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

That night, Yang Hu stayed in the felt tent and did not leave.

Yue Chong did not wake up. His breathing was shallow but even. The small piece of horsehide stuck to the outside of the empty arrow shaft in his chest deflated with each inhale and inflated with each exhale, without stopping all night.

Su Heng checked every half hour: taking the pulse, looking at the lips, and listening to the movement of the horsehide.

At midnight, she asked in a low voice.

"General, how long should we keep this arrow shaft?"

"Three days," Yang Hu said. "After three days, when the air inside stops pushing out, pull it out and stitch up the wound."

"What if it's still at the top?"

"Then let's stay for three more days."

Around the fourth watch of the night, Yue Chong moved his hand.

Then it will be dawn.

He opened his eyes at dawn.

After opening his eyes, he didn't speak immediately. First, his eyes slowly rolled around, from the felt roof to the person next to him, and finally landed on the arrow shaft in his chest.

He stared at the bulging and deflated horsehide for a long time.

"...What is this?"

"It's for venting your anger," Yang Hu said. "Don't touch it."

Yue Chong's throat moved.

"This humble general... is he still alive?"

"Alive. We held on yesterday."

Yue Chong closed his eyes, then opened them again.

"That flag?"

"Standing upright."

He fell silent. After a while, tears welled up in his eyes and trickled down his temples into his hair.

"General."

"Um."

"My thirty riders..."

Nineteen returned.

Yue Chong's lips moved, but he didn't make a sound.

"I know what you're trying to say," Yang Hu said. "You can count them yourself when you can sit up. Don't think about it now, or you'll get breathless and the incision will hurt."

"General."

"What else?"

"When that arrow came in yesterday, I thought to myself, 'It's not a shame to die on the grasslands this time.'" Yue Chong's voice was broken. "In the past nineteen years, I've never died knowing why. But I did yesterday."

Yang Hu pulled the felt covering him up a little.

"There will be more battles to come. Keep those words in mind and tell your men back at your camp."

Yang Hu got up and stepped out of the felt mat.

The sky outside was just beginning to brighten. Steam rose from nine pots over the low-lying area, and lines of people waited to receive soup. In front of the earthen ridge, the bodies of yesterday's battle had not yet been collected.

Cui Ting came forward to greet him.

"General, in yesterday's battle, our side lost 873 men, while the barbarians left behind more than 2,100 corpses."

"What about the right flank?"

"The Right Battalion lost 411 men, the most among the three battalions." Cui Ting paused. "The brothers knew that General Yue was still alive, and when they were counting this morning, the Right Battalion stood up and shouted."

"What are you shouting for?"

"Call out the general's name," Cui Ting said, "not General Yue's."

Yang Hu did not respond to that sentence.

He glanced towards the right flank of the camp. Four hundred and eleven men hadn't returned yesterday, and the remaining two thousand three hundred were currently collecting corpses. They were collecting the bodies of their own men, and also the barbarians. Collecting the barbarian corpses was an order he had given the day before: drag them all downwind, dig pits, and weigh them down with stones.

Some people didn't understand and said that those were the corpses of the enemy, and that they should just be thrown there to feed the wolves.

"We fed the wolves, and the wolves drank our water." That was all Yang Hu said at the time.

"Has Liu Ye returned yet?"

"You're back. We'll wait for your reply."

Liu Ye returned before dawn, and even fell asleep on horseback once.

"General." She rolled down, her feet wobbling, but Cui Ting caught her. "There are troops to the south."

"How many?"

"A large group, heading south. In front are cavalry, followed by pedestrians and cart drivers." Liu Ye gestured with her hand, "I can't see the tail end clearly, but I estimate four or five thousand."

"How far south?"

"Last night we traveled thirty li to reach those three bodies of water."

Cui Ting's breathing quickened: "They really went to herd the horses."

"He really went."

Yang Hu went over those words in his mind.

Four or five thousand went south, and about fifteen thousand remained in front of the earthen ridge.

Fifteen thousand to five thousand one hundred and sixty.

"General." Shao Qi arrived at this moment, his face still stained with yesterday's blood. "This humble general has something to discuss."

