Translator: Henyee Translations Editor: Henyee Translations
Everytime an officer came back, Tuershan’s face would darken a shade deeper.
There was very little good news. Most officers were ignorant of what was going on in the camp, and they were more alarmed than the soldiers that their own orders were being ignored.
This shouldn’t have happened and couldn’t have happened. In the Norland, military orders were imperative and could not be disobeyed, and the Court Attendants Army was always highly disciplined in following orders. In the face of such open insubordination, the officers were at their wits’ end, unable to recall any past experiences they could draw on.
Looking at the noble officers swarming back, Tuershan suddenly felt a surge of disgust in his heart, but he still had to listen to their reports.
“The soldiers went mad and are refusing to carry out any of our orders.”
“No one knows why they are running around.”
“King Riyao’s soldiers are nearly finished.”
“I saw a centurion being killed with my own eyes. He clashed with the soldiers…”
“The tenth corps… I don’t know where it went.”
Very few officers were flexible enough to adapt to the situation. As soon as they discovered that most of the soldiers weren’t obeying the order of ‘stay where you are,’ they summoned and gathered the soldiers who were still obedient at the main tent.
Tuershan realized that he had made a mistake. If he had initially ordered the soldiers to assemble, more might have come. But now only several thousand people had answered the summons, among whom there were still soldiers that changed their minds and were turning around to join the crowd that was out of control.
He felt a bit of fear. The officers who had gathered around him were almost all aristocrats. The officers who had been drafted from the ordinary soldiers had never been many, but now they were even rarer. Most of them had joined the ordinary soldiers.
Why hadn’t there been any warning of such a divisive split? Why was there no one sending him news secretly in advance? Wasn’t he the most popular and respected general among the ranks of the ordinary soldiers?
In the face of fear, Tuershan’s instinctive reaction was to challenge it. So he laughed several times before turning to face the kings. “It looks like someone doesn’t want me to be the Commandant. Honestly, I don’t care. At worst, I will just go home and watch the sheep graze. However, I’m a stubborn man and despise people who stab me in the back. I have to find out who he is.”
The kings all had their own concerns and hadn’t felt the danger yet. Like King Riying, all they saw was a good opportunity.
At this point, it was no longer necessary to cover up the relationship between them. King Shengri stood beside Tuershan and said to the kings, “Do not think that you can turn the table though just a little mutiny. Tuershan has met the expectations of the masses and he was jointly chosen by all the officers.”
Then King Shengri turned to the group of officers, “This is your new Commandant. Does anyone have a problem with it?”
A cold voice came out from the crowd. “I heard there was an extra bloody sheepskin. Is it true?”
“Lies!” King Shengri’s answer was clear and resolute.
“But it’s true,” said a young king inappropriately. “We counted the bloody sheepskins together.”
The influence of King Riyao’s charge hadn’t disappeared because of his assassination but had increased instead.
King Shengri felt like his victory was slipping through his fingers like sand, and that he had to do something to stop it. Without answering the crowd, he suddenly cried out, “Dragon King, it was the Dragon King who hatched a plot in the camp. He ran away with King Riying as soon as the mutiny started. King Riying is obviously the mastermind. Everyone saw it.”
The panic grew. Any charges, if not refuted by the parties involved right away, would almost be accepted universally. King Shengri’s strategy of transferring the contradiction was almost successful until it was stopped dead in its tracks.
“Who said we ran away?” King Riying pushed his way out of the crowd, who was sweating profusely yet appeared quite calm. “King Shengri, you are an elder. There are not many kings of the older generation left. You have to be responsible for what you say.”
King Shengri blushed but didn’t confess to anything. “Where’s the Dragon King? Where is he hiding and what is he plotting again?”
“I’m here,” Gu Shenwei said from the crowd, “And I’m ‘plotting against someone.’”
Some people laughed. King Shengri’s accusation was loose in the first place, and now no one believed him. Azheba then said what was on most people’s mind, “The Dragon King is a foreigner. How could he possibly incite the soldiers into disobeying orders?”
King Shengri still wanted to say something but was stopped by Tuershan. He was the Commandant of the Court Attendants Army after all, and no matter what happened on his first day in office, he had to turn the tide by himself. “No matter who’s behind this, I’m sure that I can find out later. The most important thing is to stabilize the military spirit. Who can tell me what the hell is going on? What do the soldiers want? Who are they trying to kill?”
The officers could not answer this question, and the few soldiers who had followed the order to come here looked so frightened that they could not speak at all.
King Riying coughed and stood before King Shengri but faced towards the crowd instead of Tuershan. “I have looked into it and concluded that this isn’t a common mutiny. There’s no need to bother looking for the mastermind because the mastermind does not exist. If there’s indeed someone behind the scenes, it would be the old Khan and the former Commandant.”
Two dead men. King Riying’s half-joking words startled the crowd. Dozens of soldiers even kneeled on the spot and bowed their heads in prayer.
“The soldiers are dissatisfied,” King Riying said loudly, knowing that every word he said was crucially important. “They are dissatisfied with the fact that the body of the Khan hasn’t been properly buried, that the assassination of the Commandant has no explanation, and that the generals and officers are indifferent towards the assassination. In a word, they are dissatisfied with all of us.”
