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War was a contest of the mind, a contest of morale. The Turks’ morale had now collapsed; even if the legendary Sun Tzu himself were to return, he could scarcely turn the tide.

Chen Ying led the Tang army and the surrendered Turkic forces in a united pursuit, cutting down the fleeing enemy. At that moment, the resentment that Yuguni had kept buried for so long erupted completely. As one of the Turks’ mounted bowmen and a tribal chieftain, he had endured no small amount of humiliation from the aristocrats of the Ashina clan. Most of all, the woman he loved, Zanmei Guli, had been tortured to death by Silifu She.

In ordinary times, the lofty Silifu She would not even deign to look at him. Now, however, the man was fleeing in wretched disarray like a beaten dog. To chase one’s enemies down and hack off their heads—to Yuguni, the sensation was exquisite.

The soldiers of the Yuguni tribe, once regarded as lowly by the Turkic nobility, now took on savage expressions one by one. In that moment, even the cudgels in the hands of Tang camp laborers seemed to have become terrible weapons.

Worse still, in their desperate struggle to seize a path of escape, the Turkic cavalry trampled one another and cut each other down, accelerating the slaughter.

As for Yuguni’s men, they were nomads and therefore especially skilled at fighting cavalry. Eager to distinguish themselves before the Tang generals, these nomadic horsemen showed no mercy as they butchered their fellow Turks. Some shot them with arrows; others cast lassos over those desperate fugitives who were racing for their lives.

Amid such chaos, the scattered Turkic resistance could accomplish little.

“Kill the barbarians!” Chen Ying roared, his eyes bloodshot. “Kill every last one of them!”

Seeing Yi Wuzhenmo galloping farther and farther away, Luo Shixin clamped his legs against his horse’s belly and charged after him alone, heedless of the fact that the Tang cavalry behind him had not yet caught up.

If the Turks were, at that moment, a slab of flesh, then Luo Shixin was a razor-sharp knife—and that blade was aimed straight at the hardest flesh and bone among them.

Yi Wuzhenmo saw that Luo Shixin was clinging relentlessly to his trail. He wheeled around and shouted in grief and fury, “Kill him!”

The several hundred Turkic horsemen who had followed Yi Wuzhenmo were just turning to meet the attack when they glanced back and were instantly scared out of their wits. Thousands of Yuguni’s riders were surging toward them, driving the routed Turks before them like a flood.

“Yabghu, flee!” shouted one fiercely loyal guard. Gritting his teeth, he forced himself to charge at Luo Shixin.

In truth, he had already recognized that dark-faced Tang general—the god of slaughter who had just ravaged the battlefield. Like a bone-scraping knife, he had split open the hardest bones of the Turks, blow after merciless blow.

More than fifty Turkic warriors had already fallen beneath Luo Shixin’s hand, yet even now the dark-faced Tang general showed no trace of fatigue. To charge him was nothing more than to throw oneself onto the chopping block. The guard did not understand why, but the moment he faced Luo Shixin directly, his hands went weak and numb merely from meeting the man’s gaze.

Luo Shixin was not deliberately glaring. But ever since he had followed Zhang Xutuo into the army, he had led every charge, placed himself at the forefront, and rushed first into battle. The enemies who had died beneath his hand already numbered in the thousands. The killing aura tempered in him by years of war had gathered between his brows into a faint, sinister force. His pupils seemed to retain the horrifying images of those who had died beneath his blade, so that anyone who looked into them instinctively imagined that opposing him would mean certain death.

Luo Shixin himself was scarcely aware of it. He had long since grown accustomed to seeing enemies tremble before him. Only veterans who had survived countless battles could withstand the murderous aura between his brows and the deathly intent in his eyes. The Turkic soldiers facing him had not yet reached that level.

In ancient times, Zhang Fei’s roar had stopped an army at Dangyang Bridge. Now Luo Shixin needed only one furious glance to shatter the hearts and courage of his enemies.

He had loosed no arrow and thrust no spear, yet a single glare sent a horseman tumbling from his saddle. On the battlefield, that sight filled the already demoralized Turks with even greater terror and stripped them of the last of their will to fight. They beat their steeds desperately and fled forward at any cost.

“Do not kill me! I surrender!”

The warhorse of a Turkic rider suddenly faltered, throwing him to the ground. The snow beneath him was hard as iron, and the fall left his face streaming with blood. He paid no heed to the pain and cried out in halting Tang speech, “Do not kill me! I surrender!”

The surrender of that Turkic soldier, kneeling in the snow, was something countless others yearned for. Yet when Chen Ying encountered such a situation, he had far more to consider than an ordinary soldier.

They had won on the battlefield—but what of the larger reality?

Luck had played a part in this victory as well. The Turks could afford to lose again. Even if they suffered three, five, or even ten more defeats and lost a hundred thousand men, they could still bear the cost. The Tang, however, could not. The dynasty had only just been founded, and its foundations were too weak. As for waging an all-out war against the Turks, quite apart from whether the Tang possessed the strength to do so, Li Yuan’s cautious nature meant that he would never risk a war that could consume the entire realm at this moment.

One’s position determined one’s thoughts. Chen Ying was no longer a wandering hero free to pursue personal vengeance, nor was he merely an ordinary soldier. He was a Fourth-Rank Loyal and Martial General of the Tang, as well as a commander overseeing the army’s march. He had to consider every matter from the perspective of the whole and the greater strategy.

Just as a Tang soldier raised his saber and brought it down viciously upon the kneeling Turkic captive, Chen Ying shouted, “Stop! Those who are not of our people—if they do not surrender, kill them!”

The Tang soldiers roared in unison, “By order of the commander: those who are not of our people—if they do not surrender, kill them!”