The distant horn calls rang out. The Hewu forces began to assemble and form up. Before long, formation after formation began pressing toward Beishan Pass.
Within the formations, rows of powerful soldiers pushed enormous siege towers forward. Their pace was glacial — the towers were far too massive to roll on wooden wheels, and could only be moved by means of rollers. Soldiers had to lay rollers in front of the towers, then heave them forward, then carry the rollers from behind to the front again, over and over in a continuous cycle.
Alongside the towering siege machines, great numbers of crossbow wagons were also being pushed forward. The Hewu people built everything large — their crossbow wagons looked even bigger than ordinary horse-drawn carts.
In truth, however, it should be said honestly: the Hewu had learned all their siege tactics from the Central Plains.
The territory of the Hewu Empire vastly exceeded that of Chu, larger even than the old Zhou dynasty at its height, yet within all those vast lands, great walled cities were few. The customs of the population were simply different — in the Central Plains, even a county town had tall walls for defense. Inside Hewu territory, there was no system of commanderies and counties; below the large cities came townships, and you could travel a thousand li across Hewu land without seeing a single major city — only scattered villages.
In the earliest times, the Hewu people’s unfamiliarity with siege tactics was total: they simply never thought about how to besiege cities, because it had never come up.
This was also a reflection of the two regions’ histories. For a thousand years, it was always the Hewu attacking others — their people had never experienced what it was like to have an enemy push into their homeland. The Central Plains was the opposite: for more than a thousand years, it had faced relentless invasion from outside, which was precisely why so many formidable cities had been built.
Hewu battle commander Jingluo Fu was a veteran officer of the Southern Court. Though barely forty years old, he had served in the army for twenty-five years. As a teenager he had been a messenger for Chizhu Liuli’s father, and had stayed close to the old general throughout his career.
Chizhu Liuli’s father had risen to Grand General of the Southern Court’s main camp. On his deathbed, he submitted a memorial to the then-reigning Hewu Khan-Emperor, saying that his son was a man of exceptional talent and fit to succeed him as commander of the Southern Court. The old Khan-Emperor knew this loyal servant well enough to understand that he would never recommend his own son purely out of sentiment — if he said his son had the ability, his son had the ability. So the Khan-Emperor agreed, and at the time, Chizhu Liuli was only in his twenties.
To rise to the heights of power at such an age was something even the thousand-year history of Hewu could count on one hand.
When Chizhu Liuli took command of the Southern Court, he elevated Jingluo Fu to the rank of general.
Less than two years after that, the old Khan-Emperor died, and Kuokedi Dashi ascended to the throne. From the very beginning, Kuokedi Dashi had disliked Chizhu Liuli — he was convinced that Chizhu Liuli had become Southern Court Grand General only because his father had leveraged sentimental ties to pressure the old Khan-Emperor into the decision.
His dislike extended to anyone Chizhu Liuli had promoted, including Jingluo Fu, so when he stripped Chizhu Liuli of his command, Jingluo Fu too was stripped of all rank and returned to the countryside with Chizhu Liuli to tend cattle and horses on a farm.
Now, Chizhu Liuli’s appointment of Jingluo Fu as vanguard commander was partly his way of giving Jingluo Fu a chance to prove himself — and partly so the two young generals could see how a Southern Court general fought.
There was nothing wrong with young men being proud and headstrong, but without a bit of discipline, they would never truly fall in line.
At the front of the formation, Jingluo Fu looked up at the recently repaired Beishan Pass and drew a long, deep breath.
Siege tactics were siege tactics, in the end. When battle was joined, it was courage that prevailed.
That was Jingluo Fu’s creed. He raised the command flag and called out: “Push the crossbow wagons forward. Suppress the Chu troops on the city walls and protect the siege towers as they approach.”
As the flag swept down, soldiers began pushing the heavy crossbow wagons forward toward the city.
The Hewu belief was simple: if something is built large enough, it will be more powerful than something smaller. In most circumstances, this was actually true.
Their crossbow wagons had been purpose-built after Chizhu Liuli returned to command the Southern Court. He had understood from the moment he resumed command that if he could not produce results in the years to come, the voices questioning him at court would never quiet down.
