Zeng Ling’s preparations on the east wall had been thorough enough — he believed they were more than sufficient to hold.

To stop Luo Jing and his three thousand Tiger-Leopard Cavalry, Zeng Ling had committed no fewer than fifteen thousand Jizhou soldiers, closing off the front and surrounding the rear.

And not only those fifteen thousand seasoned fighters.

There were also Zeng Ling’s two most capable generals: Liu Ge and Jinzu — both men who could ride freely into any formation and out again.

Still it had not been enough.

Jinzu was dead in battle. Liu Ge gravely wounded.

And that arrogant young general had already cut his way inside the gate — and had split the crossbar with a single lance stroke.

Through all the ages, brave soldiers who dared to charge enemy formations head-on were not uncommon; but among those who charged and managed to break through and return, the number was far smaller.

Luo Jing split the gate bar, turned, and ordered: “Pull the gate open!”

The dozens of fighters behind him rushed forward — every one of them a man of exceptional size and strength, with arms to match.

They tore out the bar and heaved at the gates with all their strength. The instant the gate swung open, the Yuzhou soldiers who had been pressing against the outside all seemed to freeze for a moment.

For that one instant, no one could process what had just happened. Then, a moment later, they poured through the gate like a tide.

Luo Jing seemed to have anticipated it all beforehand. He had already turned back to his men, lance leveled: “Strike the flanks!”

The fighters and Tiger-Leopard Cavalry soldiers surged sideways with all their strength — otherwise the Yuzhou soldiers flooding through the gate would have swept them off their feet.

Outside the walls.

“The city’s fallen!”

“Jizhou City has fallen!”

The shouts came one after another.

In the distance, Qingzhou Military Commissioner Cui Yanlai stood on a rise with his spyglass raised. He had been waiting until his patience was nearly gone.

Now, seeing the gate flung open, he immediately shouted: “Sound the horn — order the full army to strike hard at the Yuzhou flank! Drive Yuzhou back!”

The great horns were raised. Their deep sound rolled out again and again.

The Qingzhou army, which had been waiting for this exact moment, immediately charged forward. They had been resting while the Yuzhou army had been battering at the walls all day and half the night; the Qingzhou army had merely watched from the side the entire time.

Within moments, the Qingzhou van crashed into the Yuzhou formation, and both sides — as though it had been an open understanding — showed no surprise at the other’s attack.

The Yuzhou army immediately detached forces to form a line blocking Qingzhou from striking east toward the city gate.

Two armies, each over a hundred thousand strong: the open plain outside became a field of carnage for both.

The mass of humanity pushed inward; blades and spears turned toward each other.

Cui Yanlai and Liu Li — one had lost his Qingzhou, the other had lost his Yuzhou. Both wanted to seize Jizhou’s great city as a new base of power.

What looked like an alliance on the surface — but who could have truly meant it?

Outside the walls, the battle was already fiercer than the one within.

After breaking open the gate, Luo Jing had not paused for a single breath. He immediately led his men to strike the flanks.

He had apparently known all along that the army outside was not his father’s Youzhou forces, so the moment the gate was open, he left at once.

His force pressed along beneath the city wall and broke out, Luo Jing still opening the road, ignoring everything else, thinking only of getting through.

At this point, the Jizhou army’s primary opponent had shifted from Luo Jing’s Tiger-Leopard Cavalry to the Yuzhou soldiers streaming through the gate.

“Form up!”

The wounded Liu Ge had lost all concern for Luo Jing’s men. Luo Jing’s remaining force numbered no more than seven or eight hundred; the Yuzhou army outside numbered over a hundred thousand.

He roared out commands, directing the troops inside the gate to form ranks. The formation that had been blocking Luo Jing now needed to block the Yuzhou army.

The shield-bearers immediately formed a semicircle to ring the gate; archers behind them loosed in a frenzy.

The Yuzhou soldiers filing through the gate dropped in wave after wave. The bodies piling on the ground were rising at a visible pace.

“Push them out! Force them back!”

