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

The return gift came faster and more generously than expected.

Three thousand heavily armored infantrymen of the Northern Xuan Army, clad in black iron lamellar armor, wielded two-zhang-long hardwood spears.

Like a black iron curtain, it completely surrounded the dilapidated wooden fence of the Eighth Battalion.

The crowd was separated.

Eight ballistae equipped with four wheels were pushed to the front of the battle line by the bare-chested strongmen of the supervisory team.

A steel arrow, as thick as an adult's arm, was nocked on the bowstring, its arrowhead poisoned and gleaming with a cold, eerie blue light in the firelight.

The arrowheads locked onto the few dilapidated tents in the center of the Eighth Battalion's drill ground.

This siege weapon, when fired, can string five or six people together like a skewer of candied hawthorns and pin them to the ground with a single arrow.

Not only that, but four tiger-crouching cannons were pushed up from the left and right sides, their dark muzzles directly pressed against the gap in the barricade.

A captain of the supervisory team, clad in silver fish-scale armor, rode on horseback, his whip pointing at the gate of the Eighth Battalion, and shouted at the top of his lungs.

"By order of the commander-in-chief's staff to fight to the death!"

"The entire Eighth Battalion has plotted rebellion, tantamount to treason! Half an hour later, the entire battalion will be slaughtered! Not a single survivor will be left!"

"Anyone who brings Lu Jing's head out of the camp will be spared the death penalty and rewarded with one hundred taels of silver!"

After those shouts, the Eighth Battalion was so quiet that only the sound of the wind could be heard.

Hundreds of soldiers, armed with rusty machetes and chipped wooden shields, looked at the impenetrable army formation outside, and their legs began to spin uncontrollably.

Skinny Monkey plopped down in the mud, and the broken wood-chopping knife in his hand clattered to the ground.

"It's over."

He clutched his hair with both hands, tears mixed with mud streaming down his face.

"They've even brought up the ballistae. That bastard Gu Changfeng is determined to crush us into mincemeat."

The blind old soldier gripped the wooden spear tightly, veins bulging on the back of his hand, and his lips were bitten until they bled.

Fighting to the death is one thing, but risking your life is another.

Using broken wooden sticks to charge into a fully armed, heavily armored infantry formation, plus using ballistae to mow down the ground, is called mincing meat.

Inside the camp.

Lu Jing sat expressionlessly on the bench with the missing leg.

Ji Ruxue leaned against the innermost corner of the wall, her tattered bright red palace dress barely covered by dry straw.

She looked at Lu Jing coldly, a sneer playing on her lips.

"Stop making a scene, why don't you stop?"

His voice carried a hint of schadenfreude.

"I told you long ago, in the face of absolute military power, your thuggish tactics are a joke. Gu Changfeng won't fall for your trick of holding a centurion hostage. Half an hour later, a volley of arrows will be fired, and you won't even be left with a single piece of flesh."

Lu Jing blew a breath onto the blade.

"Big sister, have you gone mad from the cold? When a barrage of arrows is fired, do you think the arrowheads have eyes and can avoid you, the noble princess of the Great Yan? We're in this together now. If I turn into mincemeat, you'll turn into mincemeat too. What are you getting so excited about?"

Ji Ruxue was speechless, her chest heaving violently. She turned her head away and said nothing more.

In the corner of the tent, Shen Qingqiu lowered his head and pondered.

The countdown from the supervising officers outside kept coming, and Lu Jing's stubborn and unyielding attitude made her internally struggle.

She had initially thought Lu Jing was a ruthless and capable man who could help her survive.

But now it seems that this madman is just a crazy person who starts trouble and doesn't care about the consequences.

He tied Zhao He to the flagpole, pushing Gu Changfeng to the point of flipping the table.

Half an hour.

Time slips away, bit by bit.

The shouts outside were like a death knell striking Shen Qingqiu's heart.

She doesn't want to die.

The entire Shen family was executed, and she endured humiliation and was exiled to this hellish border region.

It was all for survival, and for the day when I could uncover the mastermind behind the murder of my father.

If she were to be shot to death by a hail of arrows in this shabby tent tonight, her father would not be able to rest in peace.

Shen Qingqiu took a deep breath and wiped the cold sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand.

She suddenly turned around, her back to Lu Jing.

He reached for the collar of his prison uniform with both hands, and with force, tore open the several knotted strips of cloth on his chest.

The rough prison uniform slipped down her round, fair shoulders, revealing a bright red silk bodice.

In this icy, snowy camp, where blood and flesh were flying everywhere, this bright red color was so glaringly obvious that it made one's heart tremble.

Lu Jing heard the rustling sound of the cloth and raised his eyelids to take a look.

