Chapter 1514: The Annihilation of Xiaoyue Pavilion

The soldiers covered their mouths and noses with wet cloths one after another, lending a strange appearance to the encircling formation.

Smoke rose from the town, where faint signs of disorder were already visible. General Sun assessed the situation and made his decision on the spot. He suddenly shouted, "Kill!"

A wooden mallet swung down hard. Bang! The mechanism fired with an explosive crack, and a steel spear screamed away, as though sounding the signal for the entire assault.

Wooden mallets rose one after another and smashed down upon the triggers of the siege crossbows. Bang, bang, bang! The firing reports erupted in a dense succession.

Steel spears flashed coldly as they howled through the air...

"Break out!" Lu Yuan had only just roared from the rooftop when his gaze flickered. He saw the first steel spear plunge from the sky. With a heavy thud, it split the stone paving and buried half its length in the ground.

A storm of shrieking sound immediately descended after it. Gleaming steel spears came raining down densely enough to blot out the sky.

These were siege weapons capable of punching into thick city walls to provide holds for scaling troops. They split stone and tore earth, shattered roof tiles and punched through walls, sweeping across the entire town with overwhelming force.

Crashes and splintering explosions sounded everywhere. Alarmed shouts rose on all sides as people dodged wildly. Commands and calls had become useless.

One man, his head swimming, shook it hard to clear himself. His body suddenly jerked. A steel spear had punched straight through him, and he collapsed.

Many cultivators knocked incoming spears away with clang after clang as they dodged, desperately searching for some place that might offer shelter.

Some of the oil jars hidden in corners had been placed there earlier by the Hundred-Man Commander and his men. Inevitably, a number were smashed by the steel spears. Flammable oil spilled everywhere, releasing a sharp, pungent smell.

Dark shadows came hissing in wave after wave, like banks of black cloud rolling overhead. Arrows. A dense rain of arrows had arrived, covering a broader area even than the steel spears.

Among the army of two hundred thousand, countless archers drew their bows skyward and loosed in rotation without pause, maintaining wave after wave of continuous fire.

Flames appeared. Fire arrows were lit and mixed into the rain of arrows flying toward the town. Those that struck the spilled oil quickly set the town ablaze.

As the fire rose, the poison smoke within the town grew even thicker. The roaring flames also trapped those who had hoped to use walls and buildings as cover.

A cavalry force appeared with thunderous hoofbeats. Luo Da'an had returned, once again leading three thousand Yingyang and Wulie Guards.

They emerged from the upwind direction and halted behind the attacking army. Luo Da'an sat motionless in the saddle, expression indifferent, coldly watching the extermination unfold.

Zhuang Hong and Xia Lingpei were with him. Mother and son naturally knew who the people inside the town were.

Watching such a brutal scene, both stared in horror and disbelief.

Lu Yuan was hiding behind a large tree, blood spilling from his mouth. He had avoided what came from the front, but not what came from behind. The poison had slowed his reactions and robbed strength from his limbs. A steel spear had pierced him through the back and pinned him brutally to the tree.

Hearing screams rise without end around him, Lu Yuan threw his blood-filled mouth toward the sky and roared in grief, "Shang Chaozong, even as a ghost I will never let you go!"

It was a cry torn from the heart. He had never imagined this was a trap. Not even in his dreams had he imagined Shang Chaozong would go through such an elaborate charade merely to strike Xiaoyue Pavilion dead.

He had never imagined it. Even now, he could not understand why!

A Heavenly Sword Talisman appeared in his hand. Vast power erupted, releasing heavenly sword-aura phantoms one after another. They blasted the great tree in front of him to splinters and blocked the rain of arrows.

The sword-aura phantoms faded. Lu Yuan, still impaled by one steel spear, had only just turned when another came straight at his chest. It nailed him to the ground on the spot. A torrential rain of arrows then turned him into a human hedgehog, leaving him on his back, vomiting blood without end...

The siege crossbows ceased firing. Only the arrows continued to cast wave after wave of dark cloud across the town.

