The Far Eastern Lands, Sevenfold Pass.
The withdrawal from Shikui Pass and Long Ridge Pass ahead had been completed.
At the very front of Sevenfold Pass, atop its wall that rose more than a hundred zhang,
stood a man in gray-silver armor who looked to be in his early thirties, gazing out over the vast land beyond the pass.
Not a blade of grass grew there. Nothing lived.
Shen Ce, a commandant of the Left Army at Sevenfold Pass.
He had only just turned twenty-four, but six years of wind and sun in the army had stripped away every trace of the green recruit he had once been.
Shen Ce was the son of Shen Dingwu, Minister of War of the Cloudborne Dynasty. The dynasty ranked among the stronger of the nearly thousand states in the Far Eastern Lands. After more than three thousand years of development, it now supplied forty million soldiers to the region's more than two thousand imperial army corps.
In other words, the Cloudborne Dynasty had provided enough troops for forty massive armies of a million men each.
For various reasons, Dao-Suppressing Pass—the seat of power in the Far Eastern Lands—could not allow any one dynasty to command an army corps wholly its own.
Though the Cloudborne Dynasty would never dare defy the lieges' trusted retainers transferred from the Far Western Lands to the front, its influence among the Far Eastern Lands' native army corps was undeniably immense.
For that reason, Shen Ce could have been transferred to the rear whenever he wished.
But he had always wanted to win glory through his own deeds.
"..."
Now, however, Shen Ce's thinking had shifted in subtle ways.
Especially after General Xiong had shown him what awaited soldiers corroded by the Outer Dao.
This was a war without