xionghu thought: Yuezhou was his old homeland. When he returned, he would surely be welcomed and celebrated — the people of the entire province would come out to greet him in the streets.

He was already imagining his entry into Yuezhou, with the people of every prefecture and county waving and crying out the name *Overlord!*

The banquet descended into a blur of revelry, and it was not until noon the following day that Li Xionghu finally came to.

After rising, he tried to recall what had been said the night before — most of it was gone — but thankfully he still remembered the strategy that had been settled upon.

So Li Xionghu organized his forces and ordered them divided: half to remain in Hangcheng and hold Yangzhou; he himself would personally lead two hundred thousand troops back to Yuezhou.

His subordinate general Pu Cun, who had earned credit for suggesting the plan and whose ability to command troops was considerable, was assigned by Li Xionghu to lead the two hundred thousand holding Hangcheng.

With that, the Chuang Army was split in two, and Li Xionghu personally led the main force south.

A month and a half later, Li Xionghu entered the territory of Yuezhou — and sure enough, just as he had imagined, the people of Yuezhou came forward one after another, calling out the name *Overlord!*

Local gentry and village elders offered fine liquor; seeing that his prestige in Yuezhou remained so great, Li Xionghu was more gratified than ever.

After drinking heartily with the local gentry and elders, he set out again.

Everywhere he passed, people came to receive him — not only offering up food and drink, but presenting beautiful women to serve him.

The whole journey, Li Xionghu drank every day and reveled every night.

His advisors had already begun to sense something was off, and spoke up to warn him — and were berated by Li Xionghu.

He said the man simply didn’t understand how great his own prestige was in Yuezhou, didn’t know how the people of Yuezhou regarded him.

After dismissing the advisor with a tongue-lashing, Li Xionghu made not the slightest change. Continuing south, he remained just as dissolute as before.

By the second month of the new year, Li Xionghu entered Yuezhou’s Songgong County. By this point he had completely let down his guard.

Songgong County was set in difficult terrain, the county seat perched on a hillside. As the army reached this place, not a single official or gentry elder from Songgong came out to meet them. Li Xionghu flew into a rage, concluding these people didn’t know what was good for them, and ordered forces divided to attack the county seat.

Not long after Li Xionghu’s army entered the hills, they were ambushed. No one knew where so many soldiers had come from — it was like an ambush from all ten directions, hitting Li Xionghu’s forces before they could react.

A crushing defeat: of Li Xionghu’s two hundred thousand troops, fewer than fifty thousand broke through the encirclement. He fled north in a wretched state.

Only then did he learn — Yuezhou was no longer the Yuezhou he had once known.

It turned out that Guan Tinghou, the son of the Yuezhou Military Governor Guan Haoran whom Li Xionghu had publicly executed, had seized on the moment when Yuezhou was left unguarded to rally the remnant forces of the Chu state — and had grown into a formidable power.

Guan Tinghou was barely twenty years old, yet his temperament was steady and his mind calm. Having grown up in an official family, he had been raised on military texts from childhood and was a man of exceptional ability.

He had devised a series of interlocking stratagems to lull Li Xionghu into complacency after entering Yuezhou — which was how such a catastrophic defeat had been engineered.

Li Xionghu retreated north, with Guan Tinghou’s army pursuing and cutting him down the entire way.

And the people who had greeted Li Xionghu with such fanfare on the way in were nowhere to be seen.

Every city they passed shut its gates.

Only now did Li Xionghu understand how vicious the enemy’s scheme had been. After entering Yuezhou, he had been left with the illusion that his prestige was still absolute.

Wherever his army went, food and provisions had been arranged for them. His own advisors had pointed out that since supplies would be provided at every stop, there was no need to carry heavy supply wagons — that would only slow the march.

But now that the battle was lost, Li Xionghu’s army had no provisions of their own, every city was shut, and he dared not attack — for if the pursuing enemy caught up, escape might be impossible.

Fighting while retreating, they traveled another seven or eight days like this, and the army ran out of food entirely. Then they reached the Wei River. When coming south, boats had lined up eagerly to ferry them across — but now the river surface was completely bare of vessels.

Guan Tinghou led the Yuezhou Army and caught up with him; both sides fought to the death on the south bank of the Wei River.

By this point the Chuang Army had no morale left whatsoever. Having gone without enough food for many days, they were no match at all for the Yuezhou Army.

After a great battle, the Chuang Army’s fifty thousand were nearly all slaughtered.

Li Xionghu’s life was stubborn — in the chaos of flight, he found a small boat and crossed north with only a dozen or so men.

Yet Guan Tinghou clearly had no intention of letting him go. He led the Yuezhou Army across the river and drove deep into Yangzhou.

Li Xionghu ran north the whole way — in as wretched a state as it was possible to be.

This overlord who had dominated the realm — starving to the point of desperation, he burst into a farmyard to grab food, was surrounded by village people, and when he escaped, half of his remaining dozen followers were beaten to death on the spot by the villagers.

Only six or seven people remained with him — yet the pursuing forces behind grew ever closer.

Seeing that escape was impossible, Li Xionghu hatched a plan: he had one of his personal guards disguise himself as him and run with the others in one direction, while he himself fled in another.

