Border Soldier: My fiancée snatched credit and broke off the engagement, so I promptly became a marq

When the white wolf closed the door, there were still more than two thousand people and horses lying outside.

Some were alive, and some were dead.

The frightened warhorses dragged broken spears and ran wildly through the corpses, while wounded soldiers cried for help from under their horses' bellies. The Black Pot Cavalry chased them to the gate and stopped three hundred paces away, no longer risking their lives by crashing into the wall, but turning around to seize horses, strip armor, and drag their own men away.

Two hundred and seven people died in this battle.

Of the more than ninety heavy cavalrymen, only seventy-three were able to remount. The light cavalry numbered more than two hundred and fifty, of whom more than five hundred were injured enough to stand. Some men, even with a broken arm, still used their teeth to bite the reins and lead the stray horses back to the outer camp one by one.

The things Han Wanshan left behind covered the snow.

Four hundred and thirty-seven live horses, two hundred and six sets of usable heavy armor, thirty-four carts of arrows and medicine, six Black Mountain banners, and more than three hundred Han family corpses that were not brought back in time.

Su Wan ordered people to first remove the corpse's boots.

Many of the newly arrived women and children from the outer village were still barefoot. The leather boots were taken from the feet of the dead, boiled in snow water, and those that were still wearable were put on immediately. An old woman who had escaped from inside the pass got the boots, and without caring about the blood inside, she wrapped two layers of grass around her feet and slipped them on.

"A living person's feet must not be frostbitten."

A and Ma then separated.

Lu Shuangyi wanted to stand at the entrance of the village and pick out the heavy armor that could be repaired, but as soon as she took a step, blood seeped from her left rib. She leaned against the wall and still told the forge worker which breastplates were usable and which were only fit to be dismantled into iron plates.

Lin Qinghe grabbed her collar from behind.

"Lie down."

Where is Chen Mu?

"Sew him first, then you."

Chen Mu has already been carried into the garrison commander's quarters.

The bedding beneath him was completely soaked. Hu Yanpo had reopened the old wound on his right shoulder, and a half-foot-long gash appeared under his ribs. His injured foot was swollen even more than yesterday. Lin Qinghe cut open his clothes, revealing the flesh beneath the gash turned inside out, with a small piece of armor embedded inside.

She reached out with the pliers to grab it.

Chen Mu gripped the edge of the bed with his left hand and remained silent.

Blood gushed out immediately when the metal piece was pulled out. Lin Qinghe pressed it with a cloth, but her fingers trembled.

"Scream if it hurts."

"Where's Er Gou?"

"He won't die."

"I won't die either."

"Say one more word, and I'll make you scream in pain."

Lin Qinghe's needles were very heavy.

Chen Mu indeed stopped talking.

Er Gou lay in the next room, with twenty-three stitches in his chest. Even in his delirium, he clung to the new copper pot, pulling anyone who touched it closer to his chest. An old cook from the kitchen tried to wipe the bottom of the pot for him, but Er Gou kicked him while his eyes were still closed.

"The pot can't be thrown away..."

The old soldier wiped away his tears and sat on the ground to keep watch over him.

There was no celebration in the outer village.

There were so many dead bodies that three rows of pits had to be dug. The boy who had been stabbed in the shoulder and was delivering food couldn't carry soil, so he put his father's helmet on a wooden stake. Every time a corpse passed by, he would carve a mark on the stake.

By the time they had carved the 207th line, it was already dark.

Su Wan laid six Black Mountain flags at the bottom of the pit, placing the corpses on top. Those from the Black Pot side each took a bag of rice and two catties of meat, while the deceased's family members still received three portions. The silver box was much lighter than yesterday, but no one hoarded any silver. Some exchanged silver for sheep, some for cotton-padded clothes, and others took their assigned horses and two fatherless children back to their houses.

Anato has been collecting horses outside the pass.

Her left shoulder was lacerated by an arrow wound, and her armor was soaked with blood, yet she still rode her black horse to the eastern slope. When the last horse of the Han family army was harnessed back, she fell from its back, rope and all.

Two shepherdesses went to help her up, but she pushed them away.

"Help the horse first."

The horse's leg was cut by a knife, and blood was gushing out. The shepherdess held the horse's leg down, while Anato sat in the snow, looking up at the white wolf guarding the wall.

There were no torches on the wall.

After Han Wanshan retreated, the entire pass seemed to be dead.

