The plains shuddered under the thunder of hooves.

Spears longer than a man’s body swept through the air, harvesting soldiers’ necks like ripe fruit in a grim orchard. A rain of arrows pursued the retreating cavalry, a black deluge that blotted out the sun and painted the fields in a grotesque abstract of crimson and collapsed bodies.

“O Khan! Protect us!”

The Suksin warhorses were beasts of burden and war alike, thick-legged and standing a full head taller than the Empire’s mounts. When they charged in unison, they did not merely run; they made the earth tremble.

Boom, boom, boom—

At the heavy beat of the war drums, the archers in the rear shifted their aim and swapped their ammunition. The initial volley had been metal-tipped, designed to punch through the heavy plate of the Central Plains soldiers. Now came the bone-tipped shafts. While they lacked the piercing power against armor, bone was lighter, granting them the range to harass the enemy’s fleeing rear guard. The Suksin saddles were laden with quivers holding over a hundred arrows each, a seemingly endless supply of death.

“Fire!”

The bone arrows soared, traveling over two hundred jang—nearly six hundred meters—to tear into the faltering enemy lines.

Whiiiiiine—!

The maximum effective range for an archer of the Hua Empire was, at best, one hundred jang. Though the border soldiers were disciplined in Danjeon breathing and could loose a volley with synchronized precision, creating a perfect parabolic arc of death, their equipment was hopelessly outmatched by the recurve bows of the nomads.

“Kraaaagh! Kill them! Kill the crazy bastards!” a centurion shrieked, lost in the frenzy of battle as an arrow found his vitals. A spurt of blood silenced his command, leaving the military physician with nothing to do but help him pass without pain.

The Empire’s archers fell from their saddles like withered autumn leaves.

“Our arrows can’t reach them!”

“Mother! Motherrr!” screamed a young soldier, his mind broken as he cradled the headless corpse of a comrade.

Mixed among the bone arrows were shafts imbued with True Qi—arrows of absolute death. A mere graze was enough to shatter a spine or pin a fully armored man to the earth.

“Retreat! Retreat!” a commander’s cry echoed in vain.

Then, the drumbeat shifted again.

Dum-dum, dum-dum, dum-dum—

Instantly, every Suksin archer drew a new type of arrow. Heavy. Cold. Iron.

Thwack!

One impatient shaft, loosed before the command, struck the earth near an Imperial commander. He pulled it from the soil, his eyes widening in horror as he inspected the craftsmanship.

“This… this level of smithing? Don’t tell me they’ve already conquered that place?”

In that moment, a shadow fell over him. Was it a cloud? He looked up, and his vision filled with a sky made of solid iron. A heartbeat later, the sky fell.

Thud-thud-thud-thud!

Like an ant crushed under a thumb, the commander’s limbs were mangled beyond recognition, his remains driven into the hungry earth.

Boom, bu-boom, boom—

The drums beat on. They still had arrows. They had so many arrows left to fire.

***

Danmok Fortress sat on the northern border of Shanxi Province, a crucial junction where the cultures of the Central Plains and the Steppes mingled, usually in trade. Now, however, the bustle of commerce had been replaced by the rigid order of a massive military encampment.

Zhuge Rin lowered the window of their carriage.

[Hee-ya. What is the first thing you sense?]

It was a lesson disguised as a conversation, a practical examination from strategist to apprentice.

Jin Cheon-hee closed his eyes. The first sensation to hit him was the thick, pungent stench of horse dung. Surprisingly, the metallic tang of blood was faint. Instead, the sharp, cloying smell of alcohol permeated the air.

[The scent of defeat,] Cheon-hee projected back.

[Why do you think so?]

[The horses that survived returned in a hurry, so they relieved themselves here in mass quantities. The lack of blood means one of two things: either there was no time to drag back the wounded, or the defeat was so total that they couldn’t even retrieve the bodies.]

[And the alcohol?]

[A general, fearing his soldiers would desert after a rout, likely distributed spirits to numb their fear.]

