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

The winter camp was nestled in a sheltered, hilly area, surrounded on three sides by low hills, and opened to the south.

When the men of the vanguard surrounded the camp, Captain Pang led his men around the perimeter first, then returned to report that there was no ambush. The camp was completely empty; the tents had been dismantled, leaving only the compacted ground and dozens of piles of ash that hadn't been cleared away.

"They've been gone for some time," Captain Pang said. "General, should we burn it?"

"Don't burn it yet."

Yang Hu dismounted and walked towards the camp.

He walked very slowly. Captain Pang followed behind and saw that he neither looked at the entrance to the south nor at the surrounding low hills, but kept his head down, walking back and forth between the compacted round ground and the ash heaps.

When he reached the third pile of ashes, he squatted down.

"General Choi."

"Your subordinate is here."

"Count the pits."

Cui Ting hesitated for a moment, but still agreed. He returned after an incense stick had burned: "Reporting to the General, sixty-one."

"Where's the tent cord?"

"Fifty-eight laps."

Yang Hu used a tree branch to dig away the ashes. The soil underneath the ashes was black, and after digging down two inches, it was completely cold.

"Sixty-one kitchens, with about ten people per kitchen," he said. "Six hundred to seven hundred people have lived here. There were fifty-eight tents in a circle, and each circle was quite large, housing twelve or thirteen people, which was also the same number."

"General, are you saying this isn't a scout cavalry unit?"

"The cavalry don't set up tents or enclosures, nor do they build stoves." Yang Hu pointed a tree branch to the east, "There are three piles of horse manure over there, the thickest one almost knee-deep. It wouldn't take more than three or five days for a horse to stay in one place and produce such a thick layer of manure."

Cui Ting's expression slowly changed.

"This area is a village."

"It's a village." Yang Hu stood up, dusted off his hands, "Six hundred men, they've been holed up here all winter, eighty li away from Black Stone Bridge."

He didn't say anything more. But Captain Pang understood: the forty or fifty riders who had scattered like sand over the past six days were never the whole group. They were only wearing a thin layer of clothing.

Yang Hu returned to the pile of ashes and squatted down again.

This time he peeled it very carefully, layer by layer. When he got to the bottom, he picked out a small pinch of ash from the ashes with his fingers.

The residue was brown, with a slightly broken leaf shape.

He held the residue in his palm, brought it close to his eyes to look at it, then rubbed it apart and raised the powder on his fingertip to his nose.

Then he stopped moving.

"General?"

Yang Hu did not answer. He divided the crumb into three parts, smelled one part, touched one part with the tip of his tongue, and held one part up to the light in his palm.

In the portion facing the light, there are a few extremely fine strands of white.

"Su Heng".

Su Heng squeezed through from behind. Yang Hu offered her his palm.

Her expression changed after just one glance.

"This is the dregs of the boiled-down wound medicine."

"Let's see."

Su Heng squatted down, picked up another pinch from the ashes, rubbed it together, and brought it close to her eyes. She rubbed it for a long time until her fingers turned red.

"General," her voice was a little tense, "this medicine contains official powder."

"What percentage?"

"It's hard to say. But this kind of 'official powder' doesn't come from the grasslands." Su Heng raised her head. "The barbarian shamans treat injuries with horse oil and red-hot iron. They don't make this."

"This is a prescription from our army." Yang Hu gathered the handful of medicine in his palm and poured it into a small bag he carried with him. "The wound medicine issued from Qing Shi Kou is also prepared using this method."

Cui Ting stood to the side, his throat feeling like something was stuck in it.

He stayed at the front camp for five years, and he opened those seventeen packets of medicine mixed with soil, one by one.

"Dig up all these piles of ash," Yang Hu said. "After that, dig under the tent."

Two thousand people spent half a day digging.

The items they unearthed filled three trucks.

There was a broken earthenware pot used for boiling medicine, with a layer of black residue still clinging to the bottom; there were strips of cloth used to wrap wounds, washed, dried, and neatly folded; there was a half-full bag of unused medicinal herbs, the burlap sack being double-layered, the knot at the opening of the sack being the kind commonly used for military supply trains.

Finally, what was dug out from under tent number thirty-seven was a bundle of arrows.

