Chapter 87: The Two Faces of the Yingzhou Army

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Good heavens. Secondary merit?
The moment those two words were spoken, every soldier’s face flushed crimson, eyes flaring like sparks.
Even Du Huai-shan’s breathing grew quick.
One secondary merit was worth five tertiary merits—forty-five Honor Points, enough for a full set of polished plate armor, plus a top-forged red marrow steel weapon, and still plenty left for energy elixirs.
Even split among three men, it was a huge reward.

“First rank, heed my order! In squads of three, spread out immediately and find the red marrow location. Whoever finds it first will get thirty silver crowns from me personally.”

The infantry platoon sergeant who had been loud about helping Jiang Dayi only moments ago now sent his men ahead at once.
If one of his men secured that merit, he himself would rise with them and might even be in line for deputy platoon commander.

Wang Zhenglin turned back to the men of Reconnaissance Second Platoon and called out:
“You all know we’ve spent half a month investigating the White-Elder Mountain incident, losing countless brothers, just to have a result, and now it is before our eyes…”

The old soldiers were already bracing for action.
“Last stretch. Move out!”

At the command, everyone cried out and rushed behind the rear of the infantry line, splitting into different mouths, including the machine-gun squads, even the artillery team.

“Huai-shan, what formation now?” Li Anqi hesitated as veteran and recruit alike vanished through the cave mouths in a stream.
“I can’t say there is any formation left,” Du Huai-shan answered as he spoke. “The pressure from the yao-ghost threat and the hunger for merit have all gone wild. Whoever pins down the red marrow first wins.”

Zhang Shihan, with Baiyang beside him, chose one of the outermost cavities.

“Are we going together, or splitting up?”
Now only Wu Ming’s First Squad men and Du’s Eighth Training Team remained nearby.
“Best to split.”
Du fixed on the mouth. “Dispersing weakens us, but increases the chance of finding it, and also means we’re less likely to all be taken at once. Also, this chamber doesn’t have room for much of a multi-person fight.”

“That’s fine. I’ll take my men and go first. Meet at the mine.”
“Meet at the mine.”
Du nodded to the Eighth Team.
Chen Jun and Li Mingcheng were dead, and Jiang Qian had been taken by the Special Operations Platoon. Only five were left.

“Xu Yan, take Li Anqi and Lin Sizhi. I’ll take Tan Hai.”
“All right.”
Xu Yan, as cold and quiet as before, lifted her torch and entered the central cavity without another word.

“Everyone, be careful,” Lin Sizhi said before parting.
Du and Tan took the rightmost opening.

Below the black, towering walls, their footsteps were the only sounds between them, with distant, faint, chaotic noises drifting in from nowhere in particular.
Tan raised the horse-lantern.
High above, the stalactite fields, distorted by shadow, looked like the fangs of a monster.
“Aah—!”
From ahead at the mouth came a ragged scream; Tan’s lantern rattled in his hands.
In darkness like this you never know when danger appears.
It might be the next instant a giant yao-ghost bursts out.

Even at a few mouths ahead, eerie demonic heads already seemed crowded in the dark.

“Steady,” Du said. “What’s your fusion level right now?”
“One... one hundred and eighty?” Tan stammered.
“Eighty,” he corrected himself.
“Eighty. That’s already good. You may not be able to kill a yao-ghost alone yet, but your self-preservation is strong.”

“Is that so?”
Tan pushed his helmet up with a reflexive motion. Confidence came to him for no reason he could name, and his fear thinned.
“Think about it—I only broke through one tier when I killed that earlier yao-ghost. Keep faith.”

Du spoke once more and stepped into a narrow opening ahead.
He took one more step and his boot struck a stone.

“This looks like a dead end, Huai-shan…” Tan called, torch sweeping the walls.
“Huai-shan?”
No answer came.
He called again.
When he looked back, he found Du squatting, studying the stone that had tripped him.