But the siege crossbows had not relaxed their readiness. Their crews stood prepared to adjust firing angles at any moment. The instant anyone rushed out of town, the crossbows would immediately fire with another series of explosive cracks and tear them apart.

Within the army, cultivators holding weapons occasionally looked at one another. They had scarcely found any opportunity to act at all.

That was entirely thanks to the thorough preparations. The poison smoke released unobtrusively beforehand had already left most of Xiaoyue Pavilion's people weak in the knees. Faced with an assault that spared no arrows, very few had any chance of breaking out.

The moment someone emerged, they would fall from the air, bristling with arrows, and smash into the ground.

Some charged out carrying objects over themselves as shields and plunged into the army, trying desperately to carve their way free.

Yet the archers in formation barely reacted. They simply allowed the intruders to enter. The firing lines did not fall into disorder and continued shooting at the same steady rhythm.

What kind of "new army" was this? These were plainly veteran soldiers, rigorously trained and under iron discipline.

And of course they could not have been new troops. The matter was too important. Niu Youdao had spoken personally. For Shang Chaozong, whether this operation succeeded now concerned whether he could become Regent and whether he could take full control of Yan's military and civil authority.

For that reason, Shang Chaozong had assembled essentially the finest troops available in Nanzhou, together with large numbers of siege crossbows and an enormous quantity of bows and arrows.

Of the two hundred thousand troops, nearly seventy percent carried bows. Such a proportion of missile weapons was extremely rare.

Shang Chaozong had practically given Luo Da'an an order on pain of death. Meng Shanming had likewise sent instructions to his disciple, stressing again and again that the operation could only succeed. He had even used the words "at any cost."

As for the Xiaoyue Pavilion members who managed to charge into the army, cultivators accompanying the troops immediately came forward to intercept them and joined forces to kill them.

The poison smoke had already left them weak. Anyone capable of reaching this far was already like a bolt at the end of its flight. Outnumbered so overwhelmingly, escape was impossible.

The attack did not last long, not even fifteen minutes. At a wave from the commanding general, the army obeyed instantly and ceased its assault.

The surrounded town was already buried in a sea of fire.

General Sun waved again. More than a thousand cultivators around the perimeter flashed forward with wet cloths covering their mouths and noses. They charged into the burning town to extinguish the fires and search for survivors, including anyone who might have slipped underground to hide.

Part of the army began advancing. Swordsmen, spearmen, and archers worked together in teams of ten, clearing the ground inch by inch as they closed in.

Alive or dead, anyone still breathing was finished off. Even bodies already lying on the ground were struck again to make certain.

If someone sprang up, the archers shot them immediately.

If someone staggered to their feet, the spearmen attacked together and stabbed repeatedly until there was no possibility of survival.

One man struggled to rise. A soldier rushed over and cut off his head with a single stroke, muttering a curse under his breath. "Never fought a battle like this before. Never seen people this stupid either. They see an army arrive and still gather together so we can surround and wipe them out. Damned strange."

The ordinary soldier knew nothing of the arrangements made behind the scenes. He did not even know who the people he was helping exterminate actually were. It was hardly strange that he found the whole affair baffling.

Even some of the officers taking part in the encirclement found it unbelievable.

Had Xiaoyue Pavilion brought someone like Luo Zhao, a man rich in battlefield experience, the outcome might have been different.

A man like Luo Zhao would instinctively study an army the moment he saw it. He would have noticed something wrong with the unusually high proportion of bows. The terrain around the town and whether it suited a large army's encirclement would likewise have made him wary.

But from beginning to end, Xiaoyue Pavilion's people had detected nothing unusual. Only after the attack began did they realize they had fallen into a trap.

Watching this merciless extermination from afar, Zhuang Hong and her son had terror in their eyes and felt chills run through them. They did not know what fate awaited them.

Once the fire in the town had been extinguished, the army swept back and forth repeatedly as though drawing a net through the place. Every corpse, without exception, received a finishing blow.

A massacre. A true massacre. Not one spared!

The soldiers who had participated were comparatively unmoved. Men died in war. Was that not normal?

