"Five thousand?"
With those words, the hall fell silent again. After a long while, Tang Rong swallowed and asked, "How many troops does the enemy have? I remember you just said it, but I seem to have misheard.!"
Zhang Li nodded and said again, "According to information obtained by my Jiedushi, this force is one of the four White Lotus Sect armies seeking conquest. It originally numbered around thirty thousand, and gathered more hands and sect followers along the way. After joining forces with Buddhist Marsh, its strength has already exceeded sixty thousand."
"Sixty thousand?" Liu Yuan's face twitched. "The Imperial Commissioner only brought five thousand men. This..."
Before he could finish, Chen Shouxin beside him suddenly recalled something. His expression shifted unpredictably, and Xiong Bi noticed it. Unable to restrain himself, he asked, "Shouxin, have you remembered something?"
"Yes, Lord Xiong, I have indeed thought of something. But all of you know about it as well." Chen Shouxin took a deep breath and said to those present, "Gentlemen, do you still remember that after Imperial Commissioner Qiu came to Jiannan, he first proposed training troops? He said he had a method for training soldiers and wished to put it into practice."
"Yes, I know of that as well. At the time, quite a few people regarded it as Qiu Yan's breakthrough point for taking charge of military reform. But they also knew he had written the Military Canon and wanted to see what he was capable of, so they assigned him some men." Xiong Bi nodded, an astonished look appearing on his face. "What? Do you think these five thousand... elite soldiers came from those troops he trained back then? But I remember that ten thousand men were assigned to him."
"Ten thousand veteran slackers." Zhang Kaiyong took over,