“This stone has been shaped by hand,” Du said.
He ran his fingers along the edge: clean corners, a perfectly flat top, sides slickly rounded.
“This is not natural rock. It looks like—”
“A stone bench?”
“Right. A stone bench.”

Tan saw it too when he said it.
When Du kicked it aside, more evidence showed on the floor:
fragments with neat edges, scratch marks in colors not found elsewhere.
Like a man-made stone chamber that had been deliberately damaged.
No wonder the opening had been so narrow.

“Could it be the Light Society people? Their repeated ambushes, maybe just to delay us?”
Tan pointed to the ambush from last night.
Once Wang Zhenglin heard about red marrow, he would telegram the report to command immediately.
Even if you blocked one line, higher command would still learn there was red marrow under White-Elder Mountain.
So it made sense that the Bright Society gangs and their shadow-backed allies were just buying time to mine more red marrow.
If they could replace key people, that would be even better.

“Delaying is true, but...”
Du gestured to the marks around the cave.
“Whether for mining or weapon dealing, why build a stone chamber here?
Sure, there’s toxic sulfur, but with this many yao-ghosts moving through?
No sane person would live here.”

“That is strange,” Tan said, unable to think of a reason.
“Fine. We search first.”

No sooner had they stepped out of the chamber than rough running echoed from a crack to the right-front.
Du raised the lantern and saw several grizzled machine-gun veterans running wildly.
“Run! A yao-ghost behind you!”
A gray-bearded veteran yelled, waving.
The next instant, a flicker of pink scales flashed at the edge of the light.
“It’s the serpent yao-ghost!”

“How did it get this far?” Du dropped the rifle from his shoulder and fired at the snake-body behind them.
His round punched through the surface scales, but the wound was shallow; the creature did not slow.
It opened its bloodied jaws and dragged the last soldier into the dark, leaving only a scream.

“This way!”
Du hauled three of them back into the chamber.
Four old soldiers remained. Two were buried in a corner, clutching their heads.

“Come on, there must be an exit,” one of them said to the walls, then spun and faced them.
“This is a dead end. We have to get out now!”

“No… those are not the finished-integration soldiers, are they?”
The veteran on the floor pointed a trembling finger at Du and Tan’s mismatched eyes.
“They’re recruits!”
It was true:
the biggest difference between recruit and old hand was the absence of a shoulder cape.
Ordinary infantry wore white cloaks; Special Operations wore dark green.
The capes weren’t just decoration, not just armor protection.
They bore the Chiyu Heavenly Empire’s iron-blood tiger-dragon emblem.

For many veterans, recruits lacked combat sense. Normally veterans shield recruits, not the reverse.

“Fine, if you don’t leave, I will.”
The old soldier raised his only light machine gun, ready to bolt through the chamber mouth.
A blast of stench-laden force slammed him back.
He collapsed hard.

Boom.

The serpent’s head slammed the cave mouth, forcing only half the body through because the gap was barely a meter wide.
With a wet tearing sound, something struck the soldier’s face.
It dropped between his legs: a half skull, soaked in blood, with black-and-white eye dots still circling in place.
“Agh—ah!”
He scraped backwards on bare feet, his greatest scream bursting out like it came from all his years at once.

“Move!”
Du shouted. A flash of shadow snapped out—a shimmering projection.
All the old soldiers froze at the sight of a nearly six-meter guardian spirit, broad-shouldered and monstrous.
A vast four-horned horse-like spirit.

In an instant of ghost-human form, Du was no longer a raw recruit.
His aura curdled to cruelty, and rage.
His arm extended, muscles swelling; his saber flashed silver as he chopped at the serpent’s maw.
A geyser of blood sprayed across the stone and walls.

The machine-gunners stared open-mouthed.
They could not imagine a recruit taking a bite out of that serpent head in a single stroke.
The yao-ghost felt no pain, no fear.
The cut drove it harder, and it rammed again and again at the chamber entrance, showering rock dust down the walls.

“Support him!”
The gray-bearded old soldier raised his machine-gun and kept firing into the bleeding head.
“Dada-dad-dad—”
The cave burned white with fire.
The serpent’s face was mangled half away.

