Chapter 850

"Take Nanshan within ten days and capture Jinzhou within half a month!" This was the deadline set by Governor-General Wang Yongji for the army tasked with pacifying Liaodong. Any later, and the weather would grow even colder. Once the soil froze, it would be impossible to lay siege by digging tunnels. Even if a tunnel were successfully bored, the city walls—saturated with moisture—would freeze solid, becoming incredibly resilient. It was uncertain whether even gunpowder could bring them down. Assaulting the walls with scaling ladders was even more out of the question. A defender needed no special equipment, just a supply of cold water. When the enemy began to climb, they would simply pour the water down the ladders; the freezing air would turn it into ice in an instant. Those slick, frozen ladders would become a graveyard for the Ming Army. And even if the Ming Army somehow managed to blow a hole in the wall, as long as they hadn't breached the city itself, the defenders could quickly patch the gap by piling up earth and dousing it with water to freeze it solid.