Chapter 3698: The Wind Carried Him Beyond the Ninth Heaven
Although seven or eight days had passed since Yue Lingshan routed the imperial army, killing and scattering all fifteen hundred soldiers before they fled back to Xi'an Prefecture, the court had made no further move. It was hard to tell whether the soldiers had been so frightened that they wanted to avoid provoking the Huashan Sect for now, or whether some other reason was keeping the court from sparing enough troops and attention.
Whatever the reason, a closer look showed that the court's sluggish response was not all that surprising.
After all, the imperial army was currently locked in fierce fighting with the Sun Moon Holy Cult's rebels in Jiangnan and the Suzhou-Hangzhou region. The court had already committed vast amounts of manpower, supplies, and troops to the campaign, and most of its attention was tied up there. Diverting yet more soldiers to tangle with the Huashan Sect clearly wasn't a wise move.
If the three garrisons from Xi'an Prefecture had succeeded in suppressing the rebellion, that would have been one thing. The court would have been glad to let Xi'an Prefecture handle matters on its own, wipe out the Huashan Sect, and send the relevant parties—such as the martial arts alliance leader—to the capital for harsh punishment, as a warning to others.
But after the rumors spread through the martial world, nearly everyone in the land knew what had happened to the imperial army.
Though the Huashan Sect had fewer than a hundred people, the facts had proved that it was not to be trifled with!
Send too few troops—say, the one or two thousand sent on the previous campaign—and they were bound to lose. They would only be throwing away lives. The accounts and miserable fates of the