Chapter 147: A Living Witness

Led by Liu Chengzong, Du Qiaoer searched through the prisoners to find the murderer.

In Liu Chengzong's eyes, the clever and courageous young girl walked timidly through the ragged lines of captives, her body suddenly freezing up as if struck by a paralysis spell.

"Found him?"

Seeming roused by his voice, Du Qiaoer shifted slightly and raised a hand to point at a hereditary soldier at the front of the formation.

Liu Chengzong looked over. It was an old hereditary soldier in his forties. His weather-beaten face was covered in wrinkles, and he looked remarkably honest. Missing an arm, he sat cross-legged at the very front of the queue with a hunched back.

Pointed out, a look of puzzlement appeared on the old soldier's face. He glanced at Fan Sanlang, then raised his eyelids to look at Liu Chengzong. "You bandit scum, if you want to kill and draw your sword, just do it. Don't go splashing dirty water; I don't even know this person."

To be honest, Liu Chengzong had actually suspected that Fan Sanlang might have mistaken the person.

However, hearing this soldier call him bandit scum, he tilted his head, scratched the back of his neck, and dragged the tip of his tongue across his teeth.

Ever since entering Shanxi, the Lion Camp had wiped out eight bands of rebels including the ones at Cliff Head Mountain, and surrounded the Huo Family Fortress where only Gao Xian's unit had fired a few arrows. Apart from that, they had only fought the hereditary soldiers of the Fenzhou Garrison.

And this garrison unit? Right under the noses of the reconnaissance cavalry, they had plundered and burned down Zaowang Mountain and Fan Family Ravine, slaughtering at least two hundred households of commoners.

Now this man could call him a bandit scum.

Then there was definitely no mistake.

Before he could say anything, Fan Sanlang untied her hair wrap. "You killed my brother-in-law, you killed my younger brother, and you dragged away my eldest sister! Look at me again and tell me if you know me!"

"It's you, you little girl. Why did you kill my brother-in-law, my younger brother, and my eldest sister!"

Du Qiaoer had only glanced at the old soldier's face once, but she could never forget it.

Even though she had fantasized about ways to exact revenge in her mind for two whole days, she had only dared to look at it once.

Just taking one look at that face caused her heart to be gripped tightly by fear.

These hereditary soldiers were monsters who ate people and spat out no bones; half of her family had died at the hands of this very man.

Yet now, this person had become a prisoner at the mercy of others. People were not afraid of him in the slightest, and these bandits from Shaanxi were not even willing to waste a rope to tie him up.

"So it's you, little girl."

A ripple of emotion crossed the old soldier's face. He turned his head away to avoid looking at her and merely said, "I've killed so many people, how could I remember which one was your brother-in-law and which one was your younger brother?"

That was enough.

Liu Chengzong watched as the old soldier used his remaining arm to push himself up. The surrounding hereditary soldiers unconsciously distanced themselves from him a little, yet there was no trace of fear in the face of death on this man's face.

His gaze landed on Liu Chengzong's face. Abandoning the title of bandit scum, he put on a flattering smile instead. "General, even with just one arm, I can still kill people for you... You said it yourself, anyone in the Lion Camp who points out others gets a reprieve from death. You can't kill me."

The old soldier pursed his lips, turned to the girl with a grin, and then turned back to say, "I want to make accusations."

Liu Chengzong let out a laugh through his nose. "Your mind turns pretty fast. To live to this age and still just be a hereditary soldier—what a waste of your talents. Do you think this has any meaning?"

The old soldier was not using rules to fight against the one who made the rules.

He looked left, then right, before nodding back at Liu Chengzong.

The meaning was clear: since death was at hand anyway, either spare me, or if you kill me, the rules you made are absolute horse manure. No one else will make accusations, and the captives will no longer sit passively waiting for death.

Few people in this world truly sat passively waiting for death.

Those who sat and waited for death all believed that they were just sitting, waiting not for death, but for life.

If what they were waiting for was death, then what else was there to wait for?

Liu Chengzong could only raise a hand. "You point them out. I won't kill you."

With a victorious smile on his face, the old soldier turned around and began pointing at people.

