Dawn crawled across the valley like a festering wound oozing pus. At first, it manifested as a crimson hue bleeding across the horizon, then as a dull, lifeless light seeping through veils of dust and ash. The sun, pale and distant, seemed to refuse to cast its gaze upon the scene stretching beneath it: a tapestry of death woven with entrails, rusted steel, and churned earth. The air, thick with the acrid smoke from the torched farms to the east, carried a metallic sweetness that clung to the throat: dry blood mixed with sweat and horse dung.
Luo Wen's army did not march; it sprawled. A smear of greasy wool, cracked leather, and vacant eyes. Of the one hundred twenty thousand who had departed from the capital, only thirty thousand remained standing. The survivors shuffled their feet between swollen corpses, their boots sinking into puddles where the water had turned a dark, ominous red. Some scavenged nicked swords or pried golden teeth from half-open mouths. Others, the younger ones, retched and sobbed as they inadvertently stepped on a ruptured belly from which blueish entrails spilled forth.
In the center of the valley, where the battle had reached its climax, the dead formed grotesque pyramids. Cavalry bodies crushed beneath their own mounts, infantry embraced in their final agony, horses with their spines cleaved open by axes. Flies already danced in swarms over the empty eye sockets, while vultures traced patient circles high above. A group of prisoners, stripped of armor and dignity, dug graves with their bare hands. Each time a spade struck a bone, the hollow sound echoed like a sickly heartbeat.
"Do you see it?" Luo Wen's voice sliced through the air like a knife through fat.
Everyone turned. The Chancellor stood on a tipped cart, his black tunic torn on the left side, revealing a scar that snaked from his collarbone down to his ribs. He bore no sword. In his right hand, he held an enemy standard: tattered crimson silk, the emblem of Yuan Guo stained with mud.
"This is not a mere victory," he continued, throwing the trophy at the feet of a trembling prisoner. "It is the rebirth of the empire."
A young soldier, whose bandaged arm oozed pus, raised his spear with a hoarse cry. The movement was contagious. Dozens, hundreds of voices joined in a chorus of torn throats:
"Chancellor! King of War! Invincible General!"
But amid the clamor, beside the supply wagons, a group of archers remained silent. They were the ones who had survived the rear guard, the ones who had witnessed how the flood planned by Luo Wen had swept away not only the enemy troops but also the village of Linhua. One of them, a veteran with burn scars on his neck, muttered to his companion:
"Three days ago, that girl offered me a peach while we patrolled the river. Now she's buried under two meters of mud. Was she also 'rot of the empire'?"
His companion, a seventeen-year-old with his left cheek shattered by an arrow, did not reply. He simply pressed a blood-soaked rag tightly against his wound.
On the western slopes, where the Jian River once wound between willows, only a cracked mudbed remained. Luo Wen's engineers had dynamited the dikes at the break of dawn on the third day of battle, turning the valley into a liquid trap. The corpses here floated face down, their hair tangled in broken branches. Among them, pale flashes of color: the dress of a peasant woman clutching an eyeless child, an old man's hands still knotted in prayer.
A cavalry captain, mounted on a lame steed, rode through the area with three subordinates. He stopped before a half-submerged tree where the body of an enemy soldier hung. He had not been killed by the water, but by the rope. A wooden tablet lay at his feet, with awkwardly carved characters: "Forgive me, mother."
"Burn this," the captain ordered, turning to hide the tremble of his lips. "And search the houses. If there are survivors…"
He did not finish the sentence. He knew the orders: no witnesses.
By evening, when the elongated shadows turned the valley into a mosaic of sinister chiaroscuro, Luo Wen walked among the prisoners. His steps crunched over arrowheads. Every so often, he paused before an upturned face, studying bloodshot eyes or trembling mouths.
"You," he pointed to a young officer whose An Lu uniform was torn, "How many years did you serve the traitor?"
"F-five years, Excellency," the man stammered, before whose feet lay the corpse of a standard-bearer no older than fourteen.
Luo Wen nodded slowly. With a gesture almost paternal, he untied his own cloak—black silk embroidered with silver dragons—and threw it at the prisoner's feet.
"Put it on. Tomorrow, you will lead the first battalion of the Redeemed Vanguard."
A whisper ran through the ranks. The prisoner touched the fabric reverently, but when he looked up, Luo Wen had already turned away. In his place, a masked executioner with a bronze mask planted himself before another group of captives.
"Traitors to the throne!" he bellowed, raising a curved axe that gleamed in the dying light of the day. "The Chancellor offers you mercy! Who will join the Redemption?"
Hands rose amid tears. Others spat on the ground. The axe descended eleven times before the sun disappeared behind the horizon.
On a cliff top, where the wind howled like a wounded wolf, Luo Wen watched the torches winding their way toward Guangling. Wei, standing to his left, tried in vain to read the Chancellor's profile against the starlit sky.
"Will you order the advance at dawn?" he asked, adjusting his left gauntlet, where an arrow had left a deep groove.
Luo Wen did not respond immediately. In the darkness, his right hand closed around an object hanging at his neck: a bloodied wolf's fang tied with a strand of human hair. When he finally spoke, his words blended with the howling wind:
"I will send the prisoners first. Let them clear the obstacles from the roads. Let their former masters see what is left of their army."
Wei shuddered. Below, in the valley, the undertakers' bonfires flickered like the eyes of demons. A distant scream tore through the night—perhaps a wolf, perhaps a man—and the Chancellor spun sharply, his cloak billowing like bat wings.
"Tomorrow," he said, and in that word echoed the cracking of bones under the wheels of supply carts, "the empire will remember who its true master is."