Chapter 554: - Indulge Yourselves

Count Pingye had no intention of stopping when it came to putting eye drops in General-in-Chief Nian’s eyes.

Of course, sometimes there was no particularly concrete objective behind it. He simply did it because he felt like it.

Would Nian Yao rebel? Did he want to rebel? What hardships did he have? What misgivings held him back?

Count Pingye did not care.

Neither did the Prince of Jingnan.

In Tian Wujing’s calculations, Nian Yao’s reaction had never been part of the equation at all. Whatever Nian Yao chose would not affect the Prince of Jingnan’s determination to swallow Great Chu’s elite forces in a single stroke.

After West Mountain Fort fell, it had never mattered whether Feng Yuanyang’s words were a straight hook or a curved one, because Tian Wujing had never intended to spare that fishhook a glance.

I am going to destroy you.

Whether you kneel or not is your own affair.

“Someone, find him a horse.”

Count Pingye beckoned and pointed at Wang Zhi, who was still kneeling before him.

“Remember. Not a single word different. Deliver the message exactly.”

With that, two personal guards dragged Wang Zhi away to be “released back into the wild.”

Behind them, Yan soldiers were still disembarking from the ships.

Jing City was a strategic strongpoint. Nian Yao had always been cautious when facing the Prince of Jingnan, so naturally he had not neglected this place. Three separate forces alone were stationed northwest, northeast, and directly north of Jing City.

Unfortunately for him, who could possibly have imagined the Yan army would come ashore openly and grandly from the rear by following the Wei River?

No matter how hard the shell protecting your front might be, Count Pingye had still reached around with one finger and pinched down hard on this juicy patch of soft flesh.

“Pass down this Count’s military order. Today, there will be no quarter!”

“The Marquis has ordered: no quarter!”

“The Marquis has ordered: no quarter!”

The soldiers needed to vent the repression accumulated through so many days crammed aboard ship. Zheng Fan, meanwhile, needed genuine slaughter to manufacture enough terror.

Naturally, they could not kill everyone. His troops were no longer cavalry, so plenty of people would inevitably escape. Those survivors would carry the terror with them and spread it farther.

Inside and outside Zhennan Pass stood several hundred thousand of Great Chu’s finest Imperial Clan Guards and noble private armies.

So what?

The moment Zheng Fan planted Great Yan’s Black Dragon Banner here, he was telling them in plain language:

You are already meat on the chopping block.

Count Pingye looked at the Demon Kings gathered behind him and clapped his hands.

“Rare chance. Go have some fun. No sense leaving A’Cheng to enjoy himself alone.”

“Yes, Master!”

“Yes, Master!”

...

Liang Cheng had already led troops into Jing City.

The city’s defenses were badly lax. Yan was famous for cavalry, but elites remained elites even after they dismounted.

More precisely, if one set aside rigid factors such as battle formations and coordinated maneuvering, then in the chaos of close combat, a cavalryman without his horse was still usually fiercer than an ordinary infantryman.

In the age of cold weapons, cavalry quality crushed infantry quality in nearly every dimension.

The Chu troops inside Jing City were plainly not of especially high quality, and the Yan had struck them completely unprepared. They organized several counterattacks, but each was broken almost immediately. After that, all they had left was running in every direction.

That was normal.

No country, however formidable, could fill every unit with elites.

Even the State of Yan had once possessed the Left Route Army that dragged everyone down during the First Battle of Wang River. Even now, the Yan military system divided its forces into clear grades. The Chu were certainly no different.

These were troops responsible for grain, transport, and guarding the safest possible rear area. If they had truly been able to fight, why would they have been stationed here?

As for the men under Count Pingye, aside from the First Command of Savage warriors that the Savage King had brainwashed into shape, the rest were genuine elite shock troops. In a Tian Ji horse-racing matchup where the tiers were so badly mismatched, the Chu collapsing outright was hardly surprising.

“Kill!”

Liang Cheng charged with saber raised.

He was the arrowhead. The Yan soldiers pouring into the city used him as their guide and drove toward the key positions inside Jing City.

Once organized Chu resistance had been shattered, the next task was to seize the Garrison Commander’s Residence and choke off the enemy’s command center. After that, forces could split off to control the other city gates, clear out scattered troops, and suppress any Chu who still tried to resist.

The outer wall of the Garrison Commander’s Residence was fairly high.

What was absurd was that when Liang Cheng led his men there, he discovered the entrance completely jammed with people.

