Chapter 784: So There Really Was One Han Worth Five Barbarians

All of this went exactly as Chi Tian had predicted. Their journey across the Hot Sea was full of alarms but no real danger, and even the soldiers garrisoned at Helie City never suspected them.

Three years earlier, after Guo Guangyi seized power in Suyab, Guo Xuanchao and the others who refused to submit to him had fled to the Gray Wolf Tribe, where Guo Guangcheng's elder brother-in-law Chi Tian lived.

Guo Guangyi then mobilized several thousand men to attack the Gray Wolf Tribe. The tribe's chieftain He Chi and the Guo family leader Guo Xuanchao were both defeated and killed.

The rest fled up into the snow mountains, where they have now been hiding for a year and a half.

As for why they are coming down now, it is simple enough — they can't hold out any longer.

Suyab is not the Central Plains. The only places here that can sustain people are south of the Hot Sea (Lake Issyk-Kul) and the long strip from Talas to Suyab where there is snowmelt water.

Everywhere else has no valleys to block the winter wind and no sufficient water sources. Scattered bands of one or two hundred people can scrape by in small tribes, but once numbers grow, there isn't even enough grass root for people to eat, let alone for grazing herds.

That these people managed to hold out for over a year already exceeded most people's expectations. Most had thought they could only last two or three months.

A junior officer from Helie City reluctantly spurred his horse out of the city for a look and sighed inwardly.

When these people first refused to submit to the Khan King and fled after their defeat, there had been over a thousand of them. Now only four or five hundred remained.

It seemed they truly could not hold on any longer. Even coming back to do hard labor was better than starving to death.

The junior officer glanced at Chi Tian with pity. He knew this proud fellow — originally one of the finest archers around the Hot Sea. He never imagined he would be reduced to this state.

Then he waved them through without even sending soldiers to escort them. He did not believe these people could flee anywhere else.

As for why he didn't inspect them properly or send a few dozen men to escort them?

What was he thinking? This was February on a plateau over two thousand meters above sea level. The freezing wind could turn a man into an icicle. Guo Guangyi hadn't married his daughter off to this junior officer, so why should he risk his life on such a task? With that time, he'd rather be home holding his woman and sleeping.

The only men with that kind of discipline and initiative would be the border guards of a future republic.

If this junior officer really had brought a few dozen men to escort them, then there would be no need to fight at all.

Because men who would still do their duty in such heavy snow, who would risk their lives for a few hundred coins a month — those would have to be super-elite troops like the Yue Family Army or the Qi Family Army. No! Even the Yue Family Army and Qi Family Army couldn't do it if their pay was short.

If there were soldiers of that quality here, Yao Yuanfu would never dare attack Suyab City. Men like that would be enough to hang them up and pound them.

Guo Guangyi was not in Suyab City. How clever he was! The court would obviously never tolerate a rebellion like his and would certainly send troops to attack. Staying in Suyab City would be like a turtle caught in a jar.

So Guo Guangyi had planned it all out from the start. He had directly relocated one hundred thousand of the one hundred forty thousand people around Suyab, turning the four hundred li from the Tang Monk's Old Road to Suyab City into a complete wasteland. Any army coming from Shule would not find a single grain of food.

The remaining tens of thousands withdrew into Suyab City, which was stocked with large quantities of grain. Guo Guangyi himself waited east of the Bao Da Army City (Tokmok), a hundred li away, biding his time.

When the punitive army from Khotan had battered itself bloody and exhausted against the scorched earth and the strong walls of Suyab, he would suddenly strike with thirty thousand elite cavalry and annihilate the court's forces.

After that, he could rest easy and become the Great Khan of the Suyab and Talas region, and might even conquer the Samanid Persians and achieve a great enterprise.

That wild-dog fugitive Satuq had promised that as long as Guo Guangyi could hold off the court's great army, he would open the gates to Anxi City (Bukhara) for him.

As for how high the chances of success were, Guo Guangyi believed they were very high! Because someone had done this before, and succeeded.