At the same moment the head twitched.
Du roared and lunged again. His arm moved like a tiger, his saber sweeping like claws that wrapped the wound-clotted head.
“Xingyi Five-Elements: Cannon-Slash!”
His whole body trembled;
muscles quivered like bowstrings and hummed.
Qi struck bone and flesh in a dry, rapid crackling that ran from his feet to his hands like a whip.
Then he drove his blade all the way in.
Dark blood came off in sheets, drenching him.
Before he touched the ground, the veterans were still firing.

“Stop! Enough.”
Du gave no further explanation.
He shot his hookline out and was already clear of the chamber.
Tan answered by summoning his Yinhuai guardian spirit and leaping out beside him.

On the wide ravine wall, blood and gore spattered everywhere.
The shattered serpent pieces burned and turned to ash fast enough to be seen.
What remained was a seven-meter body and two winged claw-shapes.

“Tan Hai—cut the clawed wings!”
Du reeled in his line, kicked the wall for rebound, and dropped toward the split.
With the head gone, the two bat-like talons were its only weapons.
Sever both and the beast was merely an emaciated tiger waiting for a butcher.

“Got it!”
Tan gave a long, sharp cry.
His pulse exploded through his blood, and the yao power in him spread through every vein.
His body thickened, his skin seeming barked over, the once-slender frame transformed.
His hookline struck a wing claw; he spun through the air and cut repeatedly at both wings.

Across from him, Du’s blade was wrapped in black mist and ghostlight.
A ghostly chill ran along it as he cut.
The blade gathered plague-energy and struck again and again.
Wherever it landed, the yao-flesh seemed to rot open into green-black runoff.
“Fast! Faster!”
Two of them moved in a relentless rhythm, sword and machine-gun fire suppressing and cutting.
Each strike broke more off each wing.
When Tan’s final slash fell, the once eight-meter serpent was headless and shortened to seven meters, bare and slick, rolling like a headless eel.

A swift twist, and Du avoided a tail crash, ran up the wall in leaps, and launched from the serpent’s neck.
In midair, both hands clamped the saber; he dropped like a knife.
Torchlight and blood made a red dusk around them, and his black haze trailed like dirty fog.

“Die!”
His blade punched through serpent flesh and out through the heart.
The cavern bloomed with a brutal ghostly light.
The creature gave no further struggle; it slackened and dropped, still.

“Whew… whew…”
Du knelt atop the body, hands still gripping the hilt.
Under his helmet, two black-red demonic horns flickered in time with his breath.
Below him, the serpent burned away in place.
Blood, steel, armor, ghostfire—all braided into a savage work of beauty.

“Did we really kill it?”
At the threshold, the gray-bearded soldier stared in shock.
His band had just killed a calamity-rank twenty-four yao-ghost.
One veteran, almost drained, simply sank down, eyes fixed on the ash.
He had never seen anything like it.
“Incredible. This is the first time in my service I have ever been in a yao-ghost kill.”
“The first for me too…”

...
Du slid his blade home and drew back.
From the embers he found a heart pulsing pink light, its surface pricked with soft spines, like a pitaya.
“Huai-shan!”
Tan stared, elated.
Unlike the last fight at Qingshi Mountain, where support and chaos were mixed, this time only he and Du had truly engaged the thing in close combat.
Two recruits had slain an eight-meter yao-ghost.
That was the sort of feat that made people whisper about impossible fortunes.

“Not sure there’s time enough yet.”
Du tucked the heart into his field pack.
“Don’t be reckless. We won because of this terrain.
This chamber’s mouth is narrow enough that no yao-ghost can come in en masse.”

A normal beast might retreat after a few collisions.
A yao-ghost only attacks until death, so we used that for ours.
That let me sever one of its strongest kills: the head.

“Thank you for saving us.”
The gray-bearded veteran came over, saluted him.
“Zhao Lixin, squad leader of the first squad in the machine-gun platoon of the main company. These are my men.”