The guards inside were plainly trying to close the gate, while quite a few prominent men of Jing City had brought their household guards and were desperately trying to force their way inside for safety.

The Yan had not even arrived yet, and these people had already started killing one another at the gate.

The residence guards loosed arrows.

Those outside raised sabers and kept forcing their way in.

Then, when ranks of black-armored Yan troops appeared within sight, the same Chu who had possessed enough courage to fight among themselves abruptly collapsed all over again.

The men outside dropped to their knees and surrendered.

The men inside abandoned helmets and armor and fled toward the rear residence.

It was not that they had no wish to resist.

They no longer possessed the spirit to resist.

Coldness was a zombie’s natural state, but even Liang Cheng found himself giving a speechless little laugh at the sight.

It was almost as though the Chu they had spent months grinding against outside Zhennan Pass and the Chu before him now were two completely different species.

The Chu in this city had gone a little Qian.

The order of no quarter had already been passed down, and this had never been a battle fought for prisoners. Even when Chu soldiers dropped to their knees and surrendered, Yan troops simply rushed forward and finished them with a stroke of the saber.

The rest continued into the residence.

By the time Liang Cheng entered the rear courtyard, Yan troops had captured Jing City’s Garrison Commander, Jing Suyuan, alive beside a well.

At Jing Suyuan’s side was a handsome young man with much of his clothing missing.

This handsome young man was the troupe master of the Traveling Song Troupe that had performed outside the dock. He had traveled widely and possessed a reputation touched with mystery and legend, but now, faced with bright Yan sabers in every direction, he truly went pale enough to deserve the phrase “a beauty losing color.”

Then again, a man this delicate and lovely possessed a kind of allure all his own.

As for Jing Suyuan, one only had to look at his surname.

The Jing Clan of Great Chu controlled much of Chu’s literary tradition. It produced civil officials in abundance and stood as one of the great representatives of Chu culture.

The Jing Clan placed little emphasis on martial preparations. So unlike many other great clans, it had not contributed large private armies to this war between states. Instead, it supplied enormous quantities of grain, fodder, and civilian laborers.

Jing Suyuan had originally headed a yamen in the commandery seat of Shanggu Commandery. Once the war began, he was transferred to Jing City to organize its operations.

Perhaps Zhennan Pass had truly made the people behind it far too comfortable and complacent.

Lord Jing had somehow still found time to hold a private rendezvous with this illegitimate son.

Truly, where beneath Heaven could one find a soul who understood one’s own?

The Jin fashion for male beauty was dancing merrily away.

The bastard-born young man was lovely enough to make one’s heart soften, but the Yan soldiers around him wore expressions of unmistakable disgust.

To put it plainly, this Jin-style taste was far more fashionable among the powerful and wealthy. In fact, precisely because it was fashionable among the elite, its vitality only grew stronger. It was as though a man who did not follow the fashion somehow lacked class.

Ordinary people and ordinary soldiers were still at the stage of saving their pay so they could enjoy themselves in a red tent.

Their tastes were purer.

More grounded.

“General!”

At that moment, a Lieutenant Commander escorted a woman over.

She looked about thirty-four or thirty-five. Hairpins adorned her hair, her figure was plump and full, and a mole marked the corner of her mouth. One glance was enough to see the air of a hungry tigress about her.

No wonder the skinny Garrison Commander Jing had needed to seek his sense of existence from that illegitimate son instead.

No quarter was no quarter.

But some people who ought to be captured alive still had to be captured alive.

The Lieutenant Commander had good eyes. After noticing something unusual about the woman, he brought her over.

“Madam...”

“Husband...”

Liang Cheng looked at the woman a few more times.

According to the Blind Man and the others, this woman should have cleared the threshold.

But after A’Ming’s last attempt to help arrange Madam Ke for Master, Liang Cheng had no interest in becoming the kind of man who procured women for his lord.

Better to let Master judge for himself.

“Take all three of them to the dock and hand them over to the Count!”

“Yes!”

...

“Tsk. No.”

“Tsk. This one won’t do either.”

A’Ming was like “a little girl gleaning ears of rice.”

The fighting all around him had not even finished, yet he was already rummaging through the corpses on the ground in search of wine that suited his palate.

Generally speaking, the stronger a person was, the sweeter and more fragrant their blood tended to be.

But it was not absolute.

Sometimes a person with no cultivation at all still had a chance of yielding wonderfully drinkable blood.

