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For several days in a row, the Ning army did not attack — they simply bombarded Mei City relentlessly with their trebuchets.
One hundred and fifty trebuchets hurled stones into the city day and night without pause. At regular intervals they adjusted the range, making sure every corner of Mei City received its share.
The section of the outer wall facing them was left with almost no battlement merlon intact.
Since the Ning army showed no sign of actually storming the walls, Pei Qi’s soldiers had stopped standing guard up there — hiding wherever they could. The gatehouse had been pounded full of holes, its roof riddled with gaping craters, making it useless as shelter.
Most of the men huddled at the base of the inner wall, which should have been the safest spot — yet even there, shattered bricks could fall and injure them.
After days of continuous bombardment, Pei Qi’s troops stopped even pretending to man the walls; the Ning army wasn’t coming up anyway.
Then, on the sixth day, they suddenly heard a series of horn blasts from the Ning side.
The lookouts still posted on the walls snapped to attention and peered out. The Ning army was forming up their ranks.
Horns rang out on the city walls in answer. The Shu Province soldiers who had been sheltering at the base scrambled up.
But the trebuchets had not stopped. They were forced to dash back to their positions under a rain of falling stone.
When they finally reached their posts, the trebuchets were still going — they had no choice but to weather it.
The Ning infantry columns began advancing in steady formation. Every Shu Province soldier on the wall tensed. The real clash seemed imminent.
But half a watch passed, and the Ning army, having assembled, still hadn’t moved quickly toward the walls. They were advancing — just barely faster than a crawl.
Their ranks were immaculate. It looked less like a charge and more like a slow drill march.
Their formation, however, was impeccable.
After enduring this for half a watch, the Ning army actually stopped.
By then the defenders on the walls had already suffered heavy casualties. After many days, the boulders had piled up on the walkways so thick that soldiers had little clear footing, making it hard to dodge.
Having taken this kind of punishment for so long, the Shu Province soldiers’ morale was crumbling.
They would rather have met the Ning army in a proper head-on fight. Shu Province men did not give up easily. But this suffocating, helpless kind of battle left them furious and frustrated — full of fight with nowhere to spend it.
Unable to endure the mounting casualties, Commander Pei Xuecheng reluctantly ordered most of the garrison to fall back from the walls temporarily.
On the Ning side, a lookout stationed in one of the tower wagons saw the mass withdrawal of Shu soldiers and immediately began waving signal flags.
At the signal, the Ning army picked up its pace.
Pei Xuecheng had no choice but to recall the men he had just sent down.
The moment the Shu soldiers returned to the walls, the Ning infantry columns stopped again.
Throughout all of this, the trebuchets never once paused.
Crouching beneath the wall, Pei Xuecheng’s expression was black. A general under his command crawled over — looking even worse.
“Commander, the casualties are becoming too great. Perhaps we should pull the men back for now. It’s clear the Ning army has no intention of actually storming the walls — they just want to bleed us.”
The general’s name was Xue Yun, one of Pei Xuecheng’s oldest subordinates, a man with over a decade of battlefield experience.
Even so, this kind of battle was a first for him.
“Disgusting bastards,” Pei Xuecheng spat.
He kept spitting — moments ago, a boulder had just grazed the battlement right above his head and smashed into the wall behind him, showering his face with shrapnel, some of it into his mouth.
“This can’t go on.”
Xue Yun said: “Roughly thirty zhang to the east, a section of the wall has already partially collapsed. It’s not large, but the Ning army has spotted it — those trebuchets seem to be targeting that breach now.”
“Disgusting bastards,” Pei Xuecheng muttered again.
He raised his head and looked outward. The Ning formation was still two or three li from the walls — within range of the wall-mounted crossbow carriages, but not close enough to do real damage. Besides, many of the heavy defensive crossbows had already been smashed, and they could no longer suppress the enemy’s movements.
“Half the men stand down,” Pei Xuecheng ordered.
Xue Yun acknowledged and crawled away.
The moment he vacated the spot — a thunderous crack. A boulder slammed into the wall and demolished the merlon entirely.
Had Xue Yun been even a heartbeat slower, he would have been crushed under stone and rubble.
He glanced back, his face draining of color.
The Shu soldiers began pulling back. Seeing this, the Ning army seemed to drop all pretense too — their columns turned and returned to camp.
That would have been fine as a one-time incident. But the next day the Ning army repeated the same routine, advancing in perfect formation once more.
The Shu Province garrison couldn’t afford not to respond. Up they went, back down, up again, then down again.
After this cycle repeated itself, the soldiers were seething with resentment.
Not a single Ning soldier had been killed yet — but the carnage on their own side had already spread fear.
