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

Liu Ye chased after it for six days.

Chasing people is different from chasing water. Water stays still, but people move. But there's one thing a person driving sick livestock can't avoid: he has to drive the animals slowly, and the slower the animals move, the more livestock are left behind.

On the afternoon of the sixth day, she brought back three things.

The first item is a piece of rope. It's made of twisted wool, about two fingers wide, with one end frayed.

"It's for tethering livestock." Liu Ye spread the rope out on the table. "On the grasslands, livestock are tethered with leather ropes, which are very tight. This is a wool rope; it won't kill you, but it won't hurt your hands either."

"Why use a woolen rope?"

"Because the leather strap has to be pulled close to the hand," Willow Leaf said. "The woolen rope can be a layer in between."

The second thing is a pile of ash.

"Seventy li to the northeast, under a sheltered embankment, there was a fire. There were bones in the ashes, sheep bones." She opened the packet of ashes. "There were no knife marks on the bones."

Cui Ting leaned closer to look: "What does it mean there's no cut?"

"When you kill a sheep to eat its meat, you have to remove the bones," Liu Ye said. "These bones are whole, and the meat has been mushy and fallen off; it wasn't removed."

Yang Hu picked up the bone, looked at it, and put it down.

"They didn't eat it. They burned a dead sheep."

"Why burn it?"

"Let's see if it can burn."

The third item was a piece of leather. It was about the size of a palm, with the edges cut very neatly, and several lines drawn on it with charcoal.

Yang Hu examined the piece of leather under the lamp for a long time.

The pattern consists of three horizontal lines and one vertical line running down from the middle, splitting into two branches at the end.

"What is this?" Cui Ting asked.

"I don't know," Yang Hu said, "but it's a mark."

"mark?"

"He drove dozens of sick animals and released them into three different places and four different bodies of water." Yang Hu turned the hide over, revealing an even shallower scratch on the back. "He had to remember which place had how many animals, which place only left a mark, and which place had the animals driven away. If he couldn't remember, he himself would accidentally drink the water."

Cui Ting felt a chill run down his spine.

"He's using his own people as a scapegoat."

"Marketing".

On the seventh day, that person appeared.

It wasn't the scouts who found it; he stood on the slope himself and made himself visible.

On that day, the army reached the bottom of a gentle slope. Just as the vanguard crossed the slope, a group of people appeared at the top.

There were about twenty riders.

It wasn't A. The twenty or so people were all wearing long robes, the color of which was dark, and it was impossible to tell whether they were gray or brown. The one in the lead wasn't riding a horse; he was standing at the highest point of the slope, with a pole on each side of him, with something hanging from the top of the pole, swaying slowly in the wind.

Captain Pang immediately ordered his men to charge.

"Don't move."

"General! About twenty men!"

"He's standing there, waiting for you to charge," Yang Hu said. "Can you see what's behind the slope?"

Captain Pang reined in his horse.

The two armies were locked in a stalemate, separated by a gentle slope.

Yang Hu raised his hand and beckoned to his personal guards.

"Take that white flag."

"Does the general wish to discuss this?"

"I won't talk about it," Yang Hu said. "I need to see him for who he really is."

The white flag was raised, and Yang Hu led six men forward two hundred paces, stopping where they could not be reached by arrows.

The person at the top of the slope didn't move either.

Two hundred paces away, you can't see a person's face clearly, but you can see some things clearly.

The man's hands were tucked into his sleeves and never came out. His boots were new, a stark contrast to his old robe. He stood atop the slope, the grass beneath his feet firmly planted, indicating he had been standing there for a long time.

There are two more things.

The same twenty or so people were standing in the same spot. They weren't in a circle, but rather spread out in an arc, with the opening facing downwind. Not a single one of them was standing downwind of those two poles.

Another thing was their hands. While they jumped, they were tapping something, but not a single one of their hands touched the pole. The pole was driven deep into the ground, requiring someone to hold it in place. The person who had held it in place wasn't among these twenty people at that moment.

Yang Hu mentally reviewed the two points.

They know how to avoid it.