Liu Ge’s voice had already gone ragged — hoarse as wind blowing across a dry, cracked wasteland in the northwest.

It was a moment of life and death. Jizhou soldiers all had red eyes. Arrows flew into the gate tunnel without stop. One layer of white-fletched shafts was buried beneath a layer of bodies; a fresh layer was laid on top; another layer of bodies pressed it down; another layer of shafts was laid.

Seeing the Yuzhou army falter slightly, Liu Ge immediately shouted: “Shields forward, spearmen advance!”

The shield-and-spear formations gathered specifically to stop the Tiger-Leopard Cavalry now showed their greatest power — against an entirely different enemy.

A sea of dark figures pressed toward the gate from the inside; an equally thick sea pressed in from outside. The Yuzhou soldiers caught in the middle became the sacrifice, with nowhere forward, nowhere back, dying layer by layer.

The shield wall pressed in; the spearmen behind it had all gone blood-mad. Who could think carefully about targets at a moment like this? They simply drove their spears forward over and over without stopping.

Those dense spear shafts thrust out, were drawn back, thrust out, were drawn back — repeating the motion endlessly, reaping lives in the same rhythm.

The Yuzhou army had more men; if they could have concentrated their force on the gate, they might have held the advantage. But they could not concentrate: the Qingzhou army was determined to shove them out of the way.

Inside the city, killing. Outside the walls, killing.

This field of battle had become an immense grinding wheel.

The scene was already chaotic enough.

Yet somehow it could still become more chaotic.

Qingzhou was striking hard at the Yuzhou flank; Luo Geng’s Youzhou army had arrived. Led by heavy cavalry, they crashed into the Qingzhou rear.

Layer within layer. Layer upon layer.

But Luo Geng was not the final layer.

Just when Liu Li and Cui Yanlai had both killed themselves into a frenzy, horns began sounding from the north.

The Yanshan Camp had arrived.

This night was destined to be written into the history books.

From Yanshan Camp to Jizhou was a journey that should have taken more than ten days; the Yanshan Camp covered the distance in nine.

Without any rest, the Yanshan Camp immediately launched a ferocious assault on the government troops in their path. In the darkness it was impossible to distinguish whose formation was whose — and it didn’t matter: attack, and be done with it.

They couldn’t tell the formations apart, but they could see that the east gate of Jizhou had been breached, and everyone wanted to drive through it.

The killing went through the night; when dawn came, it was still ongoing.

When the sun rose, its light could not reach the soil east of the city wall, for every inch of that soil was covered by the dead.

Bodies blanketed the field.

The Yuzhou army was the most ill-fated of all, caught on two sides. If they had only needed to hold the Qingzhou army, it might have been manageable — because Qingzhou was itself being squeezed from behind by the Youzhou forces.

But with the Yanshan Camp’s arrival, the Yuzhou army became the filling inside the filling — struck from three sides: the frenzied Qingzhou army on one flank, the Yanshan Camp on another, and fiercest of all, the Jizhou army.

And then came something no one had foreseen — something that, even imagined, seemed impossible — right there at the east gate of Jizhou.

What stood between the Yuzhou army and the Jizhou army were the bodies of soldiers from both sides. So many had died that the dead had filled the gate tunnel entirely shut.

Who could have imagined such a scene?

—

The underground chamber.

Li Chi had long since woken. Though he had taken a blow, after sleeping through half a day and a full night, his spirit had mostly recovered, and the red had faded from his eyes.

As Tang Pidi had said: he had wanted to save Yu Chaozong, and so he had spent an entire night in thought over this battle, over how many shifts it might take. The feeling of it — someone without sufficient breadth of vision could not begin to imagine.

He had been like a giant who had grown to enormous size, or a soul floating up into the void. Before the great battle had even begun, he had already been looking down at it from above.

He had paused it again and again, had enlarged one corner of that vast field again and again, looking to see if any gap might be exploited.

Again and again he paused. Again and again he enlarged. Again and again came disappointment.