[In a crisis, a commander should steel the minds of his men. Why give them alcohol?]

[It means the shock to our forces was severe enough to shatter their discipline entirely.]

[So you believe it was a crushing defeat?]

Jin Cheon-hee nodded without a shred of hesitation.

[Yes.]

[Then we are in trouble indeed.]

Zhuge Rin’s mental voice was as placid as if he were discussing the weather. The two strategists of the Zhuge Clan never panicked; they were merely weighed down by the accumulated wisdom of their ancestors. They were fish who had found water, though Jin Cheon-hee was a fish who desperately wanted to climb out of the tank.

***

You didn’t need the nose of a tracking dog to read a war; every conflict possesses its own olfactory signature.

Cheon-hee recalled reading memoirs of American soldiers from the Vietnam War, how they could detect the enemy by the distinct smell of fish sauce. The Vietnamese, in turn, likely identified the Americans by the scent of their rations or tobacco. From the reek of gunpowder and oil to the copper scent of torn flesh, the battlefield was a library of scents for those who knew how to read them.

The Zhuge Clan taught its strategists to read the wind, a skill that naturally extended to gleaning information from the air itself. The White Qilin Divine Physician was determined to pour every ounce of his knowledge into his disciple, and Cheon-hee, inundated with data, had no choice but to learn if he wanted to survive.

[Well, even so, do not let on that you know,] his master advised. [Learning the truth and being conscripted to fix it are two separate issues.]

He didn’t need to be a Zhuge Liang courted three times by a lord. If His Highness Eun decided he wanted Cheon-hee, he’d be dragged away with a leash around his neck, protocol be damned.

Outside the fortress walls, a city of military tents had bloomed. When Wangya Ju arrived, the Lord of Danmok Fortress and the commander-in-chief, Grand General Yuk Heon, emerged to greet them personally.

As expected of civil servants, Cheon-hee thought, watching from a distance. They live and die by protocol. Even amidst slaughter, they cannot escape the ritual.

“Ten thousand years! Ten thousand years! Ten, ten thousand years!”

The soldiers raised their spears in a rhythmic salute to Wangya Ju. She watched them with a bored, almost irritated expression.

“Isn’t that the least of our worries right now? I’m sure I told you not to bother busy soldiers with this sort of pageantry.”

Yuk Heon bowed low. “However, to neglect the proper courtesies to Your Royal Highness would be tantamount to committing an act of disrespect against His Majesty the Emperor himself.”

“…That kid wouldn’t care about stuff like that,” she muttered, turning away to find her quarters. “Well then, see you later.”

She gave Cheon-hee’s party a cursory nod as she left, a gesture that somehow felt heavier than if she had simply ignored them.

The White Qilin Medical Pavilion was placed under the guidance of a commander named Jeon Dan.

“Centurion Jeon Dan, at your service! From now on, I’ll be guiding the members of the White Qilin Medical Pavilion. If there’s anything you find inconvenient, please don’t hesitate to let me know!”

A centurion is considered a high-ranking commander here, I suppose.

Jeon Dan led them to a section designated as the Murim Brigade, the unit where the warriors of the Gangho were segregated. Tents for the White Qilin Medical Pavilion had already been erected.

“You can unpack your things and set up your clinic here.”

“Understood. Um, are all these people from the Gangho?” Cheon-hee asked, eyeing the sheer size of the encampment.

“Yes, sir, that’s right. The remaining members of the Murim Brigade are scheduled to be drafted as a special mobile unit.”

Hoh. It felt strange for him, a man of the Murim, to think this, but taking these individualistic warriors—who had no concept of military discipline, formation, or tactics—and throwing them into ambushes seemed like a recipe for disaster.

Then again, considering their massive egos, it was probably the only way to use them. From the military’s perspective, the people of the Gangho were like the Windows operating system: indispensable, yet prone to catastrophic errors and frustratingly difficult to manage. You knew the updates were terrible, but you couldn’t just throw the whole computer away and switch to DOS or Linux.