The new Khan-Emperor Kuokedi Yijilü appeared to trust him unreservedly, but no Khan-Emperor enjoyed a subordinate who sat idle and accomplished nothing.
These crossbow wagons had a greater elevation angle and were drawn not by human strength but by a capstan, which allowed them to deliver maximum force. Their one drawback was precisely that capstan mechanism — winding it to generate tension was considerably slower than the hand-drawn crossbow wagons they had used before, meaning the rate of fire was notably reduced.
Up on the city walls.
Li Chi furrowed his brow slightly. He was looking at these crossbow wagons for the first time.
“They look like they have longer range than our mounted crossbows.”
Li Chi glanced at Xiahou Zuo. Xiahou Zuo nodded, his own brow creasing. He had commanded troops on the northern frontier for years, yet even he had never seen crossbow wagons like these. The years Xiahou Zuo had spent in the north happened to be exactly the years when Chizhu Liuli was absent from the Southern Court — the two had never crossed paths.
“Watch out—”
Li Chi called a warning and grabbed Xiahou Zuo’s arm.
From below came a series of heavy, muffled impacts, followed immediately by a wall of dark shapes rising up — arriving in an instant.
Li Chi pulled Xiahou Zuo down into a crouch. A heavy bolt slammed into a battlement, shearing off a corner in a burst of sparks. Chunks of shattered stone flew in all directions and could wound a man outright, while the deflected bolt tumbled upward and lodged itself in the eaves of the watchtower above.
The first bolt arrived — and then they came in a dark torrent, one after another. The city wall was battered so thoroughly that a fog rose over it, stone dust blooming from every impact.
“Go and prepare the rollers,” Li Chi shouted from his crouch. “As thick as a man’s thigh or larger — wrap two layers of rope around the outside, then lash five together side by side.”
The order was passed quickly. Soldiers inside the city began working, binding the pre-positioned log rollers together with rope, five abreast.
After a little over half an hour, the first completed sets were carried up.
Li Chi took one of the bound log sections and hung it along the outside of a battlement.
A heavy bolt flew in and glanced off the round wood, gouging a crack in the log but leaving the wall itself untouched.
Seeing that this worked, Li Chi turned and shouted: “Make more. And bring water up — keep it poured over the logs. Guard against enemy fire arrows.”
Having given the order, Li Chi crouched down behind the wall and exhaled: “The Hewu people… they’re filthy rich.”
Each of these heavy bolts had cost a small fortune to produce, and the Hewu had now been keeping up a continuous suppressing fire with them for nearly an hour. The sight made Li Chi’s chest ache a little.
A moment later he spat dust from his mouth: “Pfeh… damn it. Good thing we have money too.”
Watching the Ning army drape a layer of timber armor along the city walls, Hewu battle commander Jingluo Fu immediately thought of fire. But Li Chi had anticipated it — they kept pouring water over the wood continuously.
Out on the northern frontier, even now in spring, the temperature remained far colder than down in Jizhou City. The wood froze solid before long, and whatever fire-tipped bolts the enemy sent couldn’t even melt through the ice layer.
“The enemy crossbow wagons have stopped!”
Xiahou Zuo called out: “Our turn now. When the enemy enters range, let them see what our crossbow wagons can do!”
For the better part of an hour while the Hewu maintained their suppressive fire, the siege towers had been inching forward. But those towers were monstrously heavy, moving on rollers — how slow they traveled needed no description. After an hour, the towers had barely managed to crawl within arrow range, roughly level in height with the defenders, allowing for a direct exchange of fire.
The towers were up. And with them came a wall of infantry — dark masses of Hewu soldiers bearing siege ladders.
“Kill them!” Xiahou Zuo roared.
The crossbow wagons on the city wall opened up. Their firing became a continuous sound, shot after shot blending into one sustained note.
The Hewu had shown the Ning army what power looked like — their heavy bolts outranged the Ning crossbow wagons, could shatter stone, and hit with crushing force. Now the Ning army showed the Hewu what speed looked like.
