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

After those words were spoken, no one responded for a long time afterward.

Shao Qi stood ramrod straight, waiting.

"That's all," Yang Hu said.

"Yes." Shao Qi took out a piece of paper from his pocket. On the paper was what he had calculated last night: "Leave 500 men, with half of the 24 loads of meat, to guard this low-lying area. The main force, 5,800 men, lightly armed, with three days' worth of dry rations per person, will go out through the southeast pass and head straight for Heishiliang."

"When will you arrive?"

"Seven days."

"Will you come back to pick me up?"

"Go to Heishiliang to replenish the grain, then come back to pick us up again. The round trip will take sixteen days."

"The sixteenth." Yang Hu repeated these three words.

"The sixteenth." Shao Qi nodded. "This humble general is not saying we should abandon them. This humble general is saying that five thousand eight hundred men are trapped here with four hundred who can't even be carried. They can't even walk thirty miles a day. Once their food is gone, no one can get out. If they go separately, six thousand can survive. If they are all crammed together, not one of them will survive."

Cui Ting listened from the side, his face turning bright red, but he did not refute.

Because what Shao Qi said was true.

"General Yue." Yang Hu turned his head.

Yue Chong, with his arm in a sling, sat on a rock. He looked up.

"Does the general want me to tell the truth, or something more pleasant?"

"truth."

"General Shao's proposal is common practice in the border regions," Yue Chong said. "I've witnessed it four times in my nineteen years of service. The five hundred men left behind were never picked up when we came back to fetch them."

Shao Qi's face twitched.

"General Yue's words..."

"I'm not contradicting you," Yue Chong waved his good hand. "You're right. The barbarian cavalry will find the five hundred men and four hundred wounded soldiers left behind within three days. You and I both know that. But this method is still correct because the other side has six thousand men who perished together."

He turned to Yang Hu.

"I have finished speaking. I neither agree nor disagree with this proposal. The Right Battalion will follow the General's orders."

No one responded after the earthen ridge.

The north wind blew in through the gap, stirring up a layer of dust on the ground.

Yang Hu squatted down and drew on the ground with a broken twig.

First, a circle was drawn to represent the depression. Then, three arcs were drawn outside the circle to represent the position of the Third Battalion. Finally, a dot was marked in the southeast direction.

"General Shao, I acknowledge your debt," he said, "but you've overlooked one thing."

"Please speak, General."

"You counted those 403 people as 403 burdens."

"They can't lift it."

"We can't lift it today." Yang Hu turned the broken branch around. "Qingshikou was besieged for forty-five days. More than two thousand one hundred wounded soldiers were carried into the wounded soldiers' camp. On the day the siege was lifted, nine hundred and seventy-four of them were back on the city wall. Of the five hundred and seventy-three men from the front camp who went to the new camp, sixty-four returned to their posts within twenty-two days, and three hundred and eleven returned a month later. Of the eight hundred and fifty-eight men who were lying down in the three camps before leaving the pass, six hundred and twelve of them have stood up."

He spoke these numbers very slowly.

"Of these 403, based on the ratio of the vanguard, 240 will be able to wield weapons again within 20 days. What you're losing isn't 400 burdens, but 240 guns in 20 days."

Shao Qi was stunned.

He knew all these numbers. The one about returning to the unit on the 22nd, with 64 people, was something he heard Cui Ting report to him personally during a meeting. The one about 858 people standing up, with 612 people standing up, was something from his own battalion.

But he never put all those numbers together and calculated them.

"General, but..." Cui Ting began, "Twenty days. Right now we only have three days' worth of rations."

"Yes." Yang Hu threw the broken branch on the ground. "So this score can't be settled right now."

He stood up.

"I will not refute General Shao. His calculations are correct. I just want you to remember one thing: the reason this meeting is being held is because we only have three days' worth of rations left. If we had ten days, this meeting would not have been necessary at all."

"The general means..."

"It means: what we should be arguing about is not whether to abandon or not, but where those ten days came from."

Shao Qi was stunned for a moment.

"General, are you saying there's another way?"