Those few guards discussed it while Li Xionghu slept. If they obeyed him, death was certain. But if they captured Li Xionghu and handed him over to Guan Tinghou, there might still be a way to survive.

So while Li Xionghu was asleep, they brought a club crashing down hard on his head, then piled on top of him.

Perhaps because Li Xionghu had such a ferocious reputation, and was so powerfully built, they dared not be careless.

As a result, they struck far too hard — and this overlord who had raged across the southern reaches for over a decade was beaten to death.

When those men realized Li Xionghu was already dead, they were all terrified. Looking again at him — this great villain of the southern lands had died with his eyes wide open, his leopard eyes fixed and staring, as though watching them still.

Those men were so frightened they turned and ran — and before they had gotten very far, they were spotted by Guan Tinghou’s men and all captured alive.

Guan Tinghou came close, saw that Li Xionghu was already dead, and ordered his men to find a coffin to put him in — giving Li Xionghu at least one last shred of dignity in the end.

And so this great bandit who had rampaged across several provinces of the southern realm, killing countless numbers, came to such an unceremonious end.

Guan Tinghou ordered the men who had killed Li Xionghu torn apart by five horses — a bloody and gruesome death.

After utterly annihilating Li Xionghu’s southern force, Guan Tinghou did not return to Yuezhou — instead, he continued driving his army north.

When his forces advanced to Hangcheng, the Chuang Army general Pu Cun, holding the city, opened the gates and surrendered without any warning whatsoever.

From that point on, this Guan Tinghou who had suddenly emerged seized both Yuezhou and Yangzhou in rapid succession.

And his military strength had already grown sufficient to threaten Suzhou, which was under Ning Army control. When the news reached Jingzhou, even Tang Pidi was forced to consider a temporary withdrawal.

And only then did people truly understand the farsightedness of Tang Pidi’s vision.

When he had met with the Chuang Army General Cao Ying, he had advised Cao Ying to hold Hangcheng firmly. Had Cao Ying not vacillated and held fast, Suzhou would not now be threatened by anyone.

It was a pity that Tang Pidi’s careful planning had come to nothing — the loss of Hangcheng forced the Ning Army to entirely rethink its dispositions.

Meanwhile, Li Chi and the others in Jingzhou received two pieces of news.

The first came from the northwest of Jizhou — Lian Xifu had sent someone to Jingzhou to report that there was no sign of anything suspicious in the northwest of Jizhou.

The Yong Army had not appeared in Jizhou.

That message had barely arrived when the intelligence operatives Li Chi had sent toward Shuzhou delivered another piece of news.

Han Feibao, self-proclaimed Military Governor of Yongzhou, had led his army of several hundred thousand battle-hardened Yong troops and appeared in Shuzhou.

Shuzhou Military Governor Pei Qi had personally welcomed Han Feibao through the pass. After the Yong Army received a massive supply of provisions and equipment in Shuzhou, they had set out — their target: Jingzhou.

When this news came back, Li Chi’s advisors and scholars finally understood the depth of the Ning King’s far-reaching foresight.

In truth, Li Chi had not been certain the Yong Army would enter Shuzhou — but something had felt wrong to him.

After the Dachu Emperor Yang Jing devised his abdication scheme, the configuration of the realm shifted immediately.

Those who had been watching from the shadows all along could sit still no longer.

Li Chi was always at his best striking last — and only now did he realize that among those waiting to strike last, there were many players across the realm.

Though he knew nothing yet of Han Feibao’s background, this person was likely a far greater threat than Yang Xuanji.

And when you considered it alongside the sudden, unexplained death of the previous Yongzhou Military Governor — it made the origins of this Han Feibao all the more suspicious.

When the realm had fallen into chaos before, the Yongzhou Military Governor had made no move whatsoever — clearly having no ambitions to contend for the realm.

He had calculated that no matter who eventually won the realm, his position as Yongzhou Military Governor would remain as secure as a mountain — and as long as he still commanded troops in Yongzhou, his family members in Daxing City would be safe. Whoever took Daxing City would do their utmost to protect his family, in exchange for his eventual submission to the new dynasty of the central plains.

Only under such calculations would he have been willing to yield to the new order.

Yet he had died suddenly without warning, with no sons at his side — and Han Feibao took command of the Yong Army.

All of this seemed, dimly and indistinctly, to already be connected to the people Mr. Li had spoken of.

Mr. Li had sent back no word for several months now. After Yu Jiuling returned to Yuzhou City, settled Li Zhiye safely, and rushed back to find him — no news had come back from that direction either.

And now the Yong Army had appeared in Shuzhou, entering through a route that should have been impossible — which made the situation extraordinarily complicated.

Guan Tinghou holding Yuezhou and Yangzhou. Han Feibao emerging from Shuzhou. Yang Xuanji right there in Jingzhou.

These three forces had formed a massive iron pincer, clamping down hard around Jingzhou.

And their purpose, of course, was to block the Ning Army from entering Jingzhou — to stop Li Chi from entering Daxing City to receive the Dachu Emperor’s abdication.

That was an imperial abdication, after all — far more legitimate than seizing the realm by force.

Li Chi looked at the letter in his hand and slowly let out a breath.

“This realm — is even more interesting than I had imagined.”

—