Persian carpets, expensive incense, soft Great Tang velvet fabric covered the bed. A pair of golden cups were placed at the bedside. This was originally a good place for a tryst and private romance, but now it was permeated with a thick, bloody smell.
When Lu Chengqing had carried Gao Sanyang to the bed and was indulging in passionate affection, Hidemi stabbed a fine needle a full half-foot long into the back of Lu Chengqing’s neck. After that, Lu Chengqing fell to the ground like a piece of wood.
Gao Sanyang helped Hidemi lift Lu Chengqing onto the bed, then signaled that Hidemi could send a signal to Huan Nu outside. Hidemi tore her collar even wider, exposing half a breast, then walked out carrying a lacquer basin from the room. Seeing Lu Chengqing’s guards, she said in a low voice, “The Grand General forbids anyone from disturbing him tonight.” Then she said to the maidservants that the princess had brought, “The princess won’t return tonight. She orders you to go back. Just leave Huan Nu behind.”
The guards on deck and Gao Sanyang’s maidservants all exchanged knowing glances before leaving the cabin door. Hidemi took the fresh water the guard handed over, opened the cabin door, and walked back in. She rolled her eyes and gave a disdainful look to the guard who wanted to peek inside, then heavily closed the cabin door.
Lu Chengqing’s chest was heaving violently, and his eyes were nearly splitting open, but his body couldn’t move in the slightest. Gao Sanyang lay on top of his head, looking at the furious Lu Chengqing with amusement and laughing, “You don’t have the qualifications to make deals with me. If it were that nemesis Yun Ye, I might have accepted. But you? Lu Chengqing, are you worthy of making deals with me?”
“Yun Ye is a petty person—of this I’m very certain. But you? You’re a hypocrite. On the great ocean, everything becomes real. Whether petty people or gentlemen, all have ways to survive. The ocean alone does not accept hypocrisy.”
“I, Gao Sanyang, am a princess of the Land of the Rising Sun, the empress of the lands of Goguryeo, matchlessly noble. Yun Ye earned my respect with his wisdom and viciousness. What are you? Would even a wild dog bark wildly at a phoenix?”
“Don’t show that expression that everything can be discussed. There’s nothing to discuss. What I want, you can’t give. Yun Ye, precisely because he clearly knows he can’t give me what I want, will think of every possible way to destroy me.”
“On land, there’s no nation more powerful than your Great Tang. Therefore, no one wants to be your neighbor—they all want to run far, far away. We all know that being the Great Tang’s neighbor, no matter how submissive you appear, you can hardly escape the disaster of national annihilation.”
“I want to be the empress of the great ocean. Grand General Lu, do you think that’s possible? Ever since Yun Ye robbed me for the first time, he made me understand one principle: the strong possess everything, the weak have nothing.”
“In places you can’t see, my warriors are quietly entering the water. They’re biting knives in their mouths, hanging rope hooks at their waists, carrying fire oil bottles on their backs, slowly climbing onto your warships. Listen—your subordinates haven’t discovered them. I heard the Lingnan Navy’s military discipline is very strict. During the banquet just now, I heard the lights-out signal. Everyone obediently went to sleep. Only you, my Grand General, are still at the banquet.”
“If it weren’t for your Tang nation’s invasion, at this time I would be the empress of Goguryeo, sitting in the most beautiful garden appreciating the most beautiful scenery, listening to the most moving ballads, instead of staying on the salty ocean with a bunch of stinking men. Every time the moon is full, I have to strip off my clothes for them to watch. So you see, it’s the Tang nation that owes me. You must first repay some interest.”
While Gao Sanyang spoke, her hands weren’t idle. A small hand knife continuously cut here and there on Lu Chengqing’s body. She didn’t care where she cut, just acted at will, which made the entire process appear incomparably terrifying.
Hidemi pricked up her ears listening to the activity outside. When the cabin door transmitted one heavy and two light knocking sounds, Hidemi opened the cabin. The soaking wet Huan Nu walked in from outside—not the two who had come earlier, but fully thirty-some people.
“Princess, the entire ship is under our control. The Tang people on the ship have all been killed. Onizuka asks whether to light the fires now?”
Gao Sanyang pushed open the porthole to look at the pitch-black sky outside, cocked her ear to listen to the ocean’s sighs—the tide had already started coming in. She nodded definitively and ordered, “This is the moment. Destroy all the ships, kill all the people.”
A fire arrow shot up into the sky. Those pirates who had been assigned to the warships didn’t hesitate to open their bamboo tubes, poured out and drank all that unpalatable liquid, pulled out the stoppers inside—fire oil immediately was evenly splashed on the sails piled together. A torch was thrown up, flames immediately leaped into the air. What was burning simultaneously wasn’t one or two ships, but over a hundred. Those pirates who had set the fires tied the cabin doors shut with mooring ropes, then leaped into the ocean.
On many more ships, extremely fierce battles had already broken out. The deputy general wearing sleeping clothes and hastily responding to battle desperately ordered his subordinates to approach the commander’s warship. Helplessly, he was dragged down by the swarming pirate ships and couldn’t advance a single step. What made his liver and gallbladder want to split was that the ship slowly moved, and the lamp signal transmitted from above was actually to hold position and await reinforcements.
The deputy general’s horizontal blade flashed in the pirate crowd. No matter how many pirates he killed, no matter who he killed, his heart was full of dead ashes. He fundamentally didn’t want to defend—his entire mind was only thinking of dying in battle. Perhaps if he died in battle, his parents and family members wouldn’t be implicated.
