Chapter 148

In the end, only a little over a thousand men retreated with General Niu back to the Badong Commandery Office. Every single one of these defeated soldiers looked ashen, their armor stained with gunpowder smoke and blood. Many had even lost their boots in the flight, leaving a trail of bloody barefoot prints across the bluestone pavement. Out of the ten thousand Prefecture Army soldiers, some two or three thousand had died near the city walls. Zheng Fuhu kicked aside a corpse and discovered it was a teenage soldier no more than sixteen or seventeen years old, his youthful face still frozen in an expression of terror. At the base of the city walls, dozens of wounded soldiers sat leaning against pools of blood, groaning, while medical soldiers of the Xiangyong Army bound their wounds with white cloth strips. "Don't kill me! I have an elderly mother at home!" A junior Prefecture Army officer dropped his sidearm, fell heavily into the muddy water, and kowtowed repeatedly. His helmet had long since vanished, and his disheveled topknot clung to a cold-sweat-drenched forehead.