The surging of blood — that had been entirely to be expected.

Others watched a war after it had begun. Li Chi had already seen what would unfold outside these walls even before the first blow was struck.

But although Li Chi had woken, he still could not get out of bed.

Because he had been tied to it — more precisely, wrapped: rope wound around him again and again, round after round. The coils weren’t tight, but there were so many of them that if there were any more, he would simply be one of the room’s furnishings.

“Do you want to know who hit you?” Gao Xining asked.

Li Chi shook his head. “I want to know more who tied me up.”

Gao Xining said: “First came the hitting, then came the tying, so let’s take this one step at a time.”

Li Chi sighed: “Does it really need to go step by step…”

He pursed his lips and tilted his chin toward his chest. There on the rope, tied across his front, was a bow-knot. Did she even need to ask?

Gao Xining’s cheeks colored faintly, slightly abashed. “I didn’t tie it very well.”

Li Chi sighed again. “If I said you tied it just fine — would you undo it?”

“Not yet,” Gao Xining said. “Tang Pidi said it couldn’t be undone before he came back.”

Shen Rujian was still lounging at the door in her customary unhurried fashion. She cut in at precisely the right moment.

“He really is insufferable. First he knocks you out, then he won’t let anyone untie you easily.”

Li Chi said: “I remember who it was…”

Shen Rujian: “You’re remembering wrong.”

Li Chi: “…”

Just then, Tang Pidi came in from outside. He looked somewhat tired; he had left the underground chamber after dark and had been watching the battle ever since.

“What’s the situation?” Li Chi asked the moment he saw Tang Pidi.

Tang Pidi shook his head. “Not well. The Yanshan Camp has arrived.”

Li Chi’s face went instantly white.

Tang Pidi stared at the layers of rope coiled around Li Chi, and paused: “Who tied this?”

Li Chi looked at Gao Xining. The meaning in his gaze was clear: didn’t you say Tang Pidi ordered no one to untie me until he came back — but Tang Pidi doesn’t even know about this?

Tang Pidi read Li Chi’s expression and understood. He glanced at Gao Xining, then glanced at Shen Rujian.

Then Tang Pidi said: “If I’m not mistaken, I just had two pots hung around my neck? Two of them?”

Li Chi said: “Then aren’t you going to untie me?”

Tang Pidi said: “Leave it.”

Li Chi: “…”

Tang Pidi pulled over a stool and sat down beside Li Chi, then said: “I’ve already had the men seal the entrance again from the inside. For the next few days I’m not going out, and you’re certainly not.”

Li Chi opened his mouth. Tang Pidi shot him a look. Li Chi closed it.

“I changed into Jizhou army uniforms,” Tang Pidi said, “and quietly slipped into the defending forces. Spent the whole night on the wall with them — no one recognized me. That’s exactly why I got a clear view of the battle.”

He paused, then continued: “The Yuzhou army had already forced its way through the gate, then was ambushed by the Qingzhou army. The Qingzhou army was then ambushed by the Youzhou army. And right on their heels, the Yanshan Camp’s forces struck the Yuzhou army from the north.”

Yu Jiuling, standing to one side, muttered to himself: “The Yuzhou army has it rough.”

Tang Pidi heard him, turned back to glance at Yu Jiuling, and said: “Because among all the armies outside, the Yuzhou forces were the strongest. Never mind that the Yanshan Camp couldn’t tell them apart in the chaos — even if they could, they would have struck the Yuzhou forces first. And that position they held was too terrible to begin with — anyone standing there would have been hit from both sides.”

He looked at Li Chi again and said: “The melee will continue. It won’t be decided in a few days. So lie down here and stay put.”

Li Chi pleaded: “Can I at least not lie down?”

Tang Pidi asked: “Who tied this exactly?”

Gao Xining said, somewhat awkwardly: “Me…”

“Not bad,” Tang Pidi said. “In a moment I’ll undo it for him… and then you can retie him to the chair. He says he doesn’t want to lie down.”

Li Chi: “…”

—