More than two hundred years ago, the Turgesh Khagan Sulu had created a wasteland right here. The Anxi troops had not dared to advance at all. They merely found some merchants to confirm that it truly had become a wasteland, and then abandoned the option of armed suppression.

After that, Khagan Sulu not only successfully occupied Suyab, but also commanded a hundred thousand bowstrings and awed all of Transoxiana, repeatedly defeating the Arabs' eastward advances.

Even the Great Tang at the height of its prosperity in the early Kaiyuan era could do nothing about him. They could only confer the title of Princess Jiaohe on the daughter of Ashina Huaidao and marry her off to him as a peace bride, while the Arabs and Tibetans also vied to win him over.

Khagan Sulu directly married one Arab khatun, one Great Tang khatun, and one Great Tibetan khatun. No one could have been more glorious.

Guo Guangyi chuckled twice. Suyab was ten thousand li from the Central Plains. Never mind sending a great army to suppress him — even sending an envoy, one had to worry whether the man would survive the journey.

As long as he controlled this place, even the Great Tang at its peak could do nothing. What could a newly founded Zhou state that hadn't even unified the realm do to him?

If he could grow strong enough, perhaps that Zhang Zhao would even marry a daughter off to him to placate him. Even if she wasn't a real princess, she would at least have to be Li Shengtian's granddaughter.

"Send word to Guo Guangjie: the new Suyab city must be completed before the fifth month!" Guo Guangyi gave the order, brimming with satisfaction, as if that beautiful future were already within reach.

At this moment, Guo Guangjie was standing outside Suyab City. After nearly a year of construction, the outer city of Suyab — that is, the original Suyab City — had been fully reinforced. Only the new city, the newly built inner city, still needed a little more work to finish.

When he heard that Chi Tian and the others had come to surrender, Guo Guangjie was quite excited. In earlier days, when he was around ten years old, Chi Tian — who had been qualified to marry his sister Anuduo to Guo Guangcheng — had been a truly glorious warrior.

And Chi Tian's sister Anuduo had been the beauty young Guo Guangjie most coveted in his youth.

To make the man he had once looked up to kneel before him made Guo Guangjie feel light-headed. He grabbed Chi Tian's wife by the hair and pulled her out from among the slave women.

This time, he would enjoy that wife of his — no longer so beautiful — right in front of Chi Tian, and utterly crush the last shred of confidence of this man who refused to submit.

"Aksa, assign thirty warriors to me. I'm going out of the city myself." Guo Guangjie shouted with a loud laugh.

He was Guo Guangyi's full younger brother, so Suyab City had been entrusted to him to garrison. And Aksa was the leader of the six hundred warriors inside the city.

These warriors were no ordinary armed herdsmen. Every one of them was a brave man with at least a suit of triple-layered leather armor. They were called the White Wolf Army, Guo Guangyi's trusted personal force, numbering around two thousand in total.

Aksa looked at the several hundred people staggering in the freezing rain outside, and at the tattered little carts behind them.

These people didn't have a single horse, only a few small donkeys so weak they could barely pull the little carts. There shouldn't be any danger, so he nodded.

"Ma'ernang, you go with Beg. Don't let those people's filthy hands touch a single hair on Beg." Aksa gave the order.

The junior officer called Ma'ernang flexed his wrists, then asked Aksa, "Do we need to put on armor? Those people look like they don't have much fight in them."

Aksa thought for a moment. He was still cautious. Let Ma'ernang and his men put on armor. That way, the hundred or so men he brought as backup wouldn't need to.

"Take fifty men, all in armor."

Crack, crack! Leather boots crunched on the lightly frozen ground with a crisp sound.

This was the south gate of Suyab, where the inner city was under construction, so the whole area looked like one big worksite. The refusers whom Guo Guangyi had condemned to slavery were all forcibly detained here doing hard labor.

