"Wooo..."
A deep, desolate horn blast rode the wind into the heavens. Countless contingents of Tartar troops slowly converged at its command, merging into one. The dark sea of men blanketed the green grasslands like the vast shadows cast by passing rain clouds in midsummer, their fierce, crushing presence as suffocating and terrifying as mountainous waves...
At that moment, on a small hill more than a dozen li from the Tartar army, the two brothers Lei Heng and Liu Meng, notorious mounted bandits of Lu Mountain, sat astride sturdy horses. Gazing at that distant black cloud stretching from earth to sky, both unconsciously held their breath.
Ten thousand men stretched beyond sight; a hundred thousand joined the heavens!
That dark mass of troops in the distance numbered far more than two hundred thousand!
Only after a long while did Liu Meng open his mouth and forcefully exhale. With a defiant, savage look in his eyes, he chuckled. "It's finally begun!"
Lei Heng slowly let out a stale breath, his face troubled as he sighed soundlessly. "Yes, it's finally begun..."
Ever since that rare snow disaster had begun in the twelfth month of the previous year, the brothers had worried about conditions on the grasslands. Every few days, they had braved the snow and slipped deep into the grasslands to investigate the movements of the Tartars, the Oirat, and the other tribes...
Having lived beyond the passes for years, the brothers knew the Tartars all too well.
They knew perfectly well that, over the past few years, the Tartars and the Oirat had been locked in vicious internal strife as they fought for supremacy over the Northern Desert Grasslands and sought to reunify them. Of the several hundred tribes scattered across the region, most had been drawn into this struggle between