The city wall’s crossbow wagons had been disassembled, studied, and rebuilt by Li Chi and the Daoist Changmei — worked over at length and significantly modified. Li Chi’s obsession with speed had pushed the rate of fire up by nearly double.
And the new crossbow installations on the wall weren’t only single-shot designs. Among them were volley bows — a modified version of the standard crossbow wagons, redesigned to fire five heavy bolts simultaneously.
Even the single-shot crossbow wagons fired far faster than the Hewu’s — to say nothing of the volleys unleashed five bolts at once.
Faced with a choice between range and speed, Li Chi had chosen speed.
The volley bow’s design — five bolts at once — inherently gave up some of the raw impact of a single-shot weapon.
But speed was enough. Fast, and in quantity — all you could want.
When the Hewu infantry pressed forward, they discovered what it felt like to be on the receiving end of heavy crossbow fire that fell like rain — as dense as ordinary arrows.
Rows of bolts tore through them in sweeping passes. One layer of soldiers after another was mowed down — an absolute slaughter, with no chance of survival.
If the bolts firing in coordinated volleys were like a line of great harvesting machines working side by side, cutting through grain in a forward sweep, then the arrows the Ning soldiers loosed by hand were like a thousand people following behind with scythes, cutting down whatever the machines had missed.
The Hewu had not anticipated this. In their fixed image of Chu’s border army: tough fighters, but poor and miserable. Terrible equipment, small numbers, no supplies, no support — their ability to fight was entirely a product of raw courage.
The Chu army now in front of them was operating on an entirely different level of armament.
Dachu’s battle flags were still flying on the city wall. They were, still, technically Chu border troops. But when had the Chu border garrison ever been this well-equipped?
The reason Dachu’s flags still flew was that Li Chi had never forcefully insisted otherwise — he respected the feelings of the border soldiers. Men who had spent their whole lives as Chu soldiers, defending Chu’s borders all their years — asking them to suddenly change their flags was not something they could easily accept.
As for which flags flew, Li Chi had never cared much. What he cared about was that the frontier held.
And so the Hewu assault sustained itself for barely half an hour before it collapsed. Of the first wave that had gone forward, not one soldier from the leading ranks came back.
The bodies covered the earth, and white-feathered arrows covered the bodies.
“That’s the feeling!” Li Chi watched the Hewu forces pull back and pumped his fist through the air.
“I’ve scraped and schemed and clawed for money from every corner of the world, and this is exactly the feeling I was after!”
He let out an exhilarated shout.
Using firepower to pin the enemy down and keep them from advancing — that was the greatest gift Li Chi could give the border troops.
Xiahou Zuo clapped him on the shoulder: “It’s been hard on you these past years. But seeing the enemy scatter and flee like that — what’s going through your mind right now?”
Li Chi laughed aloud, pointing at the field of spent arrows: “If you can spend money to take enemy lives, every single coin is a profit!”
Xiahou Zuo nodded vigorously.
Then he heard Li Chi add: “Though I wish we could collect them and use them again… it feels great, but I won’t lie — there’s a tiny, tiny bit of heartache.”
Xiahou Zuo froze. He narrowed his eyes at Li Chi.
Li Chi glanced back, then laughed: “What are you looking at?”
Xiahou Zuo said: “That is one very big… tiny bit.”
Li Chi shook his head, then couldn’t hold back another burst of laughter.
He stood there with his hands on his hips, and in all his years of life, this moment was his proudest.
When he entered the academy — he had not been proud. When he built the carriage company — not proud. When he became the Third Chief of the Yanshan Camp — not proud. When he was made Prince Ning — still not proud.
But now — through his own effort, the invaders who had come to threaten his homeland had been made to tremble, while the border troops had suffered almost no losses. This was his finest moment.
“Hell yes!” Li Chi let out a shout.
It was nothing more than a heartfelt cry of elation, born of feeling and excitement in the moment.
What he hadn’t expected: every soldier on the city wall — Chu border troops and Ning troops alike — seemed to suddenly share the same heart. In one voice, they roared together:
**”Long live Prince Ning!”**
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