Fengzhou City's battlements lay shrouded in the dead of night.
Min Zimo sat cross-legged in a corner of the battlements, the Black Iron Spear resting across his knees as he closed his eyes and regulated his breathing.
The daytime clamor had long since died down. Outside the city, an eerie silence had settled over everything—but this kind of quiet was more hair-raising than any shout.
"Lord Commissioner! Lord Commissioner!"
A flurry of hurried footsteps approached from afar. A personal guard rushed up onto the battlements, his armor plates clattering and ringing crisply across the empty walls.
"There's movement in the north!"
Min Zimo's eyes snapped open, a flash of brilliance flickering through them before vanishing.
He stamped one battle boot against the ground and shot toward the northern wall.
A quarter of an hour later...
Xu Yuncheng pointed at the torches covering the land beyond the city. Amid the flickering flames, a stark outline emerged.
"Lord Commissioner, look..."
As a Third-order Martial Artist, Min Zimo's vision was not hindered by the night.
He saw that roughly two li north of the city, on what had originally been a flat wilderness, a two- or three-man-high platform had somehow been erected.
Countless figures were still frantically hauling earth and stones, piling the platform higher and higher.
Moreover, the platform's design was rather strange.
It had neither battlements for the defenders to hide behind nor a slope convenient for soldiers and horses to climb.
It was simply a gigantic, smooth, circular earthen platform, its four sides steep—as if a flat-bottomed wok without a handle had been overturned across the plain.
Min Zimo's brows drew tightly together. A martial artist's instincts told him that something was wrong with this thing!
"I'm going to investigate." He tightened his grip on the spear and spoke in