Several iron spikes flew out and drove through the bodies of the four personal guards.

The supporting Magistrate soldiers rushed in swiftly, checked the bodies, and the men behind them immediately closed the courtyard gate.

“Jiang Mo.”

Fang Xidao turned and called out.

Jiang Mo responded at once: “Centurion Officer — I’m here.”

Fang Xidao looked at the gravely wounded Shang Qingzhu and spoke with urgency: “Take Shang Qingzhu with you and get him out of Anyang City. Don’t go overland — take the water route.”

Jiang Mo said: “Understood. But you two—”

“We have to stay.”

Du Yan said: “With Meng Kedi dead, the whole of Anyang is going to descend into chaos. Those people will tear at each other for control of the city.”

“That gives us the chance to do more — and to eliminate more of them. More than anything else, our staying behind gives us the ability to receive the General when he leads his forces south.”

Fang Xidao continued: “While word hasn’t spread too widely yet, move quickly. I’ll have the field medic from my squad go with you as well.”

Under the Magistrate’s Army’s configuration, every five-person unit included one person whose primary study was medicine. Others might acquire a broader range of skills, but this individual spent most of their time outside of basic training on medical study.

What they learned was directed and taught personally by Lady Xiahou.

The training period was not especially long, admittedly — but what they were learning was not meant for treating complex or unusual conditions. The focus was emergency care.

Among the five essential items every Magistrate soldier carried, there were also various medicinal preparations specially compounded by Shen’s Medical Hall.

At this very moment, the Magistrate’s Army’s field medic was already at work treating Shang Qingzhu.

Jiang Mo bowed deeply to Fang Xidao and Du Yan: “On behalf of our Centurion Officer, I thank you both.”

“Enough of that.”

Fang Xidao waved him off. “Get moving.”

—

A little over a month earlier, Shang Qingzhu had sent word back, informing Gao Xining that he had confirmed there was indeed activity in Anyang and that he intended to handle it.

When Gao Xining received that message, she immediately understood: the target Shang Qingzhu meant to eliminate was not merely the jianghu assassins — it was Meng Kedi himself.

Without a moment’s hesitation, she recalled both Fang Xidao and Du Yan, ordering them to ride through the night and make for Anyang with all speed.

Those two pushed their pace hard, and covered the distance in a third less time than it would normally have taken.

After they entered the city, it was not long before they found the Magistrate soldiers’ location by following the signals left for them.

The three youngest and most exceptional Centurion Officers of the Magistrate’s Army — all of them were now in Anyang.

Gao Xining had once said: the Magistrate’s Army never abandons its own.

Fang Xidao watched as Jiang Mo and the others carried Shang Qingzhu away, then turned to look once more at the corpse pinned to the wall.

He looked at Du Yan. Du Yan gave a slight nod.

Both of them understood perfectly well: in a straight fight, Shang Qingzhu could not have beaten Meng Kedi — and neither could the two of them.

They had been able to kill Meng Kedi together only because Meng Kedi had had no idea anyone was waiting outside.

Meng Kedi had also just been wounded by Shang Qingzhu, and rage had made him less alert than he might otherwise have been.

And beyond all of that, Meng Kedi had been confident in himself.

“Send word back. Tell the General that Meng Kedi is dead.”

Du Yan said: “The generals in the Anyang Army all want to move up. There will be plenty of opportunities for us.”

Fang Xidao smiled a little. “This one wants to kill that one, and that one wants to kill this one — so we kill this one and that one, and they’ll think this one killed that one, and that one killed this one.”

The two of them looked at each other and smiled.

—

Twenty days later. Jizhou City.

Li Chi had first received the urgent report sent by Fang Xidao and the others and learned that Meng Kedi was dead. Even Li Chi was quite stunned.

A man like Meng Kedi — by all reason, he should have been the greatest and most immovable obstacle standing in Li Chi’s path when the time came to march south.

If a person’s life could be said to be a road, then Meng Kedi was a massive stumbling block on Li Chi’s road — and now that stumbling block was gone.

Meng Kedi’s death also compelled Li Chi to rethink his plans.

The timeline he had mapped out for pushing south had actually been very distant — certainly not something that would happen within a year or two.

Anyang’s garrison stood at a minimum of fifty thousand troops, and the city had the Great River as its natural shield. When Prince Yu once led an army numbering in the hundreds of thousands to besiege Anyang, he had still come away with nothing to show for it.

At the time, Prince Yu could field several hundred thousand soldiers. Li Chi now had only around forty thousand.

And so Li Chi had always regarded Meng Kedi as the barrier he would have to overcome when the Ning Army eventually pushed south — a barrier that would be extraordinarily difficult to break open.

Yet Meng Kedi had simply died, just like that.

By ordinary reasoning, Li Chi should now immediately lead his forces south to seize Anyang while he had the chance.

But Li Chi felt not the slightest urge to do so.

It looked like a tempting piece of meat. In truth it was a great bone — hard to crack.

“I need to make a trip.”

Li Chi looked over at Tang Pidi, without saying where he intended to go.

Tang Pidi smiled a little and said: “That man is in a rather sour mood right now. If you go to him at a time like this, you may not get a warm welcome.”

