Chapter 762: Awakening
Third Master had seen plenty of major scenes in his life.
He did not mind lying here a while longer and watching the show.
Marquis Pingxi Residence's objective this time was to eliminate whatever existence had become entangled with that prophecy.
They were not here to fight over some treasure.
There was no need to rush in foaming at the mouth.
If another group was willing to charge first and wear the target down for free... wonderful.
The roasted flour was not especially pleasant to eat.
Too dry.
Xue San stuffed a mouthful of snow into his mouth to moisten it.
Then he shifted his lower body slightly.
Third Master disliked hiding in snow.
On the surface, it seemed like an excellent environment for concealment.
But every time... it froze the lower half of his body stiff as a board.
The two sides were now fighting furiously.
Xue San silently estimated the strength of both parties.
At the same time, he kept part of his attention firmly fixed on the block of ice.
Had the thing inside already awakened?
Was it half awake?
Still sleeping?
The distance was too great to see the details of the killing clearly.
But that was fine.
Watching from here was a little like watching fireworks.
He did not need every detail.
He only needed the broad spectacle.
How many experts did each side possess?
How strong were they?
How did they compare with the men under his own command?
Eventually...
Xue San reached a conclusion.
Both forces were stronger than his group.
Not only in numbers.
In quality too.
But there was nothing to panic over.
He had not brought his men here to stand in a line and brawl like idiots from the jianghu.
The men under him were assassins.
Scouts.
Saboteurs.
Ambush was what they were truly good at.
At last... the attacking side began losing momentum.
After suffering substantial casualties, they chose to withdraw.
The column did not pursue.
They were probably worried about the enormous block of ice on the sled.
Instead, they remained in place and began tending the wounded and reorganizing.
"Tell the brothers to spread the sentries farther out. If someone's willing to do our work for free, why refuse the labor?"
The attackers had failed once.
They would not give up.
They would come again.
Under those circumstances...
Xue San had no reason to mix his own people into the chaos.
The force transporting the ice was a common enemy to both groups.
Whoever weakened it did him a favor.
Watching a fire from the opposite bank was comfortable.
Waiting nearby to pick up whatever remained afterward... even more comfortable.
Near nightfall... the column began moving again.
That unexpected decision made Xue San narrow his eyes.
Traveling at night?
Interesting.
He immediately waved Dai Li over.
"You take the brothers and follow from a distance. Watch for the markers or fire signals I leave behind. If something happens at the critical moment, you make the decision yourself. I'll move alone. Easier that way. I'll get closer and take another look."
"Yes, Third Master."
Xue San nodded.
Then he separated from his men.
Without subordinates tying him down...
Third Master's concealment skills became far more flexible.
By the time darkness fully settled... he had already shortened the distance between himself and the column considerably.
The column advanced under torchlight.
Earlier... it had numbered around five hundred.
Now... closer to four hundred.
The attack during the day had clearly hurt them badly.
Xue San still did not rush closer.
He simply shadowed them at a safer distance.
After traveling through the entire night, the column finally stopped around sunrise and began setting camp to rest.
At that moment...
Xue San clearly sensed faint rustling sounds beginning to appear around the area where he himself was hiding.
Third Master immediately concealed himself even more thoroughly.
Snow covered him.
His head became a protruding stone beneath the drift.
It had the added benefit of allowing him to keep observing.
A first-rate assassin... had to be a first-rate expert at hiding.
At this point, unless one of those rustling men walked directly over and stepped on him... well... if his luck truly became that awful, there would be nothing he could do.
Otherwise... neither side would discover this "observer."
Xue San was genuinely curious.
Who exactly were these people?
Why were they so obsessed with attacking the column transporting the ice?
One failed assault yesterday had not been enough.
Now they were back again.
But Xue San understood something else too.
The convoy leader had chosen to march through the night.
That meant everyone in the column should be exhausted now.
Would that leader really fail to understand something so obvious?
Buzz...
Buzz...
A head emerged from the snow not far from Xue San.
A Savage face.
Xue San almost laughed.
Another half a zhang to the right... and the man would have discovered him.
Fortunately...
Third Master's luck was not bad.