“Eighth Team, One Hundred and Seventy-Third Class elite training detachment,” Du replied.
“Du Huai-shan.”

Du shook hands.
“You’re with Commander Jiang’s team?”
Zhao nodded.
“Afterward we met two more yao-ghosts. The whole unit got split apart.
Only those near Commander Jiang still had infantry with them; all other squads and teams are in total chaos.
Nobody can find anybody else now.”

In Chiyu, there were no radio sets. Not even reliable telephones in this terrain.
Communications meant telegraph lines or wires, and both required conditions that this environment never offered.
So soldiers themselves had to run messages.

In this cave tangle, each with his own line and knot, even this much-traveled Du had begun to spin around and lose direction.
What of ordinary soldiers?
Not good.

“We move on downward, searching the red marrow.”
Du stated the objective plainly.
Zhao’s men exchanged looks.
“May we follow you?”
“Yes.”

Frankly, one of the reasons this battle had gone as smoothly as it did was those machine-gunners.
Once a yao-ghost grows beyond six or seven meters, ordinary rifles are unreliable unless they strike exact weak points.
Machine-guns, with sustained pressure and heavier caliber, still tear down material that behaves like carbon lifeforms.
A yao-ghost is not carbon, but its manifested structure largely follows that logic.

Machine-gunners were grounded, no grappling lines.
Here, in this not-too-vast fissure cave, they didn’t steal away the three-dimensional space that our two recruits relied on.
“That’s good,” Zhao said.

“Then we keep moving with you.”
They had no contact with Jiang Dayi’s main company.
Wandering hole to hole like blind flies would kill them.
Following these two trained recruits at least gave them a chance to survive a contact.

Du pulled his ghost-human state down to one percent.
Through trials he had learned it was like an engine:
if the fused guardian spirit was the engine itself, normal stamina was gasoline.
Ghost-human mode was ignition.
One percent was idle speed.
Starting from ignition burns more and has a warm-up delay even when reactions are fast.
Li Mingcheng’s death was the clearest proof.
So for fights that were not prolonged, Du preferred low-rate combustion.
His Yinglu guardian specialized in endurance—like a second fuel tank.
He could keep the low burn longer than ordinary men.

Then a new tremor rolled through.

“Huai-shan! The sound again—this time from the right entrance!”

They changed direction while running.
At once, the right tunnel vomited heat and rot-stench, like an oven door flung open after being loaded with waste.
“The sulfur smell is stronger. Breathe as little as possible.”
Du wet his scarf from his flask and tied it back over his mouth.

After three minutes, the heat rose like furnace wind, searing skin even from within.
Then suddenly: a flare of reddish light at the tunnel front. The party rushed through, and the cave opened wide.
A vast arched chamber stood before them: at least forty to fifty meters tall, hundreds of meters across.
Ahead, the floor seemed shattered by a giant strike, and dark red fissures bled with molten flow.
Magma drifted slowly through the splits, bubbling and muttering, with sulfur smoke and ash shooting up like violent chimneys.
The heat felt like the air itself was burning.

Along the edge were already many soldiers: main-company men, Reconnaissance Second Platoon, Special Operations, even a handful of elite trainees.
“So many.”
Tan was bitter. If not for the chamber and the serpent, they would have reached earlier.

“How many did we start with?”
Du sighed.
Only thirty to forty stood by the fissure now; with laggards maybe a hundred.
At departure from Baitun, they had been over three hundred.

“So that is the red marrow ore?” Zhao asked.
He pointed to a neighboring crack where dark-red viscous matter oozed and glimmered, like crude oil with pulses of red inside it.
Every face lit with shock, envy, burning awe.
It looked like zealots before their own god.

“Du Huai-shan!”
Li Anqi called out.
Three women came from a side hollow on the west.
“We’re exhausted. Midway we ran into a yao-ghost.
Thank fate Xu Yan moved fast and cut its ankle, then pulled us through.”
“We met one too,” Tan said with pride. “Me and Huai-shan killed it.”

