"Did you find out anything?"
A temporary camp somewhere in Sibao Prefecture.
The man speaking looked to be thirty-five or thirty-six. Thanks to his good upkeep, even though he had grown somewhat slack in figure after living in comfort these past few years, his underlying vitality remained. With a finely trimmed mustache, he sat in the command tent sipping fine wine, carrying an air of leisurely ease.
He sat high in the seat of honor, his eyes shrewd.
Lamps had been lit inside the tent, their light faint.
Judging from the breathing of the several people present, none of them were ordinary men.
A martial general below threw back his head and laughed, his voice laced with ridicule. "Reporting to my lord, there hasn't been the slightest word from Longwu Commandery. We really have to wonder—was the person who nearly wrecked the Ten Crows two years ago truly Shen Youli? Could he have been an impostor?"
The man set down his wine cup. "There really hasn't been any movement?"
The general said, "Every word is true! It was all thanks to my lord's brilliance in seeing through Shen Youli. He really is 'long on benevolence, short on slaughter.' And we struck during the autumn harvest. Surely he wouldn't dare abandon the grain harvest to fight us for real. He could only swallow this dumb loss."
It was not that the general was arrogant and underestimating the enemy, treating Shen Tang as no threat. Rather, Shen Tang's presence in the outside world was genuinely too weak. She had risen to fame only recently, and her battles at Xiaocheng and against the Ten Crows had been flashes in the pan. Once they were over, she buried herself in managing her own little patch of land. Even when Zheng Qiao forcibly transferred her