A’Ming was searching very seriously.

“Mm. The blood in this corpse is extremely active. This one should be decent.”

He held a wineskin in his right hand.

The nails of his left hand lengthened.

Just then, the Chu soldier lying blood-soaked and apparently dead before him suddenly opened his eyes.

Their gazes met.

A trace of awkwardness appeared in both sets of eyes.

This bastard had been playing dead.

A’Ming’s nails pierced the man’s neck.

The Chu soldier tried to struggle, but he had no strength left. Very soon, he truly became one with the surrounding scenery.

A’Ming rose helplessly and went looking for his next target.

After that, he found several more Chu soldiers lying among the dead and pretending to be corpses in hopes of slipping through.

Some Yan soldiers who noticed what was happening could not help feeling a chill crawl through their hearts.

They did not possess the vocabulary to describe it precisely.

It merely seemed that Mr. A’Ming deliberately singled out the Chu who had tried to muddle through by playing dead, especially the ones who had nearly succeeded, and then shattered their hope one by one, personally delivering despair.

In reality, A’Ming was only looking for something to drink.

Living men lying among corpses possessed blood whose vitality was simply far too obvious.

Yet each one disappointed him.

“Aaaaaah!”

Another Chu soldier pretending to be dead was killed by A’Ming.

A’Ming’s expression had already turned cold.

He had searched for so long.

Turned over so many bodies.

Yet the wineskin was still empty.

For the first time, on a battlefield, A’Ming felt that corpse-picking was terribly difficult.

...

Xue San had taken men to another city gate.

Their numbers were small, so they made no attempt to forcefully block and control the people fleeing from inside.

More precisely, no one had intended to kill everyone in Jing City to begin with.

Those who escaped could be allowed to escape.

So Xue San was in an excellent mood.

He sat there with a perfectly clear conscience and went fishing.

What he was fishing for were the higher-grade fish hidden among the fleeing crowd.

“That one. Go!”

“And that one. Go!”

“That one over there. Go!”

Some nobles truly did possess a talent for running for their lives.

The Yan attack had arrived with almost no warning, yet these people still managed to change clothes and disguises at astonishing speed before mixing into the crowd leaving the city.

Unfortunately for them, they ran into Xue San sitting there playing a “spot-the-difference game.”

He did not have many men beside him, but every one of them was skilled.

And the Chu only cared about escaping.

When they saw the Yan were merely pulling out one or two specific targets while ignoring everyone else, naturally they did not develop any melodramatic impulse to unite in shared hatred and resist together.

“For the men, ask their offices. Keep the important ones alive for now. For the women and female relatives, if she’s good-looking and she’s the principal wife, keep her too.”

...

“ROAR!”

Fan Li led a group of soldiers onto the Chu vessels moored upstream from the dock and began clearing the Chu aboard them.

These ships had been berthed beside the dock when everything happened and had never had time to escape.

Naturally, they could not be allowed to slip away.

Jing City’s grain stores had to burn.

The Chu military provisions had to be destroyed.

But Chu was still a great state with deep reserves. So if one wanted to reduce its ability to move provisions and military supplies afterward, these vessels absolutely could not be allowed to escape either.

That did not mean the Yan chose to scuttle them.

If the Prince of Jingnan’s style of war was to consider everything, split every thread, and peel every cocoon, then Count Pingye preferred the principle that “a crafty rabbit keeps three burrows.”

Under the original plan, after the army disembarked from the Yan Navy’s ships, those vessels should have been scuttled to block the river and prevent the Chu navy from coming through.

There was no point fantasizing about it.

In terms of warship scale, shipbuilding technology, water-combat experience, and practically every other relevant dimension, the Great Yan Navy simply could not compare with the Chu navy.

When the Great Yan Navy sailed in this time, no one had ever expected those ships to return.

And in truth... they could not return by the same route.

But Count Pingye still felt there was no need to go to extremes immediately.

Taking Jing City this easily had exceeded his expectations.

Yet that also revealed another problem.

The city might not actually be very easy to defend.

Otherwise his own troops could not have stormed in so casually.

If circumstances truly turned bad, keeping these ships intact meant that at the final moment he could still transfer his troops somewhere else.

Retracing the original route would inevitably run straight into the Chu navy the moment it received the news and came searching.

But what if he changed direction...?

One had to remember that the Mi River beside Ying Capital was, in fact, also a tributary of the Wei River.

