Chapter 825: Brother Zheng, This Big Brother of Yours...

Xie Yu’an walked through the military encampment.

What he saw was not the celebration one would expect after a great victory.

Quite the opposite.

The atmosphere was oppressive.

Wounded soldiers were being treated everywhere. Every physician in the Liang capital had been dragged here, even the errand boys from medicine shops, yet there were still not enough hands.

A brutal victory.

A pyrrhic victory.

Only when such words stopped being words on a page and became reality before one’s eyes could a person truly feel the blood-soaked cruelty hidden behind them.

Xie Yu’an found his father.

Xie Zhuyang sat on a wooden block. His shoulder had been bandaged, and his lips were visibly cracked.

Xie Yu’an had always considered his father something of a living treasure. The man cared about appearances immensely. His speech could be vulgar, his behavior crude, but his person had to remain refined and presentable.

Right now, Pillar of State Xie clearly had no energy left to care about any of that.

Xie Zhuyang saw his son approaching.

He wanted to laugh.

Instead, he cried.

His son had been precocious since childhood. Long ago, Xie Zhuyang had already lost the ability to put on much of a fatherly front before him. Spanking the boy had become the last extreme expression of paternal authority he possessed.

Sometimes Xie Zhuyang even worried that once this son grew a little older, perhaps it would be time for him to abdicate and make way for the worthy.

The old fossils inside the clan certainly seemed to be looking forward to it.

Power was involved, and the Xie Clan was effectively a local royal house unto itself. By rights, the relationship between father and heir should have been fraught. Why had Crown Princes throughout history so often lived difficult lives? Because their very existence already threatened the authority of their imperial fathers.

But Xie Zhuyang had only this one seedling.

After such a tremendous victory, especially one won against elite Yan troops, he should have been able to show his son some heroic grandeur.

Instead, when the moment came, the tears would not stop.

Son, your father was terrified.

Son, your father almost never saw you again.

He never shouted the words aloud.

His expression betrayed everything.

And Xie Zhuyang did not feel ashamed of showing such emotion before his own son. He knew perfectly well what place he occupied in Xie Yu’an’s heart, and what image the boy already had of him.

Xie Yu’an walked forward, spread his arms, and hugged his father’s head.

He patted it gently.

“Dad. The battle’s over. It’s over now. Don’t be scared. Don’t be scared anymore.”

“Wuwuwu...”

Xie Zhuyang burst into loud sobs, utterly unconcerned with the eyes of the clan soldiers around him.

Then again, everyone had long grown used to the way this father and son behaved in public. And for the soldiers who had just followed their clan head through this battle, there was something in his crying that resonated with them too.

Xie Zhuyang cried for quite a while.

When he finally stopped, he blew his nose on his son’s clothes.

“...” Xie Yu’an.

Xie Zhuyang straightened up. A personal guard brought over a basin and towel, and he began washing his face.

Xie Yu’an stripped off his outer robe.

“Careful you don’t catch cold,” his father said.

Xie Yu’an shook his head and took a cloak from the old attendant, wrapping it around himself.

Xie Zhuyang snorted.

“This old man isn’t bedridden yet, and already it looks like I won’t be able to count on you waiting beside my sickbed in the future. Unfilial wretch.”

“Dad, if our family ever falls so far that I personally have to sit beside your sickbed and serve you, I suspect you’d be the first one unable to endure that kind of life. Better to leave early and spare yourself the misery.”

“Ah... that does sound about right.”

“How bad are the casualties?”

Xie Yu’an asked the question that mattered most.

Xie Zhuyang clenched his teeth.

Then cursed:

“Those Yan dogs are all fucking lunatics!”

Hatred toward an enemy was often the highest form of praise.

People found it much easier to display grace and magnanimity toward defeated opponents.

If even that grace disappeared... then it meant the pain had been real.

“Everything was actually inside our calculations,” Xie Yu’an said as he began peeling an orange. “From the moment the Yan came in to the moment we closed the gate, all of it was planned. We calculated half of it ourselves, and the Yan even calculated the other half for us. In the old days, that sort of treatment belonged to the Yan. Chu, Qian, and the old State of Jin were always the fools instead.”

“Son, thank Heaven you calculated it properly. If you hadn’t...”

“Dad, you need to get used to it. Get used to staking your life like this again. After this battle, once we return home, you’ll be the man everyone expects to lead. Our own people know Nian Yao was no mediocrity, but the Imperial Clan Guards under him could do nothing except get beaten down by the Yan. This time, though...”