“How high was it?”
“Twenty-four.”
“My gods! Bigger than the one at Qingshi Mountain!”
Li Anqi blinked, then asked sharply:
“Wait—was it you two, or was it only you, Huai-shan?”

“Both of us.”
Tan’s voice rose as he launched into a full description.

Lin Sizhi asked at the opening:
“Who found the red marrow first?”
Du shook his head.
“I only got here recently.”
“It was Special Operations,” said someone behind.

“Guo Tingyu,” said Huai-shan as he turned, seeing him.
“I think Baiyang likely already smelled the fact that all these caves connect to one another.
No matter which path you take, you can end up here.”
“So splitting us all off wasn’t for search efficiency,” Guo added, voice hardening into anger.
“It just drew more yao-ghosts away from them.
More bodies lost by us, fewer sacrifices needed by them.”

He had to force his words through clenched teeth.
“To be told about secondary merit while we’re used like beasts!”
Xing Zhenhao beside him looked equally furious.
After such hard work and blood, being reduced to disposable tools would sour any heart.
It seemed even this age had its bait-and-burn promises.

If Guo was right, Special Operations had crossed the line.
They were playing with men’s lives.

“Has Old Wu arrived?”
Du scanned around; no sign.
“I don’t see him,” Guo said, shaking his head.
Then a soldier limped from a fissure, soaked in blood, one arm half gone, crying in pain.
A bad instinct rose in Du.

Around the fissure, seventy or eighty more men gathered one by one, making just over a hundred in total—two-thirds of the force gone.
Zhang Shihan and Jiang Dayi, along with other officers, stood in the center.
Zhang held a notebook, recording routes and intelligence.
When he finally closed it he pointed toward the red marrow face and said:
“I need scouts. It may be dangerous, but this will give Yingzhou Army critical information for future mining.”

“If you go and live, I’ll award you Third Merit.
If you die, you’ll be buried with officer honors, and your family will be paid handsomely.”

Earlier it had been veiled.
Now it was nakedly offered.

“I’ll go.”
A short, heavy-set veteran stepped out first.
One crossing for a Third Merit, if he returned alive, was quicker than hunting monsters.
With merit he could buy a yao-guardian spirit and rise beyond normal soldiers.
He paced carefully, stepping on large stones, avoiding the orange-red lava, and made it halfway.
Then his boot struck and a jet of fire leapt.
Fear made him stamp the stone.
The moving lava shifted under him; he tipped right, widening the crack.
A blast of white heat shot up from below.

“Ah—!”
His skin burned at once.
He screamed once, then dropped.
His cotton armor caught and flared.
He became a charred black husk.

“Next who?”
Zhang’s face did not change.
Like the previous man had been no more than poultry.
Du thought of Qingshi Mountain and the old soldiers who had already fallen there.

The Yingzhou Army had two faces.
One was these infantrymen:
greedy, panicked at times, but at times boiling with blood-hot resolve, charging into danger without hesitation.
The other was Special Operations:
ice-calm, rational, and willing to sacrifice everything, even comrades’ lives, if military gain demanded it.

“I’ll do it.”
This time the caller was a veteran already in ghost-human form.
He stood at the lava edge, studied the ground, then fired his grappling brace at the largest central slab.
He shot across fast, rolled on landing, and let inertia bleed off.
Two streams of high-heat vapor roared up.
Unlike the fallen shortman, he did not panic.
Once more he hooked onto the wall near the ore mouth and crossed successfully.

“Good work, Old Wei!”
Main-company voices cheered.
As all eyes stayed on him near the ore mouth, a familiar shout came from behind.
“Old Wu, you’re finally here!”

Du turned.
Old Wu, in ghost-human form, staggered in with a wounded recruit over his shoulder, streaked with blood.
“Outside it’s all yao-ghosts.
Lin Luo is dead.
Xu Zhigang is badly wounded.
The two of us barely escaped.”

