Beside the dim yellow campfires, the smell of meat mingled with the stench of piss and shit.
Like grains of salt, snowflakes-whether falling from the sky or swept up from the ground by the wind was impossible to tell-struck the fires and instantly melted. Dulan Khagan sat beside a fire, staring at those grains of snow, his face livid and his body visibly stiff. He simply let the meat in front of him roast black.
That afternoon, Dulan had taken what might have been the most correct course of action: reorganizing his forces, then trying to use their fighting strength to bite through the harbor before them.
As long as they could take it and secure supplies and a foothold, everything would be manageable. The odds would even favor them, the local Wu Clan people.
But they had failed.
The reasons could not have been simpler:
First, the troops had made a long-distance forced march through the previous day and night. Once their morning burst of energy had passed, they were utterly exhausted. Having no strength meant having no strength-even Condensing the Core Experts grew unbearably sleepy once they sat down. Second, the Exorcising the Dragon Gang's defensive counterattack, that wave unleashed with fire, prisoners, and livestock, had stunned the Eastern Royal Court's elite forces, originally thirty thousand strong and now of uncertain number. At the very least, their organization was completely scrambled... yes, even Wu Clan tribes needed military organization. The Royal Court's own armies and the major tribes attached to it had all become a pot of porridge, impossible to reorganize in a short time... in fact, if Dulan's own Ancestral Dragon Guard had not been scattered by their own people, he certainly could have accomplished something then.
And so the afternoon's result was that Dulan could only