On the third day of the new year, they fought a bloody battle all day.
The three sides returned to their respective camps, counted their dead, wounded, and missing, and could not help feeling shaken.
But the truly shaken man was at Yique Pass-the following dawn, after learning that the seat of Xiangcheng Commandery had changed hands, that the Eastern Capital Army's last armored cavalry force had collapsed and scattered, and that the fate of all three generals, Shang Shisheng, Xue Liang, and Xue Ren, remained unknown, Li Shu all but lost his nerve entirely!
There was nothing he could do. Truly, nothing!
First, the loss of Xiangcheng's commandery seat and all the armored cavalry guarding the supply route meant that the Eastern Capital Army's main force in Nanyang had lost its logistical lifeline completely and could only turn back immediately. Yet Li Shu still knew nothing of the fighting at the front. If the battle had gone badly, and something else went wrong during the retreat, it would be a calamity that overturned heaven and earth. Second, with the Eastern Capital cut off, replacing warhorses was exceedingly difficult. The disintegration of these last few thousand organized armored cavalry was itself a bone-deep injury, never mind that Shang Shisheng was a senior Eastern Capital general and Xue Liang a dependable, capable commander who had joined them on the battlefield. Now neither could be accounted for; these were grave problems in their own right. Finally, and hardest for Li Shu to accept, he, the Minister of War, was the principal officer overseeing the rear in this campaign, in a sense more important even than Sima Jinda, who held the Eastern Capital. Yet he had brought about this outcome in just a few days... how could he face Sima Zheng?!
But, but