In just over half a month, Kou Zhong and Xu Ziling had led the elite Eighty-Thousand Twin Dragons Army—officially claimed to number one hundred thousand—to sweep away Shen Faxing's Liang Kingdom. They had not only wiped out countless enemy troops but also captured nearly thirty thousand fleeing Liang soldiers. Shen Faxing himself had been beaten so badly that he had vanished without a trace.
At any rate, after Changzhou fell, Kou Zhong never saw him again.
Some said Shen Faxing had died in the chaos of battle. Others said he had crossed north of the Yangtze and gone into hiding. Since the Twin Dragons Army had not crossed the river, they had naturally been unable to catch him.
But either way, whether Shen Faxing was dead or alive, his Liang Kingdom was all but finished. Its king had abandoned the city and fled, while Kou Zhong's elite forces had battered the vast lands south of the Yangtze into disarray and gradually taken control of them.
Unless something unexpected happened, there might no longer be any place for Shen Faxing in the future struggle for supremacy.
And the same went for someone else!
After Shen Faxing's downfall, Li Zitong's general Qin Wenchao in the Wu Kingdom naturally did not last much longer either.
In particular, Xu Ziling had come up with a clever way to breach the city. He used wooden, human-powered flying machines to bombard and burn the Wu Kingdom's river forts on both banks of the Yangtze night after night. They torched the Wu navy's warships and supplies, sowing panic among the defenders of Zhenjiang. Then, working with the Twin Dragons Army's navy, which arrived soon afterward, they broke through the iron chains blocking the river and completely surrounded Zhenjiang, cutting it off from all sides. With no reinforcements