The last time Jing Renli sent Zheng Fan gifts, Zheng Fan had been away taking the Princess to Yanjing to receive rewards from Emperor Yan and the imperial court.

That was regrettable.

Count Pingye had always been particular about propriety.

He liked returning courtesy for courtesy.

If the situation changed again, he truly would not mind boarding ships with his men, following the Wei River farther south, turning into the Mi River, and reaching the walls of Ying Capital to ask his elder brother-in-law whether all was well.

Surely his brother-in-law would be both delighted and deeply moved by the visit of his sister’s husband.

...

Fourth Lady was inside the city, but she had brought no men with her.

Jing City had already been under military administration for some time. Its true civilians and merchants had either become civilian laborers or received early orders to relocate.

But that did not mean the city had stopped being prosperous.

The powerful and wealthy were a species that naturally carried an aura of luxury wherever they went.

They knew how to eat.

They knew how to play.

They were willing to spend lavishly on both, even during wartime.

After so many days drifting aboard ships, the fresh ingredients they had hurriedly brought with them had long since been exhausted.

Fourth Lady wanted to find new ingredients so she could cook dinner for Master.

Exquisite food was nature’s finest reward for humanity’s diligence.

The sound of killing shook the city.

Fourth Lady, meanwhile, carried a basket through street after street, deliberately seeking out great residences so she could inspect their kitchens.

From time to time, she passed an alley where Yan troops were slaughtering Chu.

The moment the Yan soldiers saw her, they immediately saluted.

They knew perfectly well that this woman belonged to Count Pingye.

Fourth Lady nodded lightly and kept walking toward the next house.

Threads extended from her fingers and lifted the bolt on one kitchen door from the inside.

The kitchen beyond made her eyes brighten.

There was a great deal stored here.

The vegetables and meat both looked fresh.

At that moment, a man suddenly rushed toward her with a blade in hand.

Fourth Lady’s gaze sharpened.

She was just about to lift her hand, and razor threads capable of dismembering the man in an instant were on the verge of flying out, when the man abruptly stopped.

He looked at Fourth Lady and said:

“Quick! Hide in the cellar at the back. Don’t come out. The Yan dogs are killing people outside!”

An apron was tied around the man’s waist.

He looked like a cook.

And the weapon in his hand was merely an old kitchen cleaver.

“Quick, quick. Get in there with the others.”

Fourth Lady said nothing and walked deeper inside.

The cook opened the cellar hatch for her.

Several women and children were hidden below.

At the mouth of the cellar, Fourth Lady sensed a thread of coldness.

That meant there was probably a small ice room below.

How extravagant.

The former owner of this residence had plainly been someone who knew how to enjoy life.

Fourth Lady descended.

Master liked fish.

She wanted to see whether the ice room stored any.

If there was fish, she could make fish soup for Master that evening.

Below the cellar was another woman, also wearing an apron.

How should one describe it?

After a husband and wife spent enough years together, certain parts of them slowly converged until they began to resemble one another.

One glance was enough to tell that this woman was the cook’s wife.

She stepped forward, took Fourth Lady’s hand, and pulled her away from the ice room toward the others.

“Don’t be afraid. It’s all right. It’s all right. The Yan dogs won’t find this place.”

But haven’t I already found it?

The woman’s hand was trembling.

She was terrified.

Her husband remained above, guarding the door bolt, guarding everyone here.

Fourth Lady pointed toward the ice room.

“Is there fish in there?”

The Chu liked eating fish too.

They had countless ways to prepare it, especially wealthy households.

The cook’s wife froze in astonishment.

She truly could not understand why this woman, supposedly fleeing disaster, would ask such a question at a time like this.

“Is your husband a good cook?”

The woman froze again.

The women and children beside her stared blankly as well.

Fourth Lady patted the cook’s wife on the hand.

“How about this? One specialty dish for one life here. Fair?”

...

At the dock, personal guards brought over two chairs and a table.

Count Pingye sat in one chair with both legs propped on the table.

He invited the Sword Saint to sit in the other chair.

The Sword Saint refused.

Count Pingye looked at him.

“Why not go have some fun?”

That was nonsense.

In a battle this one-sided, why would the Sword Saint possibly draw his sword?

The Sword Saint asked in return:

“Why don’t you?”

Count Pingye placed one hand over his chest.

“I’m softhearted. The thing I can least bear to watch is killing.”

[End of Chapter 554]