Scouting Selection

The current Northwestern frontier army had a total of two hundred thousand troops.

Of those, only the twenty thousand well-equipped infantry and six thousand cavalry personally commanded by Gao Yu, the frontier army's Governor, could be called elite.

Apart from the twenty-six thousand elite soldiers directly under the Governor's Mansion, the Northwestern frontier army was divided into three major defense zones.

They were the Left Garrison Army, the Right Garrison Army, and the Guard Army.

The Left Garrison Army had eighty thousand men; the Right Garrison Army had fifty thousand; the Guard Army had twelve thousand.

The remaining forty thousand or so served in the Northwestern frontier army's transport corps or garrisoned its various passes and fortresses.

Of the two hundred thousand troops, aside from the twenty-six thousand elite soldiers directly under the Governor's Mansion, only forty thousand were fully armed, at most.

The rest—six hundred and sixty thousand? No, aside from those sixty-six thousand, the rest were mostly just numbers on a roster.

As a new recruit, Chen Yan was assigned to Dingzi Camp, an outpost of the Left Garrison Army.

The equipment issued to him consisted of a standard blue-purple padded coat worn by Great Yan's frontier army, a short spear, and a wooden shield.

The short spear bore dozens of cuts, large and small. Some of them still held dark bloodstains that could not be removed.

It was plainly a weapon salvaged from a battlefield.

It wasn't hard to imagine what had become of its previous owners.

The quality of his weapons and armor didn't matter.

To Chen Yan, the only thing that mattered was the food in the army.

But the meals provided to new recruits at the Left Garrison Army's outpost were a profound disappointment.

Breakfast was usually millet soup mixed with unremoved husks and