The moment Huan Yi saw Quan Yi, he felt as though his entire understanding of the world had been rearranged.
So the city had not fallen, but once a fire started, they could treat it as though it had and use that to pressure its defenders into surrendering... that step was one thing. He could still understand it.
The crucial point was that sometimes, even when one side wanted to accept a surrender and the other wanted to live, they could not simply make contact. Instead, they had to lay down conditions upon conditions to maintain the other side's psychological balance before an agreement could be reached. And apparently, even preventing certain hostages from being sent over had value.
Looking back over the entire process, every attempt to achieve its corresponding result in a single step, from feigned surrender to burning the city to urging surrender, had basically failed. Yet almost every seemingly failed step had ultimately taken effect.
"Have you thought things through, Mr. Ziliang?"
Of course, Liu Cheng had no idea that Huan Yi had experienced an awakening and gained three points of intelligence, and even if he had known, he would not have cared much just then. The moment he saw that the man delivered to him was Quan Yi, he had been genuinely overjoyed. In his eyes, this was something more precious than Xingyang City itself, and he immediately went forward without a care to take the man's hand. "Otherwise, with your intelligence and strategic skill, how could you have let someone send you here so easily?"
"Even if I were an immortal, how could I have imagined you would take four cities in three days with the Western Command's remnants and new recruits? When I saw the flames last night, I was already preparing to