And so, His Highness Eun had tearfully installed Murim Version 10, fully prepared for the inevitable resource conflicts between the Orthodox and Unorthodox factions. He could only pray that the bundled software—the White Qilin and Hwaju Medical Pavilions—would function as a disk defragmenter and antivirus program. The question remained: would Danmok Fortress Version 11 run properly, or crash to the desktop?

The Hwaju Medical Pavilion is already in the tent next to us.

The neighboring pavilion was a hive of activity. The conscripted physicians from the Unorthodox Path—likely unable to admit they were from the Dark Palace Medical Pavilion—sat with sullen, resentful expressions. They had begun chopping the head off a sheep and hanging it upside down to dry, effectively ensuring no ordinary soldiers would dare approach their tent.

Bzzzzzz—

A swarm of flies gathered on the severed head. In the corner, the physicians were building a makeshift altar and performing some cryptic ritual.

…Is this standard procedure for the Dark Palace?

The physicians of the Hwaju Medical Pavilion tried their best to avoid looking toward the Unorthodox camp, and Jin Cheon-hee made a concerted effort to avert his gaze as well. The hygiene over there was already a nightmare, bringing back traumatic memories of the Five Poisons Sect.

Ah, they’re cooking it.

To his immense relief, they dropped the severed sheep’s head into a boiling pot. A foul, gamey smell wafted over, but as a doctor, Cheon-hee preferred the smell of cooking meat to the stench of rot. The sheep was, at least, relatively fresh by the standards of a war zone.

Jin Cheon-hee turned to his master. “The Hwaju Medical Pavilion is already being worked to the bone. Is it alright if we only treat the people from the Gangho?”

“There is no need to phrase your wishful thinking as a question, Hee-ya. We will likely have to treat everyone who breathes.”

“But won’t there be physicians sent from the Imperial court?”

“I haven’t seen them, but they are surely short-staffed as well.”

Of course. Still, Jin Cheon-hee’s internal hope-circuit tried its best to fire up.

“We-ell… it’s a relief that the state will be providing all the medical supplies and that we’ll be properly compensated.”

“Indeed. The supplies we brought are ample, and a reinforcement supply train will arrive soon. We will manage somehow.”

Perhaps due to special orders from His Highness Eun, the land allocated to the White Qilin Medical Pavilion was quite spacious. Though the Hwaju Medical Pavilion was technically “next door,” there was enough distance that their voices didn’t carry.

Jin Cheon-hee crouched down and scooped up a handful of dirt. “Looking at the earth’s veins, it seems we can just barely set up a defensive formation.”

“The geomancer from the military camp must have assisted in the layout.”

[But if fire attacks continue, the surrounding earth veins will dry up, and it will be difficult to maintain the formation, Master,] Cheon-hee projected.

[Mm, yes. A good observation.]

The cocktail of smells Cheon-hee had detected included tar, gunpowder, and oil. In this world, firearms were generally inferior to bows; they couldn’t be imbued with internal energy, had a slow rate of fire, broke easily, and often exploded in the user’s hands.

But it’s a different story if you load them onto a catapult.

Even the Gangho’s equivalent of TNT, the Jincheonroe, was a devastating weapon. What would happen if the enemy used siege engines to launch such explosives into a besieged camp?

[Whoever the strategist in this camp is, I don’t know them, but their tactics have failed spectacularly,] Jin Cheon-hee observed.

[Indeed. We have lost many soldiers. The number of wounded currently arriving is but a fraction of the total casualties.]

So this was the camp they had established after a desperate retreat. Having processed the grim reality, Jin Cheon-hee tried to ignite a spark of optimism one last time.

[Master, they may have failed this time, but surely the strategist has learned their lesson! They won’t get wiped out again, will they?]

[Hohoho, Hee-ya. We may be in the rear, but if they lose the front line just two more times, we will likely get to experience the destructive power of the nomads’ catapults firsthand.]

Damn it.