At least he did not possess Master's cursed constitution.
The Savage clearly had no idea Xue San was hidden beside him.
He watched the camp ahead with extreme caution.
Then... a faint vibration came from his body.
The wind was howling across the snowfield.
It was not snowing.
Yet the vibrating sound carried strangely far.
Soon... similar vibrations began answering from the distance.
Xue San was bored anyway.
So he listened.
And analyzed.
Judging from the current situation, he could roughly infer what kinds of information an attacking force would need to transmit.
Then he began playing a little game of codebreaking.
It was not difficult.
More precisely... to an expert, it was genuinely simple.
And under battlefield conditions like these, signals could not be made too complicated.
Complicated signals delayed communication.
After listening for a while, Xue San understood the general pattern.
He could not claim to understand every message.
But he could probably imitate the system now.
Of course... first he would need a "transmitter."
Probably some little drum made from animal hide.
As time passed... and as more of the attackers' signals were decoded...
Xue San realized more and more people were gathering from other directions.
Another assault was about to begin.
Whoosh!
Whoosh!
Whoosh!
In an instant... figures erupted from the snow at the positions closest to the convoy and charged.
The Savage beside Xue San rose as well.
But just as he prepared to rush downhill... coldness brushed his neck.
A dagger had already opened his throat.
If you allowed an assassin to hide beside you for this long... unless you were some Third Grade Martial Artist with a body tempered beyond reason... there really was no plausible explanation for why you should survive the first strike.
Once the man died, Xue San retracted the dagger with his right hand.
His left hand snapped out.
Bandages instantly wrapped around the man's throat so blood would not spill across the snow and contaminate the area.
Then he dragged the corpse beneath the snow.
There... he sprinkled a powder of his own invention over it.
Animals with sharp noses found the smell extremely unpleasant.
Finally... he removed the little hide drum the dead man had been using and strapped it onto himself.
Then he restored the snow over his head.
Once more...
Third Master became a protruding stone.
Nearby... the second round of killing had begun.
The convoy's choice to march through the night had already felt strange.
The attackers choosing to strike again after failing yesterday was understandable in one sense.
They had caught the convoy at its most exhausted hour.
But they had already failed once.
Would they really repeat the same move without some hidden card?
In Xue San's view... both sides ought to have something prepared.
No one involved should be this stupid.
A pity.
If Master's army were already here... none of these questions would matter.
An army would solve everything.
And sure enough... during this second assault, the convoy suddenly produced a large number of military crossbows.
Buzz!
Buzz!
Buzz!
A dense volley erupted.
The attackers were immediately shot into confusion.
Those crossbows had never appeared in yesterday's fighting.
Xue San listened carefully to the sound of the bolts.
Well maintained.
Average range.
Not made by Marquis Pingxi Residence.
He knew that without needing to inspect them.
The Residence's ordnance production was overseen by Xue San himself.
Its military crossbows possessed better range and better accuracy than common battlefield models.
The weapons being used by the convoy... unless something unexpected had happened... were probably military crossbows that had leaked into the snowfields during the Savage invasion years ago.
Great Cheng, and the Situ Clan before it, had always enforced an iron embargo against the snowfields.
Later... when Marquis Pingxi Residence began trading with the various Savage tribes, restrictions on armor, weapons, and military equipment remained extremely strict.
There had only been one period between those two eras when the snowfields suddenly received large amounts of such equipment.
That was when the Savage King broke through Snow Sea Pass.
At the time... vast amounts of wealth, population, and material resources flowed back north.
Some tribes became rich overnight.
The Naiman Tribe had dared defy Marquis Zheng of Snow Sea Pass in later years largely because it had swallowed so much profit during that period and convinced itself it had become powerful.
Xue San's thoughts sharpened.
The people transporting the ice should have been hiding in the far north before this.
So why did they possess this kind of military equipment?
That very likely meant... a large Savage tribe somewhere on the snowfields had already established contact with them.
Things... were becoming increasingly complicated.
Then... the flow of battle changed again.
Chanting suddenly rose.
Snow spiraled upward from the ground.
In an instant... it condensed into blades of ice and screamed toward the convoy.