“Let Father breathe for a while first. I don’t want to think about any of that right now.”

“All right.”

Xie Yu’an did not disturb his frightened old father any further.

He turned and headed toward another camp.

The Qian and Chu armies had joined their encampments together. After the battle, nobody had much energy to separate them again. When people were all busy licking wounds, their tempers tended to become softer.

Conditions in the Qian camp were no better than among the Chu.

If anything, they were worse.

From somewhere in the distance came the howls of soldiers who had gone half mad. They were not screaming from wounds or unbearable pain.

Something inside their minds had simply broken.

Xie Yu’an saw Old Fifth Han sitting against a fence, his right eye wrapped in bandages.

Old Fifth Han had originally come from Qian’s Western Army. After committing an offense, he had been expelled, only to catch the eye of a regional Military Commissioner who took him as a son-in-law. Heaven knew how many men envied the dogshit luck that had fallen into his lap.

Later, when Yan invaded Qian, the armies of the Three Frontiers remained in place. The Qian troops sent up from the rear were routed batch after batch.

Old Fifth Han had been among those routs.

Once an entire army collapsed, individual martial prowess meant very little.

He could only run with everyone else.

For years afterward, Old Fifth Han loved boasting that he had fought Prince Pingxi for three hundred rounds amid the chaos and that the Prince’s saber technique had been terrifying.

In truth, Zheng Fan really had noticed him back then. He thought the man looked like a big fish and had prepared to sneak over and knock him out from behind.

Well.

Not with a club.

With a rock.

But Old Fifth Han had looked so ferocious while knocking a Yan cavalryman from the saddle with a single spear strike that Zheng Fan, not yet Prince Pingxi at the time, immediately chose discretion over valor.

So in a sense, Old Fifth Han’s boasting was not actually that exaggerated.

He was, after all, the man who had once widened his eyes and frightened Prince Pingxi into retreat!

That same year, after the Qian army collapsed, Old Fifth Han’s father-in-law organized commandery troops and tried to block Li Bao’s force.

Naturally, those commandery troops collapsed as well.

Old Fifth Han proved himself a decent son-in-law. In the middle of the rout, he rescued the old man and fled south with him.

After reaching the outskirts of Shangjing, he then helped his father-in-law organize a force of local volunteers to defend the sovereign.

And he truly did.

At the time, that trouble-magnet Prince Pingxi had just finished bathing at the home of a local wealthy landlord outside the capital.

The Demon Kings were far weaker then than they were now.

And then...

Baili Jian arrived with his younger sister Baili Xianglan.

Two swords came straight for them.

A Sword Saint, accompanied by a sister whose own strength was nothing to sneer at.

Prince Pingxi had been extremely tense.

The Demon Kings had already decided they would stay behind to hold the pair off while Master escaped first.

Then Old Fifth Han happened to charge out with his volunteer troops.

The noise immediately drew a nearby Zhenbei Army cavalry unit over to reinforce them.

And so the world only remembered that the Baili siblings saw Zhenbei cavalry coming, drew not a single sword, and turned to flee.

Very few people knew that if they had been given just a little more time, or if Old Fifth Han had emerged a little later... the man who would one day shake the realm as Prince Pingxi might have died right there.

After the war, the Yan withdrew.

The Qian Emperor seized the opportunity to dismiss three old Chancellors in one stroke and began gathering the reins of government into his own hands.

Everyone had performed terribly in that war, so the court could only pick the tallest man among dwarfs.

After Le Huan’s troops were routed, he gathered stragglers in the rear and took the initiative to harass the Yan army. He achieved little, but at least he genuinely fought.

Old Fifth Han lost again and again, but he kept his father-in-law alive. Countless northern governors abandoned office and fled. Only Old Fifth Han’s father-in-law persisted in resisting the enemy.

His loyalty and courage were therefore praised.

After the war, not only was he spared demotion, he was promoted into the central government.

Naturally, Old Fifth Han’s own future became even more secure.

And then came the recent battle.

Ran Min, the bait, did not immediately join Li Fusheng after learning that reinforcements had arrived.

Instead, he led his force around Wenming Mountain, drove through a Liang army blocking the south, and continued toward the Liang capital.

It was perhaps the wisest decision Ran Min made after this war began.

The cage had already formed.

If he rushed straight toward the reinforcing army, he would only make it easier for the enemy to hammer the stakes deeper.

Since the enemy wanted to trap and swallow him... he might as well throw the battlefield itself into chaos first.

