"Speak! How goes the battle ahead? Have the demons already crossed the border?!"
The scout reined in his horse, gasping for breath.
Yet his face wore an expression as though he had seen a ghost.
"R-Reporting... Reporting to the Commander!"
"Ahead... ahead, Baxi Commandery..."
"No... no demons."
Xu Xiao froze. "What?"
"There are no demons!"
The scout's eyes were wide, as if he had yet to recover from the scene he had just witnessed.
"Baxi Commandery still stands!"
"This subordinate saw no demons besieging the city, nor did I see beacon fires or war smoke... It was just..."
Xu Xiao's brow furrowed tightly. "Just what?"
"It was simply too quiet."
Hearing this, doubts sprouted thickly in Xu Xiao's heart.
No demons?
How could that be possible?
By his reckoning, at this hour, those beasts should already have reached Baxi Commandery...
Could they have suffered a defeat and retreated?
The instant the thought arose, he strangled it himself.
Absolutely impossible.
Jiannan Circuit's forces were stretched thin now. What could they use to resist?
"Could this be an empty-city ruse? Or perhaps..."
Xu Xiao's expression changed sharply.
"Full army, be on guard!"
"Enter the city with me!"
Whether a dragon's pool and tiger's den lay ahead, or some deceitful trap.
Now that they had arrived, there was no reason not to go in and take a look.
The army reached the foot of Baxi Commandery's walls.
Xu Xiao pulled his horse to a stop and looked up at the city.
The walls were battered beyond recognition, riddled everywhere with breaches blasted open by immense force.
Dark-red bloodstains, like splashed ink, had dyed more than half the walls crimson.
But this blood was not the blood of civilians!
Countless demon corpses lay packed together in dense masses.
Some had been cut in