Guo Guangjie's eyebrows nearly flew off his face, because he saw Chi Tian wearing nothing but a tattered sheepskin coat, kneeling dejectedly on the ground still covered with ice flowers.

Chi Tian's wife let out a piercing wail. She was not crying for herself, but because she saw her husband — proud as a gray eagle in ordinary days — casting aside all his dignity. That was harder for her to bear than any humiliation done to her.

"You fool! You fool! Why didn't you run to Khotan! Now that you've come back, this beast won't spare us either.

If the Gray Eagle of the Gray Wolf Tribe doesn't live, no one will ever be able to avenge us."

"Ha ha ha ha!" Guo Guangjie laughed up at the sky. "The Gray Eagle of the Gray Wolf Tribe? What I see now is a big-headed fly on a wild dog's carcass. You still want revenge? Come on! Here is my fine head. Come and take it!"

With that, Guo Guangjie grabbed Chi Tian's wife's ragged clothes and tore them open, exposing skin that was not exactly fair.

But Guo Guangjie's wild laughter gradually died down, because he did not see Chi Tian howl in agony. Instead, he saw mockery in the man's eyes.

What do you mean by this? I've torn your wife's clothes off, and you're happy?

But immediately, Guo Guangjie saw a face he had once known very well. "Rotten-Eye Dog, so it's you brothers stirring up trouble!"

It had been a long time since Guo Guangjie had heard anyone use that insulting name, Rotten-Eye Dog.

It was a nickname people gave him because a branch had scratched the corner of his left eye when he was a child, leaving a scar.

He stared in surprise and looked closely. "Erlang... Guo Erlang!"

Guo Guangjie recognized him at once. In the past, he was just a sore-eyed dog no one thought worth a glance. Guo Guangcheng was the second son of the Guo clan head, so of course Guo Guangjie knew him.

The moment "Guo Erlang" left his mouth, Guo Guangjie jumped up, wanting to flee into the protection of the armored soldiers behind him.

But Guo Guangcheng had already moved. He stepped forward with his left leg, and the meteor hammer hidden inside his robes shot out.

Thud! It struck Guo Guangjie squarely on the right cheek. Guo Guangjie let out a shriek, spraying out a mouthful of shattered teeth mixed with blood, and passed out on the spot.

Yao Yuanfu roared, hurled himself out like a fierce tiger, and with a miraculous flick of both hands, two iron maces appeared in his grip.

Bang! He smashed open the head of a White Wolf Army soldier in a single blow.

Then he thrust with his left hand, striking another White Wolf Army soldier square in the chest.

The man wore leather armor and had a heart-protecting mirror on his chest, but who was Yao Yuanfu? He was a peerless fierce general second only to Gao Xingzhou, Huangfu Yu, and the like.

His full-force strike caved in even the heart-protecting mirror. The White Wolf Army soldier vomited a mouthful of blood and could only writhe on the ground.

At the same moment Yao Yuanfu struck, the men behind him — the most terrifying yabing guards from the Central Plains, who had been bottling up their fury — howled and charged out.

The White Wolf Army? What garbage!

Those fifty armored soldiers had looked impressive enough swaggering about, but the moment Yao Yuanfu's dozen-odd men hit them, they were cut into pieces, and in an extremely short time were beaten into corpses strewn across the ground.

"Bai Zhu'er, don't let them close the gate!" Yao Yuanfu bellowed. A giant of a man who had just been smashing a White Wolf Army soldier's head with a great hammer dropped it at once and started running.

"Loose arrows! Loose arrows!" Inside the gate passage, Aksa, a warrior who had been through a hundred battles, immediately saw that these men in black robes over strange armor were truly terrifying.

"Get out of the way!" Big Bai Zhu'er was a horrifyingly brawny man, two meters tall and weighing two hundred thirty or forty jin. Because his skin was fair and he hadn't earned the nickname "Bear," he was called Bai Zhu'er — White Piglet.

He lived up to his name, just like the fat white pigs rarely seen these days. A moment ago, to keep up the disguise, he had been kneeling on the ground pushing a cart the whole time.

