Watching the Black Wu’s enormous towers topple one after another, Li Chi and Xiahou Zuo stood there completely dumbfounded. Events like this defied rational explanation — from where they stood, there was genuinely no reasonable interpretation. If there had been even a marginally sensible one, Xiahou Zuo would never have asked, in the middle of a battlefield, on this most solemn occasion, whether Li Chi had cast a spell.
Yet that wasn’t even the strangest part. Shortly after the towers had fallen in succession, fire erupted in the rear of the Black Wu camp. Within moments, black smoke was billowing up, and from the speed at which it spread, multiple points were clearly burning at once.
Judging by the position, that would be the Black Wu supply depot — so from Li Chi’s perspective, those towering flames were nothing short of a magnificent fireworks display.
Now standing on the wall and watching the Black Wu forces — who had not yet breached the walls but had been gaining ground — begin to withdraw, Li Chi and Xiahou Zuo exchanged another look.
Both men felt as though they were dreaming. A turn of events this dramatic, even someone as uncannily capable as Li Chi could never have predicted.
This was clearly an internal collapse within the Black Wu camp — yet it was an internal collapse that defied all logic.
Ye Fulie’s talent for commanding troops could be called the finest in all of Black Wu. To call him the Black Wu equivalent of Prince Wu would not be an overstatement. The Black Wu generals serving under him could not possibly be dissatisfied — beneath a commander of such absolute authority, even if subordinates harbored friction with one another, open mutiny was unthinkable.
—
Out in the Black Wu army, Ye Fulie’s expression had turned to something beyond description.
“What in all hells happened?!”
He demanded of the messenger who had come running with the report.
The supply depot at the rear had caught fire — inexplicably, at multiple points simultaneously — and had quickly consumed the entire camp. The provisions and materiel for an army of a million men were stored there. With a catastrophe of this magnitude, it wasn’t merely a question of whether the assault on Beishan Pass could continue — maintaining the army’s cohesion at all was now in doubt.
“General…”
The messenger’s face was equally pale. His words stumbled and halted.
“It should be… it should be the Chile people.”
“The Chile people?”
Ye Fulie seized the man by his collar and hoisted him off the ground with one arm: “If you conceal a single word, I will flay you alive right now.”
—
The Black Wu Empire was perhaps the largest nation in the world by territory, and likewise the most diverse in its tribal composition. Within Black Wu, hundreds of tribes existed, large and small, the most exalted of which were naturally the Eight Tribes of Guiyue.
The reason Black Wu had been able to erect the framework of such a vast empire in such a short time was largely because it had inherited most of the Meng Empire’s existing structure.
There are many cycles in this world — not coincidental ones, but cycles that make perfect sense in hindsight.
The Meng Empire had once seized Black Wu’s entire vast territory in less than three years. To maintain control, the Meng cavalry unleashed a campaign of bloodshed across that land that lasted for years. Countless smaller tribes and kingdoms were wiped out entirely.
This brutal slaughter produced short-lived compliance, but resistance came swiftly in its wake. The rebel forces led by the Eight Tribes of Guiyue grew ever stronger, while the Meng forces had no means to suppress every corner of territory that large.
After Black Wu was founded, the Meng nobles and civilians who had been unable to flee were subjected to furious reprisals from the Eight Tribes of Guiyue. Meng noble families wiped out to the last member were beyond counting. Even those who survived spent the following centuries living under iron oppression — Black Wu’s treatment of them was far harsher than toward any other group.
This was the Chile tribe — the people who had once built the Meng Empire — still living within Black Wu’s borders, unable to return to the steppe.
As with the Meng Empire before them, Black Wu had imposed a rigid hierarchy on its tribal peoples.
The Eight Tribes of Guiyue sat at the apex. The other Black Wu tribes were first-tier. The peoples who had originally inhabited that land before Black Wu’s rise were second-tier. The various steppe peoples who had subsequently submitted to Black Wu were third-tier — but the Chile were not among that third tier.
Within Black Wu, there was a category of people even lower in status than slaves — the children born of Bohai women and Black Wu men. Vast numbers of Bohai women had been sent as tribute to Black Wu as slaves, and the Black Wu nobility didn’t see them as human beings at all. When these women bore children, the father might be the master or might be another slave — no one cared. These children, in Black Wu eyes, ranked below pigs and dogs — for slaves were on par with livestock, so such children ranked beneath even slaves.
And the Chile were regarded as roughly equivalent.
The Chile, who had once built the mightiest empire in the world, had no shred of dignity left to them inside Black Wu.
—
Listening to his subordinate’s account, Ye Fulie’s expression had gone to the darkest place imaginable.
The Chile had historically served as the labor force for Black Wu armies on campaign — every dirty, exhausting, or suicidal task fell to the Chile.
Just ten or so days earlier, huge numbers of Chile slaves had been herded like livestock, driven along to transport the enormous siege weapons. When they arrived, they weren’t permitted even a drink of water before being ordered to assemble the towers and catapults within a matter of days.
The Chile chieftain was named Bulegedì — nearly forty years of age, built like a lion — but with none of a lion’s standing.
He had come this time with more than eighty thousand Chile to transport provisions for the Black Wu army. On the road here, casualties among his people had been severe — by the time they arrived, fewer than sixty thousand remained.
