With the threat of the catapults eliminated, Xiahou Zuo led the main force of the Ning Army to shore rapidly. There was no rallying of troops, no waiting—they launched a fierce assault without even waiting for the ranks to form.
Their objective was singular: rescue Prince Ning!
Xiahou Zuo, who had not personally taken to the battlefield in a long while, wielded his long spear with fluid, sweeping strikes.
Under his lead, the momentum of the Ning Army soldiers charging forward was nothing short of overwhelming—like a force that could crush dry wood and break withered branches.
The Yong Province Army had always been proud, yet this time, their pride was ground to dust by the Ning Army and stomped on twice for good measure.
By this point, Han Feibao knew the tide had turned against him.
If he rallied his forces for a decisive battle, the vanguard had already collapsed, and there was a real chance the center and rear formations would be dragged down with it.
What was most dangerous about this kind of situation was the risk of the Ning Army pressing against the retreating Yong Province soldiers and driving them backward into their own lines, leaving the rear formations unable to fight freely.
If that happened, what had started as a river-crossing battle for the Ning Army would become an all-out decisive engagement—and the Yong Province Army, despite their numerical advantage, might find themselves routed outright.
If they were to suffer such an inexplicable defeat, all the years of scheming in Yong Province would have amounted to nothing.
So Han Feibao made a swift decision: he abandoned the vanguard and ordered the center and rear formations to pull back, creating distance to prevent being struck by their own retreating soldiers.
This battle was lost. The vanguard—tens of thousands of men—was given to Prince Ning Li Chi as a parting gift.
As the horns sounded, the Yong Province Army began withdrawing in orderly fashion. The rear guard became the vanguard, and the center became the rear.
After pulling back roughly twenty li, they immediately reformed their battle array. With their lines standing firm, if the Ning Army dared to advance again, Han Feibao would not shy away from that decisive engagement either.
In terms of numbers, the Yong Province Army alone fielded four hundred thousand soldiers. Adding the forces he had brought from Shu Province when he set out, his total strength exceeded five hundred thousand men.
Even after losing the vanguard—six or seventy thousand casualties—the Yong Province Army still held an absolute advantage.
The Ning Army’s total strength was under two hundred thousand, and more than half of those were fresh recruits trained by Xie Xiu in Jing Province.
So the spearhead unit of the Ning Army’s attack was its true core force—fewer than fifty thousand men.
Han Feibao understood clearly: if Prince Ning Li Chi still had his wits about him and had not let a temporary victory go to his head, Li Chi would not order a pursuit.
On the battlefield, the Ning Army soldiers had swept through the Yong Province vanguard like a crashing tide, engulfing them entirely. Where before the Yong Province soldiers had been surrounding Li Chi’s unit, now the Ning Army main force had arrived, and it was the Ning Army encircling those tens of thousands of Yong Province men.
The fierce fighting lasted roughly two hours. Every Yong Province soldier who had failed to retreat in time was killed—not a single prisoner was taken.
This was not because Li Chi and his men chose to take no prisoners. Whether to take prisoners is a decision made after the battle is over.
The fact that not one Yong Province soldier was captured alive spoke volumes about the ferocity of these northwest wolves.
When they fought, they were brutal not only to their enemies but to themselves—they would die before surrendering.
It was the first time Li Chi’s Ning Army had encountered such enemies. These men were nearly equal in fighting strength, and in spirit and momentum, they were not far behind either.
When the great battle ended, Li Chi did indeed refrain from ordering a continued pursuit. Pressing further would have turned a great victory into a great defeat.
As the troops reorganized, Xiahou Zuo searched frantically across the battlefield for any sign of Li Chi, his eyes red as blood with urgency.
“Prince Ning is over there!”
A Ning Army soldier who had pulled back gestured ahead. “On that high slope over there.”
Xiahou Zuo was so overwhelmed he was nearly in tears. He had never been so frightened in his life, and upon hearing that Li Chi was still alive, the surge of emotion that hit him was almost more than he could bear.