After learning Ran Min’s movements, Li Fusheng, for once, stopped calling him a wife-killing little bastard.

The truth about Ran Min killing his wife had never really spread far.

Zheng Fan would not announce it.

Xu Wenzu would not either.

But some things did not need to be explained to people at a certain level.

Why in Heaven’s name would Prince Cheng Residence go out of its way to assassinate the wife of some low-ranking patrol officer?

Were they terrified of lacking evidence against themselves and desperately wanted someone to slap them with it?

Those who knew, knew.

But after Ran Min won Xu Wenzu’s appreciation and recommendation, then received promotion from the Emperor himself, almost nobody dared openly mock him over it the way Li Fusheng did.

The force assigned to block Ran Min was Old Fifth Han’s.

While the Xie Clan army moved north to contain Li Fusheng...

Old Fifth Han deployed directly before the Liang capital.

The first truly vicious and satisfying engagement since the beginning of the campaign broke out between those two men.

In the first battle, Old Fifth Han held for two hours.

Then his troops began collapsing.

Defeat.

Ran Min continued toward the capital.

But Old Fifth Han had left a reserve behind.

He gathered the routed soldiers, formed another defensive line, and stood again.

This time he held for a little over an hour.

Then collapsed again.

Yet behind that second line... he had somehow kept another reserve.

The routed troops were gathered again.

Another formation took shape.

By then it was so thin it was practically a cicada’s wing.

Old Fifth Han understood perfectly well that if they broke one more time, there would be no gathering the men again.

So he charged personally at the front.

Three hundred household retainers followed him tightly.

An arrow struck his eye.

He ripped the arrow free.

Swallowed the eyeball into his mouth.

And kept fighting with spear in hand.

At the critical moment, General Pu, previously stationed inside Wenming County City, noticed Ran Min’s movement and immediately marched out.

He entered the battle at precisely the crucial point, striking from the rear flank.

After so much fighting, Ran Min’s force had already taken significant losses.

His soldiers were exhausted.

The bloody courage they had summoned earlier came largely from knowing reinforcements were on the way.

But against Qian soldiers as sticky as oxhide candy... they finally ran out of strength.

In truth, if Ran Min had possessed more troops and enough men to spare for a proper pursuit, Old Fifth Han would never have had the opportunity to gather the routed soldiers again and again.

But he did not.

And in the end, General Pu struck.

Ran Min’s troops were defeated.

His plan to throw the battlefield into chaos failed.

He had no choice but to lead the remnants toward Li Fusheng and seek a junction.

Xie Yu’an stood before Old Fifth Han and stared at his bandaged eye for a long time.

After a while...

Old Fifth Han smiled.

“Well?”

“Quite magnificent.”

“Hahaha.”

Old Fifth Han pointed at his missing eye.

“From now on, whenever I go drinking, people will ask how I lost this eye. I’ll be able to tell the story properly every single time. It’s like carrying my own dish to go with the wine.”

“General, your spirit is heroic.”

“Pillar of State Xie did well too. A real man.”

“My father is crying in his tent right now.”

“Hahahaha.”

There was no mockery in Old Fifth Han’s laughter.

After Old Fifth Han’s battle, the Yan forces joined together.

They maneuvered for several days.

Then their commander, Li Fusheng, ultimately chose to strike head-on first.

Perhaps it came from Yan pride.

They were unwilling to flee without fighting.

Perhaps it came from Li Fusheng’s own character. He had always preferred taking the straight road through a problem.

Or perhaps, in Li Fusheng’s view, rather than withdraw in circles while being chipped apart layer by layer by Qian and Chu forces, it would be better to do the opposite.

Charge directly.

Break the allied formation to the south.

Make every other enemy force afraid.

Then withdraw at leisure.

And the true pivot of this entire cage... was the Xie Clan army.

Its position alone made the Yan uncomfortable no matter which direction they moved.

Years ago, during Great Yan’s national invasion of Chu, Zheng Fan had been ordered to charge the camp defended by the rattan-armored troops for a similar reason.

Formations.

Strategic posture.

Troop placement.

The situation of an entire battlefield.

These things were not dead objects.

They were alive.

The pivot had to be uprooted before the whole structure could be broken.

That became the second great bloody battle.

It lasted an entire day and night.

Using fortifications built in advance and relying on the encampment itself, the Xie Clan army brought the finest qualities of Great Chu infantry to their absolute peak and endured the Yan assaults head-on.

Trenches.

Pits.

Chevaux-de-frise.

Before half a day had passed, both sides had filled them with human lives.

