The low-key prince summons trainees from the Imperial Household Department at the start of the game.

North of Baiyangbao was a route that Huo Qubing frequently patrolled.

The place wasn't particularly dangerous, but if you went another sixty miles north, the grasslands started to thin out, and the herders' yurts became fewer and fewer. Further north, you would enter the territory where the Xiutu tribe's cavalry often roamed.

He made at least two trips a month, sometimes with a light cavalry team, sometimes with only three or five people, setting off before dawn.

They would leave the fortress at the first rays of dawn, walk for three days, and then return. When their dry rations ran out, they would chew on a handful of snow, and when they ran out of arrows, they would pull them from their prey.

As usual, he set off before dawn, carrying only three days' worth of dry rations and two quiver of arrows.

After the snow, the sky and earth were so brightly white that if you squinted and looked at it for too long, tears would well up in your eyes.

But the wind was so cold it felt like it was going to cut one's throat, seeping in through the gaps in the cuffs and collar, like a layer of fine ice shavings sticking to the skin.

The group walked northwest along the abandoned beacon tower line. Most of the beacon towers had collapsed, leaving only half of their rammed earth foundations standing in the snow, like a row of forgotten tombstones.

The scouts led the way, their horses' hooves wrapped in burlap, making almost no sound as they trod on the snow. Only the white breath exhaled by the riders and horses condensed into wisps of mist in the cold air, which were quickly dispersed by the wind.

At noon, the scout rushed back.

Before the newcomer's horse had even come to a complete stop, he shouted to Huo Qubing from his saddle, his voice broken by the wind: "General... ahead... the herdsman is dead..."

Huo Qubing didn't ask questions like "How many died?" or "How did they die?" He simply said two words: "Lead the way."

He spurred his horse forward to follow the scout, with more than twenty riders silently following behind.

He reined in his horse after rounding a gentle slope.

There were about twenty corpses lying haphazardly on the snow, men, women, and children, all wearing the fur robes commonly worn by herders. Some of them were still clutching leather whips and short sticks used for herding sheep, as if they were trying to block something at the last moment.

They died a horrific death.

Some had only a very thin black mark left on their throats, as if they had been strangled or cut by a thin thread, with the skin and flesh at the edges of the cut slightly curled up and an abnormal grayish-black color.

Some chests were completely sunken, with bone fragments protruding from the flesh. The bone fragments at the break were white and stark, as if someone had smashed them in from the outside with a blunt object.

There were no knife marks or arrows on the ground; the snow was trampled into a mess, but the shapes of the footprints were wrong.

Slightly larger than a human foot, with a blurred outline, it looked as if it had been stepped on with some irregular material.

Huo Qubing reined in his horse and paused at the edge of the pile of corpses.

He didn't dismount immediately. He glanced at the wounds, mentally reviewing their direction and distribution, before finally landing on his feet.

The soles of the boots made a soft "crunch" sound as they stepped on the snow.

He walked to the body of a young herdsman, squatted down, and looked down at the black mark on his throat.

The mark was so fine it was almost invisible, but the skin at the edges was already rotting, as if it had been scratched by something's fingernail and then lingered there for a while.

He held his finger up an inch above the dark mark for a moment, without touching it, and then withdrew it.

"It wasn't the cavalry." He stood up, brushed the snow off his knees, and said only this without further explanation.

Several veteran soldiers who had followed him for many years dispersed to examine the other corpses. One of them lifted the eyelids of a corpse to look at the pupils, while another covered another corpse with a fur robe that had been overturned.

No one spoke; only the soft rustling of the wind through the snow could be heard.

Huo Qubing looked up and gazed at the end of the snow-covered plain to the north.

There was a patch of black dots moving slowly, but very regularly.

Unlike cavalry, which moved at varying speeds and in groups, these were a dozen or so figures arranged in a loose horizontal line, evenly spaced, moving southward, like a row of things tethered by the same thread.

He squinted and spat out the blade of grass that he had been chewing for half the way, which had already lost its flavor.

The blade of grass fell to the snow like a very thin, withered thread, and was quickly blown away by the wind.

"The corpse," he said.

The light cavalry he brought were all elite troops from Baiyangbao.

