Chapter 5: Scouting And Slaughter
That night, Xuan Chong and his group of twenty-three people applied Breath Concealing Talismans, then left the grain station camp.
This nighttime stealth, as the second or third in command in the military camp, was something one absolutely could not lack. One day, if the army was trapped in a city and needed a reliable person to break out and seek reinforcements, it would be pretty much this method.
Xuan Chong had confronted the snake people for so many days that he had a general sense of where snake people were hiding in the surrounding grass and trees. For example, in areas with dense snake people activity, the sounds of frogs and birds were very scarce. These things were not hard to notice, but they required observation.
Currently, there were a total of five hundred and twenty-six people and horses in the entire grain station, but in normal times, few had the mind to observe their surroundings and stay vigilant at all times. Every night after drills, as soon as they had a moment, they were playing board games.
If they really had to count one by one, only Wu Fei personally stepping up could handle such tasks. Well, scouting soldiers could manage these tasks.
This was also a drawback of the feudal army—there were too few capable people! It absolutely could not be compared to the modern army from his previous life that had a strong drive for learning.
……
Xuan Chong’s group left the area around the grain station, completely shaking off the snake people’s scent behind them. Then, Xiao Qing, the guide assigned by Wu Hanluan, came into play. She led everyone to the mountain north of the camp, found a cave, and then slipped inside.
The “coo coo” sound was not loud, but it was startlingly abrupt. Wu Fei suddenly looked around and confirmed it was the sound of bats in the cave. In this karst cave hall, they occasionally saw bioluminescent moss scattered on the ground, while most places were pitch black, sensing nothing, and a sudden noise could scare one to death.
The other soldiers following Wu Fei were even worse off. Although they had bits in their mouths and could not make a sound, their eyes stared ahead in fear, their hands always near the sabers at their waists.
Guide Xiao Qing clung to the rock wall with her movement technique, like a big gecko. Xuan Chong: Like the abomination from movies in his previous life.
Xuan Chong could not help but marvel: A snake person who had already humanized could walk on the rock wall like Spider-Man, so what about the orthodox snake people?
As this thought emerged, the image involuntarily appeared in Wu Fei’s mind: In pitch darkness, suddenly snake pupils opened one by one, the sound of flicking tongues surging like a tide, echoing in the cave, followed by countless snake people like abominations suddenly raising torches, overwhelming his exploration team, then taking his head to show off to his uncle.
Karst caves were already places that triggered claustrophobia, unable to withstand wild thoughts. Wu Fei stared tightly at Xiao Qing overhead, then took a deep breath, rejecting once, twice, three times the possibility in his heart that this guy was a double agent, forcing himself to be “sillier.” Everyone knew the principle of using people without doubting them, but in an unknown environment, with eyes lost and helpless, who could truly trust the loyalty of a defector with “enemy camp” colors?
…Unknown, suspicion, breeding…
As they went deeper into the cave, the fluorescent stone markers left by Xuan Chong and the others on the ground slowly extended forward. In the darkness, as everyone’s breathing and heartbeat sounds grew more chaotic, everyone’s sense of reality continually weakened. At this point, the only thing they could discern was the signal provided by Xiao Qing, leading everyone blindly through the black void.
Many were worried about being attacked by snake people in the next second. If there was any movement, they were ready for a desperate counterattack, taking that Xiao Qing along with them.
Wu Fei suddenly understood the truth of “Li Guang getting lost.” In the vast desert, with no landmarks, water and supplies gradually consumed bit by bit, the entire troop led by the “foreign race” guide he had previously rejected, advancing toward the vast unknown. One day, two days, finally it seemed like they had gone in circles, or perhaps the guide had taken a small wrong step in the wind and sand, leading to a dispute, and the guide was killed. The histories would not record how a defector from the Xiongnu died, but the writer would lament: General Li lost his chance to be enfeoffed as a marquis.
As a transmigrator, Xuan Chong, under the suggestion of something (the system), took a deep breath and began adjusting.
Xuan Chong self-reflected: “Anxiety and timidity” were caused by not finding a direction to exert effort, just like a person who just entered the water flailing without grabbing a fixed point, ending up drowned in just 1.5 meters of water. The more confused the time, the calmer one must be; the mind must find a current anchor point for thinking and position itself.
As the head currently leading the team, Wu Fei knew he should play the role of setting the anchor at this time.
In the cave, Wu Fei lightly stomped his foot. The soldiers groping in the darkness all stopped, and Xiao Qing ahead was signaled by Wu Fei to pause for the time it takes to burn one incense stick.
On the stone path, Wu Fei gave commands to the soldiers in the front and rear queues one by one by drawing characters on their palms.
“Every five steps, pick up a stone for me. Once the stone’s moisture changes, scrape your saber with your finger to signal me.”