Now that he stood up, he was simply a terrifying killing machine. He threw away the great hammer and, with one wild boar charge, slammed into the dozen or so soldiers who were about to close the gate.

Those scrawny fellows were in no condition to withstand this white wild boar's charge. The ones at the front were sent flying outright.

One man with a short blade tried to stab Bai Zhu'er. Bai Zhu'er bellowed and got in first with a huge slap.

Clang! It was clearly a slap, but it landed with the effect of an iron ruler striking home. The short-blade soldier went flying, man and blade together, and promptly obtained an infant-like sleep.

Only then did the enemy arrows arrive. Bai Zhu'er ducked behind the gate with a roar, braced his shoulder against it, and single-handedly shoved the several-hundred-jin gate completely open.

Then another wave of arrows came. With no way to dodge, Bai Zhu'er howled and took them all with his body. Before long he was shot full of arrows like a hedgehog.

Yao Yuanfu didn't even glance at Bai Zhu'er. The enemy had no crossbows, so they couldn't do anything to Bai Zhu'er in his ring-mail underlayer and cloth-faced iron armor. He might look like a hedgehog now, but in truth his skin wasn't even scratched.

What Yao Yuanfu cared about now was how fast the armored soldiers behind him were donning their armor.

Because on the way here, having twenty-some men already armored had been risky enough; they couldn't possibly have had everyone armored. Right now those twenty-some men were doing the slaughtering, while the armored soldiers behind were putting on their armor.

Aksa understood very well: this had to be the Central Plains elite the Khan had spoken of.

These men were nothing the Samanid Persian warriors could compare to. The gate had to be closed now, or else these few hundred men alone would take the lives of all of them.

Bai Zhu'er alone held the gate open, not letting the White Wolf Army close it. A dozen men couldn't shove him back. When the distant White Wolf Army saw that dozens of arrows still couldn't pierce his armor, Aksa shouted, and over a hundred soldiers charged forward with swords and blades.

Bai Zhu'er was delighted, because he wore two layers of armor, while the hundred-odd men opposite him had none.

And they hadn't brought spears either. Those things were several meters long and quite cumbersome; unless heading to a battlefield, no one wanted to carry one. So the White Wolf Army men charging over had only swords and blades.

Clang, clang, clang! A chaotic clatter rang out as the White Wolf Army's swords and blades stabbed at Bai Zhu'er, but the sharp edges couldn't even scratch the surface of his cloth-faced iron armor.

Because the hammered-tight cloth was studded with round bosses, which posed a tremendous obstacle to thrusting and slashing blades.

Bai Zhu'er gave a cold snort. Through his black yaksha face mask, he looked at these barbarians who at most came up to his shoulder, sank his qi to his dantian, and pulled from behind his hip a pair of iron hammers about two cun long.

Unarmored against armored — what were they thinking?

There was no need for any technique at all. Bai Zhu'er put his back to the gate to keep these fellows from swarming him and pinning him down, then looked at the mass of dark heads and simply smashed them like whack-a-mole.

One barbarian raising a curved blade didn't pull it back in time before Bai Zhu'er hammered his skull. In an instant, a blood-red flower seemed to bloom amid the dirt-yellow hair, blood pouring over his whole face like water brimming over a basin.

The barbarian beside him stared blankly at the short blade in his hand. A moment ago he had slashed Bai Zhu'er and heard a crisp clang, and then the blade edge had chipped.

And in the moment he stood dazed, Bai Zhu'er's hammer smashed his head down into his neck a notch, as if he had suddenly become three fen shorter.

Aksa was dumbfounded. He stared blankly at the gate, where that bear-like giant stood with his back to it, beating the hundred-odd men he had sent into howls and wails.

He even had a feeling that the other several hundred men needn't bother armoring up, because by the time they finished, the men outside would have finished too, and in the end they still wouldn't win.

Congratulations to him — he guessed right, but there was no prize.

