Chapter 1011: Tangerine Caramel — Shanghai Love (2)

The Mongol warriors’ morale shot through the sky.

So our Suh had a plan all along!

Hey, bastard, is Suh your buddy? He’s the nation’s new legend, the young hero, the Great Khan who will open a new age just like the former king of the four seas, Chinggis Khan!

Unable to contain their excitement, the Mongol warriors burst into a tremendous roar.

“Suh Mantturan! Mungkh Orshikh!”

“Long live Suh—may it continue forever!”

“Mongol Ulser Ahin Mantul!”

“Make the Mongol Empire great again!”

No one knew who shouted it first, but the moment the cry—Make the Mongol Empire great again!—hit their ears,

a thrilling shiver ran down every Mongol warrior’s spine.

That shiver met the excitement before a historic moment, and at last it erupted into Mongolia’s war song.

GOOOOO...! / PIIIIII...!

The Mongol warriors’ war song!

A strange bass that was closer to vibration than sound, and a clear high note like a hawk’s cry—two completely different sounds bursting from a single mouth.

It was Mongolia’s war song, Khöömii.

If one person sang Khöömii, it might be nothing more than a curious trick. One throat, but two sounds?

But Khöömii screamed by ten thousand Mongol warriors together was different.

Sharper than an earthquake made by hooves pounding the earth, with sand-laden wind whipping like a storm, that low bass was ominous beyond belief.

And mixed into it—those uncanny hawk-cries!

So when Mongol horsemen once swept the entire world, this war song was the sound that everyone under heaven—regardless of skin color, faith, or culture—feared the most.

“Come on, let’s go! Follow me!”

Fired up by the war song, Suh spurred harder and increased his horse’s speed.

Behind him, Suh’s milk-brother Hurle lifted their clan banner high and thundered forward.

Because if ten thousand Mongol riders were going to pass through Shanhai Pass’s narrow gate, they’d have to form a long column three ranks wide.

Even without orders, starting from the front ranks, the Mongol warriors hauled on their reins and drove their horses hard; the massive lump that had been bunched together stretched out powerfully, like it was being swallowed into an invisible funnel, taking on the shape of a long, narrow dragon.

Ten thousand warriors and fifty thousand warhorses moved like one organic living creature—this was the true might of Mongol cavalry.

Shanhai Pass was built in a connected form: the fortress called “World’s Number-One Pass” jutted outward beyond the main gate of the Great Wall, and on the inside, the enormous fortress of Shanhai Pass was joined to it.

The outermost gate was called the World’s Number-One Gate.

Suh raced through the first checkpoint of Shanhai Pass—the World’s Number-One Gate—in a single charge.

Behind the World’s Number-One Gate, the gate directly connected to the Great Wall was called the East Gate—the Great Wall’s eastern gate.

The very tip of that endless three-rank column of men and horses pierced through World’s Number-One Pass and crossed the East Gate, and it was the moment the Mongol horse-warriors trampled past the Great Wall’s main line and into the Central Plains with their hooves.

It was also the moment Shanhai Pass was breached.

The long, single-file Mongol cavalry cut across Shanhai Pass.

And finally—the western checkpoint of Shanhai Pass—the wide-open Gate of Welcoming Grace—beyond that narrow gate passage, past a distant plain that stretched out without a single obstacle, the horizon came into view.

At the end of that horizon, Beijing—the king of the Central Plains—would be seated.

And it would become the place where the nation’s new age, where the empire’s new khan, where the Great Khan who would be remembered in history, would be born...!

Suh’s mouth yawned wide, and an uncontrollable, hearty laugh burst out.

As he entered the gate passage, the laughter boomed and echoed in all directions.

The laughter bounced through the gate corridor that ran three jang deep—so loud it was as if all under heaven were answering Suh’s spirit and laughing with him.

And at last, Suh kicked through Shanhai Pass’s final gate—the western Gate of Welcoming Grace.

The brief time inside the gate passage had been dark, so when he stepped back into sunlight, Suh’s vision flashed for a moment, dazzled.

But only for an instant.

At last he escaped that narrow view, as tight as the long gate corridor itself, and the vast open plains of Hebei revealed themselves in every direction.

Endless green earth!

The same green, yet completely different from Mongolia’s desolate steppes—fertile land!

Straight ahead, a neat road paved with stone ran perfectly straight, its end impossible to gauge.

To the left, the broad Eastern Sea rolled majestically, glittering with sunlight split into countless shards.

