The sky stretched vast and blue, the wilderness spread boundless; the wind bent the grass low, revealing cattle and sheep.
On the Luobo Plain, distant mountains and nearby fields lay open to view. Several dozen riders galloped past, startling quite a few herders and gatherers. They looked up, showing a little surprise-but only a little-before returning to their work.
Though each of these riders had two horses, their hard-bitten bearing was unmistakable, and the civil and military members were clearly distinguishable, none of that was unexpected, especially with White Wolf Guards sporting white wolf tails among them. The only problem was that red flag with its large characters, which inevitably struck people as odd. The Northern Lands boasted Eight Dukes and Seven Guards, and a hundred regiments, but no one remembered a regiment called "Out of the Black."
Yet while the herders on the plain could treat that flag as a joke, inside Luobo City, the current Duke Luye, Yuan Baoqi, could no longer remain calm.
In fact, upon receiving the news, this man of around fifty-one of the Eight Dukes of the Northern Lands, theoretically in the golden years for a regional leader-had immediately blanched. "Are you certain? Have the Exorcising the Dragon rebels really come in person?"
Though sparsely arranged, twenty or thirty people stood in the hall before him. For a time, no one around him said a word, making the scene exceedingly awkward.
There was nothing particularly mysterious about this scene... its roots actually lay with Great Wei. Great Wei's old claim that only the corner of Dongyi remained outside its dominion had not been nonsense. The Cao Clan's rule had penetrated considerably into both the Wu Clan's Three Tribes and the Northern Lands-indeed, more than halfway. To name just one example, the Northern Lands' feudal