From the very first moment, the slaughter was brutal.
The Black Wu understood better than the Ning Army that this was the final battle — and better than the Ning Army what defeat would mean.
If they returned home just like this, every one of them would carry a shame they could never wash away for the rest of their lives.
As soldiers of the Black Wu Empire, defeated by the Central Plains people they considered weak and frail — when they went home, everyone around them would look at them with a certain strangeness.
Because every Black Wu person was, at heart, the same as these soldiers, and the way they regarded Central Plains people could be summed up in three words:
Two-legged sheep.
So no one would care what they had endured on the battlefield, no one would care how many had died — only the defeat would be magnified without limit.
Their families might be implicated as well, looked down upon by neighbors, treated as the kin of cowards and losers.
Every soldier — whether of the Central Plains, the Black Wu, or the smallest nation imaginable — carries a bone-deep pride.
That pride cannot be stained.
Even the soldiers of some tiny country with barely any men — do they have no sense of honor?
So in this battle, every member of the Black Wu forces quietly steeled themselves. They would pour out every ounce of grievance and resentment that had been bottled up all these months.
Yet they ran into a problem larger than themselves.
Li Chi stood on the wall watching, and as the enemy’s siege towers moved faster than the ramps had, he immediately turned and called: “Have the lookouts report the positions of the towers first!”
The personal guard turned and sprinted off to relay the order to the lookouts at height.
At the highest point of the gatehouse, it wasn’t only lookouts stationed there — Gao Xining was there as well. In terms of estimating distance by eye, Gao Xining had an extraordinary natural gift.
Which was perhaps also the reason her dirt clods always flew so true.
Gao Xining sighted the position of one siege tower and pointed her crimson battle flag in that direction.
Behind the wall, the five Thunder Divine Vehicles immediately adjusted their positions. For the Ning Army to deal the Black Wu the greatest possible blow to their nerve, the full impact of the Thunder Divine Vehicles’ first strike had to be demonstrated in one shot.
When Gao Xining raised her flag and pointed in that direction, it meant she had estimated that the siege tower was entering the firing range of the Thunder Divine Vehicles.
Behind the wall, the soldiers manning the vehicles were tense as well. They could not see where the stones their machines flung would land — they were entirely dependent on Gao Xining’s guidance from above, and every one of them was hoping luck would stand with them.
The moment Gao Xining thrust the great flag upward, all five Thunder Divine Vehicles launched their boulders at once.
Outside the wall, great numbers of Black Wu soldiers were laboring to push the siege towers forward. These towers were the attacking side’s key weapon for suppressing archers on the walls — the Black Wu archers positioned on the towers could redirect the Ning Army archers’ killing power toward the towers themselves, and in doing so, give the infantry a far better chance of getting their ladders onto the walls.
“Push, you idiots!”
A Black Wu general was shouting, desperate for his men to close the distance to the wall in the next instant.
Then, for some reason, a strange feeling came over him. He looked up instinctively toward the sky.
He saw several dark specks rising from behind the walls of North Mountain Pass. They moved with great speed, and before long, what had been specks became boulders.
“Not good!”
The general shouted and immediately turned and ran.
The first boulder landed among the crowd behind the siege tower, throwing up a wave of earth and dust, and an unknowable number of people were crushed to pulp.
After the great stone struck the ground, it carved a deep furrow in the earth. Not a single Black Wu soldier in its path survived — not one was left with a whole body.
These suddenly descending boulders struck instant terror into the Black Wu, draining the color from their faces.
Nothing like this had ever appeared on any battlefield they had fought on. Nothing like this had ever happened to them before.
It was as though the Central Plains people had suddenly mastered sorcery — the power to command boulders to fall upon them.
Or perhaps the divine powers protecting the Central Plains had intervened — sending meteors down from the heavens to protect the Central Plains’ border city.
The second boulder came quickly. This one struck true, landing hard against the midsection of a siege tower, shattering the thick wooden pillar, blasting a gaping hole through the center, and sending the upper half toppling sideways.
In the space of a thunderous crash, the third, fourth, and fifth boulders arrived almost simultaneously. Two landed on the ground, crushing numerous Black Wu soldiers. One struck the tower, finishing off what was left of it.
The ten-some-zhang-tall siege tower fell, sending a cloud of dust billowing into the sky.
“What is that!”
When Kuokedi Dashi, standing at the rear of the army, witnessed this, his eyes opened to their widest.
He stared at the place where the boulders had fallen, and for a brief instant, the color drained from his face.
In that fleeting moment, what he saw felt not like stones at all, but like some great and mighty divine force in its fury.
He had already had such thoughts before — sensing that the Central Plains also had divine powers watching over it. Now, seeing those boulders hurtling across the sky, such thoughts were inevitable.
He was far from alone in this. Because nothing like this had ever been seen before, the ordinary soldiers had no way to comprehend how stones could fly like that — stones that enormous, traveling that far.
In the towers and among the troops, one voice cried out in despair: “They called down meteors!”
A Black Wu soldier, his courage shattered in an instant, let out a wailing cry.
“They can call down meteors!”
Others around him took up the cry, and terror spread with a speed that put plague to shame.
At the highest point of the wall, the moment Gao Xining saw the siege tower come crashing down, she cried out in excitement, then began waving her flag in wide arcs.
Behind the wall, when the soldiers saw Gao Xining swinging the crimson battle flag, a wave of cheers erupted.
