[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"origin-from-special-forces-to-the-multiverse":3,"chapter-from-special-forces-to-the-multiverse-from-special-forces-to-the-multiverse-chapter-189":6},{"origin":4,"title":5},"chinese","From Special Forces to the Multiverse",{"chapter":7,"nextChapterSlug":19,"prevChapterSlug":20,"totalChapters":21,"novelImage":22},{"id":8,"novel_id":9,"title":10,"slug":11,"index":12,"content":13,"wordcount":14,"created_at":15,"updated_at":15,"volume":16,"translator":17,"content_hash":18},2315239,4527,"Chapter 189: Consecutive Defeats","from-special-forces-to-the-multiverse-chapter-189",189,"\u003Cp>Outside Lingbi City, the Song army’s encampment received the routed troops at midnight.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>First came the sound of hooves—disordered, frantic—not like messengers bringing good news, but like men fleeing from ghosts. The sentries at the gate, torches in hand, shouted the password; the reply came jumbled, trembling with sobs. The firelight revealed their faces—bloodied, armor askew, arrows still embedded in their mounts.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>“Suzhou… Suzhou has fallen!”\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Those words were like salt thrown into boiling oil—the entire camp exploded. Soldiers burst from their tents, half-dressed, surrounding the routed men, shouting questions. The survivors spoke in fragments, but each phrase was horrifying: General Guo’s camp had been overrun, hundreds dead, corpses floating so thick in the Huai River they looked like duckweed.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The Song commander leading the assault on Lingbi was Li Shuang. He was woken by his personal guard in the dead of night; his first reaction was disbelief—eighty thousand men, two months, collapsed overnight? But more routed troops kept arriving; by dawn, over a hundred stragglers from the Suzhou direction had gathered at the camp gate, dazed, as if their souls had yet to crawl out of that hell.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Li Shuang stood at the camp gate, watching the routed men, and something inside him began to sink. He knew his own troops had heard the news. The soldiers who had cheered just last night over breaching Lingbi’s outer wall now stood silent, staring at the survivors as if seeing their own futures.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>“Issue orders,” Li Shuang whispered to his deputy, “say General Guo has merely retreated to Qixian to regroup. Whoever spreads rumors will be executed.”\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The deputy obeyed and left. But Li Shuang knew even he didn’t believe it.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Morale takes months, years to build, but one night is enough to shatter it. That afternoon, units refused to fight during the assault on the city. When the battering ram reached the wall, soldiers looked up at the dense volleys of Jin arrows and retreated. The officers raised their swords to enforce discipline, but one soldier suddenly shouted: “Suzhou’s fallen—what’s the point of fighting?”\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>That cry was a signal. The entire assault force began to fall back. No matter how much the officers screamed and cursed, the soldiers refused to advance. Their hands trembled on their blades; their eyes no longer fixed on the enemy, but kept glancing south—as if safety lay across the Huai River.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Li Shuang did not execute anyone to restore order. He knew: kill one, ten flee—that was the law of collapse. He could only order a retreat, then sit alone in his tent all night.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The next morning, worse news arrived.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Heshilie Zhizhong gave him no chance. That Jin general who had held Suzhou for two months didn’t pause after crushing Guo Zhuo—he personally led a light cavalry force straight down the retreat route. His horsemen were few, but swift as a dagger, driving straight along the Song army’s path, smashing camps, charging units, giving them no time to regroup.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Li Shuang received the scout’s urgent report at noon: Jin cavalry had appeared on the road thirty li south of Lingbi, cutting down the remnants of the Suzhou-routed Song troops. Thirty li—mere moments to cavalry.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>“Retreat,” Li Shuang said, his lips trembling as he spoke the word.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The moment the retreat order was given, the camp descended into chaos. Soldiers scrambled to pack, drawing swords on each other over horses, some discarding armor and weapons entirely, fleeing south with only rations. In the grain depot, no one bothered to move the supplies—piles of rice sacks were abandoned. The armory was breached; soldiers surged in, grabbing valuable items, then discarded them along the way because they were too heavy to carry.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Li Shuang sat atop his horse, glancing back at Lingbi City. On the walls, Jin soldiers cheered; some tossed down the Song banners that had flown there two months prior. At the time, they had believed their greatest moment had arrived.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>From Lingbi to Hongxian—less than two hundred li—the routed troops ran for two days and nights.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The Song garrison in Hongxian learned of the disaster later. Their commander, Tian Junmai—the same man who had lost his banner during the Suzhou collapse—had barely gathered two thousand survivors and was preparing to reorganize when he saw dust blotting out the southern road. He thought it was reinforcements, sent men to meet them—and returned not with troops, but with Li Shuang’s men—no, not troops, but a mob of wounded, armorless, stumbling survivors.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>“You’ve been defeated too?” Tian Junmai asked.