Before she could speak, Shen Qingqiu had already pulled a sharpened wooden hairpin from her hair and used it to forcefully poke at the edge of the bodice's lining.

The silk tore.

She reached her fingers into the interlayer and groped around for a bit, pulling out a neatly folded piece of oil paper covered with a thick layer of waterproof yellow wax.

The tattered pages still carried the warmth of her body and emitted a very faint fragrance.

Shen Qingqiu turned around, tightened his slipped prison clothes, and walked up to Lu Jing.

She slapped the tattered page, still warm from her body, onto the rotten wooden table in front of Lu Jing.

"This is what my father left me before he died."

She stared into Lu Jing's eyes, her eyes red-rimmed, her voice hoarse.

"Fragments of top-secret secret accounts from the Ministry of Revenue. They record some of the transactions by high-ranking officials of the Northern Xuan Army over the past three years involving the resale of military funds and the smuggling of military rations."

Upon hearing this, Ji Ruxue, who was in the corner of the tent, straightened up and stared at the yellow wax paper.

The Ministry of Revenue's secret accounts!

The account book that caused a sensation in the court and led to the execution of the entire family of the Minister of Revenue had a page that this criminal woman sewed into her bodice and took to the border!

Lu Jing raised his eyes.

He glanced at the torn pages on the table and at Shen Qingqiu.

"Trade this thing for your life?"

My fingers tapped on the table.

"Your father, who was the Minister of Revenue back then, couldn't even save his life. You think you can make Gu Changfeng withdraw his troops with just a torn page?"

"My father used a secret method to encrypt the contents of the ledger, so no one but him can understand it."

Shen Qingqiu bit her lower lip.

"Send someone to shoot an arrow and deliver the tattered pages to Gu Changfeng, telling him that the real code is in my head. If he withdraws his troops and spares my life, I will write down the codebook for him. Otherwise, we'll fight to the death, and the other part of this ledger will naturally be delivered to the censor in the capital!"

Lu Jing chuckled after hearing this.

"You're playing a trick on him."

He pointed to the sea of ​​fire outside.

"There's a flaw in your plan. Gu Changfeng isn't some kind of saint. He can just arrest you and interrogate you. If you're tough, you'll just get stabbed a few more times; if you're soft, the password will be in his hands before dawn."

Shen Qingqiu's face turned pale.

Lu Jing stretched out two fingers, picked up the warm yellow wax paper, and brought it to his nose to smell it.

"It smells so milky."

I just casually made a comment.

Shen Qingqiu's cheeks flushed red, and she wished she could grab the wooden hairpin on the table and gouge out his eyes.

"Alright, put your clothes on first."

Lu Jing held the tattered pages up to the light of the oil lamp.

"If I freeze to death, I'll be missing a helper who'll take responsibility."

The yellow wax paper was covered with dense writing, a bunch of illogical single words arranged in a way that made no sense.

"East, Sun, Horse, Bow, Water, Moon, Mountain, Stone..."

Lu Jing raised an eyebrow as he looked at the words.

Ji Ruxue sneered from the side.

"Don't bother looking at it. That's a scrambled Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches code unique to the Ministry of Revenue. Without a corresponding master code, it's just a piece of waste paper. Even if you stick it on Gu Changfeng's face, he'll shoot you into a pulp on the spot."

"Shut your beak."

Lu Jing laid the tattered page flat on the table and traced the first line of garbled text with his finger.

As a top-notch modern special tactics instructor, he studied advanced cryptography in the special forces for a full six months.

Even more coincidentally, in his previous life he had gone abroad on a mission to intercept ancient documents.

In order to decipher a batch of secret letters hidden in the scriptures, I spent half a month studying Chinese character fanqie (a method of indicating pronunciation) and ancient phonetic materials.

When ancient people created codes, they used methods such as acrostic poems, character decomposition, and, at a more advanced level, the fanqie method.

【Chinese Character Fanqie Method】

Take the initial consonant of the first character, the final vowel and tone of the second character, and combine them to form a new character.

For example, the fanqie for "东" is "德红切", which takes the initial consonant of "德" and the final vowel of "红" to form a new sound.

Lu Jing stared at the first four characters of the first line: "clothes, darkness, horse, person".

I quickly went through the pronunciation of the official rhyme book of the Great Yan Dynasty in my mind.

The initial consonant of "衣" and the final vowel of "暗".

The initial consonant of "马" (mǎ, horse) and the final vowel of "人" (rén, person).

After piecing it together... Lu Jing fell into deep thought.

Just when Shen Qingqiu and Ji Ruxue were about to lose hope.

Suddenly, Lu Jing's eyes lit up.

"Yanmen".