Liu Chengzong lowered his head to glance at Fan Sanlang; she was still crying.

He turned around and beckoned to a spot not far away.

Acting as if he were playing a game, the old soldier wore a smile, straightened his arm, and swept it across the crowd. His finger seemed to possess immense power; wherever it swept, the expression of the hereditary soldier there would change drastically.

At that moment, the old soldier suddenly wanted to ask: what was the meaning of innocence?

In a place like the garrison guard posts, where the same few families took turns serving as commanders for two hundred years, and the same group of people served as military households for two hundred years, could human beings still be considered human?

The garrison commander was the sun in the sky, while the hereditary soldiers were the leeks on the ground.

They were upright livestock and human tools whose numbers were replenished by reserve households whenever they died. Whatever the commander wanted done, they had to do even if they didn't want to; whatever the commander forbade, they couldn't do even if they desired to.

Morality, ritual laws, justice, right and wrong—whatever the commander said went.

The garrison guard post—wasn't a garrison guard post just meant to fight wars for the emperor? As long as they could fight, that was enough.

One thousand men facing the Lion Camp's fifteen hundred—if positions were swapped, could even the Xuanfu and Datong border troops necessarily fight much better than they had?

***

Suddenly, the expressions of the others interrupted the old soldier's fantasy.

Those hereditary soldiers pointed out by him were no longer afraid of his hand; instead, they looked past him with expectant expressions toward his back.

He turned his head to see Liu Chengzong holding a matchlock hand cannon, explaining something to that little girl.

Chengyun had thought his second brother was calling him for some major event, and had run all the way over, only for his second brother to not say a single word to him, casually snatching the hand cannon right off his waist instead.

Outrageous!

"Using a saber isn't good for killing him. This thing—don't let your hands shake. Hold it with one hand and steady it with the other, shove it right up to his face, and pull the trigger."

The old soldier raged, "You can't kill me!"

"Fumbling around just to point out a few people. I won't kill you, but debts have their debtors and wrongs have their perpetrators. Why shouldn't she kill you? She won't go pointing fingers at others."

With that, he fitted the matchcord and handed it to Fan Sanlang.

The hand cannon was in the girl's hands. Her front hand supported it while her rear hand gripped it, just like holding a long-barreled matchlock bird gun, as she walked step by step toward the old soldier.

Bang!

Gunpowder smoke erupted in front of Fan Sanlang. The very instant the flash of fire burst forth, Liu Chengzong saw the old soldier sigh.

Instantly, a bullet pierced his chest and he fell to the ground, stretching his only remaining arm toward the sky as if trying to grasp something.

Fan Sanlang turned back, ran over, and placed the bird gun into Liu Chengzong's hands.

She wiped the tearstains from her face, turned back around, and reached for her saber. Misjudging the length in her clumsy movement, she straightened her arm, but the tip of the blade remained stuck in the scabbard.

She had no choice but to pull back on the scabbard before finally gripping the waist saber in her hand.

The girl was no longer afraid of the old soldier. She walked over, raised the saber high above her head, and struck—one cut, another cut, and yet another.

More than nine hundred hereditary soldiers sat in place. Not a single one stood up; they merely watched with expressionless faces.

Strange to say, when the old soldier said he wanted to make accusations, sporting that look of absolute certainty over him, Liu Chengzong's heart had not fluctuated at all.

Yet the old soldier's sigh before death carried a tremendous sense of weight, making him feel a sense of sorrow.

He looked up at the azure sky, stepped forward, and grabbed Fan Sanlang by the back of her collar, hoisting her up like a flailing little animal.

This was simply not material for a soldier.

In truth, Liu Chengzong placed great importance on having a female soldier come to join him.

Extremely excited, actually—female soldiers.

All beginnings are difficult. With female soldiers, they could further use them as role models to motivate the common people, increasing the potential conscription pool by at least thirty percent.

Yet the female soldier he wanted was actually someone like Qin Liangyu—six feet tall and weighing a hundred and eighty pounds—not this little peanut that he could hoist up with sheer strength in a single arm, weighing barely a hundred catties.