There were more than twenty people, none of whom were new recruits. Each of them had followed him on patrols in the northern border for at least two years. Some had followed him in chasing the Hu people's cavalry, some had ambushed him in the snow for three days and three nights, and some had taken arrows for him.

No one panicked upon hearing the words "corpse."

The men exchanged glances, then remounted. Some turned their bows to the front, while others pulled their swords half an inch from their sheaths and pushed them back in, making sure the swords slid smoothly in their sheaths.

The crossbowmen removed their crossbows and drew heavy arrows coated with cinnabar from their quivers.

The arrowheads were coated with a dark red powder made of cinnabar and realgar, which would burn upon contact with blood.

Li Wenzhong ordered the military craftsmen to specially allocate them to the scout teams. Each person only received five, and once they were used up, they were gone.

Huo Qubing didn't say much.

He mounted his horse, lightly tapping its belly with the heel of his boot. He didn't urge the horse to gallop faster, but instead let it steadily accelerate towards the black dot.

More than twenty riders followed silently behind, their hooves crushing the snow and kicking up a layer of white mist-like snow foam, which looked like a small, moving gray cloud from behind.

That squad of corpses consisted of about ten people.

Wrapped in linen and covered with ash, each body was spaced about four or five steps apart, like a string of beads.

As they moved south through the snow, their steps were extremely steady, each step landing in almost the same spot, without any difference in depth, as if they were measuring something.

The green light in their eyes was particularly striking in the midday snow, like a dozen or so phosphorescent lights embedded in the gaps of burlap, which did not completely extinguish even in the sunlight.

Upon hearing the sound of hooves, they all stopped in their tracks.

It's not the kind of pause a living person would make upon hearing a noise; it's a more orderly, sudden stop, as if controlled by the same string.

Then they turned around.

Huo Qubing did not wait for them to form a battle formation.

As he leaped from his horse, the tips of his boots lightly touched the saddle, propelling him across the snow like a pebble launched into the air, landing at the very front of the Yin Corpse formation.

He didn't draw his sword, but instead lightly pressed his right palm against the foremost corpse.

He didn't hold back with this palm strike. When the eighth-grade true qi was released from his palm, it carried a shockwave that was almost invisible to the naked eye. The air was compressed and then released, producing an extremely muffled sound.

The corpse's chest looked as if it had been struck by a sledgehammer; the linen ripped open in the middle, and its entire body flew backward, crashing into the second corpse behind it. The two rolled four or five steps together before coming to a stop.

When the first body landed, its sternum was mostly broken, leaving a fist-deep crater in its chest. Fragments of broken bone protruded from the tear in the burlap, like an old wooden board pierced through from the inside.

Huo Qubing landed on the snow.

The moment his foot touched the ground, the second corpse had already risen from its rolling position, using a severed arm to support itself and stand upright again.

The first one moved too. The indentation on its chest did not affect its movement. It used its hands to support itself on the ground, like a worm that had been broken in the middle and then put back together, and slowly lifted its upper body out of the snow.

Huo Qubing raised an eyebrow.

He stood still on the snow, watching the two slowly rising corpses, his voice neither loud nor soft, carrying a cold "I knew I was right" tone: "These things are harder than last time."

The last time was half a month ago, near an abandoned watchtower further north, where he chopped down three lone shadow corpses. At that time, his palm strike was strong enough to shatter them in two and make them impossible to put back together.

The power of this palm strike remains unchanged, but their recovery speed has increased.

He stopped testing the waters.

He drew his ring-pommel sword with a backhand motion.

The sword emitted a very light and crisp hum when it was drawn, like an iron string being plucked.

Eighth-grade true qi flowed into the blade, surging from the hilt all the way to the tip. A very faint red light rose on the blade, not dazzling, but it made the snow within a few feet around it appear blood-red.

The crimson light shone on the hemp cloth surfaces of the several corpses, and the ash from the talismans on the cloth began to smoke slightly, like old paper rolls that had been baked by fire.

Huo Qubing leaped forward.

He swept across the snow like a green shadow, and with a flash of his blade, the corpse that had risen up was cleaved in two from shoulder to waist.

