Winter had passed, leaving behind its cruel shadow, and spring arrived only to reveal a land so devastated it could barely sustain life. Across the eastern frontier of Guangling, villages no longer existed in the form one could recognize: what once had been fertile farmlands and peaceful hamlets had turned into blackened plains, scorched fields, and towns reduced to heaps of ash. The countryside was littered with corpses, left unburied and exposed to the elements, silent witnesses to a war of attrition that had exacted a price neither side could have foreseen at the beginning.
The peasants who still breathed were little more than hollow ghosts wandering the earth. Many had no home, no land, no family left. Some had fled northward into forests and mountains, dragging with them hunger, despair, and above all a growing hatred. Those who remained had been consumed by Luo Wen's war machine—conscripted against their will, driven forward as expendable cannon fodder, or exterminated outright in collective reprisals.
After months of a merciless cycle—sieges, recoveries, counterattacks, and the same repeated again—the Invincible Chancellor achieved what he had sought from the outset: the breaking of the chain of fortresses that had stood like a shield before Guangling.
The last stretch of months had been nothing less than a parade of blood. Each fortress resisted until the last possible breath—defended sometimes by peasants armed with nothing more than sharpened sticks, sometimes by desperate militias hastily raised, sometimes by weary veterans Wei Lian dispatched in lightning strikes. Every victory Wei Lian wrestled back was short-lived, every defeat chipped further away at his strength.
Luo Wen, hardened by experience, no longer made the mistake of leaving behind fragile garrisons. Each time a fortress fell into his hands, he brought entire divisions to crush it fully. He would burn food reserves, dismantle walls to their foundations, and execute anyone suspected of harboring rebels. His doctrine became one of scorched earth: nothing must remain that could be of use to the enemy.
The guerrillas, once a thorn in the Empire's rear, were hunted with unrelenting ferocity. Peasant bands that had ambushed supply convoys were chased from valley to valley, mountain to mountain. Those who survived scattered into distant lands of little strategic importance. Their strikes became erratic, almost symbolic gestures of resistance—burning empty granaries, slitting the throats of a handful of isolated sentries. They were no longer a serious threat, merely shadows lashing out against the inevitable tide.
The fortresses themselves collapsed in sequence, falling one after another in a rhythm that could no longer be contested. For every tower Wei Lian tried to recover, Luo Wen returned with three times the force and razed it to the ground. The cycle of attrition had drained both defenders and attackers alike, but only Luo Wen had the near-limitless reservoir of men, discipline, and sheer willpower to continue.
By the time the campaign reached its grim conclusion, the approaches to Guangling resembled a desert of war. Rural life had been all but exterminated. Villages lay gutted and abandoned, fields stood unplanted, corpses decayed in old trenches, and the roads had turned to muddy scars under the constant passage of marching armies.
Among the Imperial soldiers, grim jokes circulated with bitter laughter:—"There are no peasants left here, only empty land and ashes."
Even Luo Wen's generals, hardened by years of bloodshed, could not deny the horror of what they had wrought—though none dared to say it aloud. They knew the only thing keeping the army advancing was the Chancellor's implacable will. Luo Wen had shown the world he was willing to pay any price, even the extermination of an entire people, so long as the path to his ultimate goal was cleared.
In Guangling, Wei Lian and Zhao Qing received the reports in a silence heavy as stone. The defensive line they had poured so much into constructing had disintegrated. The chain of fortresses was no longer a living shield but heaps of smoldering ruins, useless as obstacles.
"He's done it," Zhao Qing muttered, his lips pressed tight. "He's crushed the chain of fortresses."
Wei Lian, his face gaunt from exhaustion, nodded slowly."Yes… but he has done it over a wasteland. Where there was once life, now there is only dead earth. That too, one day, he will pay for."
He knew, however, that such reflections were cold comfort in the short term. The Chancellor was still advancing. The guerrillas, battered and diminished, had retreated too far to alter the tide. The villages, annihilated, could no longer provide men or food. Spontaneous resistance had been drowned in blood. Guangling now stood alone as the last bastion.
In the Imperial camp, Luo Wen gathered his officers. Before them lay a map, stained with dirt and marked in blood. Across it, the chain of fortresses was crossed out, claimed as conquered.
"The resistance is shattered," he declared, his voice iron. "There are no walls left between us and Guangling. Now, the capital of this front is our single objective."
The generals exchanged glances. They had lost tens of thousands of men in the campaign; the toll had been savage even with peasants thrown forward as expendable bodies. Yet none dared question the Chancellor. His determination was a gravity that pulled them all inescapably forward.
"We have lost much, yes," Luo Wen continued. "But what we have gained is beyond price: the enemy has no more intermediate defenses. Guangling itself will be their grave."
Outside the command tent, the remnants of the army rested in a nightmarish landscape. Camps had been erected amidst charred ruins, campfires fed with beams from burnt villages. Exhausted soldiers polished their bloodied weapons with ragged cloths. The smell of smoke, rot, and death clung to every breath of air.
Among them shuffled the conscripted peasants, survivors of countless assaults. They were skeletons in rags clutching spears, their faces hollow, their eyes devoid of hope. To the Imperial army, they were not men but tools—beasts of burden for supplies, expendable ranks to throw forward in the next storming of walls.
In the northern mountains, scattered remnants of guerrilla fighters gazed down at the columns of smoke marking the fall of the last strongholds. Many abandoned all faith in halting the advance. They withdrew, shifting their targets, attacking remote posts and side roads. But such blows were tokens, gestures of defiance rather than threats. Luo Wen's army, now disciplined to ignore the periphery, pressed on unshaken.
When the order finally came to march on Guangling, the Imperial host moved like a beast of iron dragging itself across a desert of ash. No peasants remained to provision the enemy, no villages stood to harbor guerrillas. There was only the city itself, rising defiant as Wei Lian's last bastion.
From Guangling's walls, the watchmen saw it: a great cloud of dust billowing on the horizon, stirred by legions of men, horses, and the grinding wheels of siege engines. It was like a storm with no end, an oncoming roar that seemed to shake the earth itself.
Standing beside Wei Lian, Zhao Qing gazed at the horizon."They've destroyed everything between us and them. Now there are no more shields. It is only us."
Wei Lian clenched his fists. His face showed no fear, but his eyes held the weight of inevitability."Then here is where we will stand. Guangling will be the last wall. And if it must fall, it will fall only after the earth itself is drenched in the Chancellor's blood."
The silence that followed was heavy, broken only by the whistling of the wind across the towers. The entire city felt the truth in the air: the storm was almost upon them. The war of attrition was over. Now the final battle was about to begin.