Comparing ideals with reality, reality was nothing more than a cooing, clucking quail.

The accusations ended in the afternoon. Four hundred and twenty-two heinous Fenzhou Garrison hereditary soldiers were executed.

One hundred and thirty guilty soldiers were organized into left and right units. At dusk, after drinking a bowl of millet porridge, they were issued round shields, sabers, and swords outside the besieged fortress and began scaling the walls.

The remaining six hundred-odd hereditary soldiers were assigned tasks according to the severity of their crimes: digging earth pits or hauling cargo.

Among them, over two hundred had their testimonies verified through repeated inquiries among the garrison soldiers, confirming that they had indeed merely been coerced and had never been enthusiastic about the deceased commander's orders. Ultimately, they were released.

Liu Chengzong even gave each of them two catties of dry rations as travel expenses.

This made them particularly overflowing with gratitude, as this bunch had never expected to make it back alive.

They were the ones who least believed in whether surrendering troops were killed or spared, let alone that they were captives rather than surrenderers.

In this world, there were only causes and effects; there was never retribution.

If retribution truly existed, Liu Chengzong was their retribution.

Fu Renxi had also rushed over from Yonghe Pass to watch the battle of the two units of guilty soldiers scaling the fortress.

Liu Chengzong's bloodlust scared Commander Fu, but this man also considered matters very practically. "Things have reached this point, why did you let those two hundred people go back? You should have just killed them all in the valley."

"Among the two hundred-odd people let go, there might still be some who didn't act humanely, but I believe more of them didn't behave like beasts."

Fu Renxi was momentarily at a loss for words. Not daring to raise his hand too high, he gestured vaguely toward his waist and said, "You're really strange. If you send two hundred people back, the folks at Fenzhou Garrison will fight you to the death next time and refuse to surrender."

"If they don't surrender to me, they'll surrender to someone else. Either way, they always have to find someone to surrender to. If a rat hides in a cat hole, its head gets stuck; if a rat crawls into a cat's nest, it dies."

Liu Chengzong took this matter very lightly. "We're not cut from the same cloth. They don't want to surrender to me, and I have no desire to accept their surrender either."

A volley of gunfire rang out from the fortress walls as the two units of guilty soldiers entered the range of Huo Family Fortress, carrying scaling ladders and shields to quicken their pace.

Fu Renxi pointed toward Huo Family Fortress. "Does that mean Your Excellency and I are cut from the same cloth?"

***

"If you want to go to Liaodong, I can send you a part of the way. Once you get over there, I won't be able to help much. Such is the state of the world."

Watching two scaling ladders hook onto the fortress walls, Liu Chengzong slowly shook his head. "Everyone in this world seeks merely to survive; ambition is what makes people truly precious."

He was quite gratified that when the Lion Camp clashed with Zhang Zhan, Fu Renxi had not led troops to stab them in the back.

With a bitter smile, Fu Renxi spat. "In this day and age, I only have four hundred men under my command, and the General can help me. If I were to become a Regional Commander or Deputy Regional Commander, waking up every day to tens of thousands of mouths begging me for grain, I wouldn't have a single damn ambition left."

Liu Chengzong turned his head to glance at Fu Renxi. "Deputy Regional Commander? Just you wait and let me ponder how many times I have to be wiped out to earn you a Deputy Regional Commander post. By the time you actually become a Deputy Regional Commander, I reckon that no matter where I go in Shaanxi and Shanxi, I'll be able to feed you."

"Ha!"

Clearly disbelieving, Fu Renxi took it as Liu Chengzong joking around, so he cupped his fists with a smile and said, "Then this subordinate will take the General's auspicious words to heart. If the day comes when I go to Liaodong, I'll have the kid acknowledge you as his godfather."

Liu Chengzong wasn't joking.

He already had a rough route mapped out in his mind.

Barren places like Shaanxi and Shanxi were not devoid of grain; it was just that the best land was all in the hands of the royal estates. Countless commoners were displaced, and the number of remaining residents was far below what it used to be.

