A divine healer, a general, a young marquis! Who can rival them!

After the bloody battle, the Western Camp was severely weakened.

As a medical officer, it was Yang Hu's duty to tally the casualties and calculate the consumption of medicines and military supplies. This also gave him a legitimate reason to explore the depths of that hidden canal one more step.

He meticulously calculated the war losses, meticulously listing the weapons, arrows, and casualties of the battle.

He meticulously recorded every detail: how many men each team lost, how many broken swords and arrows were recovered from the city walls, and how many new weapons were reissued to the arsenal. His record was flawless, leaving no room for error. But beneath this dutiful task lay what he truly sought to investigate.

The more he looked at the core, the more his brow furrowed.

The battle was so fierce and the casualties so heavy that it was not entirely due to the strength of the barbarians. On the city walls, countless soldiers' swords dulled at the slightest touch, countless bows snapped halfway through their draw, and countless arrows flew limply, failing to reach the city below.

When weapons are unusable, even the bravest soldiers will risk their lives. A dulled sword cannot cut through the barbarian soldiers' leather armor, but instead receives a spear thrust into the chest of the swordsman; a broken bow cannot repel the iron cavalry charging into the city, but instead adds another corpse to the city walls.

As Yang Hu looked at those shocking numbers, he could almost see on the city walls how those brothers who shouldn't have died, gripping their scrap metal weapons, desperately faced the barbarian blades.

The lifeline of a large camp has been hollowed out to such an extent.

"The problem lies in the supply chain." As night fell, Yang Hu whispered to Qin Ying, who was disguised as a medicine boy, what he had seen during the day's accounting. His eyes were filled with a chilling light. "Good swords and arrows were leaked out in batches to feed the barbarians. What was sent down from the city walls were all inferior goods to fill the quota. Half of the blood our brothers shed is attributed to that hand."

Upon hearing this, Qin Ying slowly clenched her hand, which was hanging in her sleeve, into a fist.

"When I led the troops to guard this pass," she said in a very low voice, each word seemingly squeezed out from between her teeth, "the weapons were all inspected before being put into storage. Blades with dulled edges and bows with broken strings would never reach the hands of the soldiers. In just over a year, they have deteriorated to this state."

She knew better than anyone that this high-profile scheme could be concealed from the accounts for a time, but not from the corpses on the city walls, who had died from inferior weapons.

"Good steel and iron were all replaced with inferior goods. What was saved and what was leaked out all went into the pockets of that hand and the barbarians beyond the Great Wall." She spoke each word with deep hatred. "They used the lives of my border soldiers to fatten themselves up, and also to fatten the enemy's knife."

Yang Hu scrolled down through the damaged ledgers, and that recurring name and that familiar little seal caught his eye once again. It was still that military clerk.

This batch of substandard weapons, used to make up the numbers and causing the deaths of countless brothers, had a traceable history from allocation to storage. The person who handled the inspection and sealed the weapons was none other than the weasel-faced Squad Leader Zhao; and the last, most weighty, and final seal was still that of the Central Army Clerk.

One link leads to another, from the inferior weapons that claimed lives on the city walls, all the way to Section Chief Zhao in the quartermaster's office, and then to the clerk in the central command tent. This bloodsucking underworld gradually becomes clear.

The line moved an inch closer to the heart of that hand.

None of these incidents were isolated. The leaked military rations, the falsified accounts, the substandard weapons used to make up the numbers, and the brothers who died unjustly on the city walls—these may seem unrelated, but in reality, they all flowed from the same private seal.

"He not only leaked military rations and embezzled accounts," Yang Hu's voice was as cold as ice. "He was also responsible for the brothers who died in this battle."

A boundless hatred surged in Qin Ying's eyes. Her ambush, the blood feud of her entire Lu family, the corpses of those who died unjustly on the city wall—all these events were twisted into an ever-tightening rope in the hands of this military clerk.

"He has people above him." She gritted her teeth, saying each word clearly, "This clerk can handle accounting and drafting reports in the central army, and can turn the military supplies of an entire camp into an ironclad case. But such audacity and such deep connections are definitely not something a mere clerk like him could support."

She paused, her voice extremely low: "Back then, the person who dared to write my name—the granddaughter of the Duke of Zhenguo's mansion and a female general patrolling the border—as 'fighting to the death for her country' in one stroke, and managed to deceive the capital and the court's investigation, must have had a truly all-powerful hand behind him. And that hand held a very high-ranking official position."

Yang Hu nodded slowly.

The clerks of the central army were like claws that surfaced. Squad Leader Zhao was a nail driven into the quartermaster department. But the hand that truly issued orders, hollowed out a mighty pass, framed loyal officials as rebels, and turned Qin Ying from a living person into a "dead person," remained hidden in the deepest part of the fog, without even a shadow showing.

Having investigated this level, Yang Hu made another move in his mental game. The name of the military clerk and the appearance of his private seal were already etched into his very bones.

He glanced at the heavily lit and heavily guarded central command tent deep within the camp.

There lies the answer to all of this, as well as the overwhelming danger that could crush him and Qin Ying together.

With each step further in, the water becomes deeper and the danger increases.

He was an outsider, a medical officer who had only distinguished himself through a few life-saving skills, his foundation very shallow; his opponent, on the other hand, had been entrenched in this area for years, with eyes and ears everywhere and numerous henchmen. In this contest, he had been walking on a knife's edge from beginning to end. One wrong step, and not only would he be shattered to pieces, but Qin Ying, disguised and whose identity was the biggest flaw in this game, would also be dragged into an abyss of no return.

But the corpses on the city walls, the bodies killed by inferior weapons, the blood-stained accounts, and the Zhenguo Duke's mansion, which had been framed and destroyed in the chaotic world, did not allow him to retreat.

Having transmigrated here, learned the skill to snatch lives from piles of corpses, and encountered a woman like Qin Ying, whose family and country had been wronged yet who still possessed unyielding integrity, he had no reason to stand idly by in the face of this colossal injustice.

"Layer by layer." Yang Hu clenched his fist, his eyes as steady as a mountain. "Squad Leader Zhao, the clerk of the Central Army, and above that... One day, I will follow this line and uproot that hand, so that the souls of the heroes who died unjustly in this city, and the blood feud of the entire Lu family, will all have a resolution."

The night was deep, and the lights in the central command tent were dazzlingly bright. Yang Hu knew that beneath those lights sat a villain who used a formidable pass and countless loyal souls as stepping stones to amass wealth.

The night wind swept through the camp, causing the lights to flicker.

He stayed up late into the night reading that ledger. The candle wick flickered three times, and he trimmed it each time. The handwriting on the ledger wasn't from the same person; the beginning was neat, the end sloppy, and the sloppy section represented the two months with the most damage. The person who wrote the ledger was guilty, and guilty people have trembling hands; trembling hands can't lie.

He placed the losses and medication receipts for those two months side by side, drawing a line in the middle. The numbers on both sides didn't add up no matter how he calculated them.

He retied the ledger, put it back in its original place, and even reversed the direction of the knots.

This thread, stretching to the deepest depths, is still very long. But what he holds in his hands is the lives of a city's brothers, an insurmountable injustice, and an unyielding, unwavering commitment that he can never relinquish.