Chapter 770: Humbled Survival on the Brink, Bloody Blades at the Trade Fair

The first white-hair blizzard of early winter raged like countless invisible, biting ice blades, howling and rampaging across the pockmarked, hard-baked wilderness beyond the frontier.

The swirling snow and ice violently swept up sand and gravel from the ground, completely burying the smuggling tunnels that the remnants of the Rouran and Turks had relied on for life-saving supplies, deep under snowdrifts that reached a horse's belly.

Inside the Turkic Royal Tent, the bronze brazier that usually burned red-hot now held only a few embers smoking with black fumes; Moheduo stood up, his face dark and gloomy.

He lifted his right foot, clad in a heavy leather boot, and kicked the brazier over with a vicious stomp, letting the faint sparks scatter across the priceless but now-chilled snow leopard skin rug.

"That insufferable villain Chen Yan—he wants to starve us Turkic warriors to death in this blizzard!"

Moheduo tore at his disheveled braids with both hands, his nails gouging several glaring bloody scratches into his scalp, but the rage churning in his chest could not fend off the bone-freezing cold all around him.

Without raw iron, the Turkic longswords that had been blunted in the Battle of Jinshan were now nothing but scrap metal.

Without smuggled salt and winter provisions, the wounded soldiers who had barely escaped death on the battlefield were freezing to death in droves at a hair-raising rate.

This proud and arrogant Turkic Crown Prince, when faced with a survival crisis that could uproot his entire tribe, finally bent his once-straight spine in humiliating submission before the wind and snow.

Moheduo turned around, slammed his fists against the icy tent pole, and squeezed out an order from his throat, a command laced with endless sorrow and compromise.

"Go select the fattest cattle and sheep from the tribe, lead out our few hundred finest Hequ stallions kept for breeding, and head to the new Trade Fair in Xiazhou to exchange them for life-saving salt and iron."

At the same time, deep in another snow-swept grassland, the Rouran Khan Nuhe Ti, under this same terrifying economic blockade, swallowed his bloody, broken teeth and made an equally humiliating decision.

The scene followed these foreign survival parties trudging through the blizzard, all the way to the entrance of the newly built Official Mutual Trade Fair outside Xiazhou City of Great Zhou, a sprawling complex covering a vast area.

Ten flaying scaffolds, each several zhang high, stood like ten nine-abyss demons with gaping jaws, erected in the very center of the Trade Fair's wide square in a manner that made one's liver and gallbladder quake with terror.

A gale swept across the square, violently swinging the ten dried, purple-black merchant corpses that had been flayed and wind-dried for smuggling goods privately.

The desiccated bones clattered against each other in midair, producing a series of crisp, hair-raising sounds—a deathly symphony from hell that instantly cowed every foreign envoy who had brought cattle and sheep to beg for trade.

Zhang Wenqian, the Deputy Governor of Xiazhou, was dressed today in a thick, warm fox-fur Great Cloak. He sat upright in a Grand Master's Chair cushioned with warm jade at the Trade Fair's central hub, holding a carved red copper hand warmer in both hands.

He watched the Turks and Rouran people shivering in the wind and snow, their eyes fixed on the scaffolds in terror, and slowly curled his lips into a cold, cruel arc, like a predator watching its prey's futile struggle.

A burly Turkic general braced himself and walked up to the wooden table before Zhang Wenqian. He took off his felt hat, presented a sheepskin scroll covered in the counts of cattle, sheep, and warhorses with both hands, his rough hands trembling slightly in the cold wind.

"Great official of Great Zhou, these are the goods our Turks have brought this time. We only ask for a thousand catties of salt and five hundred fine mountain-cleaving longswords to survive the winter."

Zhang Wenqian didn't even take the sheepskin scroll, which reeked of mutton. He merely used the finger holding the hand warmer to casually tap the Trade Fair price list written in cinnabar on the table.

"Read the rules clearly before you speak. Our Xiazhou Trade Fair has always been fair to all, with prices clearly marked."

The Turkic general followed the direction of Zhang Wenqian's finger. When his bloodshot eyes landed on the words on the wooden plaque, they bulged out instantly from extreme shock and terror.

It was written there in plain sight: a single shoddy iron kitchen knife was to be exchanged for two fully grown, fat plow oxen, while a single catty of smuggled salt mixed with a large amount of yellow sand was forcibly priced at one top-grade Hequ warhorse.

This terrifying "Scissors Differential" pricing, a hundred times more outrageous than outright robbery, was like a sharp butcher's knife, openly pressed against the carotid artery of the entire grassland tribe.

"You Central Plains people are drinking the blood of us Turkic warriors!"

The Turkic general, enraged and humiliated, could no longer suppress his fury. He slammed both hands on the wooden table, the veins on his neck bulging like knotted little snakes.

Zhang Wenqian remained seated, unmoving. He lowered his head, breathed in the warmth from the hand warmer, then lifted his eyelids and stared at the other man with a cold gaze, as if looking at a dead thing.

"And that's not all. Duke Chen set a new iron rule yesterday: from today onward, our Xiazhou Trade Fair absolutely forbids any crude barter transactions."

