1423: Seizing the Bridge, Blowing Up the Waterway (14) [Please Vote for a Monthly Ticket]

Jimò Qiu?

Where had this nobody sprung from?

His old friend, exhausted but narrowly victorious over Gongyang Yongye, heard Jimò Qiu issue his challenge and quietly glanced at the others. They varied in age, and some even looked familiar. The Central Allied Army had truly gone all out this time. To keep Kang's main forces pinned down in the Yudi Mountains, they had called in favors and used threats or inducements to drag out many warriors who, like him, had been living in seclusion.

They were taking this even more seriously than the State of Wu had back then.

The year the State of Wu rose to prominence, he had still been a little rascal making mud pies in the village. Those great figures who flew through the skies and burrowed through the earth existed only in the gossip of passing merchants. By the time he went out to seek his fortune, the State of Wu had already splintered into more than a dozen countries, all still fighting to the death.

From the mouth of a superior who claimed to be of Wu's direct line, he had glimpsed something of a great power's fading glory: elite troops and mighty generals, ruler and ministers in harmony, daring to contend with Heaven, the Mandate of Heaven won over by the people. Who could have imagined that even such a behemoth could not withstand schemes that wormed through every crack, and would meet its bitter end?

[This is making a mountain out of a molehill.]

He sympathized with what had befallen the State of Wu, but he also believed that the Central Branch's machinations against Wu had utterly extinguished the spirit of ambition among heroes and patriots everywhere, branding the word "unification" with a taboo no one dared touch. For over a century