Extreme Frontier Army: Starting from the bottom ranks, conquering the chaotic world

As Lu Jinggang pressed down on the hilt of the knife, a chill ran down his side.

The old man silently pressed his short knife against his waist.

Lu Jing's expression remained calm, and his breathing remained steady.

"Gu Changfeng didn't arrange for anyone to check the accounts tonight. That old fox of his wouldn't send a stranger here in the middle of the night, even if the sky were to fall."

The old soldier had a sinister look in his one eye and a hoarse voice.

"Speak, who sent you? If you don't speak, this knife will cut a hole in your waist and shred your intestines in the next instant."

Lu Jing glanced at the entrance to the courtyard out of the corner of his eye.

Shen Qingqiu huddled in the shadows, covering her mouth with her hands.

"Old Deng."

Lu Jing sighed, his tone helpless.

"Your knife is a bit dull. It's hard enough to cut meat, let alone shred my intestines!"

The veteran squinted his one eye, somewhat taken aback.

Faced with a dead end, this kid is not only unafraid, but also complaining that the knife isn't sharp enough?

It was that moment of astonishment.

Lu Jing slammed his right foot off the ground, his entire body advancing instead of retreating, crashing headlong into the dark red dagger!

"laugh!"

The knife tip sliced ​​into the waist, leaving a bloody gash.

His blood boiled and soaked through his black patrol uniform.

The veteran was completely unprepared for the other party to walk right into the line of fire, and the force he was about to use to push forward suddenly vanished.

Lu Jing's left hand, like a venomous snake emerging from its hole, gripped the old soldier's knife-wielding hand tightly.

The veteran's hand was strained, and the short knife almost slipped from his grasp.

Before he could even raise his hand to retaliate, a broken, black arrow had already slipped out of Lu Jing's sleeve.

It was something I casually pulled out from a pile of corpses when I passed by the battlefield. The arrowhead was broken in half, and the end was worn down into a short spike. I had been hiding it close to my forearm.

Using the momentum of his forward lean, the broken arrow pierced the old soldier's jawbone precisely from below.

"puff!"

Rusty iron mixed with blood plasma pierced straight through.

The veteran convulsed violently, and his one cloudy eye suddenly lost focus.

Lu Jing twisted the dagger with his left hand and snatched it away, then pulled out the broken arrow with his right.

The body lay limply on the bluestone slab.

The entire process was conducted without making any unnecessary noise.

Lu Jing flicked the blood off the broken arrow and tucked it back into his sleeve.

He bent down, rummaged around in the veteran's sheepskin coat for a bit, and pulled out the bunch of brass keys.

When I got up, my vision went black for a moment.

He steadied himself against the doorframe, his face turning pale.

Lu Jing shook his head and waved to the shadows at the entrance of the courtyard.

"come over."

He glanced down at the fresh wound on his side, which was still bleeding.

That fucking hurts.

Shen Qingqiu leaned against the wall, her legs so weak she could barely walk.

She watched Lu Jing unlock the door with a blank expression.

"You...you killed another one..."

"If I don't kill him, we'll both be hanging on the city wall of Yanmen Pass to dry tomorrow morning."

Lu Jing inserted the largest brass key into the lock of the tin door.

The heavy brass lock clicked open, and Lu Jing pushed open the wooden door.

Before they could even step inside, a strong, almost tangible odor hit them directly in the face.

Sweet, cloying, and fishy.

The mixture of cheap coarse salt and spicy spices couldn't mask the horrifying stench emanating from beneath.

Shen Qingqiu could no longer hold back.

He turned around, grabbed the door frame, bent over, and dry heaved, even vomiting bile.

"Where...is this place...?"

He was dry heaving while wiping his mouth with his sleeve, tears streaming down his face.

Lu Jing stepped into the warehouse, which had no windows.

In the very center of the warehouse, there were a dozen or so large black wooden barrels, each about half a person's height, neatly stacked.

Each barrel was covered with a thick black canvas, tightly bound with hemp rope.

That pungent smell was coming from these wooden barrels.

Lu Jing walked to the nearest wooden barrel, pulled out the short knife he had just seized, untied the hemp rope binding the canvas, and ripped off the black cloth.

The wooden barrel was stuffed full.

The dark red marinade was coated with coarse salt, and the surface was covered with a dry, hard, oily sheen.

Shen Qingqiu suppressed her nausea and slowly moved in, supporting herself against the wall.

"This is... cured pork that the quartermaster uses for winter?"

She looked at the bucket of things, her voice trembling.

"No wonder those soldiers outside are starving; all the good stuff is hidden here..."

"pork?"

Lu Jing sneered and tapped the edge of the wooden barrel twice with the short knife in his hand.

"The pigs of the Great Yan Dynasty don't have bones that grow like this."

The knife tip was plunged deep into the wooden barrel, and then it was pried open with force.

A piece of skin was flipped to the top.

A piece of salt was rubbed off, revealing a rough, dull layer of skin underneath.

Shen Qingqiu leaned over and took a look.

He froze, as if his soul had left his body.

His knees buckled, and he collapsed onto the dusty ground.

She bit her hand hard to keep herself from making any sound.

On that piece of leather, there was a blurry blue tattoo.

The edges have become distorted from the pickling process, but the character in the middle is still clearly legible.

[Prisoner].

She had seen this word before.

Three days ago, when the soldiers of the Eighth Battalion were driven onto the city wall, their tattered armor could not conceal the brand marks on their cheeks and shoulders.

One man even smiled at her, missing half a front tooth, and said that if he survived this battle, he would ask the soldier for half a bowl of hot porridge.

The man later fell at the foot of the city wall, his throat pierced by an arrow from the northern barbarians.

She thought he had died on the battlefield.

It turns out it wasn't over.

"You recognized me?"

Lu Jing's tone was calm.

He pressed the short knife down, the blade cutting through the spiky flesh and picking out the hard object underneath.

A broken piece of iron, covered in dark red blood clots, lay on the edge of the wooden barrel.

It was a barbed arrowhead, a standard designation from the Ministry of Works of the Great Yan Dynasty.

A wisp of cloth, not yet cleaned, still clung to the rusty iron sheet.

The truth is laid bare before us.

Gu Changfeng and his associates, along with other high-ranking warlords, resold all the good grain allocated by the imperial court to powerful families in exchange for real money.

What to do when the soldiers below are starving and going crazy?

They used these comrades who died on the battlefield, the corpses of soldiers that no one cared about, wrapped them in coarse salt, and made so-called "special-supply cured meat".

It was sent to the front lines and mixed with cornmeal to make meat porridge.

The soldiers ate the flesh of their comrades before going to fight the northern barbarians.

They die, then are brought back to be used as the next batch of military rations.

"They...how dare they..."

Shen Qingqiu sat on the ground, her voice mournful, her whole body trembling.

Even those born into official families and who have witnessed the tragedies of confiscation of property and extermination of entire families cannot imagine that such heinous acts, which cross the line of human decency, exist in this world.

She suddenly remembered those strange entries in her father's account book that were circled in cinnabar.

"Winter meat supply, valued at eight hundred taels of silver."

"The remaining soldiers returned to the granary, and three cartloads of firewood were collected."

At the time, we only thought that the quartermaster department was embezzling money and using rotten firewood to impersonate grain.

Looking at them now, those deliberately written, ambiguous words are all stained with blood.

"They ate people...they sold dead bodies as military rations..."