A steady drizzle shrouded the skies, and Yue City's ancient walls lay in utter ruin.
Yet ruined Yue City had somehow held on beneath the Chi Mang people's bloody assault. Day after day, they struggled through hell. Jiang Mian had never imagined it would be so brutal. Nearly everyone wielding blade and spear atop the walls bore wounds. After two days of bloody fighting, the city's young and able-bodied had volunteered to climb the walls and defend them, slaughtering numbly. He could no longer remember how many days had passed...
Ever since they had been trapped in Yue City and besieged to draw in reinforcements, every day had felt like a year. Once the siege battle began, time crawled by even more slowly.
On the walls, the Yan Army soldiers, once dark-skinned, had all turned pale from being soaked so long in the rainy season's endless gloom.
At midday, a torrential downpour began. The Chi Mang people finally paused their frenzied, near-suicidal assault on the city. The exhausted defenders had time to rest and eat something, grateful simply to have survived until noon.
The rain washed over the walls, carrying away the bloodstains and cooling the slaughter.
Chen Jia craned his head over the wall, took one look below, and sighed with a frown. There were too many corpses outside the city. Did the Chi Mang people even have a custom of collecting and burying their dead? They let the bodies lie exposed in the wilderness. Those who had died earliest had already swollen, rotted, and decayed in the rain, and even the downpour could not wash away that uniquely nauseating stench.
The people of Yue City wanted to clear away the corpses, but the Chi Mang people outside would not allow it. They cared nothing for the rules that