Li Chi said: “If I’m taking the initiative to come see him, how is it his place to be unwelcoming?”

Tang Pidi laughed out loud.

He asked Li Chi: “You’re confident?”

Li Chi said: “Seven or eight parts sure.”

The people in the room looked at each other, each one slightly baffled.

Not a single one of them had understood what Li Chi meant by wanting to go out, nor who Tang Pidi was referring to when he said *that man*. And the exchange that followed was even more impenetrable.

And so there were moments when Yu Jiuling would find himself turning over two possibilities.

The first: that Li Chi and Tang Pidi actually had no idea what they were talking about either, and were simply doing it deliberately — the two of them performing some theatrical display of depth and inscrutability entirely for show.

The second possibility was that he himself was genuinely far behind those two.

Yu Jiuling felt that the second possibility simply was not possible. And so it could only be that Li Chi and Tang Pidi were putting on an act.

He felt he had — vaguely and instinctively — just grasped the technique behind being an excellent leader.

“Do you want to come out?” Li Chi asked Gao Xining.

Gao Xining said: “I don’t particularly feel the need to go out — but Doggy and Divine Hawk haven’t had a chance to run loose in the open country for a while now.”

Li Chi smiled. “Then let them run loose all the way to Youzhou.”

He looked over at Yu Jiuling: “Nine, do you want to come?”

Yu Jiuling nodded enthusiastically. “I do, I do, I absolutely do.”

Li Chi said: “Then you put Doggy on top of Divine Hawk, and you carry Divine Hawk on your back, and we’ll set off.”

Yu Jiuling: “…”

—

Ten days later. Youzhou.

Luo Jing was in his courtyard practicing his forms. In this biting midwinter cold, he was stripped to the waist, heat rising visibly from his body.

That alone said something about the severity of the Youzhou winters — and about the extraordinary conditioning of Luo Jing’s body.

He was going through his punches, but not in any ordinary way.

From each of his arms hung a stone lock, thirty catties apiece.

Maintaining the angle, speed, and power of each punch while weighted down with hanging stone locks — this was the sort of inhuman feat that very few people in the world could pull off.

It was entirely unlike wearing iron weights strapped to the arms, because iron weights stay fixed. Hanging stone locks swing back and forth with every movement.

Before him stood a wooden post, waist-thick, already bearing two deep fist-holes bored into its surface. With each blow that landed, splinters flew.

Just then, the soldier on watch came trotting in and spoke when he caught sight of Luo Jing: “General — there are visitors requesting entry. They say they’ve come from Jizhou. The family name is Li.”

At those words, Luo Jing’s energy deserted him all at once. Both arms fell, and the stone locks dropped to the ground — nearly crushing his own feet.

“How in the world did that man end up here?!”

Luo Jing thought for a moment, then kept shaking his head. “Tell him I’m not here. Tell him to go back to Jizhou.”

The soldier said: “And if he says he’ll come again tomorrow?”

Luo Jing said: “Then tell him I’m never here on any day.”

The soldier looked deeply uncomfortable, thinking: that’s not something anyone could be expected to believe.

Luo Jing said: “Tell him I’ve entered a religious order. I’ve gone off to some temple ten thousand li away in the Western Regions and taken my vows.”

The soldier could only comply and turned to leave.

—

Outside the General’s Estate.

Li Chi listened as the soldier delivered this account, then let out a small laugh.

He asked the soldier: “Do you know who I am?”

The soldier shook his head. “I don’t, sir — but I’ve heard people mention you. I know you’re a close friend of our General’s.”

Li Chi said: “Then let me ask you something. Your General thinks well of me — I owe something to your General, and I come with every intention of returning it to him, yet he simply refuses to accept it. As a close friend, don’t you think that would make me feel hurt? Uncomfortable?”

The soldier nodded slowly. “When you put it that way… it does seem that way.”

Li Chi said: “One look at your face and I can tell you’re an honest man. And I’m an honest man myself.”

“Since we’re all honest people here, we ought to understand the feelings of honest people — namely, not wanting to leave a debt unsettled.”

“The whole reason I’ve come is to return something to your General. I’d be grateful if you’d go back in and ask him: does he still want it or not? If he truly doesn’t want it anymore, then there’s no need for me to keep coming. If he says he doesn’t want it, I’ll save myself the trouble.”

“Coming all this way from Jizhou to Youzhou — a thousand li is no small distance. Do me the favor of asking him one more time: if the General says he doesn’t want it, then I won’t need to come again. It saves us both the inconvenience.”

The soldier had no idea there was a trap in those words and could only nod. “I’ll go and ask again.”

Li Chi said: “Hmm… does the General’s Estate have a temple? Western Regions style?”

The soldier: “This…”

He looked at Li Chi, thinking: when you said just now that we’re all honest people — did you mean that?

Li Chi said: “Tell Luo Jing — if he still won’t let me in, I’ll set up drums and gongs right here at his gate and tell everyone he’s a man with no conscience.”

“Your General knows what kinds of stories I can tell when I put my mind to it — the kind about rotten men and heartbroken women. I used to do this sort of thing for a living.”

The soldier finally understood why their General simply did not want to see this man.

—