“You, focus your attention on smells. Note these smells, then tap the stone to signal me.” Wu Fei successively pinched some moss, some soil, and a stalactite for him to sniff carefully.
“You, listen for water sounds. The dripping from the cave ceiling is rhythmic, drop by drop. Sync your footsteps with the water drop rhythm. Signal me, I’ll hear it. If your footsteps get chaotic, I’ll stop and ask you (whether the drops fall every three seconds or two seconds).”
……
Wu Fei assigned projects for everyone advancing in the cave to pay attention to, then they set off again.
In just a moment, the team quickly stabilized. Although the oppressive atmosphere did not disappear, the originally rampant “suspicion” was like being doused with a basin of cold water, temporarily extinguished. The soldiers focused on their assigned situations, passing them to Xuan Chong, and after confirmation, their pace stabilized a lot.
But what about Wu Fei himself? Blue bioluminescent moss underfoot, starting from his boots and staining up toward his upper body.
Wu Fei found he seemed to have adapted to the darkness. Based on the constant intelligence from the soldiers behind, a sixth sense beyond vision emerged, perceiving the cave’s height, whether there were water flows on the cave walls, and the growth of stalactites.
Xuan Chong knew these were all imaginations based on the information provided by the soldiers. These imaginations might not be accurate, but the prompts from the soldiers, combined with his restless imagination, made it seem like everything was right before his eyes.
However, Xuan Chong did not know that in this plane, imagination amid life’s confusion and curiosity under ignorance were the most dangerous!
…System: Actually, the student doesn’t need to know…
Inside the Chilian Mountain Range, a three-dimensional map of the cave like a maze appeared in Wu Fei’s mind. At this time, this mountain contained numerous rock caves. According to Xiao Qing’s intelligence, these rock caves had shortcuts directly to another mountain top.
Xuan Chong understood this phenomenon, considering it similar to the karst situations in Guizhou on Earth, where only locals knew the shortcuts inside the mountains from one mountain top to another.
Before transmigrating, Xuan Chong had lurked online and heard Guizhou people boast, “When we were kids, we all explored the local caves to some extent.” Of course, from a military perspective, the terrain of Yunnan with its many mountains and karst caves made bandit suppression in the old era extremely arduous, and the banditry in the southwest had never been completely eliminated. Only later, with the grassroots governance of the new era, was the southwest banditry thoroughly eradicated.
Now, Xuan Chong, that is, Wu Fei, reflecting on the present, realized that the army he was in could absolutely not achieve the “fish and water” interdependent relationship with the locals here. In other words, why did Wu Hanluan dare to enter the Chilian Mountain Range to suppress the snake people?
Xuan Chong speculated: “Wu Hanluan must have put in a lot of effort, planting undercover networks among the various tribes, right?”
…Ahead of the team, Xiao Qing continued exploring the path; she was loyal…
Three quarters of an hour later, Wu Fei’s squad saw the light ahead and crawled out from the cave piled with loose stones, completing the cave exploration.
Wu Fei opened the silk cloth map and suddenly discovered that his current location was separated from his original grain station by an entire mountain range. Yet the time through the cave was only three quarters of an hour.
Wu Fei immediately measured the distance on the map with his fingers.
Wu Fei: This distance doesn’t match. Shrinking the earth to inches, or did the map erroneously mark the mountain range too long? Or was there some mechanism that sped up the passage, like going downhill in the cave earlier, unknowingly saving effort, and lightly passing ten thousand heavy mountains?
“Curiosity” flashed in Wu Fei’s mind, and vaguely a voice seemed to whisper in his ear: “To figure it out, if not understood clearly, it’s hard to satisfy.”
However, Wu Fei’s unwitting yawn ended this aimless thinking.
After the yawn, he found his system popping up again, prompting that it had been forty-eight hours since his last mental physical examination.
What was the use of the mental physical examination? System prompt: Basically to calm the mind and aid the brain. Because your wild thoughts affect normal rest; this mode temporarily seals some thought patterns, so rest well first.
Wu Fei casually pressed the “physical examination” button. After the desktop program scan, it prompted “some shortcut keys set abnormally.” Xuan Chong paused, looked at the “shortcut key” names: “Cave Ambush Hypothetical,” “Crushed by Falling Rocks,” “Snake Woman’s Betrayal,” and the like. Mm, Xuan Chong glanced and understood these were his useless wild thoughts in the cave.
After confirming, Xuan Chong threw these useless mental clutter into the recycle bin.
The system quickly popped up a spinning hourglass and prompted deletion to begin. After a feeling of something being rapidly forgotten, Xuan Chong felt his thoughts suddenly unburdened, his thinking suddenly much smoother, very relaxed, and his attention could focus on the important matters at hand.