Their very first strike had made the Black Wu feel fear.
Gao Xining was already sighting the position of the second tower. The success of the first strike — obliterating a siege tower — gave her considerably more confidence.
In short order, a second volley of stones climbed into the sky above the wall.
By now, almost every Black Wu soldier had their eyes fixed on the sky, and when they saw the dark specks appear again, cries of alarm rang out from every direction.
This time, luck remained with the Ning Army. The first stone of the volley struck a siege tower, shearing through one of its supporting columns.
The tower immediately listed to the side. Not a single one of the Black Wu soldiers pushing it dared stay.
Boulder after boulder rained down, reducing the tower to a pile of debris.
Two consecutive volleys, two siege towers destroyed — the effect on Black Wu morale can only be imagined.
When the third volley appeared in the sky, the Black Wu soldiers pushing the siege towers simply broke and ran.
Not just around one tower — around almost every tower, the Black Wu soldiers were fleeing.
Even knowing perfectly well that a few stones couldn’t possibly destroy all the towers at once, the thought in every Black Wu soldier’s mind was the same: divine power cannot be stopped.
In that moment, both Kuokedi Dashi and Zhimotan remembered something.
The intelligence their operatives inside Jizhou had sent back contained extensive information about Prince Ning Li Chi.
Among it, mention was made that Prince Ning Li Chi was called the Human Emperor.
When Zhimotan had first read those reports, he had scoffed. The so-called Human Emperor legend struck him as utterly childish and absurd.
If the Central Plains was truly destined to produce some Human Emperor, how had the Black Wu Empire been bullying them for hundreds of years?
Yet now, in this moment, the words from the report rose unbidden in his mind.
The Human Emperor is said to possess supreme fortune, beyond all interference…
Zhimotan even found himself wondering whether Prince Ning Li Chi was human at all — perhaps he was truly some manner of creature that had cultivated human form.
And at the crisis of battle, forced into a corner, the Prince Ning had finally, reluctantly, unleashed his supernatural arts.
In an age like this one, people hold deeply to their belief in gods and spirits.
In an age like this one, anything beyond explanation is attributed to divine and supernatural forces.
What human hands could possibly hurl stones that enormous out of a city wall from that distance, and send them crashing into the Black Wu siege towers?
So much so that even Li Chi and Gao Xining had not anticipated just how drastically the Thunder Divine Vehicles would shatter Black Wu morale.
The Black Wu advance visibly slowed — and then stalled.
Every Black Wu soldier pushing a siege tower was scattering and fleeing. What they feared may not have been the stones themselves, but what they believed lay behind them — divine power.
There was in fact one further reason for this. The Black Wu Empire had spent enormous effort cultivating the power of divine belief. Through the Sword Gate’s veneration of the Moon God, and the legend that the Khan was the Moon God’s messenger, the Black Wu imperial family had steadily consolidated its rule.
So every Black Wu person — whether of the Ghost Moon Eight Tribes or any other clan — was an unshakeable believer in divine power.
On the wall, Li Chi’s sharp awareness immediately detected the sudden disorder erupting among the Black Wu, and he understood that it had relatively little to do with the actual damage the stones had inflicted.
He was sharper than the others, and he arrived at the conclusion before anyone else.
“Pour fire oil on the stones — don’t spare the oil — light them before launching!”
Li Chi immediately called out the order.
The deterrent of blazing fire-stones falling from the sky was far greater than ordinary stones falling from the sky.
Following Li Chi’s instructions, the men moved quickly. To make the fire-stones’ impact look even more spectacular, they began wrapping the boulders in canvas, pulling the wrappings tight with rope, then drenching everything in oil — this way, as the fire-stone arced through the air, the flames blazed far larger.
Guided by Gao Xining, volley after volley of fire-stones climbed into the sky, leaving trail after trail of black smoke across the heavens.
This looked even more like meteors falling to earth.
Because the siege towers could no longer advance, the Black Wu infantry that had been pressing forward was also forced to fall back. The entire battle began to turn.
A turn that no one had anticipated — because even Li Chi, at the outset, had not imagined that the flying stones would send the Black Wu into such a panic.
Nor had he anticipated that this event would be proclaimed far and wide throughout the Black Wu nation — proclaimed with an unstoppable fervor he would have no power to contain.
In this moment, Li Chi had no attention to spare for what lay down the road. He could see the opportunity for victory arriving.
The Black Wu were pulling back like a tide retreating from the shore. Their months of painstaking preparation for this decisive battle had ended in such a manner — it was genuinely strange, genuinely absurd.
The tide receded. On the open ground outside North Mountain Pass, only the stones still smoking here and there remained, telling anyone who looked that not long ago, this had been a battlefield.
Among the Black Wu forces, Kuokedi Dashi let out a heavy breath. He knew the tide had turned against them, beyond recovery.
His soldiers’ courage had broken. To rouse it again would be harder than scaling the sky.
Heaven only knew — unable to break through North Mountain Pass, unable to kill Prince Ning Li Chi today — what trouble Li Chi would bring upon the Black Wu in the years to come.
In that moment, he resolved: no matter what punishment awaited him upon his return, he would counsel the Black Wu Khan Kuokedi Yijilü, at all costs, to place the elimination of Prince Ning Li Chi as the single most important priority of the Black Wu Empire.
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