Bai Zhu'er's ferocity bought the other armored soldiers the perfect window to don their armor. Once they were armored, the three hundred armored soldiers swiftly formed a terrifying army that struck dread into all who saw it.

Yao Yuanfu's method of fighting was simple: a few elite marksmen climbed onto the flat-roofed houses along the street and picked off the enemy's bravest fighters; dozens of fierce men wielding axes and hammers, suited to close combat, roamed and pursued; the rest formed ranks with long spears and simply pushed straight forward.

They moved as one, entering through the south gate. The first thing they met was Aksa's fully armored White Wolf Army.

This unit was decent enough — even caught off guard, it had still mustered three hundred men in the shortest possible time.

Unfortunately, their opponents were too strong. These were yabing guards forged through two hundred years of slaughter in the Central Plains. Before the two sides even closed, Yao Yuanfu roared, and over a hundred armored soldiers immediately drew the stiff bows from their backs. Even in full armor, they could loose three arrows in quick succession.

In an instant, the White Wolf Army fell in droves. Their so-called three-layer leather armor could stand up to a shabby six- or seven-dou bow and fend off stray arrows.

But against stiff bows of nine dou or more, fired at close range, it had little effect. Though it wouldn't kill on the spot, not much fighting strength remained.

As for the iron-armored men among the White Wolf Army, the marksmen who had climbed onto the rooftops dealt with them.

Because Aksa wore a flashy Persian mail coat and an iron helmet, he took seven or eight arrows almost in a single instant. The pain knocked him flat on the ground, his face twisted in a grimace.

"Kill the barbarians!" After the three volleys, the Tangut giant Luo Yechuan, prowling beside the spear formation, roared, gripped his two short-handled axes, and crashed headlong into the White Wolf Army's formation opposite.

He didn't dodge blades at all, simply taking the blows on his iron armor, and then easily sent the enemy reeling, men and horses toppling.

Yao Yuanfu was momentarily stunned. This... it seemed he had overestimated the enemy's fighting strength. Against weaklings like these, why bother forming ranks at all?

"Kill the barbarians!" He too roared, and led the charge with an iron mace in each hand.

And the yabing guards he had brought — which of them wasn't a battle-hardened veteran? What kind of army called for what kind of fighting was already carved into their very bones.

Against the likes of what stood before them, there was no need to form ranks. Just rely on the precious armor on their bodies and the steel axes and hammers in their hands, and slaughter away. Why waste so much effort!

Chi Tian helped his wife up and draped his own fur coat over her, then exchanged a look of utter shock with Guo Tianfang. This was far too easy!

They knew the White Wolf Army's strength. Why had Suyab fallen so quickly into Guo Guangyi's hands after Guo Xuanli's death? Because the fifteen hundred White Wolf Army soldiers he brought with him were more than anyone could handle.

This White Wolf Army was no pack of pushovers — it was the elite force that had marched north from Talas and made the Oghuz warriors howl like ghosts and wail like demons, then marched south and sent the Samanid Persian warriors running home crying for their mothers.

Every man had a suit of leather armor, and more than half wore iron armor. Back then, fifteen hundred of them had beaten three or four thousand men in Suyab so badly that the defenders lost all nerve to resist.

But now, looking at this — holy shit! These armored soldiers from the Central Plains were beating the White Wolf Army like they were thrashing their own worthless grandsons.

That fat man called Bai Zhu'er alone had beaten to death at least twenty or thirty White Wolf Army soldiers.

Guo Tianfang's lips trembled, and with a wail he burst into tears. "You donkey-fuckers, everything the old ancestors said was true — one Han really is worth five barbarians!

These Han, these sons of Tang, really are invincible soldiers of Heaven!"

Tomorrow I'm taking my wife and kids on a spring outing, so the update will probably have to be written when I get back in the evening. How about that — I'm only half an hour ahead of you in finding out where the plot goes. Isn't that exciting?

(End of Chapter)

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