The whole place fell silent except for the distant sounds of fighting. King Riying pointed to the place where the killing was taking place, “Tuosai’s Silver-armored Army is about to be wiped out. Once the soldiers’ bloodlust was stirred, no one could control it. I suggest all the officers to return to their units and ask the soldiers what they want and then tell them that the kings are all here and that they can reply to them right away.”
The thousand or so officers whispered to each other. King Riying’s suggestion was a bit risky because the soldiers in the camp were no longer familiar obedient followers but rather a group of silent mutineers. Returning to their own unit meant dispersing, and the result of doing so might open them up to the risk of being crushed one by one.
The man who felt the greatest danger was Tuershan who had no position in King Riying’s suggestion. He sensed the smell of challenge and of someone ursurping power, so he glanced at King Shengri nearby and then also said aloud, “Let’s not panic. Who knows the Court Attendants Army better than us? As prairie men, who will bury the discontent at heart? They must have been incited, so let them air their grievances themselves; I’ll go into the midst of my brothers later, remove the instigators, and then everyone will wake up and follow orders again.”
King Riying and Tuershan had an open dispute.
Standing in the crowd, Gu Shenwei listened quietly. Although King Riying had said those words with certainty, the information he had was actually very little. It was mostly guesswork that might be accurate. Based on his observations, the soldiers were more likely to be acting spontaneously than at someone else’s behest. Although their actions seemed orderly, it was more like a reflexive response as a result of the rigorous training they had all received.
He still remembered the words of Dugu Xian, the General of the Left. The Norland troops were different from that of the Central Plains and the Western Regions. The soldiers rode to hunt from a young age and military training started there. Everyone knew their own tasks and positions. What the commander offered was only the direction of the march. The specific tactics were already engraved in the hearts of every soldier.
But Tuershan’s guess was also probably right. The stability and morale of the army were one thing but how they could turn into disobedience in unison was another matter. It was hard to imagine that no one was manipulating them.
Gu Shenwei slowly moved among the officers and found that Tuershan had more overall supporters. As the new Commandant, he was very familiar with the officers and more importantly, his plan did not seem to require the officers to take risks.
King Riying and Tuershan then changed from debate to slandering each other. The latter had assumed the former was the mastermind of the mutiny and presented one piece of evidence after another which was hard to distinguish between true and false, and even suggested that the other side was complicit in the death of the former Commandant. “Ever since you became King Riying, you’ve been trying to please the Commandant all these days. What was your motive for coming to the camp almost everyday?”
Tuershan was a portly man and seemed to become chubbier when he was angry. Even the words he spat out carried more weight.
King Riying wasn’t a man who could be easily angered but he wasn’t tame either. He was actually waiting for Tuershan to bring up this topic. “So you do recognize that the death of the Commandant was dubious? Yeah, why would he go out at night with only five guards for no reason at all?”
“Of course it’s because someone encouraged the Commandant to do so, and then leaked the information. This man must have been trusted deeply by the Commandant.” Tuershan looked at King Riying with contempt and condemned the other in expression rather than speech.
King Riying felt that it was the right time so he produced a piece of paper slip from his wristband, which was the evidence that the Dragon King had given him and was enough to defeat the fat man in front of him. “This is the last order from the Commandant…”
“Revenge!” Someone shouted, and then three soldiers drew their sabers and rushed at King Riying.
Gu Shenwei, who had been slowly walking through the crowd, had always been at most a distance of fourteen or fifteen paces from King Riying, ready to save the other side at any time.
But the one he stopped was not the three soldiers but rather the assassin behind King Riying.
No one knew where this assassin had come from. Based on the direction he had come from, he should have been an entourage of a certain king, but strangely, no one had any memory of his ordinary face.
Draw his saber and stab out; Gu Shenwei completed his task in an instant. Then he leaped in front of King Riying, his saber poised to strike.
The three soldiers were captured alive by a group of officers before they could even reach King Riying.
The assassination had begun and ended quickly. Before most people could even react, King Riying had seized the moment and said aloud, “This order was written by the Commandant. He said that the enemy has probably already sent assassins into the camp and demanded Captain Gulun to be on his guard. Just look at this line, ‘Captain Wucuo has come up with a brilliant plan…’”
Tuershan let out a thunderous roar, “It’s you!”
Stupefied, Wucuo shrank back and almost flopped onto the ground. “It’s not me, obviously it’s…”
Tuershan struck at Wucuo but the attack was blocked by Gu Shenwei. “Keep him alive.”
As if dying of thirst, Wucuo scratched at his throat with both hands, and suddenly, with fierce eyes, he lunged at the nearest king and began to bite savagely at him.
Gu Shenwei leaped to them and slammed his saber hilt into the back of Wucuo’s head, and then took out a pill and stuffed it into Wucuo’s mouth.
Lotus had left a lot of pills, and Gu Shenwei always carried them around with him.
As Wucuo was still unconscious at the moment, Shangguan Fei ran from afar and shouted, “The Silver-armored Army has been wiped out! The Silver-armored Army has been wiped out!”
Behind him, a large body of soldiers was creeping slowly toward the main tent with a fixed pace and expressionless faces. Many of them had bloodstained sabers in their hands.