"speak."

"Chase the group to the south," Shao Qi said. "They're driving their horses back slowly. We'll have 1,100 riders go around them, intercept them halfway, and scatter the herd again."

"Don't chase."

"General?"

"We caught up, we scattered, and then what?" Yang Hu said, "After we finished this battle in the south with 1,100 cavalry, only 4,000 were left on this side of Tuliang. Once Tuliang fell, not a single one of the more than 300 people who hadn't gotten up in the depression was left."

Shao Qi shut his mouth.

"Besides," Yang Hu said, "those horses have already drunk from those three water sources."

Cui Ting suddenly looked up.

"General, you mean..."

"What I'm saying is, I know better than they do what those 20,000 horses they brought back are," Yang Hu pointed south. "I'm not going to stop them. I can't stop them, and there's no need to."

The people behind the earthen ridge fell silent.

"Then what should we do?" Cui Ting finally asked.

"Fight the 15,000 troops in the north."

As soon as he said that, all three of them looked at him.

"General, 15,000 against 5,160," Shao Qi said.

"Yesterday it was 20,000 against 5,160," Yang Hu said. "Yesterday we held our ground and even killed 2,100 of them. Today they are down by 4,000 or 5,000."

"But we're also short 873."

"We're down 873, but another 109 got up this morning in the wounded soldiers' camp," Yang Hu said. "Adding Liu Ye's 62, we now have about 4,400 who can go into battle."

"Four thousand four hundred to fifteen thousand."

"It's not four thousand four hundred versus fifteen thousand." Yang Hu turned over the wooden board on the ground and drew on it with a broken branch. "It's four thousand four hundred people who had eaten, versus fifteen thousand people who had traveled sixty miles from the north, were carrying the plague, and whose horses had run away."

He placed the broken branch in the middle of the plank.

"They split their forces to drive the horses because they couldn't hold out any longer. The reason they're still surrounding us after splitting their forces is because they dare not retreat. If they retreat, the four or five thousand troops to the south will be isolated."

Cui Ting's palms were sweaty.

"General, they are waiting for the horses to be driven back from the south."

"That's right." Yang Hu tossed the broken branch aside. "So this battle can only be fought in these three days. After three days, the horses will return, and the 15,000 will become 20,000 again, still cavalry."

Shao Qi took a deep breath.

"When will the general make his move?"

"Not today," Yang Hu said. "Today we will collect the bodies, count the wounded, and move them to the innermost part of the rear of the ridge. Starting tonight, no more fires are allowed, and no more counting is permitted."

"Not counting?" Cui Ting was taken aback. "The general himself set this rule..."

"The rules are set for our own people," Yang Hu said. "They can see our fire from sixty miles away and count our bonfires. Starting tonight, the number of fires will be reduced by half, but the number of people will remain the same. Let them count out four thousand, rather than five thousand."

"Is the general trying to show weakness?"

"We need to make them miscalculate," Yang Hu said. "What they fear most right now is that we still have the strength to fight. If we make them think we're just barely hanging on, they'll be willing to wait three more days."

That afternoon, Liu Ye went out again.

When she returned in the evening, she didn't bring back any information about the enemy.

"General," she said with a strange expression, "horses are coming from the south."

"South? Isn't that where the barbarians go to drive their horses?"

"It's not that kind of stream," Liu Ye said. "It came from the direction of Black Stone Beam. It took the old road we used to cross the border."

Cui Ting stood up abruptly.

How many people?

"Not many," Liu Ye said. "Around eight hundred, plus about twenty carts. The ruts are very deep; they're full."

Cui Ting's voice changed: "Grain?"

"Looks like it."

"What flag are you flying?"

Liu Ye paused for a moment.

"The flag of the forward camp," she said. "There's another one I haven't seen before."

"What is it like?"

"It's black." Liu Ye thought for a moment. "There are no words on it, just an embroidered border. The embroidery doesn't seem to be from the military."

Yang Hu closed the booklet in his hand.

He stood on this grassland for two months, and for the first time, he felt that the soil beneath his feet was solid.