Chapter 624: Enter No Forest Lightly

The elders said that although the Frog God governs the rain, he doesn't like it to fall without end, so in Ouyue, even in the sixth month you'll often get several sunny days in a row.

But in a rainforest where ancient trees tower to the sky, the difference between shade and sun is slight; the tall, dense canopy blocks the sunlight, leaving only a few stray beams to reach the ground and fall upon the murmuring stream.

Splash—a barefoot hunter broke the ripples, darting swiftly across the damp ground, now leaping into a thicket, now scaling a moss-covered giant tree with bare hands, like a nimble leopard.

Over a hundred feet above the ground, Dagu found himself a hidden fork in a tree; he knew that as long as he stayed within the canopy, the Qin soldiers would never spot him.

Yet every single move the Qin soldiers made, Dagu could see as clearly as a fire before his eyes!

He reached out and grabbed an unlucky lizard passing by, twisted off its head, and tore open its thin, fragile scales; the flesh, reeking of rank blood, could then be chewed by his teeth and swallowed, warming his rumbling, famished stomach—a hunter's simple lunch.

Dagu carefully adjusted his bow and pinched away the moisture on his duck-feather arrows; days of continuous rain would affect a bow's accuracy, but the advantage of duck feathers was that they didn't soak up water, and the drawback was that they wouldn't fly far.

He raised his head and gazed into the distance. After silently counting to a hundred, first came a rustling sound; the dense undergrowth was pushed aside, and a group of Qin soldiers carrying halberds and wearing armor appeared in his view.

Unlike Dagu, who treated the forest as his own home, the Qin soldiers moved clumsily; they needed men wielding axes to hack through the vines and shrubs, and a startled snake or a passing lizard would send the Qin troops into a flurry of crossbow bolts!

"What a waste of good arrows."

Dagu sneered in contempt and once more concealed himself within the canopy. Attacking now would only reveal his position too early.

In this rare moment of rest before battle, the scene from months ago surfaced again in Dagu's mind—the sight of his father being dismembered by the Qin soldiers!

His father, Yixusong, son of the Frog God and lord of Ouyue, had fallen on the battlefield and, guided by the First Ancestor, had crossed to the other side of the rainbow bridge.

Dagu could never forget the Battle of Guilin three months past. The Ou people had already abandoned the flatlands and fled deep into the mountains and forests; though they were all excellent hunters, relying on hunting and gathering alone could not sustain such a vast crowd.

As food grew scarcer by the day, many wished to return home and plant rice. Moreover, the Qin general had destroyed the Ou people's altars and graves, stirring public outrage. His father, unable to resist the clansmen's clamor for war, led the attack on Guilin, never imagining it was a Qin trick. The Ou people's backward weapons could not breach the sturdy stockade, and Qin reinforcements surged in from all directions.

The Ou people could not withstand them and could only retreat. Yixusong covered the rear but was killed by the Qin soldiers; they could not even seize back his body in time.

In that battle, countless clansmen were slaughtered, and Yixusong himself was beheaded and dismembered. The Qin soldiers, as an insult, cut off his head and hung it on the stockade as a public display. Some clansmen who tried to recover Yixusong's body crept over in the night, only to be shot dead by volleys of crossbow bolts!

This was a trap. The Ou people made no further attempts. An atmosphere of defeat spread among them, and some cowardly elders even took their families and left the forest to surrender to the Qin army, guiding the way for them…

Fortunately, at this critical moment, Yixusong's younger brother, Dagu's uncle "Jiejun," was put forward and chosen as the new lord.

Jiejun was brave and resourceful. After consulting with the remaining warriors, he resolved to stick to Yixusong's original idea: resolutely avoid a head-on fight with the Qin army, and instead wage a mobile war in the vast forest, exploiting the Yue people's strengths in climbing mountains, crossing ridges, and rowing boats, using the high peaks and dense woods to keep the Qin forces tied up in circles…

Over the past three months, this method of warfare had proven surprisingly effective. The Ou people no longer died in vain; instead, it was the Qin soldiers who bled continuously. Scattering the army everywhere was likely the greatest mistake the Qin general had made. Any garrison needed food, and the Ou people had long since strengthened their defenses and cleared the fields. Even if some surrendered and started planting now, it would be months before any harvest.