He rushed urgently to the high slope ahead, and there he saw Li Chi standing with his hands on his hips, scanning the distant Yong Province enemy positions.
Li Chi heard the footsteps and turned to look. Seeing that it was Xiahou Zuo and the others running toward him, he planted his hands on his hips with an even more swaggering air.
“Come on then, praise me. Line up and do it one by one—no repeating what someone else already said. Anyone who repeats gets three cups of wine as a penalty.”
Xiahou Zuo glared at Li Chi, the redness in his eyes looking as if it might overflow.
Li Chi laughed. “If you won’t praise me, that’s fine—just please don’t criticize me.”
Xiahou Zuo was silent for a moment, then stepped forward and pulled Li Chi into a fierce embrace. “You scared me half to death, you bastard.”
Li Chi chuckled. “What’s the big deal? It’s not like I haven’t done this sort of thing before.”
He patted Xiahou Zuo on the shoulder. “Pull yourself together quickly—you’re being awfully weepy right now. Not a good look, not a good look at all.”
Xiahou Zuo: “……”
He released his arms and looked Li Chi up and down. Li Chi was covered head to toe in blood. From the gaps in his armor, blood was still trickling down. The man looked like something conjured from blood itself—not a trace of his original color remained.
“Han Feibao has the makings of a real commander.”
Li Chi paid no mind to the state he was in. He knew he had not been injured, so he had no worries for himself—but anyone else who saw him like this would feel their heart seize with dread.
Li Chi pointed toward the Yong Province Army’s position and said, “They pulled back twenty li and immediately formed their battle array. If we pursue, we will come out the worse for it—badly so.”
Xiahou Zuo nodded. “Their reaction was indeed swift.”
Li Chi said, “Then this is a perfect time for us to rest. Have the troops set up solid defenses. Han Feibao won’t have time to counter-attack right now, but once he has his forces in order, he will strike back quickly. At that point, with our backs to the Tuotuo River, under their fierce assault we would have no way to retreat.”
After nodding, Xiahou Zuo asked, “Should we make camp here?”
Li Chi shook his head. “No. Send teams to burn all of the catapults. Enemy armor and supplies—take back whatever can be carried, and burn what cannot. Pass the order to the troops: no later than three hours from now, every unit must have withdrawn back to the north bank.”
He glanced back at the field of corpses. “Their leather armor is better than ours. Don’t waste it. The weapons and rattan shields too—take it all back.”
Xiahou Zuo agreed and dispatched men to carry out the orders.
Once the others had largely dispersed, he turned to Li Chi and said, “You must not do something like this again.”
Li Chi said, “Do you think there will be many more opportunities for me to personally take to the field and fight in the future?”
Xiahou Zuo pressed his lips together.
Li Chi laughed. “I had thought that with their years of scheming and long grip on the world’s affairs, they would have extraordinary methods and remarkable figures to show for it. But after this battle, Han Feibao no longer seems to me a match for an equal.”
He tilted his head back toward the sky. “Whatever they are, wherever they come from—whoever stands in my way, I will trample them flat, every last one.”
Xiahou Zuo burst into laughter.
Meanwhile.
Jing Province.
At the city gates of Daxing, Prince Wu bowed in farewell to Emperor Yang Jing before setting out personally to lead a great army in search of provisions.
Here in Jing Province remained the adversary he feared most—one who had remained entirely still, which left him deeply unsettled.
Looking back, Prince Wu would never have believed that one day he would be so preoccupied with and wary of a young man barely twenty years old.
Tang Pidi—that was a man of supreme composure, with an equally supreme grasp of the broader situation. A true master of command.
Prince Wu had led armies his entire life. He had killed countless young men who appeared to possess dazzling talent.
Every one of them had believed himself superior to Prince Wu, more powerful, more formidable—and every last one had been devoured by this old man, leaving not even fragments of bone behind.
When facing anyone on the battlefield, Prince Wu had never felt uncertain. He had no equal there.
