Li Wei silently watched Fan Jizhou prostrate himself beneath the earthen platform. Even as he knocked his forehead against the ground until it was battered and bloody, she felt not the slightest pity for him.
She had been in the Mirror World for barely a month, yet she had already heard so much about the barbarians' brutality that her ears were nearly calloused.
Three years ago, they had torn open the Great Wall's defenses from the northern foothills of Mount Bajing. Wherever the iron hooves of more than eighty thousand barbarian soldiers passed, villages turned to scorched earth and strongholds to ruins. Even county and prefectural cities had fallen—six or seven of them.
Throughout it all, they had raped, looted, and committed every imaginable atrocity.
Whenever a city showed even the slightest resistance, they would massacre its inhabitants after taking it, venting their fury. No one knew how many commoners had died beneath the barbarians' blades.
When they withdrew, they had driven away more than a hundred thousand young and able-bodied men, scholars, and craftsmen like livestock, hauling them beyond the passes to serve as slaves for eternity.
The able-bodied men were assigned under the banners of the Eight Tribes and reduced to slaves. Whenever war broke out, they were driven forward as cannon fodder.
Two years ago, they had raised the banner of avenging the late Khan and launched a fierce assault on Jincheng. The defending general at the time had submitted a memorial soaked in tears and blood, reporting that the barbarians "used the captured Jing people as their vanguard; when one fell, another advanced, until corpses lay level with the city walls."
As for the women, their fate was even more miserable.
Those with passable looks could still serve as maids in the estates of the powerful,