And to the right—so many people he couldn’t even guess the number—an army that looked like it numbered in the hundreds of thousands, if not the millions, as if welcoming his entry into the Central Plains—

...An army?

“Pull!”

He hadn’t been able to hear it amid the hoofbeats, shouts, and war song, but a general’s standard suddenly snapped into sharp focus, flapping violently.

If Suh had been a man of the Central Plains, he might have recognized it as the grand standard of General Yuan Chonghuan, Commander-in-Chief of the Northern Direct-Subordinate Capital Guard.

In that moment, countless ropes appeared over the well-laid highway of the Central Plains, floating parallel to the earth.

Some were shin-high, some knee-high, and the high ones were thick ropes that could reach above the thigh.

Someone might scoff—Hundreds of thousands of troops gathered and what they do is tug-of-war? Pulling heavy ropes tied to iron stakes?

But this was the second-most terrifying trap in the world to cavalry.

HIIIIIIN!!

With his beloved horse’s panicked scream, Suh’s body was flung up into the sky.

Time seemed to slow as Suh flew.

His cherished horse—raised by his own hands from its mother—shot upward butt-first, flipping in a full somersault.

Behind it, the sight of his milk-brother Hurle, still ignorant, his throat bobbing to the war song.

Then his brother’s horse caught on the rope.

Only then did his brother’s face begin to slowly distort...

And—THUD!

Suh hit the ground and sprang up.

And he shouted.

But—

The cavalry formation that had been running side by side left and right had already shifted into a three-rank column running front to back.

Of course, if they didn’t gallop at full speed, the main body of fifty thousand warhorses would slam to a stop; they had been charging with everything they had.

That narrow, long gate corridor blocked their view so they could see nothing but the back of the comrade in front.

A three-rank cavalry column charging at full speed was, in practice, the same as riding with their eyes closed.

The screams of horses and men burst together.

Even in that chaos, the warriors’ war song—still ignorant—shook the air in all directions, and the pounding hooves filled the world like countless thunderbolts striking at once.

Only now was one person’s voice far too weak to matter.

Men and horses crashed in and collapsed of their own momentum.

They caught on ropes, and the fallen became obstacles that hooked the ankles of the comrades behind them.

Some swift riders leapt over—so what? How long could they keep dodging countless ropes being pulled by an army in the tens or hundreds of thousands?

Each Mongol warrior was a master of Mongol martial arts, but the shock of being thrown from a horse— or even if they managed to land and keep balance, the stampede of men and horses surging in after them!

When you’re crushed and struck by a warhorse weighing seven hundred geun to a thousand geun, even a master has trouble staying conscious.

And on top of that—

Suddenly, the world grew dark.

As if storm clouds had covered the sun, the saturation of the world sank into a gloomy murk.

But what covered the sky wasn’t clouds.

It was arrows.

And what poured down wasn’t rain, but a ferocious downpour of bowshot.

Hebei was the heart of the Central Plains where the Forbidden City sat—how many troops would there be to guard the Son of Heaven?

The number of soldiers stationed around Northern Direct-Subordinate Capital Territory, meaning near Beijing, was fifteen hundred thousand—and that was purely the number assigned to defend Beijing itself.

And at the gateway leading to it—Shanhai Pass—there were fifty thousand soldiers permanently stationed, and another hundred thousand rotating for garrison farms, so Shanhai Pass alone could mobilize one hundred and fifty thousand.

How naive was the dream of breaking through an enemy force of three hundred thousand with only ten thousand warriors, piercing through, and capturing the Son of Heaven?

Of course, naive didn’t mean impossible.

In Qing’s home world, in the original China, fifty thousand horsemen had once bypassed Shanhai Pass and nearly ridden straight into Beijing to seize the Son of Heaven.

And these Mongol warriors of this similar half-fake Central Plains were masters armed with martial arts handed down from Yuan—couldn’t you say they possessed even stronger power?

If they truly could have advanced on Beijing in secret, before defenses were even set, and struck with a surprise raid, there would have been more than enough chance.

But—

What if the Central Plains had already known about this raid?

A hideous massacre unfolded under heaven.

Ten thousand Mongol warriors and their cavalry numbered fifty thousand.

Hoofbeats and war song covered their ears.

The narrow gate and the glory of the Mongol Empire covered their eyes.

How could blind-and-deaf Mongol horse-warriors know of the one-sided slaughter unfolding beyond the walls?

