Yitu was advanced in years, but his horsemanship was still excellent. He reached the Qin Army camp at top speed.
Meng Wu had pitched the camp thirty li north of the battlefield, on a gentle slope with an open view and no cover on any side.
Coming from the direction of the royal court, once they crossed the last ridge, the entire camp lay spread out before them like an iron-gray beast crouching on the ground—low, silent, and oppressive.
Yitu reined in his horse and paused atop the ridge.
His eyes narrowed.
He tried to make out the details of that camp.
Dark iron cannons stood along the camp's perimeter in a row, their muzzles angled toward the north, aimed directly at the road he had taken.
Those things were even larger than he had imagined. No man could carry them; each one required several horses to haul it, and where they stood in the mud, their wheels had sunk half an inch deep.
Their iron casings were painted black, without a glint of light, like bones dug from beneath the earth.
So these were the sinister devices that spat fire and thunder?
No, they were not sinister devices.
There were no runes, none of those mysterious, bizarre appearances, nor any trace of the cultivators' methods he had heard of.
They were simply lumps of iron.
But how could something made of iron spit fire and thunder?
He stared for a long time. His horse restlessly pawed at the ridge, yet he did not move.
He was thinking about how these things killed people.
He had passed through the ruins of that battlefield.
He had seen the hellish devastation there.
It confirmed the intelligence he had gathered before coming.
Mo Tu's army of fifty or sixty thousand had been shattered