By the seventh morning of the autumn cold snap, every single residential district inside Sky-Crown City was as warm and bustling. Spring thanks to the one hundred [Gu Family 2-Copper Hotpot & Peace Clinics] and Su Nuannuan’s purified warm canals.
High atop the sixty-foot outer granite ramparts of the Capital City Walls, however, the wind howling down from the northern snowfields was still bitter enough to crack iron.
Stationed along the twenty-four miles of the capital’s battlements stood the 50,000 regular soldiers of the Capital City Garrison, commanded by fifty-five-year-old General Tie-Shan , at Rank 4 Early.
Unlike Second Prince Qian Ye’s pampered Eastern Palace Guards—who wore silk-lined sable cloaks. Ate spirit-meat in heated barracks—the fifty thousand regular garrison soldiers who actually guarded the city gates day and night were treated like dirt by the royal court.
In fact, three weeks ago, Second Prince Qian Ye had secretly ordered the Ministry of War’s quartermaster. To embezzle all 100,000 silver taels of the Capital Garrison’s winter coat fund and meat ration allowance. Diverting the silver to buy his auction chamber pots, blood-sacrifice keys, and private assassins!
As a result, on this freezing seventh morning of the frost, fifty thousand loyal garrison soldiers were standing watch on the windswept granite battlements wearing thin. Threadbare summer linen tunics stuffed with dry straw, their fingers cracked and bleeding around their icy spear-shafts, with nothing in their mess-tents to eat except frozen gray bran-cakes harder than river stones!
