Chapter 862: The Imperial Capital Falls! (Part III)

For a hundred years, Heaven knew how many poets and scholars had poured praise upon this city.

Even men of letters from other states, when composing poetry and verse, liked to compare “Shangjing” to the paradise of their hearts.

It was a label.

A seal branded into an age and a culture.

To put it more lyrically, without the slightest exaggeration, even the plainest historical chronicles would struggle to conceal its radiance.

Yet now... this magnificent city was undergoing the baptism of war.

It was so beautiful.

And so fragile.

The more enchanting something was, the more powerfully it could awaken the desire hidden in the human heart to destroy what was beautiful.

The struggle between Yan and Qian could be traced back a hundred years.

In recent years, old hatred had only been joined by fresh grudges.

Yan people mocked the Qian for cowardice.

The Qian mocked the Yan for barbarity.

To Qian people, everything north of the Three Frontiers already belonged to the domain of Barbarians. The so-called people of Yan were merely Yan barbarians.

Generation after generation had, in truth, grown up immersed in regional contempt.

“All Xia.”

“Same roots.”

“Same race.”

Very few people truly understood those principles.

And among that already tiny minority, many understood perfectly well while pretending not to.

A century ago, Qian had stabbed Yan in the back with a northern expedition while Yan fought a decisive war against the Barbarians.

Years ago in Jin, Chu and the Savages had joined hands and treated Jin people like two-legged sheep.

The late Emperor of Yan had desired to swallow all Xia.

Naturally, he had exercised restraint in certain matters.

But that restraint did not include the Prince Pingxi surnamed Zheng.

Nor did it include the Yan soldiers now attacking Shangjing.

For Zheng Fan, he had already chosen to place himself on death ground in order to live.

For the Yan soldiers, once exhaustion of spirit and flesh reached a certain extreme, the next swing of the saber became almost instinctive.

Still... amid all this misfortune, there was at least one piece of good fortune.

Although Chen Yang, in his capacity as Count Yishan and commander of this army, had issued the order that “no one was to sheath his blade”... first, the army had already scattered throughout Shangjing. Formations were inevitably disordered, and transmitting that command perfectly to everyone was almost impossible.

Second, there were simply too few Yan troops.

Against a city of this scale, throwing thirty thousand soldiers inside and expecting them to swallow the whole thing in one bite was unrealistic.

After entering through Zhengyang Gate, the Yan army had effectively divided into two major groups.

One group followed Fan Li, shouting “Capture the Qian Empress!” as they rushed straight toward the Imperial City.

The other followed Chen Yang and attacked every Qian force inside the city that showed signs of gathering into organized resistance.

Those two missions alone consumed almost all the Yan army’s manpower.

And after the outer Imperial City was breached, Fan Li prepared to attack the Inner Palace—the true district where the Emperor and imperial harem actually lived.

There... at last, he encountered stubborn resistance.

The Yan had simply succeeded too easily at the beginning.

The main defensive camps outside Shangjing had already been nearly emptied, so no force had been able to stop them on the outskirts.

Naturally, the walls of Shangjing had not been properly cleared or sealed in preparation for a siege either.

With the city completely unprepared, the wolfish, tigerish Yan simply charged straight inside.

Even the outer Imperial City had been pierced amid the confusion, with the Yan using some unknown mix of Qian factions and fleeing crowds to force their way through.

But now, when the Yan blade finally reached the most central and vulnerable region not merely of Shangjing but of the entire State of Qian... when the Qian people here understood that there truly was nowhere else left to retreat... they finally erupted with considerable will to resist.

The Silver-Armored Guard responsible for the inner palace.

The Palace Guards.

Retainers brought by various great lords.

Even eunuchs from the rear palace.

All threw themselves at the ferocious Yan invaders.

The walls of the Inner Palace were not actually very high.

They were largely ceremonial.

Yet relying on those low walls, the Qian inside and the Yan outside began fighting a desperate battle to the death.

Fan Li had no choice but to order more Yan troops called in from outside the palace to reinforce the assault.

Chen Yang’s side, meanwhile, had already smashed more than a dozen organized forces that seemed to belong to Heaven knew which yamen, noble household, or great clan.

Then he began encountering resistance from guards and household retainers, manor after manor, gate after gate.

The point where the Yan had entered the city, together with their direct rush toward the Imperial Palace, had concentrated almost all Yan activity inside a relatively narrow zone.

By coincidence... that zone happened to contain Shangjing’s most famous district of wealthy and powerful households.

Shangjing had grown far too populous.

Across its history, the city had expanded several times.