After that... it was simply lives traded for lives.

Before coming here, Xie Yu’an had just walked through his own army’s camp.

The mood there was the truest portrait of that battle.

The Xie Clan had brought only a little over twenty thousand men.

But first, their clan head personally commanded them.

Second, those twenty thousand were clan elites.

Well armored.

Well trained.

And yet... the Yan had attacked the Xie Clan’s strength with their own weakness and still fought with such ferocity.

In the end... the Yan truly lacked only a little.

A very little.

The Xie army was already close to breaking.

Clan Head Xie Zhuyang himself had been wounded and dragged down by personal guards who risked their lives to protect him.

And at precisely that moment...

Qian’s main force finally arrived.

Le Huan’s troops and one branch of the Zu Clan army led by Zu Dongling struck the Yan from both flanks.

According to the original plan... this third battle should have been the decisive one.

The Qian-Chu coalition would swallow the main body of the Yan army here.

Perhaps bury it completely.

The Yan method of breaking the trap, however, was simple.

Two forces that had originally served as supports were ordered by their commanders to hold the rear.

They knew they were going to die.

They went anyway.

They threw themselves into the blocking fight with a kind of fearlessness that bordered on certainty of death.

They slowed the two main Qian forces just enough to prevent the encirclement from closing.

That gave Li Fusheng’s main body the time it needed to disengage and retreat.

Such an arrangement sounded simple.

Cut off the tail to preserve the body.

But doing it was harder than climbing to Heaven.

Not only did the commanders below need to be willing to die for you.

The lowest soldier had to be willing to sacrifice himself so that your command banner could survive.

Ordinarily, the moment a commander intended to abandon a force and “sacrifice” it in this way... morale shattered.

Sometimes mutiny followed.

The Qian-Chu coalition had genuinely not expected this Yan force to possess such iron-blooded discipline.

The encirclement and annihilation they expected... failed at the final step.

With every possibility of turning the battle around already lost, Li Fusheng had no choice but to order the troops that escaped the field to begin withdrawing.

The road he had used when marching in had not been Lion Head Pass.

He had broken several smaller camps and barriers on the way into Liang because local Liang troops had been the ones defending them.

There had been no need to stage false defeats.

Those local troops were barely capable of anything beyond occupying ground.

But after Li Fusheng entered...

Qian troops blocked the route behind him and rebuilt the positions.

In the Yan army’s present condition, if it was delayed there again on the return... the remaining troops would be annihilated.

So Li Fusheng chose a detour.

He went by Wenxin Lake.

And there...

Meng Gong, supreme commander of Qian’s expedition, had personally positioned his central army.

As though he had already calculated that the Yan would eventually come this way.

Even Xie Yu’an had not predicted that.

But he did not feel frustrated.

Meng Gong had, after all, once crossed hands with Grand General Nian.

Meng Gong’s father, back in the days when he served beneath the Tattoo-Faced Chancellor, had also been famous for defensive warfare.

This was a defensive battle.

But used in reverse... it could trap men to death.

The tangled battlefield finally became clear at Wenxin Lake.

The Yan had to smash through the central army beneath Meng Gong’s command banner if they wanted to leave Liang and return to South Gate Pass.

Meng Gong had to hold that line if he wanted to turn this victory into something complete.

Qian and Chu had allied and joined forces here.

Heroes from both states had gathered.

Every piece had been prepared with care.

If Li Fusheng escaped... they could certainly still proclaim a great victory to the outside world.

But everyone involved would know in their hearts that it did not truly count as winning.

The Yan army was a trapped beast fighting to the death.

Its will to die became terrifying.

More precisely... from the beginning of the campaign, regardless of the situation and regardless of how exhausted they became... this Yan army never once became timid when it came time to kill.

And at the critical point of the battle... a force of more than four thousand lightly equipped cavalry suddenly charged from the rear.

This was the card Li Fusheng had kept hidden.

Before entering Liang, he had already detached this cavalry and sent it around Wenxin Lake to make a broad flanking movement.

Li Fusheng was impulsive.

Truly impulsive.

But when it came to warfare... the man had skill.

The move resembled an old battle in which Prince Pingxi fought Chu Pillar of State Shi Yuantang beneath a city wall.

Prince Pingxi planted himself on the command carriage and forcibly held the line, preserving that single breath of morale until Jin Shuke led a cavalry force into the battlefield at the most precise and crucial moment, overturning the entire situation.

Li Fusheng came very close... very close... to repeating that classic victory.

But at that same moment...

Zhong Tianlang appeared.