When local supplies couldn't meet the need, they had to be shipped from the rear. Thus, the long roads carved along the rivers, with Qin supply convoys stretched out like a single-file snake, became perfect targets for ambush.

Besides harassing the supply routes, the Ou people also frequently visited the stockades the Qin soldiers built after seizing their homeland. In the pitch-black night, they would creep over, loose an arrow at the patrolling sentries, cut off their heads, and then vanish back into the darkness.

By this method, Dagu alone had taken five Qin heads, offering each one in sacrifice to his father…

The incessant harassment vexed the insufferably arrogant Qin army beyond endurance. After losing many men, the Qin army launched a counterattack. Led by those traitorous elders, they organized over a thousand men to enter the forest in a group, attempting to locate the Ou people's stronghold and wipe them out.

But what the Qin soldiers did not know was that from the moment they set foot in the forest, they had embarked on a road of no return, straight to their deaths…

In the Battle of Guilin, the Qin soldiers, armored and sword-bearing, advancing in square formations, had looked so mighty that defeating them seemed utterly impossible.

But once they entered the dense forest, these warriors became toddling infants. Their shoes slipped on the wet moss; the sunless jungle made it hard for them to tell direction; animals darting and flitting everywhere drew their attention; their bodies were weighed down by cumbersome armor, and their once-orderly ranks became utterly scattered and chaotic.

The Ou people, meanwhile, roamed this familiar hunting ground, silently keeping to the periphery, occasionally stirring up a disturbance to draw the Qin soldiers rushing about. After two days of this cat-and-mouse game, the Qin army, having achieved nothing, looked exactly like an exhausted beast of prey…

Unlike at Guilin, the prey and the hunter had now swapped roles!

Watching these Qin soldiers sprawled out every which way, resting by the stream, Dagu took out his bamboo bow.

"Dagu, not yet. A good hunter knows how to wait for the right moment…"

His father's words seemed to echo in his ears still.

Dagu slowly drew the bowstring, aiming at this band of insatiable invaders.

"Tebo, I am no longer little Dagu, no longer a child. After the blood sacrifice to the ancestor spirits, the elders tattooed the face patterns on me, just like the markings on the Frog God's body…"

Within those black facial tattoos were a pair of eyes burning with the furious flames of vengeance.

"Now, my name is Dagu. I am a man, a headhunter!"

…

An hour later, the main force of the Qin army that had entered the mountains to hunt and exterminate arrived at the spot where the vanguard had been ambushed.

When Zhao Tuo arrived, soldiers were crowded around the tree, every one of them watching with hair-raising horror.

"Make way, make way, Commandant Zhao is here!"

The crowd hastily parted to let him through, this great hero who had slain the Lord of Western Ou, Yixusong, and who was rumored to be the sworn brother of some high-ranking frontier official.

Zhao Tuo beheld a ghastly sight: over a hundred Qin corpses, stripped of their clothes, lay discarded by the stream, the water running red with their blood. In the distance, scavenging beasts prowled, their mouths watering with greed.

Every corpse was missing its head, just like the Ou people who had been beheaded and displayed after the Battle of Guilin…

Zhao Tuo frowned and crouched down, turning one body over. A huge centipede scurried out, startling his personal guards, and then it was discovered that everyone's heart had been carved out.

"The Ou people really do eat human flesh…"

The Qin soldiers shuddered with cold fear, but Zhao Tuo, who had long interacted with the Yue people and even had a Yue sworn brother, knew that, like the heads, the hearts and livers were also prized items the Ou people used for blood sacrifices to their ancestor spirits.

Some men, burning with righteous indignation, proposed pursuing them deep into the forest, but Zhao Tuo refused and calmly gave the order.