“Are you all right?” Li Anqi, Tan, Guo Tingyu and others crowded him.
“Just scratched on my arm. The armor held.”
Wu looked spent.
“We need to leave. Not long.”

Then came a deep roll.
Before he could finish, the underground floor boomed with the same strange sound again.
This time everyone heard it clearly, as though something moved through the lava itself in great ripples, though no life could survive in that heat.
Each stone struck another like thunder, making the mine tremble.
On the opposite bank near Old Wei, the red marrow pocket heaved most violently, waves rising nearly to his boots.

“How much raw red marrow is this—how many swords could be forged?”
“Old Wei, enough! Come back!”

He looked to Zhang and saw the nod.
He found the stone, prepared to return by the same method.

He found it.
His arm brace shot out—

Wham.

A massive black shadow fell from above, thundering.
It overturned vast molten boulders and drove Old Wei down from the sky.
Shards of rock and lava flew onto the soldiers.
Zhang cast a purple shield over himself and Baiyang, spreading it like an iron-bell dome that blocked the lava rain.

Not everyone had that luck.
“Agh—!”
“Put out the fire!”
A blast of molten solution struck one soldier at the bank and burned through his cotton vest in a fist-sized hole.
His belly split open; intestine and liver burst out in hot steam.
Others rolled and beat out the flames with bare urgency.

Then, in the next breath, a giant black figure rose from the magma and climbed onto the opposite bank at the ore mouth.
It dropped, opened its blood-caked maw, and lapped at the red marrow.
What had been charred by lava on its body reknit under yao energy almost in full sight.
After several deep drinks, it lifted its monstrous torso and turned toward the “little ants” below with a grotesque expression.

Three meters.
Six.
Nine.
Over ten.
Calamity Rank: Great Strength, Thirty-One!
Du could not believe it.
It was the same sheng-sheng yao-ghost he fought yesterday.
“How could that be?
Yesterday it was only a little over nine meters. How did it grow a meter in one night?”

“Was yesterday only nine?” Guo Tingyu asked, eyes wide, unable to frame the rest.

“The red marrow would do that,” Du said. “Its growth makes sense if it’s feeding.”

Only Xu Yan stayed calm.
With a hard metallic sound she drew her saber.
Lin Sizhi grabbed her arm.
“Xu Yan, this is Great-Strength level.
In lecture we learned once a yao-ghost passes ten meters, it has city-breaching power.
Not for recruits like us.”

Even these recruits had never seen Great-Strength in life.
Even Zhang and Jiang had gone rigid in shock when they faced sheng-sheng before.

“Run! Run!”
Somewhere in the ranks someone finally shouted.
Fear passed like fire.

As men began to turn, a wild-boar form with chicken feet shot from the forward fissure.
Its tusks pierced a soldier’s throat and blood streamed along the tusks, falling in ticks and drips.
To the right, from another void, a demon with a woman’s long hair, a human face, and a cat body stared in with dead eyes.
To the upper left, a white-stone deer with human hands scraped the edge and stamped, stamp, stamp, beating at their chests like hammers.

Disaster Sixteen.
Disaster Twenty-One.
Disaster Twenty-Five.
...
Large spirits of wild-terrible ranks, creatures usually seen only on open plains, had appeared seven or eight at once inside this cave.
For one instant the whole mine seemed frozen.
Only magma movement remained; every yao-ghost eye glowed with an uncanny expression,
like children baiting one another at a cage of crickets.

Then, in that suffocating stillness, Jiang Dayi broke the silence:
“New recruits, fall back!”

A hard metal ring rang as he drew his massive broad saber from behind.
“Fifty-Seventh Legion, Third Regiment, Main Company of the Baitun Patrol Camp, all units listen!
Objective: hold against yao-ghost advances. Action—!”

“Damn it! Old Wei already took Third Merit. He had already made it!
And because of your damned beast, I’m going to gut you yourself—”
The obscenity struck like a bullet.
Then steel sang: clack-clack-clack-clack.
“Charge!”
“Charge, damn you—!!”

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