The messenger from Luxia Prefecture looked at the "Lu" banner, stained with dried blood and charred black on one side, yet still standing tall. He dismounted and hurried forward several steps. Ignoring the dirt on the ground, he dropped to his knees with a thud so heavy it made the onlookers' own knees ache.
His eyes were bloodshot, and tears streamed down his face, beyond his control.
He bowed deeply toward the city walls.
In his heart, he was grateful to Heaven for its mercy.
Luxia Prefecture had held out, successfully buying time for reinforcements to arrive.
Overcome with emotion, he sobbed and wept bitterly. But no one around him laughed at him for it. Put themselves in his shoes, and they might have been even more emotional than the messenger. After all, before reaching the prefectural seat, they had all assumed it had already fallen.
If it had fallen, well...
Once word spread of what these refugee bandits had done, who wouldn't know the fate of places that drew this swarm of locusts?
Nine out of ten households emptied, corpses strewn across the land.
Their bloody methods of slaughtering an entire city were no less savage than Zheng Qiao's back in the day—perhaps even worse. It was enough to leave people dumbstruck.
It had to be said that, in the eyes of quite a few outsiders, Zheng Qiao's methods were not all that ruthless. That scoundrel Zheng Qiao had merely allowed his soldiers to loot and plunder for the first seven days after breaking through a city.
Once those seven days were up, he forbade them from committing any more atrocities.
As for the widespread massacres the outside world talked about...
That was because the commoners would stop at nothing to protect their wealth. There was no hiding place