Imperial Son-in-Law of Great Qian.

Young Marshal of the Zhong Clan.

One of the Four Great Generals of the younger generation, a man once mentioned in the same breath as Prince Pingxi and who regarded Prince Pingxi as his true rival.

He led Western Army cavalry into the field.

Intercepted the Yan light cavalry.

Wrapped around it.

Qian’s only large-scale organized cavalry field army was in his hands.

After swallowing this surprise force, already exhausted from its long flanking march before entering battle...

Zhong Tianlang drove his cavalry straight into the viciously locked main battlefield.

It was said... that after that battle... the reeds of Wenxin Lake were dyed red with blood.

Bodies from both armies covered most of the lake’s surface.

The Yan were strong.

No.

More precisely... this particular Yan army was very, very strong.

Years ago, with the same commander and many of the same veterans forming its bones, just over thirty thousand cavalry had smashed all the way to the walls of Shangjing.

That had not been luck.

It was difficult to imagine how anyone could subdue such troops if they were given open sky and enough room to let their horses run.

There was a reason Yan had won almost every battle these past years.

Fortunately...

Great Yan did not possess many commanders like this.

Nor many armies like this.

Xie Yu’an entered the Qian command camp.

He saw Meng Gong sitting outside as though basking in the sun.

An arrow had pierced Meng Gong’s leg.

At the time, Yan troops had already fought their way beneath his command banner.

That had been the most dangerous moment.

If the banner moved... the entire army’s heart would waver.

The consequences could have been unimaginable.

Fortunately...

Meng Gong held.

“Young Master Xie.”

“Commander Meng.”

This was not the first time the two men had met.

But it was the first time Xie Yu’an addressed Meng Gong as supreme commander.

In truth, Meng Gong had been the commander of this coalition from the beginning.

Xie Zhuyang, Pillar of State of Great Chu, should technically have stood on the same level as Le Huan and Old Fifth Han.

But Pillar of State Xie was proud.

And Meng Gong, for the sake of keeping the larger situation stable, had never done anything to establish authority at Xie Zhuyang’s expense.

These past years, Yan had beaten both Qian and Chu brutally.

But the Yan merely looked down on Qian people.

The ones who truly loved humiliating Qian for amusement... were Chu people.

In the end... real ability still spoke loudest.

“I’d like to go inside and see him.”

Meng Gong nodded.

He pointed behind himself toward the command tent.

“That is as it should be. Only by respecting the brave can our own side produce more brave men.”

“Is that why Commander Meng cleared the names of that father and son from Mianzhou City?”

Years ago, when Prince Pingxi first broke into Mianzhou City and cut off the Prefect’s head before leaving, there had been an old man who advanced alone against the tide, one man and one spear trying to block the Barbarian horses before dying beneath their hooves.

His son could have survived.

Instead, he fired that arrow from the city tower.

After the battle... both men were branded spies.

It was Meng Gong who personally submitted the memorial clearing their names.

He even rebuilt their graves.

Meng Gong shook his head.

“There was nothing glorious about that affair. No need to mention it again.”

Xie Yu’an nodded.

“Yes.”

Then... he lifted the curtain and entered the command tent.

At the very center, upon the white tiger pelt sleeping rug personally bestowed on Meng Gong by the Qian Emperor... lay a general in black armor.

The armor had been damaged so badly it was difficult to find even one large piece left intact.

His body had already been washed clean of blood.

But the wounds covering him from head to toe remained horrifying to behold.

Li Fusheng.

Count Huwei of Great Yan.

In the final life-and-death battle beside Wenxin Lake... he personally led the Assault Battalion.

Shouting:

“Men of the Assault Battalion, in death there is no life!”

He became the spearpoint of the entire army.

Again and again, he drove straight through Meng Gong’s central force.

Eighteen times.

At the closest moment, Meng Gong himself had already taken an arrow.

The command banner stood right there.

Li Fusheng had nearly used that savage force of will to lead an exhausted army straight through the rested Qian center.

Even after falling into the final hopeless situation... the soldiers beside him never abandoned him.

They continued gathering around him.

Shielding their own wolf king.

Meng Gong walked in as well.

He looked at Li Fusheng, “sleeping” upon his own bed.

Then said to Xie Yu’an:

“Before he died, he planted his saber into the ground and shouted one sentence.”

Xie Yu’an asked:

“What did he say?”

Meng Gong answered:

“He shouted, ‘Brother Zheng! Your big brother really got his fill of killing this time!’”

[End of Chapter 825]