Killing Again

On another passage through the checkpoint, "Sir, sir, please show mercy. Our family of five truly can't scrape together five taels of silver." A ragged old man dropped to his knees with a thud and kowtowed.

"No money? Then get lost."

The soldier beside the barricade kicked the old man sprawling. "Next."

On another checkpoint passage—"My goods are worth a hundred taels, and you want to take thirty?!"

The leader of a merchant caravan raged, "Y-you... isn't this robbery?!"

Smack!

A resounding lash cracked across his face, splitting his flesh open. He howled and fell to the ground.

"Think it's too much? Then don't pass through. Or—"

The checkpoint soldier sneered viciously. "Leave all your goods behind."

Across the hundred checkpoint passages beneath this mighty pass, crying, pleading, furious cursing, and the crack of whips mingled at every moment, turning the place into a foul miasma of chaos.

At the same time, in a corner beneath the towering walls, several rotting corpses lay abandoned and uncollected.

Clearly, this was the fate of those who resisted.

Yet outside the pass on the other side, though a sparse stream of people likewise waited to enter, they received utterly different treatment.

Some Northern Di merchants, leading packhorses laden with goods, their features strange and markedly unlike those of the Central Plains, needed only pay a token fee before passing through without hindrance.

The Divine Strategy Army soldiers chatted and laughed with them in a harmonious atmosphere, completely unlike the ferocious, demon-faced manner in which they treated the people of the Central Plains.

Higher up, banners fluttered along the walls.

Yet the emblem on those banners was not that of the Great Yi Dynasty, but a savage, blood-dripping wolf's head, with a bright, glaring character for "Luo" embroidered at its center.

This was unmistakably