"What's going on outside? Is there any water?"
The rain fell hard. Li Qingchen, who had not entered the city but slept in the rear camp, could not tell whether the muggy heat had woken him, whether his aching wounds had kept him awake all along, or whether everything he had seen and heard from noon until night had weighed on him emotionally and made him sleep especially lightly.
In any case, he had suddenly awakened in the night, and he was rather thirsty.
No one answered him. To gain control of this force as quickly as possible and turn it into his private army, Han Yingong had chosen to buy its loyalty. The result was indulgence born of deliberate indulgence, and military discipline that was particularly out of control tonight. Even the soldiers who should have been waiting for orders in the front of his tent were absent; they had presumably gone into the city to loot.
He had, in a sense, sought benevolence and received it.
Since Li Qingchen was awake and could summon no one, he lay there and went over yesterday's events, growing increasingly troubled... He had long known that things like yesterday's incidents in the army would happen. Books and the words of some elders had warned him long ago. But he had enjoyed his lineage's protection and had begun serving early under Bai Yousi, a superior who was virtually a darling of heaven, so he had never needed to become too deeply tainted by such things... Now that they were happening before his eyes on a vast scale, some moral turmoil was inevitable.
Still, compared with his female cousin, whose reactions were more obvious, he, Li Shierlang, could temporarily press it down into his heart.
After he lay there a while longer, strange sounds