There were about a hundred arrows, bundled very neatly and wrapped in oilcloth. The shafts had turned white, but the arrowheads were still shiny.

Cui Ting pulled one out and turned it upside down to look at the cluster.

Triangular, barbed, with a shallow groove at the tail.

His hand trembled slightly.

"General," he said, raising the arrow, "this is ours."

"The standard of the Western Camp."

"It's the standard design of the Western Camp," Cui Ting said. "This subordinate has reviewed the military equipment registers of the Western Camp for three years. This groove is the mark of the arrowheads in the Da Cheng Army; the barbarians can't imitate it."

The wind blew in from the slope, stirring up a cloud of dust from the cleared-out debris.

Yang Hu took the arrow and weighed it in his hand.

Three years ago, a pass on the northern front fell overnight, and the entire army was wiped out. That night, the barbarians bypassed all the sentries and specifically chose the weakest point in defense and the most chaotic troop rotation to break through the pass.

Su Heng stood half a step to his side. She didn't reach out to catch the arrow, but slowly tucked her fingers into her sleeve and clenched them.

It took her a long time to speak.

"General."

"Um."

"Three years ago, on that night, the barbarians entered through the most chaotic section during the troop rotation at the pass my father was guarding." Her voice was very low, so low that only the person next to her could hear it, "1,200 men, and they didn't even have time to nock their arrows."

"I remember."

"I've been investigating for three years, and all I found was that one page of the troop rotation book for that night had been changed." Su Heng stared at the bundle of arrows. "I still can't understand how the barbarians knew so accurately."

Yang Hu put the arrows back into the bundle.

"Do you understand now?"

"Now I understand," Su Heng said. "They didn't know it perfectly. Someone told them everything step by step, even providing medicine and arrows."

After she said that, her shoulders and back tensed for a moment, then slowly relaxed.

"General, who can these three carts of goods subdue?"

"We can't hold anyone back," Yang Hu said. "The medicine is ours, the arrows are ours, but they won't say for themselves who sent them."

"That……"

"Then let's take them back first." He rewrapped the oilcloth around the bundle of arrows. "Something we couldn't find for three years has been unearthed from a pile of ashes today. We can't rush it."

Su Heng lowered her head and loosened the hand inside her sleeve.

"General Choi."

"Your subordinate is here."

"Not a single item from these three carts is to be lost. Assign two hundred men to guard them, keeping them at the central command during the day and setting them on fire at night."

"Yes."

"Take another arrow, a pinch of medicine residue, and a strip of cloth, put them in another box, and I will carry them with me."

Cui Ting hesitated for a moment: "General, what if we're on the way..."

"If something happens on the road, we can abandon the three carts," Yang Hu said, "but we can't abandon this box."

That night, the lights in the central command tent stayed on very late.

Yang Hu wrote the draft of the battle report three times.

The first time he wrote down his achievements, he wrote seven characters: "Seven heads taken." He looked at it and kept it.

He wrote down the losses the second time. He copied down the numbers for the past six days one by one: those who collapsed, fell behind, were seriously injured, died, and even the twenty-three that drank raw water, as well as the sixty-four horses that lost weight due to Captain Cen's private reduction of bean feed.

After writing it, eighty-one became a full page.

He added two lines of smaller text at the end of the page.

The number copied from the previous line is from the five-year war damage register: In previous years, one trip would cost 144.

The next line is this one: eighty-one.

Two numbers were placed together, separated by an ink line. He stared at the line for a while, then scraped the inkstone with his brush.

He knew the Ministry of War wouldn't read those two lines. But they had to be on paper.

For the third time, he started a new line and wrote down the third item.

Seized: A barbarian winter camp, capable of holding 600 people, where they were stationed for the winter. It contained standard-issue wound medicine, baggage sacks, and 117 standard-issue arrows from the Da Cheng army. All items are present and will be sent upon receipt.

After finishing this line, he put down his pen and leaned back.

The deadline for submitting the report was one month. He couldn't deliver the report.

What that hand wanted was an ugly battle report.

The battle report was now incredibly ugly: seven heads taken, eighty-one casualties. But it was followed by another line of text.

This line of text came from that hand's own storage space.