On the open ground outside the southern city wall, five hundred ordinary warriors had already arrived. Carrying hoes and shovels, they exchanged bewildered looks, unsure what they were supposed to do. Nie Li stood at the front with a branch in his hand, drawing lines on the ground. Several men who looked like squad leaders crouched beside him and listened, confusion written all over their faces.
As Shen Fei approached, he heard Nie Li say, "Dig two trenches along these lines, twenty feet wide and ten feet deep. Pile the excavated earth on the inner side and form it into a slope."
"Young Master Nie Li, what good will trenches do?" one squad leader could not help asking. "Demon Beasts have thick hides and tough flesh. They'll cross them in two strides. These won't stop them."
"Just dig." Nie Li offered no explanation, only those two words.
Though the squad leaders had their doubts, they did not dare defy orders from the City Lord's Mansion. They turned and shouted for their men to get to work.
For a while, the scrape of hoes digging earth and the clatter of stones rang out together. With five hundred people working at once, the scene looked almost lively.
Shen Fei stood to one side and watched for a while. The first trench lay roughly three hundred feet from the city wall, and the second stood at a hundred and fifty feet. The two trenches ran parallel, stretching across the entire southern wall.
Besides digging trenches, some men drove sharpened bamboo into the bottoms and sides, forming a dense layer of upward-pointing spikes.
Farther in, the ground near the wall had been dug with countless fist-sized holes of varying depths, scattered without any discernible pattern.
Nearby, men pushed wooden barrels over and poured dark