"Whether it is or not, I will think about it tonight," Yang Hu said. "I will give you all an answer tomorrow at dawn. Tonight, no one is allowed to spread this idea, not a single word of it is allowed to pass on."

Why?

"Because once these words get out, those 403 people will hear them tonight," Yang Hu said. "Once they hear them, some of them will have to crawl out tonight and wait to die in a place where no one can see them, so that others can leave faster."

Cui Ting's lips moved slightly.

"General, this humble general greets you." He said in a low voice, "When the siege of Qing Shi Kou reached its thirtieth day, there was a squad leader with a broken leg who climbed up to the base of the city wall in the middle of the night and was not discovered until dawn."

"Therefore, it must not be spread."

All three of them agreed.

When Shao Qi was about to leave, Yang Hu called him back.

"General Shao."

"Your subordinate is here."

"Whose side are you advocating for?"

Shao Qi paused for a while.

"For those two thousand three hundred men in the left battalion," he said. "General, I am not heartless. I am forty-seven years old and rose through the ranks from squad leader. Most of these men under my command were trained by me from the bottom up. But I have also seen entire battalions die on the grasslands."

He paused.

"If the general were to ask me what I think, I would say that if these four hundred men were not injured, they would have agreed to this proposal themselves."

Yang Hu stared at him for a long time.

"That's the truth."

"This humble general would not dare to deceive the general."

"But you're still wrong about one thing," Yang Hu said. "If they weren't injured, they would have agreed. Now that they're injured, they won't."

"General..."

"In the military, the votes of those who were not injured cannot be counted only."

Shao Qi opened his mouth but didn't say anything, then bowed and withdrew.

Yang Hu did not sleep that night.

He walked through the depression three times.

The first count was: 4,700 who could fight, 1,100 who were lightly wounded but could walk, and 403 who were seriously wounded and carried.

The second count was of the items: three days' worth of dry rations, twenty-four loads of meat, a few bolts of cloth left for filtering water, and how many clothes that could be taken apart to make bandages were left. He paused when he counted the last item, which was the stretchers. Of the twenty-six stretchers, only nine remained; the rest were hastily made from spears and felt.

On his second walk, he passed by the area with the wounded soldiers.

There was no fire in that area. More than four hundred people lay huddled together. It was cold at night, and everyone who could cover themselves was covered. One old soldier was awake. Hearing footsteps, he turned his head.

"General."

Yang Hu squatted down. He was from the Right Battalion, with a cut on his leg, from his knee to his ankle; Su Heng had just changed the dressing yesterday.

"pain?"

"It hurts." The old soldier grimaced. "I'd like to ask, what time do we depart tomorrow?"

Yang Hu did not answer immediately.

"I can't use this leg, but my upper body is fine," the old soldier said. "If I really need to walk, I can crawl. General, don't have anyone carry me; carrying one will take up two people's space."

"Who told you you were leaving?"

"Nobody said anything," the old soldier said. "But I've been lying in this camp for five days, my meals have been reduced from two a day to one, and yesterday they even cooked meat. General, I've been a soldier for seventeen years, I can see things clearly."

Yang Hu pulled the felt blanket over his body up a little.

"Go to sleep."

"General."

"Um."

"When you really have to leave, don't hide it from us." The old soldier closed his eyes. "Everything else is negotiable. Just don't hide it from us."

On the third walk, I went up the north slope and looked at the darkness.

Sixty miles beyond that dark expanse, there were 1,200 empty tents and 20,000 horses.

People are dying over there too. They buried the bodies three times, each time later than the last.

By the time I finished walking it for the third time, it was almost dawn.

He stood on the slope, mentally checked the three accounts, and suddenly stopped.

There was one thing he had been calculating wrong all along.

He always considered the food shortage as his hardship.

But the barbarians didn't come in these three days.

It's the fifth day since the start of the ambush. Six thousand three hundred men are crammed into a low-lying area, four hundred wounded, their medicine almost gone, and half their flesh burned off. Such an enemy is just sixty li away, with twenty thousand horses, ready to trample them at any moment.

They didn't come.