However, Xuan Chong did not know that just as his system was scanning, a wisp of blue in his pupils quickly leaped out, trying to spread and cover, but soon, that blue wisp in his pupils was swiftly dragged away like toilet paper in a flushing toilet by a force.
…System: What cow snakes, ghosts and spirits? All come here!…
In two days, Wu Fei successfully completed exploration of the three key karst cave routes centered on his grain station and, while scouting the third karst cave, discovered traces of a super-scale snake people troop movement. In that karst cave, large amounts of snake shedding were left on the ground.
Just as camel caravans and horse teams always leave dung where they pass, snakes always leave snake skin. Xuan Chong immediately passed this information to Wu Hanluan via black bird messenger.
Wu Hanluan immediately replied with an order: Return to the warehouse camp as soon as possible.
Vaguely, Wu Fei felt things were becoming unusual.
Scouting the surrounding caves was a task personally assigned by his uncle, indicating it was quite important. And now they had just encountered a large snake people force—didn’t that mean his uncle already knew the snake people situation and thus sent him to scout their movements?
Wu Fei immediately packed his gear, because the merit was already in hand.
“Uncle wants to promote me.” Wu Fei was slightly certain.
…Five hours later…
After bypassing the area touched by snake people and returning to the great warehouse, although everything here was still orderly and Zhao Tu was respectfully welcoming him—Wu Fei even felt that the camp teams in the camp breathed a sigh of relief upon his return.
Wu Fei looked around, his gaze suddenly freezing, because at the camp flag top that was empty when he left, now hung three severed heads! This way of hanging heads, Wu Fei remembered as a child when Wu Hanluan brought him into camp, pointing to the flagpole and saying “this is sacrifice to the flag.”
These heads were the troublemakers in his camp. Wu Fei had long wanted to severely punish these troublemakers, but his punishment could only be ten military cudgels with flesh wounds. To be honest, the strong discipline of his military cudgel punishment orders was far inferior to the camaraderie between these soldiers and the cudgel-wielding guards.
During the two days he was out, they had been beheaded.
Back in camp, Zhao Tu very respectfully presented the military tally on a tray, showing no killing intent.
Wu Fei could not help but view him differently. This palace attendant had crawled out of piles of corpses on the frontline, controlling his killing intent freely.
At the same time, Wu Fei suddenly understood why his uncle had temporarily assigned him a task and handed over military authority for a few days: because he was not decisive enough in killing! Or rather, he did not have enough killing intent, did not dare, and lacked sufficient prestige to kill.
Wu Fei looked at his deputy and sighed: “General Zhao, you’ve worked hard these two days.”
Zhao Tu stepped forward deferentially: “Serving the general is my duty.”
Wu Fei stepped forward to support him and invited him into the tent. The old soldiers around who wanted to complain looked displeased. They realized: the young general seemed unconcerned with Zhao Tu’s arrogant actions.
Wu Fei coldly snorted at the old soldiers whose faces changed: “These laborer camp teams had previously acted like rough old-timers in front of me, complaining behind my back about no women or liquor. Now they want me to uphold justice, really thinking I’m some saint?”
Wu Fei quickly confirmed his current position and interests: Zhao Tu was here to make up for his shortcomings in “morale” and “prestige.” And under the dynasty system, if the commander lacked prestige, he could not reward and punish boldly; if morale was low, the soldiers would flee at the slightest loss in battle.
Previously, in this warehouse camp, facing the snake people’s provocations, Wu Fei even had to worry about not being able to retrieve the troops after sounding the gong to retreat, because he was young, lacked killing intent, and could not kill the squad leaders leading violations of military orders. Without sufficient deterrence, his punishment ceiling was only ten military cudgels. Exceeding that might lead to the old soldier ruffians conspiring together and staging a military mutiny while he slept.
Previously, when Xuan Chong checked for illicit liquor in the military camp, he understood that “military orders like mountains” was nonsense. It was because the blade was not sharp enough to suppress these seasoned soldiers. His military orders were just “reference suggestions.” Now these birds facing Zhao Tu did not dare conspire. As Wu Fei entered the tent, the other squad leaders tremblingly led their teams back to their respective military tents, not daring to fart, with none of the usual board game noises in the tents at this time.
Wu Fei gazed at the refreshed military camp and sighed: “This is truly leading troops.” The heads on the flagpole swayed in the wind, as if in agreement.
…However, above the military camp, a blue star twinkled…
Six kilometers outside the camp, a daoist priest in daoist robes, appearing ethereal, stared at the warehouse camp, a dark blue light flashing at his brow center. Looking closer, this blue light at the brow was an eye. The blue eye’s deep center seemed filled with endless curiosity and desire.
The daoist priest fiddled with his fly whisk, silently chanting an inexplicable dao incantation, looking at the military warehouse camp tent, and smiled: “Heaven’s mandate has descended, the year is Jiazi, great fortune under heaven.”