In the rush to deliver the supplies, Black Wu soldiers who already treated the Chile as subhuman had beaten and brutalized them relentlessly throughout the journey.
The Chile, long accustomed to such treatment, had shown little outward reaction at first.
Then — after two days and two nights without rest, after delivering the supplies to the Black Wu camp — they were denied any rest and driven to assemble the siege weapons and haul provisions to the front lines.
Those who collapsed from exhaustion were immediately kicked and flogged with leather whips.
While Bulegedì was pushing one of the great carts forward, a fifteen-year-old boy in front of him collapsed from sheer depletion.
Two Black Wu soldiers rushed over and began whipping the boy — lashing him until blood soaked through the skin. The boy had already drawn his last breath, yet those two men still didn’t stop.
Bulegedì’s fury broke. He could endure no more, and hurled himself over the boy’s body to shield him. The Black Wu soldiers turned their rage on him.
Bulegedì was seized, chained through the shoulders, and hung from a wooden frame on public display — kept alive with just enough water and scraps of food to ensure he didn’t die, so that the Chile could see him every day and know what awaited them if they didn’t comply.
What the Black Wu hadn’t anticipated was that this very punishment dealt to Bulegedì was what finally broke the Chile beyond endurance. They decided to rescue their chieftain.
But how could a rescue be carried out within a Black Wu army of a million men?
The elders of the tribe gathered in secret and deliberated for a long while before deciding to take the risk.
They sabotaged the towers. They’d had ample opportunity — the Chile were the very ones being driven to push those towers toward the walls to die.
They despised the Black Wu with every fiber of their being. If they were going to strike back, they would do it completely.
After discussion among the elders, they concluded that a portion of their people would have to become death-pledged fighters — those who would destroy the towers. They knew these machines better than anyone, having built and assembled them with their own hands.
When the towers fell, it would inevitably draw the Black Wu army’s attention. That was when the Chile still inside the supply depot would seize horses, burn the provisions, and rescue their chieftain.
The Chile men pushing those towers forward knew, from the very first step they took, what their end would be.
Yet under the weight of hatred accumulated over hundreds of years, they had no fear of death.
The Chile had for generations served as laborers in the Black Wu army — but beyond that, they were also used to tame horses.
When the Meng Empire’s cavalry had swept the world, the Black Wu saw the power of mounted warfare. The Chile survivors left behind in Black Wu territory had been spared total extermination precisely because the Black Wu needed them to tend their horses.
Now, led by their elders, the Chile struck first at the horse yards in the supply camp.
The Black Wu garrison left in the rear was far outnumbered by the Chile, and the Chile had a ferocity bred into them in the bone — once they moved, the horse yards fell quickly.
They seized weapons and mounts from the garrison, and in the manner of their ancestors, launched a swift charge straight into the supply depot.
After freeing Bulegedì, they set fires as they went to slow any Black Wu pursuit.
Within a short time, the supply camp that had sustained a million Black Wu soldiers was swallowed entirely in flames.
Tens of thousands of Chile seized virtually every horse and broke out from one flank, then rode clear. They were natural-born riders — once they had blades in hand and horses beneath them, they were a cavalry that could come and go like the wind.
After breaking out of the supply camp, those tens of thousands of riders swept away into the distance. Perhaps at this very moment they still had no clear destination — they only knew they wanted to escape that hell.
—
When he had heard the entire report, Ye Fulie felt as if his heart might simply burst from fury.
He had known nothing of how the Chile chieftain had been treated. With his capacity for command, his manner of conducting affairs, his meticulous habits of thought — he never would have permitted his subordinates to punish the Chile chieftain, not with a major battle imminent.
Though in his own view, of course, those lowly Chile did deserve to be kept in line.
But who could have imagined that such a mob of insects could destroy a campaign Black Wu had schemed over for so long?
How much had Ye Fulie invested in breaking the Ning Army’s defense of Beishan Pass?
The towers, the catapults, the coordinated tactics — all of it had emerged from long deliberation.
And now all of it had been ruined by insects.
A thousand-li levee, truly brought down by an ant hole.
Even if it didn’t force a full Black Wu retreat, a massive portion of the army would now have to be diverted immediately to secure provisions.
—
On the walls of Beishan Pass.
Li Chi peered through his spyglass and watched the flames roaring up from the rear of the Black Wu camp. He also watched a cavalry force sweep away into the distance.
Thinking back to the towers collapsing earlier, a rough picture began to take shape.
“Who are those riders, do you think?”
Xiahou Zuo murmured to himself.
Li Chi said: “Whoever they are — from this moment, they and we share a common enemy. That enemy is Black Wu.”
Xiahou Zuo thought carefully before speaking: “They look like it might be a slave revolt. Black Wu’s military laborers have historically been the Chile.”
Li Chi slowly exhaled and clasped his fists in the direction those riders had vanished toward: “Whether they’re Chile or not, and whatever their reasons — we owe them thanks.”
Xiahou Zuo clasped his fists toward them as well.
Then he said: “If they truly are Chile, they’ll probably try to race back to their homeland before Black Wu can get word back — then break out somewhere toward other territory. Black Wu will definitely dispatch forces to suppress and encircle them.”
Li Chi said: “Then we owe them thanks twice.”
With that, he clasped his fists in their direction once more.
—