A large cloud of black gas gushed out from the broken end. It was as thick as ink and had a strange smell that was a mixture of rust, rotten wood, and some kind of burnt smell.

He dodged to the side, the black mist brushing past his shoulder and condensing into a small dark patch on the snow behind him, as if splashed with ink.

He continued his attack, using the momentum to sweep horizontally, the blade slicing across the neck of the second corpse, its head flying off and spinning in mid-air.

Even after being beheaded, the creature continued to hiss, spewing out a wisp of green fire, like a lit old lamp wick.

Huo Qubing kicked the head away, and it rolled twice on the snow before the green flame went out.

His boots carved a deep groove in the snow, allowing him to steady himself.

The remaining corpses swarmed forward.

They are not like living people; they have no breathing sounds, no footsteps, only the faint rustling sound of burlap scraping through the air.

A dozen withered, black arms reached out from all directions at the same time, their fingernails long and black, like a dozen iron hooks that had been burned.

Huo Qubing moved erratically among them, like an elusive shadow.

His sword strikes were incredibly fast, each strike landing precisely on the corpse's neck, shoulders, lumbar vertebrae, and other joints. Wherever his true energy passed, black blood splattered.

But these things do have a certain eeriness to them.

One of the bodies, with half its body cut off, leaving only the upper body and an arm, was still dragging itself forward on the snow, biting at his calf.

Without turning his head, Huo Qubing stabbed the corpse through its skull with a backhand stroke. The tip of the knife went in from the top of the skull and came out from under the chin. He twisted the handle of the knife, and the corpse finally collapsed into a pile of grayish-black flesh and stopped moving.

The snow is getting heavier.

A moment later, the standing corpses on the snowfield were gone.

More than ten corpses were scattered all over the ground, with black bits of flesh and dark brown burlap sacks mixed in with the snow, like ink splattered all over the ground.

Several of them were still twitching.

The fingers of a severed arm were scratching and opening in the snow, as if searching for something.

The jaw of the half-split head was still opening and closing rhythmically.

Huo Qubing sheathed his sword and stood amidst the pile of minced meat, catching his breath.

He looked down at his wristband.

There was a shallow scratch on the outside of his left wrist, with a small, black claw tip hanging from it, like a piece of old fingernail that had been cut off.

He tore it off and threw it on the ground, rubbed the dark gray powder off the wristband with snow, and then rubbed his fingers to clean the grime from his fingertips.

The light cavalry then surrounded them.

They were also veterans of countless battles. Some had followed Huo Qubing in chasing down the elite cavalry of the Hu people, and some had chopped off people's heads as swiftly as chopping wood. But these people were ten times more terrifying than the Hu people.

An older soldier dismounted, glanced at the still twitching severed arm on the ground, and muttered a swear word from the grasslands. His voice was short and harsh, like a mouthful of grime stuck in his throat.

The younger scout next to him didn't curse; he just squatted there looking at the black bits of flesh, his Adam's apple bobbing as he swallowed. Then he stood up, brushed the black ash off his knees, and turned away, not looking again.

Huo Qubing heard the curse.

He would usually respond with "Get back to work after you've finished scolding," but he didn't this time.

He merely glanced back at the old soldier, a flat look devoid of smiles or reproach, and then said, "Enough talk, start the fire, don't leave a single piece."

The veterans busied themselves searching for dry grass and kerosene.

Someone found some dry branches and grass in the snow and piled them up. Someone else took two small cans of kerosene from a saddlebag, poured them on, and then lit a tinderbox to ignite them.

Flames leaped up from under the haystack, first a small ball of orange-red light, then grew stronger and stronger, drawing the scattered pieces of black meat and burlap scraps into the fire.

The kerosene fueled the fire, and when the flames touched the remains of the corpses, they emitted a strange hissing sound, like wet wood being slowly dried in a fire, mixed with a slight crackling sound.

Black smoke rose from the fire, only to be swept away by the flames. The acrid smell and rusty smell in the air mingled together and were carried south by the north wind.

Huo Qubing walked up to the still twitching remains of a corpse and nudged its face with his scabbard.

The half of the face exposed under the burlap was completely rotten, the skin and flesh turning a coppery green, like a piece of cured meat that had been soaking in salt water for too long, or like the rotten mud at the bottom of an old swamp, with the tendons and bones hanging loosely on the bones.