Casualties among the convoy increased sharply.
From where Xue San watched, he could see a group of figures standing along the rear of the attacking formation.
Each carried a staff.
Their clothing was black.
Uniform in style.
Not military armor.
Which meant... clergy.
Marquis Pingxi Residence had spent years attempting to use religion as one of its tools for controlling the snowfields.
And that work had already produced good results.
But the snowfields were simply too vast.
Most Savages still worshiped the Stars.
These men... were probably Star Envoys.
Xue San remembered that when the Savage King first rose, Gou Moli liked shouting things such as "In the name of the Stars!" whenever he wanted to mobilize his warriors.
In reality...
Gou Moli was an atheist through and through.
He had always regarded the Stars with contempt.
Otherwise, he would never have allowed Sang Hu, a man who once had blood feuds with the Guides of Stars and had even hunted them, to "take the tonsure" and become the Grand Guide of Stars on the snowfields.
Of course... that also helped create serious internal fractures inside the religious community.
Years ago, while drinking together, the Savage King had occasionally grown nostalgic and started "recalling the turbulent glory of old times."
He had said that his original plan was simple.
After returning from his campaign inside the passes with his prestige at its absolute peak... he would integrate every faction of the Guides of Stars across the snowfields.
Then he would make himself the supreme leader acknowledged by both secular and religious power.
A pity.
The Savage King had entered the passes... and failed to come back out.
An enormous pile of problems he had originally planned to settle upon his return remained untouched forever.
Later, Marquis Pingxi Residence's overwhelming pressure on the snowfields, combined with the Residence's increasingly aggressive religious outreach, pushed the Guides of Stars gradually away from the southern snowfields.
And yet here... they appeared in organized numbers.
And whatever they were doing with those chants and ice blades... how could one look at it and not think of... magic?
Of course... "magic" was not exactly accurate.
Eastern Qi Refiners, sorcerers, and ritualists could produce similar phenomena.
Master himself had only recently enjoyed a personal experience of "spirit-wandering through the Great Void," all the way to Qian's Back Mountain for a cup of tea.
But... for Xue San's understanding of the scene before him... "magic" simply fit best.
Either way... things were becoming more interesting.
Go on.
Fight.
Show all your hidden cards.
Beat each other until brains splattered out.
Better yet... destroy one another.
Third Master was more than happy to watch matters escalate.
Only once both sides had forced out each other's hidden moves... could the yellow oriole waiting behind them perform properly.
Years ago, the Savage King's army had also contained plenty of surrendered Guides of Stars.
They contributed significantly on campaign.
When Snow Sea Pass fell, the achievement had not belonged solely to Situ Jiong and Situ Yi acting as internal collaborators.
The Guides of Stars had played a role too.
But later, during the Battle of Wangjiang, when they faced charges from the era's finest iron cavalry of the Zhenbei and Jingnan Armies in a clash involving hundreds of thousands of troops... there had been little room for such people to display their abilities.
They could only be swept away in the collapsing tide of the Savage army.
In localized fighting, however... especially under the right conditions... their abilities could produce extraordinary effects.
Once the attacking side overcame its initial terror of the crossbows... they broke into the convoy again.
At the same time... two groups of cavalry appeared from east and west.
Clearly part of the attacking force.
Both began charging toward the battlefield.
The convoy's defense immediately grew strained.
The moment those cavalry slammed into them... the defensive formation collapsed.
As an advance scout for the army, Xue San had already seen some of those dazed people who had been "dispersed."
Originally, he assumed the far-northern group had learned an army was coming and become frightened enough to flee.
Now... obviously not.
Another faction had begun moving against them first.
As the Guides of Stars drew closer to the battle, they released another wave of spells.
The convoy's newly rebuilt defensive ring shattered completely.
The attackers successfully cut the battlefield apart.
Xue San had followed Master through campaign after campaign over these past years.
He had seen enough war to know what usually happened next.
Once a battlefield reached this state... one side generally began slaughtering the other.
Then... a woman with very long hair suddenly leapt onto the block of ice atop the sled.
She screamed something.
The distance was too great.
Third Master could not make out the words.
But one thing was certain.