It was the cultivators who had taken part who felt chilled as they looked across the corpses covering the ground. Thousands of Xiaoyue Pavilion cultivators had been wiped out in one stroke by a secular army in such a short time?

Next came the clearing of the battlefield. Arrows and steel spears were collected, while damaged weapons were to be hauled back for craftsmen to repair.

After conferring with the cultivators and confirming that essentially no one had escaped the net, General Sun galloped over to Luo Da'an carrying Lu Yuan's severed head. He presented it and formally reported completion of the mission. The operation had been carried out successfully from beginning to end.

The sight of Lu Yuan's head filled Zhuang Hong and Xia Lingpei with boundless fear.

After Luo Da'an rearranged and deployed the troops under him, he wheeled his mount and was about to lead his men away.

Xia Lingpei suddenly called out, "General Luo, my teacher is Master Dao of Maolu Villa..." His confidence plainly faltered toward the end of the sentence.

He said it now only to save his own life. He knew how much influence his teacher had wielded over Nanzhou's forces and hoped this final straw might keep him alive.

Luo Da'an reined in and stared at him. "If not out of regard for Master Dao's memory, if not because you were Master Dao's student, do you think you and your mother would still be standing here? Don't be afraid. Someone will take you to Nanzhou." With that, he spurred his horse away.

He did not know that this operation had been Niu Youdao's idea, much less that Niu Youdao was still alive.

Mother and son looked at each other. Only now did they understand why they had been taken out of the town. It was the status of being Master Dao's student that had saved both their lives. Otherwise they too would probably have been buried in that town.

They were to be sent to Nanzhou? Relief came together with lingering terror.

Before mother and son were taken away, they repeatedly looked back at the ruined town. The same thought rose in both their minds: Xiaoyue Pavilion was finished just like that?

To say not a single fish had slipped through the net would have been impossible. A centipede may be dead, but it does not stiffen at once. Xiaoyue Pavilion still had scattered eyes and ears planted in various places beneath Heaven. But those low-level remnants could no longer amount to anything. Xiaoyue Pavilion had been completely erased from the cultivation world.

The State of Qin too had now been truly and completely erased from beneath Heaven.

...

"Good! Da'an handled this beautifully. The arrangement was meticulous, bold yet careful, and his strike decisive. He truly deserves to be Marshal Meng's disciple. He has some of Marshal Meng's bearing and has not disappointed this prince!"

Inside the Hall of Martial Valor in Nanzhou, Shang Chaozong received the detailed battle report and confirmed that Luo Da'an had completed the mission smoothly and successfully. He praised him with delight. The heart that had been hanging in suspense for fear of some accident could finally settle.

Lan Ruoting stroked his beard and nodded with a smile. "He truly did handle it beautifully. After this, Da'an may well become famous beneath Heaven!"

"Ai!" Meng Shanming sighed instead. "An arrogant army is bound to lose. When he meets a true master, sooner or later he'll suffer for it. I would rather he endure a few defeats before he suffers a disastrous one."

From Luo Da'an's conduct during this operation, he had already caught the streak of arrogance buried in the young man's bones. He suspected it came from spending too long around Nanzhou's upper ranks, where everyone gave him some face, combined with the fact that Luo Da'an had never really suffered on the battlefield.

From Meng Shanming's perspective, taking Qin's territory had been little more than pushing the boat along with the current, while exterminating Xiaoyue Pavilion had simply been a prepared force striking an unprepared one. The larger framework had already been built for Luo Da'an. None of these counted as truly difficult battles. If becoming famous because of them fed his arrogance, that would be no good thing.

Lan Ruoting looked thoughtful, seeming to understand what Meng Shanming meant.

Shang Chaozong, however, was in an excellent mood. "Marshal Meng is demanding too much. For someone his age to possess this much ability is already very rare."

Meng Shanming did not want to say more and changed the subject. "Your Highness, we can report completion of the mission to Master Dao."

"Mm." Shang Chaozong nodded.

[End of Chapter 1514]