Yet Tang Pidi’s appearance had made Prince Wu feel a sense of crisis. He felt as if he were looking at a younger version of himself—no, at this age, Tang Pidi was already far stronger than Prince Wu had been in his own youth.
So he had to resolve the matter of provisions before Tang Pidi made his move.
Without provisions, even if Prince Wu transformed into a god of war himself, he could not lead a starving army to victory against the enemy.
After leaving Daxing, Prince Wu launched attack after attack, reclaiming the various districts and counties that the Heavenly Mandate Army had previously occupied, taking them back one by one.
On the map, at least, the territories returning to court control grew greater with each passing day.
Yet the more land he took, the more Prince Wu’s heart filled with dread—because every prediction he had made was being confirmed, one by one.
Tang Pidi appeared to be taking no action at all. But in the shadows, he had already arranged everything.
First, the provisions. Tang Pidi had stripped every granary in the region bare. He left token forces to defend them, drawing Prince Wu’s army into attacking them—but the moment Prince Wu’s troops arrived, the Ning Army would withdraw without even engaging.
Yet Prince Wu could not simply stop pressing forward. Without food, he knew defeat was not far off.
What made Tang Pidi so infuriatingly clever was that every city with a granary had Ning Army troops stationed inside it. Prince Wu’s scouts would go to investigate, and every such city would have the Ning Army’s great banner flying from the walls, with Ning soldiers standing watch.
It was baiting him to attack, and he had no way of knowing which cities truly lacked provisions and which did not.
But after fighting his way through city after city, he discovered they were all the same—all hollow, none with food.
And by the time that became clear, his army had already marched very far from Daxing.
Turning back empty-handed now would not pose a survival problem—but what about the provisions? Without them, returning would mean waiting to die.
Pressing on meant moving ever farther from Daxing, and by now Prince Wu had a fairly clear sense of what Tang Pidi intended.
That young master of command wanted to make sure Prince Wu could not return to Daxing.
When the Ning Army launched its assault on Daxing in the future, whether Prince Wu was inside the city or not would make all the difference in the world.
With Prince Wu present, the already iron-walled fortress of Daxing would be doubly impregnable. Without him, Tang Pidi’s ability to command an army would make capturing Daxing far easier.
Better still if Prince Wu could be trapped deep in the wastelands of Jing Province—unable to return, without provisions—slowly grinding the finest and most elite of Dachu’s forces, the Left Valiant Guard, into oblivion through exhaustion and starvation.
Prince Wu had foreseen this. But for the moment, he had no other way to break out of it.
It was like having told your soldiers all along that wine and feasts lay ahead, only to turn around halfway through the march and say it was all a lie, let’s go back.
What the soldiers would think was one thing—whether they would still be able to fight was Prince Wu’s true concern.
“Your Highness!”
A scout came galloping back from the front and dropped to one knee before Prince Wu. “There is a large force of Ning Army troops garrisoning Buzhou ahead. From the numbers visible on the city walls, it far exceeds any of the other cities we have taken so far.”
Prince Wu inwardly sighed. He could hear the anticipation in that scout’s voice.
Everyone hoped that the next city they took would have provisions. That hope was now the only thing still driving them to keep fighting the enemy.
“Buzhou…”
The men around him all looked to Prince Wu. “Do we attack?”
Prince Wu rose slowly. “Attack.”
So the main force of the Left Valiant Guard launched another assault on a city—but again, just as before, the Ning Army showed no intention of fighting. The moment the Left Valiant Guard arrived, they withdrew immediately.
Yet this time, something was different. Inside Buzhou, the Left Valiant Guard discovered at least several hundred carts that had not been moved in time, all of them loaded with grain.
Though several hundred carts of grain was a drop in the bucket for an army of two hundred thousand, it was hope.
Prince Wu’s eyes lit up.
That meant to the north of Buzhou, the Ning Army had not yet had time to move its provisions. If they pressed further, perhaps every city would have grain to offer.
Not only did Prince Wu’s eyes brighten—the eyes of every man in the Left Valiant Guard brightened.
—