"Collect the bodies."

The scavenging beasts had been driven off, but the corpses were still crawling with reddish-brown ants as thick as a finger joint. Compared to those on the Central Plains, the snakes and insects of Lingnan were nearly all oversized.

These red ants, each like a little bee that hadn't yet grown its wings, had round, bulging heads with a pair of bracket-shaped antennae stretching out in front, flexing nimbly. Their compound eyes flickered with a dim glow, and their two pincer-like mandibles, curved like tweezers, were gnawing at the Qin soldiers' flesh. Behind their slender waists dragged a large, oval abdomen, round and plump, with the tail tip slightly cocked, wriggling left and right in rhythm with their gnawing. Inside those bellies was the fresh flesh and blood of their comrades…

Someone couldn't help but vomit. The atmosphere was heavy; more than a desire for revenge, what filled the air was fear—fear of this sight, fear of this land.

Zhao Tuo stood up and looked at the green hell surrounding him, his gaze grave.

Swamps, wetlands, ravines, and jungles provided an ideal habitat for snakes and insects, forming a vast, inescapable net. Aside from the ants, the most annoying were the giant leeches, and the most terrifying were the venomous mosquitoes; anyone bitten by them would inevitably contract an infection and die violently within days.

With heavy rain and flash floods as accompaniment, and pestilence and miasma adding to the revelry, the Ouyue people appeared and vanished like ghosts, loosing cold arrows from the shadows.

Here, the Qin army was like a powerfully built strongman who feared no fierce beast, yet had no way to deal with the tiny bugs that crawled onto his body and bit him!

If they followed Tu Sui's plan and pushed deep to hunt and exterminate, wiping out Ouyue as quickly as possible, then before the Ou people were annihilated, the Qin soldiers' bones would likely already be strewn across the wilderness!

It seemed this war could not be easily ended just by seizing a few flatlands or killing a few lords…

"Retreat!"

Zhao Tuo made a prompt decision and issued the order to withdraw, bringing a look of relief to everyone's face.

He recalled words Blackie had spoken many years ago, after the conquest of Yuzhang, when two semi-illiterates had chatted about "the art of war."

"Little brother, if you ever fight the southern barbarians in the future, you must remember one thing I say."

The words were laden with meaning, as if Blackie, across the long years, had seen the predicament Zhao Tuo was in today.

"When you reach a forest, do not enter!"

……

Though the western-route Qin army had seized a few small flatlands, they were steadily losing men under the Ou people's constant guerrilla harassment — a style of warfare these jungle peoples seemed to possess innately.

Hundreds of li away, at the Southern Yue Longchuan Stockade, the central-route army that had set out from Yuzhang faced the same vexations. What chilled the soldiers even more was that the Southern Yue people here were not only avid headhunters, but genuine cannibals. In an empty stockade deep in the forest that they had expended enormous effort to destroy, a campfire still holding its warmth had several human hands roasting over it, one of them gnawed down to bare bone…

They were all poor Qin soldiers, captured while separated from the main force.

"This general has had enough of those forests!"

Upon learning that the punitive sweep had cost two hundred casualties while killing only a few dozen Yue people, General Jia of the central route roared in fury.

Compared to the Yue people, the jungle itself was a mighty and terrifying enemy — vast, rushing torrents formed impassable natural barriers; the unbroken mountain ranges were choked with tangled brush and twisting vines; towering trees pierced the clouds, weaving a gloomy, sunless environment of oppressive heat and unending monsoon rains.

Without the shelter of this immense jungle, destroying the stubbornly resisting Yue people would be an effortless task for the Qin army's might!

After pondering, General Jia came up with what he believed was a brilliantly clever idea:

"Set fires! Send word to every route — set fires from all directions at once! This general will burn these thousand-li dense forests of Lingnan, along with the Yue people inside them, the snakes, the insects, the rats, the ants — burn them all to ash!"

(End of chapter)