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>“We didn’t fight,” Li Shuang said, tumbling off his horse and collapsing on the ground. He drank two bowls of water before speaking. “We didn’t fight. But the men won’t fight anymore. After hearing about Suzhou, they lost their souls.”\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Tian Junmai’s face darkened. His own soldiers gathered around, listening to Li Shuang’s report: Guo Zhuo had gathered fewer than forty thousand survivors in Qixian; Lingbi had fallen, the Jin were pursuing; Heshilie Zhizhong’s cavalry might already be on the move.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Panic began.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Just as in Lingbi, the Song troops in Hongxian abandoned their positions and fled south. Tian Junmai tried to stop them, was shoved to the ground, and had two ribs broken. His personal guards barely dragged him to the roadside before the mob trampled him to death. He lay in the mud, watching his own soldiers surge past like sheep, one thought in his mind: It’s over.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The Jin pursuit turned into a massacre over the next three days.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Heshilie Zhizhong was a brilliant hunter. He knew his forces were small—barely six or seven thousand men—but he knew the Song army was already terrified. Terrified prey doesn’t need to be surrounded; just chase them relentlessly, and they’ll run themselves to death.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>He split his forces into three columns: one swept along the Huai River, one drove straight south of Hongxian, one circled behind to cut off retreat. Together, they numbered fewer than ten thousand, yet drove tens of thousands of Song troops like hunted dogs. The strongholds the Song had reclaimed—Sizhoucheng, Hongxian, Lingbi, and dozens of smaller forts along the way—all fell back into Jin hands within three weeks. Some didn’t even need to be attacked: when Jin cavalry appeared beneath the walls, the Song garrisons opened their gates and surrendered.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The worst scene occurred in Sizhoucheng.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Sizhoucheng had been the first victory of the northern campaign—Guo Zhuo had taken it in just three days. Now, a thousand Song soldiers remained inside, led by a commander named Zhao Duan. Upon hearing of the front’s collapse, Zhao Duan refused to flee. He decided to hold. He inventoried the grain—enough for a month—sealed all four gates, and prepared for street-to-street defense.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>But Heshilie Zhizhong gave him no chance.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The Jin besieged the city for three days without attacking. On the fourth night, they brought hundreds of captured Song routed troops to the city walls and made them shout to those inside.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>“Brothers, come out! The Jin don’t kill prisoners!”\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>“So many died in Suzhou—the Huai River ran red!”\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>“We’re from Sizhoucheng too—our mothers are still at home. Don’t fight!”\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The Song soldiers on the walls listened in silence. Zhao Duan tried to shout them down, but his voice drowned beneath the cries below. He watched his men lower their bows and crossbows; some began to weep softly.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>At the fifth watch, the gates opened from within—not broken by the Jin, but opened by the defenders themselves. Zhao Duan drew his sword to kill himself, but his personal guards seized him. They shoved him out the gate; as he turned, he saw the Song banner, raised only two months ago, being cut down by a Jin soldier’s blade, slowly falling.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>By mid-August, every territory the Song had seized in the initial northern campaign—except Qixian—had been lost. The Huai River defense line had reverted to its pre-war state—if one ignored the losses.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>But these losses could not be ignored.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Of the eighty thousand eastern force, only forty-three thousand remained after retreating south of the Huai. Fewer than eight thousand had died in battle; the rest had scattered, drowned, been captured, or simply deserted. Grain losses were incalculable—just the grain abandoned in Lingbi and Hongxian could feed the Jin for half a year. Weapons, armor, siege engines piled in mountains; the Jin later used this captured equipment to arm three meng’an-mouke units.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>But the deadliest loss wasn’t these.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The deadliest loss was the breaking of the Song army’s spine. The soldiers who fled back south of the Huai no longer had the fire of the campaign’s early days. They sat in camp, silent, unmoving, staring blankly north. Some woke screaming in nightmares—“The Jin are coming!”—and the entire tent would scramble up in panic; when they realized it was false, they lay back down, unable to sleep again.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Guo Zhuo was recalled to Lin’an to face charges. On the day he left, an old soldier outside Qixian’s gates asked him: “General, can we ever take it back?”\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Guo Zhuo paused. He did not turn, did not answer. He stepped into his carriage and lowered the curtain.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>On the same day, Wu Xi in the western theater finally moved—not northward, but by sending a swift messenger to Bianjing with his latest terms for negotiation.\u003C\u002Fp>",1542,"2026-06-20T13:48:22.834Z",1,"Qwen3-Next 80B","54fb2135ba0b25fd0e1a98ced0ab90bc6c2904c4de462d254a4798f4aee60d4b","from-special-forces-to-the-multiverse-chapter-190","from-special-forces-to-the-multiverse-chapter-188",205,"https:\u002F\u002Fnovelzhen.com\u002Fimages\u002Fcovers\u002Ffrom-special-forces-to-the-multiverse-cover.jpg"]