He reached his free hand into a wooden box on the table, pulled out a handful of brand-new copper coins with an unusual sheen, then opened his fingers, letting the coins clatter onto the tabletop.

"All foreign caravans must first convert your cattle, sheep, and warhorses into this Great Zhou Universal Currency at the prices set by our Xiazhou, and only then use the copper coins to buy salt and iron at our warehouses."

The Turkic general reached out a rough finger, picked up a copper coin, and gave it a slight bend. The cheap coin, mixed with thirty percent lead, bent with a white crease under his fingertip.

This ultimate poison scheme—a double plunder through both the minting exchange rate and commodity prices—finally pushed this grassland warrior, who had lived his life licking blood off a knife's edge, to the brink of complete mental collapse.

"You Zhou State demons who suck blood through your abacus tricks—I'll tear down this black-hearted stall of yours today!"

The Turkic general roared, his large hand on the sword hilt suddenly exerting force. With a harsh scraping sound, half of a gleaming grassland curved blade was already drawn from its scabbard.

Before the general's curved blade could swing out fully, a black afterimage, like a Guimo, shot out from behind the screen beside Zhang Wenqian, as swift as a thunderbolt.

Gao Jiong, wearing the dark-patterned brocade uniform of the Mingjing Si that represented slaughter, had a look of extreme, frenzied cruelty flickering in his dark, hawk-like eyes.

Gao Jiong's arm traced a cold, gleaming arc in the air too fast for the eye to catch. The fine steel dagger in his hand, designed for lethal kills, pierced through the Turkic general's wrist tendons without any resistance.

Warm blood sprayed across the price list on the wooden table. The Turkic general let out a beast-like howl of agony, and his curved blade clattered to the ground.

Dozens of Embroidered Envoys hidden on the high platforms around the Trade Fair appeared simultaneously. The steel crossbows in their hands, already loaded, fired in rapid succession. A dense rain of arrows, whistling with the sound of death, instantly pinned several foreign guards who tried to rush forward to help, nailing them into pools of blood.

Gao Jiong stepped over the corpse on the ground and stomped heavily on the Turkic general's gushing wrist. The sole of his boot ground against the shattered bones, producing a sickening crunch.

"Daring to draw a blade against the rules set by Duke Chen—you grassland scum don't want a single drop of Turkic blood left, do you?"

Gao Jiong reversed his grip on the blood-dripping dagger and made a clean, swift slash across the general's neck, severing his trachea and the pulsing carotid artery.

He turned his head to look at the foreign envoys behind him, who were stumbling back in terror, their faces drained of blood. His icy voice echoed across the square.

"Men, flay this lawless beast on the spot and hang him on the eleventh scaffold for me. Let these barbarians who haven't yet learned to bow their heads and accept their fate remember this lesson well."

Under this iron-blooded, merciless suppression, order within the Trade Fair instantly collapsed into a deathly silence of submission. The foreign envoys who had wanted to argue on principle abandoned all dignity, accepting this bone-sucking economic slaughter like lambs led to the slaughter.

This economic plunder, built on absolute military force and monopoly, displayed a terrifying, hair-raising power to absorb wealth.

In just half a month's time, the dozens of fine abacuses used for accounting in the Xiazhou Prefecture treasury had been snapped—several tens of them—by the fingers of the accountants working day and night without rest.

Chests of pure gold and silver, tens of thousands of top-grade Hequ warhorses, and an endless sea of fat cattle and sheep as far as the eye could see poured into Xiazhou City's defensive system like an unending tsunami.

The massive fiscal deficit Chen Yan had incurred earlier to rebuild Xiazhou's military was instantly filled by this economic battle that saw no swords or blades, even reaching a state of wealth rivaling a nation—something generations of frontier generals had never dared to dream of.

At this moment, Chen Yan was draped in a heavy, luxurious dark-purple Mangwen Robe. He stood as steady as Mount Tai, proudly overlooking the scene from atop Xiazhou's towering blue brick city wall.

The cold wind ruffled the precious fur trim of his robe. His eyes, as deep and unfathomable as an abyss, looked down from on high at the endless river of wealth flowing outside the city.

Watching the foreign envoys, their eyes hollow from being squeezed dry, leading a few carts of inferior goods back to the grasslands like walking corpses, a look of supreme arrogance, as if looking down on all creation, slowly spread across Chen Yan's chiseled, stern face.

He extended his long, powerful fingers to rest on the ice-covered crenellation of the parapet, gently rubbing his fingertips against the rough brick surface twice.

Chen Yan turned his head, looking at Lu Ming and Zhang Wenqian beside him, whose faces were also flushed with excitement. His low, commanding voice, radiating supreme dominance, rang out in the cold wind atop the gate tower.

"Transmit this Duke's General's Order: immediately allocate this windfall squeezed from the barbarians, and restart all the Junxie Gongfang in Xiazhou City to work day and night."

He pointed his finger toward the distant depths of the northern grasslands, a brutal ambition surging in his eyes, enough to chill the blood of any feudal lord.

"This Duke will use this gold, silver, and iron ore to forcibly forge five thousand elite Heavy Armor Iron Cavalry, armed to the teeth, before the spring thaw."