It wasn't about chanting incantations to avoid it; it was about positioning yourself, not touching it, and separating yourself from those who had already touched it. This was the same approach he used when sealing the well and dividing the camp at Qing Shi Kou.

The most important thing is those two poles.

Two dried sheep heads were hanging from the top of the pole.

Yang Hu stared at it for a long time, and suddenly realized what the two sheep heads were for.

It's not a sacrifice. It's a symbol.

That was for his own people: this direction, past the sick animals.

"General," a bodyguard whispered, "they're jumping."

The twenty or so people on the hilltop began to circle around the leader, tapping something in their hands as they did so. The sound carried over two hundred paces, muffled and out of tune.

Captain Pang muttered from behind, "Playing tricks."

Yang Hu, however, did not laugh.

He had seen this in Qing Shi Kou.

During the siege that year, an epidemic broke out in the barbarian camp. A group of people jumped over the barbarian's feet on the high ground outside the camp. They jumped for three days, and 317 people died in the camp. After they finished jumping, the barbarians retreated, not because they were forced to retreat by the jumping, but because they died.

At that time, he released more than sixty prisoners who were infected with the disease. What he released was not people, but a sentence: "The city inside the pass also had this problem. They sealed the wells and boiled water, and suppressed it on the 22nd."

What he wanted was for the barbarians themselves to know: there was a solution, but their witch doctors didn't have one.

The person on the hilltop is most likely the one who skipped the three-day period, retreated, and lost face that year.

The wind lifted the hem of his robe, and the man looked up.

Two hundred paces away, Yang Hu couldn't see his eyes, but he knew the other was looking at him.

"Back to camp."

Back in the central command tent, Yang Hu unfolded the patterned leather again.

Cui Ting stood there for a long time before finally speaking.

"General, there is something I don't understand."

"speak."

"Back at Qing Shi Kou, the general let those sixty-odd men go back so the barbarians would know there was a cure for the plague," Cui Ting said. "But now they're not treating the plague; they're using it as a weapon. Isn't that...?"

He swallowed the rest of his sentence.

Yang Hu finished speaking for him.

"I taught him."

The embers inside the tent flickered.

"General."

"On that trip to Qing Shi Kou, I showed them something." Yang Hu traced the vertical line on the leather with his finger. "The plague is not a sin sent down by heaven. The plague has a source; it comes from water, from corpses, from things that haven't been thoroughly burned."

"Once you understand this, you can prevent it."

"Once they understand this, they can release it," Yang Hu said. "I taught them where the epidemic came from, and they learned how to send the epidemic there."

Cui Ting opened his mouth, but for a moment he didn't know what to say.

"Does the general regret it?"

Yang Hu shook his head.

"No regrets. If those sixty-odd people hadn't been released, thousands more would have died at Qing Shi Kou." He folded the leather bag. "But this debt needs to be settled: the interest from those three water sources on the grassland today is from that day."

He put the leather into the small box he carried with him.

There are now five items in the box.

"General Choi."

"Your subordinate is here."

"Summon the commander of the third battalion, the head of the medical team, and the head of the scout team to the tent immediately."

"General, what do you want to do..."

"He can perform shamanistic rituals and drive away sick livestock." Yang Hu closed the box. "But he only knows one thing: sending out plagues. He doesn't know how to receive them."

Cui Ting was stunned.

"Once it's sent out, it can't be taken back." Yang Hu stood up. "He put things in our water because things haven't gotten out of hand on his side yet."

"Does the general mean that...he's going to cause trouble on his own side sooner or later?"

"He drove dozens of sick animals, covering hundreds of miles along the way," Yang Hu said. "The people who drove them, the roads they traveled, and the horses that drank the water they drank all belonged to him."

He lifted the curtain.

It was completely dark on the other side of the slope. The wind was still coming from the north, making the tent ropes taut.

"We bypassed three waterways and traveled for seven days," Yang Hu said. "How many waterways did he visit, and how many days did he travel?"

Cui Ting stood there, mentally going over the sentence and calculating it, but stopped halfway through.

"The general is waiting."

"We can't wait." Yang Hu lowered the tent flap. "But I need to know first how many more days he can hold on."