Around midnight, the sound of a child crying suddenly came from the icy ditch to the west.

The guards initially thought it was a trap set by the Han family, so they turned all twelve ballistae around. The crying grew closer, but what crawled out of the snow ditch were women, the elderly, and children.

The group of thirty-odd men in front were still wearing the uniforms of soldiers from within the Great Wall, followed by more than seventy Han soldiers who had lost their weapons. Some were barefoot, some were carrying wounded soldiers, and at the very end, two skinny mules were pulling a broken cart.

They crawled out from the manure ditch on the west side of the wall.

The gully entrance was only wide enough for one person to climb, and the icy water was waist-deep. The youngest child's lips turned purple from the cold, and he was too weak to cry when he entered the village.

The guards asked them what they had come for.

The leading Han soldier threw his waist knife into the snow.

"Have a meal."

"General Han is letting you go hungry?"

"He moved all the grain into the inner fortress."

The first thing Han Wanshan did after returning to the pass was to shut down all four gates.

The retreating six hundred-plus men were crammed into the barbican; the wounded had no medicine, and the living had no hot water. Huyan Po's head was still hanging in the outer camp, yet his personal guards had confiscated all the defeated soldiers' rations. Anyone who dared to utter a curse was beheaded at the city gate.

A centurion led his men to steal a pot, and Han Wanshan killed him with his own hands.

The rest of the people dared not speak again.

The granaries inside the pass had long been emptied, and the bark cakes that the soldiers ate were only enough for two days. The Han family's private granary, however, was hidden in the inner fortress, and each of the guards could still get a bowl of white rice.

These seventy-odd Han soldiers no longer wanted to defend for him.

They went home, carried their wives and children on their backs, and escaped through the manure ditch. More soldiers followed along the way, and the last person to emerge from the ditch was a stable boy whose back was so hunched it almost touched his knees.

The old man was holding a wooden horse in his arms.

Su Wan counted them once.

Of the 309 people who escaped, 97 were capable of wielding knives, and half of them were women and children.

Just after more than two hundred people were buried in Waizhai, three hundred more mouths were immediately added to the pot.

Some people are worried about food shortages.

Two of the twenty-four horse feed warehouses have already been relocated to people, and one of the nine rice warehouses has been opened. If we continue to collect feed like this, we'll be completely drained before we even have a chance to tackle the problem.

Su Wan did not kick people out.

She ordered the cooks to collect half of the meat that had been distributed that day, and to add water to all four large pots. The meat was chopped up, and a small amount of rice was added, so that everyone could have a bowl of hot rice first.

The first to be served porridge were the seventy-odd Han soldiers who had discarded their swords.

They dared not accept it.

A wounded soldier who had just escaped from under the closed gate asked, "Aren't we allowed to fight first?"

Su Wan shoved the bowl into his hands.

"Eat your fill before you fight."

The wounded soldier drank it down in one gulp, steam rising from his nostrils. He squatted by the pot, holding the empty bowl, and suddenly burst into tears like a child.

The others stopped pretending to be tough and started pulling their wives and children to the pot.

A young Han soldier handed the bowl to his wife first, then went to the scene of the corpse to identify the body. His older brother had accompanied Han Wanshan out of the pass that day, but during the retreat, he was pushed off his horse by his personal guards and died less than fifty paces from the pass.

The young Han soldier dragged his brother back from the pile of corpses and then stripped him of his black-toothed armor.

The old cavalryman guarding the village thought he was going to hide his armor, so he reached out to stop him.

The young Han soldier threw the armor at the feet of the furnace worker.

"Get rid of my black teeth too."

Are you going to return tomorrow?

"Return."

He looked at his wife and two children who were drinking porridge.

"My brother died today in Han Wanshan's place, and he didn't even get a sip of hot water. Tomorrow I'll go too, and bring out my family's horse and grain."

The furnace worker swung the hammer right in front of him.

The black teeth on the breastplate were smashed flat with a hammer blow and then smeared with soot. The young Han soldier put on his brother's armor again, his shoulders were wider, but the straw rope the child had given him was still hanging around his waist.

Another old woman took out half a bark cake from her bosom.

She couldn't bear to throw it away, so she placed it next to the meat pot for everyone to see. After breaking the hard cake open, inside, besides the shredded tree bark, were two frozen black insects.

"More than 3,000 people in the area have been eating this for the past two days."