Its left eye was still there, but the eyeball had become a cloudy, hard, grayish-white ball, and the pupil was dilated, so it could not reflect anything.

Huo Qubing used the scabbard to push that half of the face to the side, and stopped looking.

He retreated to the upwind side, took out a hard, dry piece of ration from his pocket, broke it in half, and stuffed it into his mouth.

The dry rations were frozen hard, and he had to use his teeth to crush them when he chewed them. The crumbs were slowly moistened by saliva in his mouth, carrying the slightly astringent taste unique to coarse grains.

He chewed slowly, the firelight dancing on his face, illuminating the fine lines worn away by the north wind.

The corpses in the fire were shrinking little by little, from blackish-gray to grayish-white, from grayish-white to charcoal-like fragments, until only a few broken bone fragments remained, still emitting wisps of smoke in the embers.

"That old dog Agula," he muttered to himself as he chewed on his dry rations, his voice low, as if speaking to the fire, "has really found a good backer."

He stuffed the rest of the dry ration into his mouth, chewed it, swallowed it, and then patted the crumbs off his hands.

A lieutenant leaned forward, his voice low as if afraid of being overheard: "General, should we send someone back to report?"

Huo Qubing nodded.

He withdrew his hand from the food bag, wiped the bits of food from the corner of his mouth, his gaze still fixed on the fire, and his voice regained its crisp, concise quality: "Report! Let the main camp know that these bastards have dared to venture north of Baiyang Fort."

He paused, as if mentally counting a series of numbers, then added, "Also, have Li Wenzhong send another twenty cartloads of cinnabar."

The lieutenant was taken aback: "Twenty carts?"

"Twenty cartloads." Huo Qubing shifted his gaze from the fire, glanced at his adjutant, and said, "Relying solely on swords isn't impossible..."

He drew half an inch of the ring-pommel sword he had used in the battle. The crimson light on the blade had dissipated, but a layer of dark red residue remained on the edge, like the color of something pickled into it. "It's just slow to kill."

When he said the word "slow," his tone was nonchalant, much like when he said, "The wind is quite strong today."

But the lieutenant could hear the underlying meaning behind that word "slow".

These corpses are more resistant to cuts than before, and Huo Qubing, being an eighth-rank martial artist, ranks among the top three in the entire Northern Border Camp in terms of speed and power of his sword strikes.

Even he thought it was "slow"; if ordinary soldiers were to face these things, not one of them would survive.

The lieutenant asked no further questions, mounted his horse, and galloped south towards Baiyangbao. The sound of hooves faded into the distance on the snow, like a line blown away by the wind.

Huo Qubing stood by the fire without turning around.

He watched as the embers slowly died out in the wind, the sparks carried by the wind like a small swarm of fireflies, circling a few times in the air above the snow before disappearing.

He turned the scabbard sideways and drew a line on the snow with the end of the scabbard, then drew another line, with a gap of about half a foot between the two lines. Then he touched the middle of the gap with the tip of the knife.

That was his estimate; the next time these things reappear, they will travel a greater distance than this time.

This distance isn't long, but if they walk half a foot further each time than the last, one day they'll reach the base of the Poplar Fortress wall.

At that point, he won't be able to stop them with just the knife in his hand.

He brushed the snow off his scabbard, mounted his horse, and shouted to the old soldiers, "Let's go! Back to the fort before dark!"

The veterans stomped out the fire completely, covered the ashes with snow, and mounted their horses.

More than twenty riders turned around in the snow and headed south on their way back.

The sound of horses' hooves gradually faded into the distance on the vast snowfield. The pile of charcoal ash that had been trampled out was still emitting a last wisp of fine white smoke, which was blown away by the north wind as if it had never existed.

The road to the North has never been paved by warhorses and scimitars alone.

The Yin Corpses have now reached the north side of Baiyang Fortress, and their memorials are still on their way to the capital, taking at least half a month to reach the Dragon Throne.

Huo Qubing rode on his horse, looking ahead, without turning back.

But his fingers gripped the reins a little tighter than usual, as if he were holding a thread that wasn't fully stretched but already knew would snap at any moment.