Ten Years

After Zhou Ming turned the entire Rose Territory upside down, it did not take long for Glan Territory, a beast beginning to bare its fangs, to reveal itself fully before every power in the Vorris Kingdom.

A rebellious land with only a supreme lord and not a single enfeoffed knight beneath him.

A rebellious land whose system of government and model of agricultural, industrial, and commercial development were unconventional, even absurd.

A rebellious land that conscripted full-time farmers, trained them, and built an army of farmers.

A rebellious land that defied all decency, colluded with thieves, wantonly plundered the property of other territories, and murdered noble lords and knights!

At all costs, the nobles, farmers, and thieves of this rebellious land had to be uprooted one by one and exterminated completely!

Ten years, seven campaigns of suppression.

Within the tiny Vorris Kingdom, warfare raged almost without interruption year after year.

Yet throughout those seven suppression campaigns, Glan Territory, at the eye of the storm, was not shattered by one storm after another. Instead, it achieved total victory in all seven campaigns!

The area controlled by Glan Territory expanded from the tiny original Glan Territory to the entire Rose Territory, then to the Merlin Territory in the north and the Bame and Yokan Territories in the west, until it occupied half of the eastern Vorris Kingdom.

Watching the rebel force grow ever stronger, its territory expand ever wider, and more and more of their own people and property be plundered away by thieves, King Herrian had no choice but to empty the royal treasury and offer to cede four count territories in exchange for aid from the western Chulin Kingdom. He borrowed a Knights Order assembled by the entire Chulin Kingdom, with two thousand heavily armored knights.

Together with the three thousand barbarian mercenaries King Herrian had hired at great expense from the northern Savage Kingdom, as well as the five hundred knights remaining in the kingdom, a terrifying army of five thousand five hundred men charged straight toward the heart of the rebel region—Glan City, a city expanded from the foundations of Rose Town and Glan Territory Castle.

Zhou Ming had long prepared for this. He issued a general mobilization order throughout the territory under his control, and in less than ten days assembled a massive army consisting of five thousand elite crossbowmen, ten thousand elite spearmen, and three thousand elite Light Cavalry, advancing toward the site of the decisive battle.

Before the battle, the more than three thousand members of the Alibaba Thieves Gang led by Great Thief Jero had already moved ahead, wreaking havoc throughout the territory controlled by King Herrian. They cut off the punitive army's supply lines, set traps, and ambushed large numbers of soldiers on the march, inflicting severe losses in men and baggage and sending morale plummeting.

The final battlefield lay on a broad, flat grassland called Tinggen Highland. For a hundred li in every direction, it was all lush green pasture.

Mounted on high ground in full armor, Zhou Ming looked at the formation of the king's punitive army on the opposing hillside.

"Ten cavalry formations, around twenty-two hundred men. Fifteen mercenary formations, just under three thousand. A little over five thousand in total. Not much of a challenge."

Zhou Ming curled his lip in disdain at this military force capable of destroying a small kingdom.

Naturally, if he dared to speak so boldly, he had the confidence to back it up.

One source of that confidence was the invincible Tiger and Wolf Legion in his hands, which he had devoted thirteen years to building. It had fought dozens of bloody battles without a single defeat, only growing stronger and fiercer with every war.

The Tiger and Wolf Legion rejoiced at the prospect of battle. At the sound of an order, they assembled at once. Once on the battlefield, they desperately competed for enemy heads and military merit, then exchanged them with Zhou Ming for land, houses, servants, Nobility Titles, and bounties. Everything had a clearly posted price: one head meant one reward. Heads were limited, and the more they took, the more they gained.

Zhou Ming's confidence also came from the strong development momentum of Glan City and the surrounding controlled areas. Agricultural output rose year after year, industry and commerce developed rapidly with abundant vitality, and a population base exceeding one hundred and fifty thousand, together with a highly prosperous market economy, generated enough tax revenue each year to support an elite army of more than twenty thousand men.

Moreover, two years earlier, he had sent a band of thieves to seize a medium-sized iron mine in the border region adjacent to the Iron Fortress Kingdom. With a stable source of ore, Glan Territory adopted blast-furnace steelmaking and, in less than two years, increased steel production tenfold from less than one hundred tons annually to one thousand tons a year.

With sufficient steel and the skilled craftsmen Zhou Ming had recruited, the quality of the weapons and armor he supplied to the Glan Territory Defense Force naturally rose several levels. The crossbowmen, for example, were fully equipped with steel crossbows containing steel springs, increasing their range by fifty percent and doubling their killing power!

After being fully reequipped, the spearmen became heavily armored pikemen clad in plate armor and wielding steel spears.

As for the Light Cavalry, they were even more formidable. Fully equipped with breastplates and sabers, with each rider also carrying two small steel crossbows, their close- and long-range combat capabilities improved enormously. They could even exploit their superior mobility to wear down knights to death with kiting tactics when fighting on equal numerical terms.

Thus, Zhou Ming, who held the advantage in numbers, equipment, morale, logistics, and every other aspect, had no doubt whatsoever about the outcome of this decisive battle.

"Brave soldiers, the time to win military merit and glory has come! Grip your weapons and charge!"

Drawing the Side Sword at his waist, Zhou Ming gave the order to attack.

"Boom! Boom! Boom..."

Amid the booming war drums, the heavy lines of soldiers moved down from the hillside like a wall. Marching in neat steps, licking their parched lips, and wearing cruel grins, they advanced toward the "military merits" ahead.

Under the sunlight, as they watched the iron wall and forest of spears opposite them gleam brightly like a massive wave crashing toward their frail "bodies," many soldiers in King Herrian's punitive army trembled in terror.

"Kill!"

"Kill!"

Two torrents of steel, one great and one small, slammed together. Sparks flew, blood sprayed wildly, and severed limbs and corpses scattered across the ground.

In this battle, Glan City's Tiger and Wolf Legion suffered fewer than two thousand casualties while annihilating the king's punitive army of more than five thousand two hundred men, achieving total victory in the final anti-suppression campaign.

After the Battle of Tinggen Highland ended, Zhou Ming did not halt his advance. Instead, he followed the Bella River westward into the rich and fertile Bella Plain, preparing to seize the city at its center that he had coveted for so long—the royal capital, Woz City.

However, not long after Zhou Ming's Tiger and Wolf Legion surrounded Woz City, before it could launch a general assault, a mysterious messenger from Glan City hurriedly delivered a secret letter. It made him immediately halt military operations, order the entire army to withdraw, and rush back to Glan City.

"Donny, Donny... You could have remained a lord and enjoyed your wealth and glory in peace. I developed the economy for you, trained soldiers for you, expanded your territory for you... You only needed to enjoy the fruits of it all. Why did you let greed cloud your mind and cause such pointless trouble? It is true that I promised Baron Connor I would not harm you, but now that you have gone this far, what reason do I have left to show mercy?"

A trace of icy killing intent flashed through Zhou Ming's calm eyes!