She pointed to White Wolf Pass.

"The aroma of meat wafts through the Han family's inner fortress every night. Anyone who approaches the private granary will have their hand chopped off."

Some people were initially hesitant about working through the night to finish the dish. But after smelling the meat porridge and seeing the half-eaten insect cake, everyone licked their bowls clean.

More than seventy Han soldiers who had discarded their knives did not ask for a second bowl.

They filled the remaining broth from the pot into water bags, saying they would take it back to the pass and give a taste to those who hadn't dared to escape yet. Some thought they might just take the broth and run, but Er Gou, the veteran cook, took the initiative to stuff an extra piece of meat into each water bag.

"Tell them."

"The pot outside is still hot."

Old Man Nu didn't drink it.

He squeezed his way into the garrison commander's house, carrying the wooden horse, and knelt outside the door, saying he wanted to see Chen Mu.

Lu Shuangyi stopped him with her gun.

"Who are you?"

"Ma Sanque" (Ma the Cripple).

"The Han family's stable boy?"

"He raised horses for the Han family for thirty years."

His hunchback wasn't congenital. Ten years ago, a stallion was startled, and Han Wanshan, unwilling to kill the horse, had someone pin him against the manger and break his spine. He survived, but his back never straightened again.

The wooden horse in his arms belongs to his grandson.

Today, the grandson's cakes were snatched by the imperial guards. When he was pushed down, the back of his head hit the stone steps, and he was unable to escape the pass.

Ma Sanque placed the wooden horse on the threshold.

"There are still more than 600 horses in Guanli Ximacang."

Lu Shuangyi's eyes flickered.

Han Wanshan took away the warhorses capable of fighting when he left the pass, but left spare horses, pack horses, and mounts for each household inside the pass. If these horses were taken away, the people in the inner fortress would have to rely on their own two feet to escape through the pass.

"How do I get into the warehouse?"

There is a small iron gate above the sewage ditch.

"The door is locked from the inside."

"I have the key."

Ma Sanque pulled a thin iron rod out of his hair.

That wasn't a key; it was an old latch used for shoveling manure in the stable. When he escaped, he deliberately didn't close the iron gate completely, only inserting it halfway. As long as someone held it from the outside of the ditch, a pull from the inside would open it.

Lu Shuangyi lifted the curtain and entered the room.

Chen Mu had just had his ribs stitched up, and his face was as white as wall dust. Lin Qinghe was changing the bandage on his shoulder when she heard this, and she slammed the medicine bowl down.

"Anyone can go, but he can't."

Chen Mu asked Ma Sanque, "How many soldiers are guarding behind the small gate?"

"So it was forty."

"And today?"

"Han Wanshan was afraid someone would steal his horse, so he added a hundred."

How far is Macang from Ximen?

"Two streets."

"Could we open the west gate from the inside?"

"There are eight people guarding the West Gate winch."

Lin Qinghe reached out and pressed down on Chen Mu's shoulder.

"Didn't you hear me?"

"I heard you."

"Then lie down."

Chen Mu did not get up.

He called Lu Shuangyi, Anato, and Su Wan into the house. Over ninety heavy cavalry remained to guard the outer camp, while two hundred light cavalry would advance into the manure ditch that night; Ma Sanque would lead the way, first taking the stables, then opening the west gate. The ninety-seven men who escaped and wished to return were all given a knife.

"Han Wanshan is still waiting for me to carry the pot and smash it against the front door tomorrow."

"Bring his horse out tonight first."

Anato asked, "Who's leading?"

Chen Mu looked at Lu Shuangyi.

Lu Shuangyi was still bleeding from her left rib.

But she had already raised her gun.

"I'll open the door."

Anado pulled Ma Sanque up from the ground.

"I'll steal the horse."

Su Wan also closed the silver box.

"I help people who have come from inside the pass to find their way."

Lin Qinghe asked coldly, "Then what should I do?"

Chen Mu pointed to himself.

"Keep an eye on me."

Lin Qinghe stared at him for a moment, then suddenly tied his left hand to the bed rail with a rope.

"it is good."

Outside, two hundred light cavalrymen had already taken off their heavy boots, and their sword blades were all wrapped in cloth.

Ma Sanque retrieved his grandson's wooden horse and walked to the front of the line.

There wasn't a single lamp at White Wolf Pass.

In the sewage ditch, the icy water was gradually turning black.