In the Chain Mountains, nearly twenty days had passed, and the forces under Zhao Cheng's command had expanded to over two thousand men.
Over this span of time, Zhao Cheng continued gathering the remnants of Yellow Heaven who had fled into the forests. At the same time, he spent a full eleven days taking Cloud-Link Stronghold, one of the hundred strongholds of the Chain Mountains.
In this era, unless they were truly uncivilized savages, even those living deep in the mountains could never be completely cut off from the outside world.
The Chain Mountains lay on the border between the Southern Wasteland and Qing Province. With towering peaks and perilous roads like a natural moat, travel was exceedingly difficult, so their contact with the outside world was comparatively scant.
The mountain folk of this era were fundamentally different from the mountain folk of the modern world.
In the modern world, so-called mountain folk merely lived in remote places. They had household registrations and fell under the court's jurisdiction. But the mountain folk of this era were people from below the mountains who, to escape taxes and corvée labor, fled into the mountains by entire villages or entire clans. They had no household registrations and did not submit to the king's civilizing rule.
Life in the mountains was harsh. Unless they truly had no way left to live, ordinary people would never make such a choice.
Under such circumstances, those who could survive in the mountains were naturally the best among ordinary people. Passed down generation after generation, the people of the mountains naturally grew ever more fierce and valiant.
Yet as time passed, there would always be younger generations of mountain folk who forgot why their ancestors had entered the mountains and yearned for the dazzling world beyond. But mountain