If an increasing number of military officers formed a symbiotic relationship with him like Fu Renxi did, he could further reduce his military pressure and gain the time to accomplish water conservancy projects that the Ming Dynasty could never finish, at least breathing a sliver of vitality back into this land.

Even if this still couldn't solve the grain problem, it would be enough to radiate outward to Northern Zhili, the Central Plains, and even the doorstep of the Land of Abundance.

However, plans always looked wonderful on paper. Last winter, he had still been hoping for a bumper harvest in Xingzi River, only for a frost to hit right after the Spring Festival, directly leaving the royal estates with harvests that couldn't even cover their own military grain for the year.

The two units of guilty soldiers fought with great vigor, pushing past bows, crossbows, and firearms to scale the fortress walls and enter hand-to-hand combat to seize the battlements.

Many of the younger men of the Huo family could fight well, but defending fortified walls made it difficult to win.

This battle essentially sealed the outcome of the victory.

Soon, the defending troops on the earthen fortress dwindled, the fortress gates were captured and forced open, and Gao Xian's infantry poured into the stronghold in an endless stream.

Before long, the old, weak, women, and children among the commoners who had previously sought refuge inside the fortress slowly emerged, while the younger men of the Huo family retreated into their clan compounds to put up a last-ditch defense.

Those who surrendered had already surrendered, while those who fought were still fighting.

Yet since the fortress gates were already breached, the remaining combat was merely a matter of clearing out those holding out to the death, presenting little further trouble.

This allowed both Liu Chengzong and Fu Renxi to breathe a sigh of relief.

It seemed to be at this moment that Fu Renxi noticed there was actually a young woman following behind Liu Chengzong, prompting him with a smile, "Is this a newly recruited personal guard of the General?"

He had intended it as a joke; who would believe that the female dependent of such a major rebel chieftain was a soldier?

Yet, once again, Liu Chengzong disappointed him by nodding with utter seriousness. "I'm troubled by it myself, too."

He glanced back at Fan Sanlang and said, "She came to attach herself to me, originally wanting her to go somewhere safe from combat, to cook and wash clothes for the troops, or even learn some medical skills. But she insists on fighting. Look how skinny she is; by the time I was twelve or thirteen, I was sturdier than her."

It was a good thing Master Gao wasn't here, otherwise he would have been angered to death.

Wasn't it only natural that you were sturdier than her? With that kind of diet in the autumn, no normal person could compare.

How many heroes and gallants got only one final death-row meal in their entire lives, yet he had crammed it all down with a *clang-clang-clang*, spending the entire autumn busy fattening up and practicing martial arts.

Even a piece of rock, eating the spiritual energy of heaven and earth and gnawing on the essence of the sun and moon every day like that, could have wreaked havoc in the Heavenly Palace.

"Assigning her to another unit means she'll die in the next battle, and she might even drag the others down. Those two villages only had this one person survive; she ought to cherish her life."

Du Qiaoer was indeed difficult to persuade.

She had thought about it for a long time down in the well. Sanlang had long since dug a cave down there, and the old matriarch had already passed away; there was no need to go out and fight desperately with people.

Fan Sanlang had traded everything he had—his weapons, his clothes, his military pay, his spoils of war, and even his very life—in exchange for her.

He wanted her to live a good life.

That was why she had erected a door panel as a gravestone at Sanlang's grave mound, with "Tomb of Du Qiaoer" written upon it.

That night was all wrong.

The hereditary soldiers shouldn't have killed people, the eldest brother shouldn't have left the village, the second brother shouldn't have jumped the wall, the eldest sister shouldn't have fallen, the second sister shouldn't have run around... everything had been wrong.

The one lying on the ground should have been Du Qiaoer, and the one walking with a saber should have been Fan Sanlang.

She needed to learn Sanlang's skills as quickly as possible and make things return to the way they were supposed to be.

Using Sanlang's saber, carrying Sanlang's bow, she would live on under the name Fan Sanlang.

Liu Chengzong turned his head, and the little quail, who had been listening in with both ears pricked up, hastily averted her eyes. He let out a long breath through his nose. "Survivors are neither special nor rare. Here, every single person you see—we are all survivors left behind by natural and man-made disasters."