If one were being honest, the boulders hadn’t killed nearly enough men to cripple the garrison’s defensive strength. These were massive stones, and they could be dodged; getting hit was simply bad luck, especially since the trebuchets operated from fixed positions and were only repositioned every two or three days.
What was truly devastating was the helpless rage of taking a beating with no way to strike back — and the growing reluctance to return to the walls at all.
What was the point of going up? Going up just meant getting pelted.
After ten days of this, the Ning army suddenly stopped — leaving the garrison completely bewildered.
Pei Xuecheng straightened up and raised his spyglass toward the Ning camp. The Ning army was dismantling the trebuchets they had used for those ten days.
The development baffled him.
He understood it soon enough. The trebuchets were being replaced — not retired.
Two or three days later, a fresh battery of trebuchets resumed their barrage on the walls.
The section that had partially collapsed before was now a gaping hole. The wall hadn’t fallen all the way to the ground, but half of it was gone — a broad breach, with its lowest edge roughly two zhang above the ground.
At that height, the Ning army couldn’t simply climb through. But they could keep hammering it down to ground level. What’s more, the concentrated targeting of this single spot had allowed a considerable mound of rubble to accumulate at the base.
The Imperial Palace.
Pei Qi summoned Pei Xuecheng and said with a dark expression: “The Ning army has been attacking for half a month. Have you come up with any plan?”
Pei Xuecheng understood what Pei Qi was asking. If they kept absorbing this punishment passively, morale would completely collapse before long.
But what could he do?
Counterattack?
The garrison’s total strength wasn’t even half of the Ning army. The seventy or eighty thousand men scraped together included nearly half who were raw recruits.
Shu Province had bled itself dry backing both Yang Xuanji and Han Feibao in their bids for dominance over the Central Plains. The result was a catastrophic loss of able-bodied men throughout the region.
From the moment Li Chi entered Shu Province, Pei Qi had never stopped conscripting — but the numbers fell far short of what he needed.
“Your Majesty…” Pei Xuecheng forced himself to speak. “I am planning to send a company of volunteers down through the breach under cover of night to raid the Ning army’s trebuchets.”
It was the only idea he had left.
Pei Qi had spent decades as a frontier administrator and military commander. He knew perfectly well how slim the chances of success were — slim enough to be called negligible.
But something had to be done. Morale had to be lifted somehow.
Even burning a single trebuchet would give the defenders of Mei City a scrap of hope to hold onto.
“Pick a brave officer,” Pei Qi said. “I will have five hundred fighters selected from the staff camp. Their individual skills are well above those of ordinary soldiers — for a raid like this, they will serve better.”
Pei Xuecheng could only nod. He knew full well he was sending these men to their deaths. But there was no other way.
That night, after the hour of Zi, General Xue Yun led a force of over a thousand men down through the breach using ropes lowered from the walls.
The descent was straightforward enough. For skilled fighters, jumping from two zhang up was nothing to worry about.
Of the thousand-plus men in the raiding party, five hundred were elite fighters from the staff camp. They had been promised — if they could destroy the Ning trebuchets, each man would receive two hundred taels of gold as reward.
Money does motivate men. Though in their current situation, even those who pocketed the gold would have nowhere to spend it.
Pei Xuecheng stood on the walls and waited. He ordered the ropes pulled back up, to be lowered again when his men returned.
After nearly a full watch, he suddenly saw flames leaping up from the direction of the Ning camp.
In that moment, Pei Xuecheng’s eyes went wide.
He had never truly believed this could work. This was a raid destined to fail, a force destined to be annihilated.
Seeing the flames, he was overcome. He was a Commander — not some wide-eyed rookie, not a man without composure. Yet in this moment, he genuinely felt like weeping.
The fires in the distance multiplied. Ball after ball of flame — like hands waving at the men on the walls, signaling their success.
“Give me the spyglass!”
His order came out urgent, almost desperate.
An aide rushed to hand it over. As Pei Xuecheng raised it, his hands were trembling.
He needed to see this. He needed to watch those accursed Ning trebuchets turn to ash, one by one.
He pressed the glass to his eye and stared toward the Ning camp, his gaze wide and intent.
The fires were still multiplying — so many it seemed almost impossible. Had the Ning army truly been completely unprepared?
He swallowed, throat tight.
Then he froze.
Something was… slightly off.
Over in the Ning camp, what he saw were bonfires — lit in a ring. And the Shu Province soldiers who had gone on the raid were being herded by the Ning troops to hold hands and dance around them.
The surrounding Ning soldiers were clapping along in time with the dancing…
Clatter.
Pei Xuecheng’s spyglass hit the ground.
……
……