Atop the grassy ridge half a mile south of Sky-Crown City, seventy-two-year-old Old Marshal Tie , at Rank 4 Peak. Three hundred thousand battle-hardened soldiers of the Northern Border Army sat on their warhorses in absolute, pin-drop silence, rubbing their eyes until their knuckles hurt.
Where was the burning capital?
Where were the breached walls and weeping refugees?
Where was the terrifying One-Hundred-Thousand Iron-Hide Flood Beast Tide that had stampeded out of the Southern Gorge four days ago?!
Instead of a bloody battlefield, the five-mile expanse of the Outer South Wall. Them was draped in festive red silk lanterns and smelled so overwhelmingly, intoxicatingly of Honey-Glazed Cumin Roast Pork, Hickory-Smoked Beef Brisket. Boiling Five-Spice Tendon Meatballs that all three hundred thousand border soldiers—who had been chewing on frozen hardtack rations during their forced march—simultaneously drooled onto their iron breastplates!
Two million rosy-cheeked citizens and fifty thousand Capital Garrison soldiers were sitting at a thousand long pine tables along the moat boulevard, clinking soup bowls and singing the “Good Dad Gu Roast-Meat Song.”
And right in front of the main South Gate bridge. The legendary Rank 4 Peak Ancient Flood-Bull King—the fifty-foot mountain overlord that Old Marshal Tie himself had fought to a. Bruising draw three winters ago—was shrunk down to a sleek ten-foot carriage-ox wearing a red satin bow around its horns.