So unlike a traditional city simply divided into an inner district for nobles and great officials and an outer district for common people, Shangjing’s wealthy neighborhoods spread outward along one particular face of the city.

Their diagonal “central axis” pointed toward the Imperial Palace.

Yao Zizhan had once written:

“Tonight, rain rings clear upon shattered tiles;
one day, the Three Streets shall write their towering splendor.”

The “Three Streets” referred precisely to Shangjing’s wealthy district.

Even Yao Zizhan had not called it the Inner City.

And so... after Chen Yang’s order was issued...

Yan soldiers who had previously been restrained in Lanyang City and Chuzhou City finally began to “open the slaughter.”

Great households.

Deep-gated mansions.

One kick smashed the door open.

Then the soldiers charged straight inside.

The grunts were simple-minded, but even they understood that only houses like these contained meat worth chewing.

Once the Yan broke in, manor guards immediately gathered around their masters and fought the soldiers.

These were all hidden armed forces of Shangjing.

On the official military registers, they did not exist.

In reality, they could not be ignored.

Some households were bold enough to bring out military crossbows.

Naturally, against proper regular troops, these so-called guards and retainers found it difficult to gain much advantage. Most were steadily beaten back.

But the Yan had effectively kicked through an entire string of hornets’ nests.

Fighting erupted everywhere at once.

Quite a few Yan soldiers were even wounded or killed after being careless around skilled household experts and retainers.

Then their comrades would gather and chase that one expert halfway across a district.

“Motherfucker. Since when were Qian civilians overflowing with this much martial virtue?”

That was probably the thought in quite a few Yan soldiers’ minds.

In a normal siege, soldiers and civilians inside a city would have time to prepare themselves mentally.

Once they realized the larger situation was hopeless, most people would still choose to bend the knee and preserve their lives.

The people who bent most eagerly would often be the ones living in the Three Streets.

But today... everyone had simply collided without warning.

The Yan arrived.

The households resisted.

And then... they started killing one another.

The Imperial Palace remained locked in a bitter struggle, continuously calling for reinforcements.

Outside the palace, Yan soldiers were bogged down mansion by mansion, fighting household guards and retainers with remarkable enthusiasm.

As a result... the Yan began running short of manpower.

Yes, the Yan had entered the city.

Yes, Zhengyang Gate had fallen.

But they had not managed to spread their forces outward in time.

Even now, nearly three quarters of Shangjing had not actually been touched by Yan troops.

Of the city’s four principal gates, three still remained in Qian hands.

This was not a command failure on Chen Yang’s part.

Nor was it a problem with Yan discipline or military law.

The truth was simpler.

No one in the Yan army had imagined the sheer area, scale, population, and complexity of the greatest city in all Xia.

You could not even conduct a training exercise for something like this.

They had never seen anything comparable.

Even Yanjing, the capital of Yan, looked somewhat small beside Shangjing.

So the Yan had entered like country bumpkins walking into the great city for the first time.

Their eyes had been dazzled.

And because of that... by all logic... if someone inside Shangjing could now stand up and call everyone together—no, it did not even need to be one person.

Three or four.

Seven or eight.

If capable people in different districts could begin regrouping routed soldiers, gathering jianghu fighters, household guards, and commoners brave enough to pick up weapons, then establish contact with one another... the situation inside Shangjing might genuinely still be recoverable.

That was no exaggeration.

This was, after all, Qian home ground.

This was Qian’s own capital.

The Yan looked overwhelmingly ferocious now, but in truth they had already become arrows at the end of their flight.

If the fighting dragged into a true grinding battle, victory and defeat would remain uncertain.

The first problem was that Chen Yang himself was leading a force back and forth through the city, smashing anything that began to organize.

The officials, heroes, and Shangjing sects capable of reacting fastest at the beginning had naturally also been the people with the greatest sense of responsibility and the greatest courage.

Unfortunately... precisely because they reacted fastest and organized most efficiently, they became the first targets Chen Yang struck.

Once those first groups were shattered, many of them cut down outright, the people who emerged afterward were inevitably lower in quality.

The second problem was even more important.

The Yan had appeared inside Shangjing as though divine troops had descended from Heaven.

The first thought of Shangjing’s soldiers and civilians was not:

The Yan made an enormous flanking march, exhausted themselves half to death, and happened to touch one corner of the capital.

Their instinctive conclusion was:

The imperial army in the north has been destroyed.

The Emperor on campaign has been destroyed too.

The Yan marched openly and directly into Shangjing after winning.

We are finished.

There was no hope.

It was not that nobody clever enough existed to realize the Qian Emperor had more than two hundred thousand troops in the north.