The Five Bureaus Administrator who was on night patrol suddenly discovered flames shooting to the sky in the harbor. His eyes went black and he nearly fell into the ocean. After briefly steadying himself, he frantically urged the warship to sail back. Today everyone couldn’t survive. Only after cutting these damned pirates into ten thousand pieces would he have the face to die.
The locked cabin doors were quickly split open by axes. The captain was the first to drill out of the cabin door and saw that the sail had already gradually shrunk in the great fire, finally becoming a piece of black charcoal. The Lingnan Navy’s sails contained large amounts of silk, which would shrink when heated.
“Open all cabin doors. Kill any pirates on sight without question.”
Qin Yuan also saw the flames shooting to the sky. He smiled, then raised his wine cup and clinked it with his gorgeously dressed wife, then returned to the bedroom to sleep in each other’s embrace.
The Quanzhou government office led the water brigade at maximum speed rushing toward the wharf. What greeted him, however, was a dense mass of crossbow bolts. In an instant, the Quanzhou Deputy Magistrate had already been shot into a hedgehog. Until death, he didn’t understand why the Great Tang’s warships would shoot crossbow bolts at him.
Yun Ye, who was still hurrying on the road, also saw the fire-red sky in the direction of Quanzhou. It was as if all of Quanzhou was burning fiercely. This scene was too familiar to Yun Ye. He had seen it when attacking Sanshanpo, had also seen it when attacking Bisha City. Now the great fire had burned onto his own head.
“No need to go to Quanzhou. What’s meant to happen will definitely happen. If the Lingnan Navy itself can’t repel those pirates, they deserve to be annihilated. We’ll go outside the harbor to intercept the pirates. This time, I want them to remember my furious appearance even after they descend to hell.”
Cheng Jiu’s luck was very poor. When he was frantically advancing toward Quanzhou, he suddenly discovered a huge black shadow blocking the sea outlet ahead. Borrowing the flickering firelight, he finally remembered what was blocking in front of him. He screamed miserably, “The Great Emperor! This is a trap, this is Yun Ye’s trap to kill us!”
His fleet immediately scattered like stars, but no matter where they fled, a streak of firelight would catch up to them, and then the entire ship would explode open. That streak of firelight flew with unusual precision—almost every one stuck into a ship’s hull. After another ship exploded open, Cheng Jiu jumped onto a small assault boat and desperately tried to drill into the harbor while avoiding the Great Emperor. With the Great Emperor here, the entire surprise attack could no longer be completed. What he should think about now was how to escape with his life. He must notify the princess—this was Cheng Jiu’s only belief.
Gao Sanyang was also fighting in the melee. Her beautiful long dress had disappeared, replaced with a set of blue-green tight-fitting clothes. Two long blades were wielded by her with cold flashing light. This woman was actually also an expert. Her lithe figure somersaulted through the crowd. Wherever she arrived, there were always Lingnan Navy officers and soldiers being cut down.
Insufficient individual combat skills was originally the Lingnan Navy’s greatest weakness. Yun Ye had helplessly equipped them with marine teams specifically responsible for close combat, but unfortunately they had been cleanly and thoroughly purged from the fleet by Lu Chengqing. Now the numerically superior Lingnan Navy was actually being cut down by pirates in successive defeats.
Gao Sanyang wiped the sweat from her forehead and felt extremely exhilarated. She lightly leaped onto another warship. The long blade in her hand flew out, nailing a sailor engaged in fierce battle to death on the ship’s hull. Taking two quick steps, her toes hooked that long blade back into her hand again. She let a wounded pirate pass, then the long blade passed through from under her ribs and stabbed into another sailor’s lower abdomen. She kicked away the bending sailor, and with another slash the sailor’s head flew into the air.
Onizuka shouted loudly in praise, then with strange cries charged toward new enemies. At this point the battle had lost all order—they could only bite each other like wild beasts.
Gao Sanyang suddenly stopped in her tracks. Just now when she had climbed the mast to survey the battlefield situation, she suddenly discovered that reinforcements from the Lingnan Navy always kept surging in from outside the harbor, but Cheng Jiu’s attack fleet was nowhere to be seen. Could Cheng Jiu have rebelled at this time? This thought had just arisen when she immediately dismissed it. If Cheng Jiu had betrayed her, she absolutely wouldn’t have had the opportunity to fight the battle to this degree. Since Cheng Jiu hadn’t betrayed, that could only explain that something unexpected had occurred outside the harbor.
After quickly assessing the situation, Gao Sanyang was about to issue the order for all personnel to assault the harbor entrance when the disheveled Cheng Jiu charged over, dragging Gao Sanyang onto his small boat and desperately rowing, terrified. The terrifying Great Emperor had already shattered his courage. His only thought now was to take Gao Sanyang far, far away—the farther the better.
Gao Sanyang delivered a heavy slap across Cheng Jiu’s face, which finally woke him from his confusion.
“Speak! What happened? Where are your subordinates? Why didn’t you bring the fleet to assault the harbor?”
“Princess, hurry and leave! The Great Emperor has come! It’s right outside the harbor! This is a trap!” Foam flew horizontally from Cheng Jiu’s mouth, but he still clearly explained to Gao Sanyang the situation he had witnessed.
Looking at the harbor with its roaring flames, Gao Sanyang laughed. She clearly knew Yun Ye had come. She no longer tangled with Cheng Jiu. Grabbing the mooring rope, she rapidly climbed onto a warship and ordered Onizuka, “Burn the warships and assault Quanzhou.”