They only screamed their war song, until their throats split, charging toward the gate—at full speed.

The Central Plains homeland they charged into, the old territory of the Mongol Empire, was truly hell on earth.

From the sky, arrows rained down without pause.

Fifteen hundred thousand archers were emptying their quivers without restraint—after all, arrows shot into their own homeland could be recovered later, so there was nothing to be stingy about.

Behind the soldiers pulling the ropes, one of the Central Plains’ secret weapons waited: northern troops holding steel bows, silently aiming the tips of their heavy crossbows to the south.

Among the northernmost elite defense forces, they were the elite of the elite mobilized by central command—a special detached unit called the Li Zicheng Army.

By the Central Plains’ standards, they were Mongol warriors who had reached realms above peak.

There were Mongol masters who shook off the collision of men and horses and the rain of arrows, rising fiercely and reaching for whips and massive blades—

BANG! TATATANG! BANGBANGBANG!

The trembling of steel-bow strings was a roar that didn’t lose out even compared to cannonfire.

These steel bows were so heavy that without supernatural strength, you couldn’t even load them; you had to carry separate loading mechanisms.

It was the explosive sound of that terrifying draw weight.

Steel shafts slammed into the bodies of Mongol warriors who’d lost their horses and were running on foot.

When the elite steel-bowmen of the northern troops fired and fell back to reload in a three-day, one-shot rotation, the rear ranks of northern troops stepped forward, dropped to one knee, and took aim again.

A one-sided massacre.

The Central Plains soldiers shooting arrows and pulling ropes looked almost monotonous.

It was also the limitation of nomads.

Nomad armies were fast and free to advance and retreat, able to enter and leave cities at will and prey on those tied to the soil.

But when they couldn’t use the sea and were blocked by walls, once their mobility was cut off, all that remained was the furious revenge of settled people.

Men-and-horses corpses piled and piled, and the killing zone crept closer to the gates.

With the flow outward choked, the cavalry’s speed slowed.

With the outward flow stalled, the Mongol cavalry pouring in began stacking up inside Shanhai Pass, packing the fortress and pooling in place.

The Mongol riders trapped in Shanhai Pass slowly realized something had gone wrong, but even now, with the flow still pouring over the World’s Number-One Gate and East Gate into Shanhai Pass, it was impossible to fight upstream and retreat.

Then people slipped out in secret from a bastion atop the wall.

On the armbands on their arms was written the character Sun—meaning they were soldiers under Son Seungjong, the overall commander of Shanhai Pass’s garrison.

He opened a fire case and brought an oil-soaked cloth to a bamboo wick burning slowly.

WHOOSH—fire caught on the fire-arrow in an instant.

PIYUNG-PIYUNG—fire arrows flew into Shanhai Pass’s interior, lodging into wooden buildings like warehouses and barracks, and the flames spread far too easily to the straw bundles that had been laid on rooftops in advance.

“Fire, fire!” “Ambush! It’s an ambush!” “W-what, what is it, what’s happening?!” “We have to put it out!” “Damn it, don’t push! The horses are panicking!”

Mongol warriors, already packed in tight on their horses, plunged into chaos all at once.

But only briefly.

The fires clinging to the wooden buildings leapt to fuses that had been secretly hidden between them.

The fuses burned down as they snaked into the buildings, and not long after—

KABOOOM! A massive explosion shook heaven and earth.

The Central Plains was the civilization that invented gunpowder—one that first invented incendiary shells, cannons, and guns.

And it was also the civilization that invented mines.

Mines that detonated under pressure—step on them and they blow—already existed, but their power was limited and misfires were frequent, so they weren’t the mines armies preferred.

The mines armies preferred were different.

They were super-massive mines packed full of gunpowder, with long fuses connected so that if one went off, the whole chain detonated in succession.

Like this.

BOOM!! BOOM!! BOOM!! BOOM!!

Explosions erupted nonstop from every direction.

The earth’s skin flipped over as if soil pillars would fill the whole world.

Sharp metal fragments and shattered chunks of ground swept the earth at bullet speed—how could anyone standing on their feet resist?

And to the west of Shanhai Pass, where the soil pillars kept rising—

Before anyone knew it, a body of cavalry had lined up in a long row, watching Shanhai Pass.

Their colorful armor, eight colors in eight combinations, belonged to Liaodong’s Eight Banners.

But now, it would be more accurate to call them the One Banner Army.

The armor might be eightfold, but the banners were only one—the banner of the Liaodong Grand General.