An army that large could not possibly have been annihilated without warning, so thoroughly and silently that no news at all reached Shangjing.

But in a situation like this... most people did not have brains.

And so, under the belief that... the imperial army had already been defeated, the Emperor had died in battle, the court had collapsed... the routed Imperial Guards could no longer be organized effectively.

Even Imperial Guards who had never fought the Yan at all stopped behaving like government troops and transformed directly into bandits.

Everyone began looting without restraint.

Great Qian was finished anyway.

Better grab whatever could be carried and run for home.

Years ago, Yan had also suffered from poor Imperial Guard combat quality.

So it had exchanged Imperial Guard formations with the Zhenbei Army, effectively rotating garrisons and forcing them through hardening.

In Qian, after the Emperor flew into a rage over Shangjing’s Imperial Guards and discovered how badly the rolls had been padded with ghost soldiers drawing empty salaries, Li Xundao took the lead in training a new Imperial Guard.

Many of the old military households tied to the former Imperial Guard establishment were sent elsewhere.

Most recruits in the new Imperial Guard came from outside the capital.

Li Xundao had once submitted a secret memorial saying:

“The people of Shangjing are fond of comfort and slippery by habit. They are unsuited to military training.”

That was why so many of the Imperial Guards now inside Shangjing felt almost no psychological burden at all when turning into “bandits.”

Most of them were not Shangjing natives.

Loot and burn quickly.

Take the wealth back home.

Thus... if one looked across the whole city at once, Shangjing had entered an astonishingly bizarre two-pole state.

On one side, the Yan were bogged down in the Imperial City and the district of great households, their manpower temporarily stretched thin.

On the other, Qian’s own government soldiers, together with local thugs, gangsters, and jianghu men lacking any heroic conscience, began madly burning, killing, and robbing Qian commoners.

The Imperial City and the Three Streets shared the same strange characteristics: huge areas, relatively sparse populations, and strong resistance.

Elsewhere, the population was dense, while ordinary people had almost no ability to resist these soldiers-turned-bandits.

At this moment, more Qian people were actually being killed by other Qian than by the invading Yan army.

Eventually... when Chen Yang continued sweeping the city for organized Qian resistance, an even stranger thing began happening.

Qian deserters who had been busy looting commoners would see black-armored Yan soldiers appear and instinctively throw down their plunder and flee.

Whichever street Chen Yang entered... that street somehow became peaceful.

Count Yishan of Great Yan found himself genuinely bewildered.

“Motherfucker. Why does it feel like I’m the one maintaining order in Shangjing?”

And it was precisely because of this bizarre situation that the Yan army survived the chaotic period immediately after entering the capital.

It gave Chen Yang enough breathing room to begin reorganizing his troops.

He immediately sent personal guards to the Three Streets with orders.

The Yan soldiers trapped fighting there were to disengage and hurry toward the Imperial City as reinforcements.

At that moment, the fighting in the Three Streets continued.

A large-scale organized counterattack was no longer possible.

Most battles involved the guards of one household, or several neighboring households, joining together and fighting Yan soldiers over a courtyard, a mansion, or a tower.

Quite a few Yan soldiers had been wounded or killed after carelessly encountering skilled household guards and retainers.

Then a whole knot of their comrades would chase the culprit down.

Fortunately, once Chen Yang’s new order spread, Yan troops began pulling away from those scattered battlefields and moving toward the Imperial City.

Chen Yang himself also began deliberately contracting his force toward the palace.

As for the vast Shangjing behind them, filled with blood, fire, and chaos... let it burn for now.

Resistance at the Imperial Palace had been exceptionally fierce.

But as more and more Yan troops arrived, the battle ceased to remain confined to a single line.

Once Yan soldiers began infiltrating from other directions... the Qian people’s final resistance became pale and powerless.

At last... the Yan surged into the rear palace like a flood.

Night had already fallen.

Yet because the final objective was drawing closer, Yan morale rose into an increasingly unnatural frenzy.

“Capture the Qian Empress alive and present her to the Prince!”

“Capture the Qian Empress alive and present her to the Prince!”

Yan soldiers shouted the slogan while searching everywhere.

Everyone knew the Qian Emperor was not inside Shangjing.

By all logic, the proper targets now ought to have been the Crown Prince or the Chancellors.

Yet from the lowest soldier to the highest officer, everyone inside the palace seemed to have only one thing in his head: the Empress of Qian!

Oh.

The Empress Dowager would do too!

It sounded ridiculous.

But it was precisely because of this kind of “faith” and “obsession” that these Yan soldiers had managed to maintain their edge even after a brutal long-range forced march followed by hours of fighting.