She was definitely shouting.
Afterward... she drove a dagger into her own palm.
Then pressed the bleeding hand against the ice.
The remaining convoy members desperately gathered around her.
They were clearly trying to buy her time.
Meanwhile... unless the attackers had water in their brains, they obviously understood the woman was preparing some ultimate move.
Their assault became even more frantic.
They wanted to stop her.
At that point...
Xue San unconsciously lifted his head a little higher and ruined part of his camouflage.
He wanted to see.
He really wanted to see.
Had the thing inside that ice... woken up or not?
Woooooo...
Woooooo...
Suddenly... wind began to blow.
A strange, sinister wind.
Above them... a mass of dark cloud gathered.
"Fuck."
Xue San cursed inwardly.
What an entrance.
Really knew how to scare people.
Then... the ice exploded.
The long-haired woman standing on it was thrown away.
Inside the broken ice remaining on the sled... a man sat upright.
He wore black armor.
His hair was very long.
The man closed one hand around a saber.
The next instant... terrifying pressure gathered around him.
His body vanished from the sled.
Then appeared inside the melee.
Wherever he passed... blood sprayed.
Chunks of flesh flew.
Other people's weapons struck his body and seemed almost useless.
His saber, meanwhile... carried terrifying power.
No corpse beneath it remained whole.
"ROAR!"
A savage howl tore from his throat.
His figure surged forward again.
The Guides of Stars immediately attacked him together.
Powerful ice blades slammed into his body.
From Xue San's position... he saw the black-armored man driven down onto one knee.
At once... a group of attackers rushed forward, hoping to seize the moment and finish him.
Then... the black-armored man snapped his head up.
His already long hair spread outward in every direction.
Like the spines of a hedgehog.
Only for countless ice blades to cut straight through it a moment later.
Severed hair scattered across the snow.
And the man's pupils... turned scarlet.
By all reason...
Xue San was much too far away to see the man's eyes clearly.
That was what made the moment so strange.
The instant the black-armored man lifted his head again...
Xue San felt cold spread down his own back.
As though... the man had already noticed him.
This was... mental force!
Master was an ordinary man.
A grass-roots nobody who had climbed upward.
But the Demon Kings... were talented in far too many things.
Xue San remembered how fond the Blind Man was of this kind of trick.
A sudden blast of mental force straight into your sea of consciousness.
The feeling... made a man want to ascend to Heaven and die at the same time.
Even Xue San, watching from so far away, had felt it.
The Guides of Stars standing near the black-armored man suffered much worse.
In an instant... half of them clutched their heads and dropped to their knees in agony.
The black-armored man rose.
Saber in hand... he plunged directly into their center.
"Oh-ho."
Third Master quietly lowered his head again.
He restored his camouflage.
A group of mages had allowed a warrior to get into melee range.
Finished.
Sure enough... the Guides of Stars were cut down in huge numbers.
In a battlefield this small, especially one not fought by properly drilled military formations... individual combat power could be amplified to an absurd degree.
The black-armored man's intervention inflicted devastating losses on the attackers.
The convoy, which had been pushed almost to annihilation moments earlier... began counterattacking.
The attacking force could no longer avoid collapse.
They fled.
This time... the convoy still did not pursue.
Because after driving the attackers away... their pillar of strength, the black-armored man... suddenly collapsed face-first into the snow.
The long-haired woman who had awakened him rushed over with one injured arm clutched against herself.
She shouted desperately.
Panic filled her every movement.
"Tsk, tsk."
Xue San thought:
Awake, yes.
But not fully recovered.
Good.
Still something to work with.
Third Master is going to seize the foremost merit this time...
Peh!
Peh!
Peh!
Third Master will absolutely fail this time.
Completely.
Utterly.
After reversing the omen against himself...
Xue San began silently withdrawing through the snow.
Then... he froze.
Because under the woman's orders, the surviving convoy members began dragging corpses toward the black-armored man.
They cut the bodies open.
Bled them.
And poured the blood over the man lying on the ground.
Inside his heart...
Xue San immediately exploded into curses.
"Fuck! He can recharge too?!"
[End of Chapter 762]
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