The Wolf's Head Hung from the Saddle, Its Spirit Unbroken; The Remnants Lay on the Ground, Utterly Desolate

Motu's hand gripping the curved blade was trembling.

The wound on his shoulder was still gushing blood, flowing down through the gaps in his armor and soaking his left leg crimson.

He could no longer feel the pain from that wound. All he felt was his entire arm growing cold, yet his fingers still clenched the hilt tightly, his knuckles white.

Blood Butcher.

He had heard that name before.

It was not as though the Xiongnu paid no attention to the Central Plains.

Scouts who had fled back from the Qin State's borders, merchant caravans bought with gold, and herdsmen who had traveled through the Central Plains had long carried those two words back to the grasslands.

They said that a god of slaughter had emerged in the Central Plains, leading an army clad in black robes and black armor. They had destroyed Han first, then Zhao, and swallowed Wei State immediately afterward.

Whenever they destroyed a state, that army piled the enemy soldiers' heads into mountains.

That baleful god called Blood Butcher would absorb the souls of the dead.

Marquis of Blood Robe.

Lord Wuwei.

Blood Butcher.

Back then, Luandi Motu had sat in the royal tent and merely frowned as he listened to those reports.

The affairs of the Central Plains were too far from the grasslands.

Those farmlands enclosed by city walls, those states whose bones had been softened by Confucian teachings—they could fight all they wanted. It was all the same in the end.

The Xiongnu iron cavalry could cross the Great Wall, coming and going like the wind. The people of the Central Plains could not catch them, stop them, or defeat them.

Yet he had still dispatched the Black-Armored Guard to fortify the Qin State's borders.

It was a habit forged on the battlefield.