At last... outside one palace hall, the final Qian resistance erupted.

A Grand Eunuch and a red-robed Commander of the Silver-Armored Guard led the last group of defenders and fought the Yan to the death.

At first, the Yan who entered were caught unprepared and suffered serious losses.

But once they realized genuine experts stood before them, the soldiers began gathering crossbows and shields to suppress them.

Elites like these possessed their own well-practiced methods for dealing with powerful individuals on a battlefield.

Most fortunately... the Emperor had personally led the army north and taken almost all of the strongest experts with him as escorts.

The Baili siblings, for example, were not here at all.

If the palace had possessed enough experts from the beginning, some could have stayed behind to block pursuit while others escorted important people away.

During the earlier chaos, before the Yan had fully entered the Imperial Palace, escaping would genuinely not have been difficult.

But the combination of Qian’s internal confusion and the absence of experts meant they failed to seize the opportunity the Yan had given them.

The Grand Eunuch died.

The Commander of the Silver-Armored Guard died as well.

Everyone remaining fell with them.

Yan soldiers raised their shields, advanced in formation, and stepped over the corpses.

Bang!

The doors of the palace hall were kicked open.

Inside, lamps blazed brightly.

There were even luminous jewels casting light, filling the entire hall with magnificent brilliance.

A group of children and youths huddled together, clutching their heads.

Around them stood a group of women.

Some were palace maids.

But from the dress and bearing of several others, they were clearly no ordinary servants.

Most likely... imperial consorts.

And at the very front sat a woman in splendid formal dress, cross-legged and perfectly dignified.

A sword lay before her.

Every Yan soldier who saw her began breathing harder.

Was this... the Empress of Qian?

Fan Li pushed through the soldiers in front of him.

One arm was tied up.

His other hand still carried a great axe.

He walked inside.

“Well damn. The Empress?”

Fan Li stared at the woman carefully.

A little older.

But very well maintained.

Her figure was full too.

Mm. Mm.

She cleared the bar.

Definitely the Master’s type.

Among all the Demon Kings, the one with the least ordinary sense of ethics was actually not the Demon Child.

It was Fan Li.

His thought process was simply too different from that of ordinary people.

“Good. Very good. Thick thighs, slim waist, big ass. Master likes that. Heh-heh-heh.”

Fan Li wanted to rub his hands together.

Unfortunately, one arm was broken.

So he used the back of his axe to rub his chest instead.

At that moment, he perfectly embodied every Qian folk tale about Yan barbarians.

“This Empress would rather die than suffer humiliation from Yan dogs!”

Determination flashed in the Empress’s eyes.

She snatched up the sword before her and laid the blade against her neck.

Without hesitation... she dragged it sideways.

Shhk...

The skin of her neck split.

It hurt.

Then the sword fell from her hands.

It was too heavy.

She could not hold it.

The Empress stared in confusion.

Why had she failed to cut her own throat?

That was exactly how the palace opera troupe always performed suicide.

In truth, even for a grown man, killing oneself by drawing a sword across one’s own throat was not especially easy.

For an Empress raised in luxury all her life, it was even harder.

Fan Li immediately rushed forward and kicked the sword away.

Then, without the slightest tenderness, he slapped the side of the Empress’s neck.

She collapsed unconscious.

Fan Li hoisted her up and slung her over one shoulder.

Then roared:

“Got her!”

The Yan soldiers erupted into earth-shaking cheers.

...

“So, Xundao, what you’re saying is that the main Yan force looped behind us long ago, and their target is still my Shangjing?”

“Reporting to Your Majesty: today, our army deployed and attempted a probing attack against the Yan camp. The Yan did nothing except contract inward. They contracted to a degree that no camp genuinely holding fifty thousand troops could possibly permit. That already proves the Yan main force is no longer there. And judging from the timing of our three armies closing the encirclement, it has not been there for quite some time.”

“The Crown Prince is governing Shangjing in my absence. Tens of thousands of Imperial Guards remain there. Great officials are everywhere. Several Chancellors are still in the capital. How could a mere few tens of thousands of Yan barbarians possibly break my imperial capital?”

“Your Majesty, the Imperial Guards left behind have not yet completed their training. Every elite formation in Shangjing is already here beside Your Majesty. Shangjing’s walls may be tall, but in truth the city is poorly suited to defense. Without enough troops capable of fighting, even if the Yan number only a few tens of thousands... Shangjing is still as fragile as a sheet of paper.”

The Emperor lay on the dragon couch.

His mouth hung slightly open.

His gaze had gone hollow.

“So... my Shangjing... is gone?”

[End of Chapter 862]