Chapter 36: The Blade Roars Like Thunder

Li Xizhi watched Xu Tuibei on the city wall, then glanced at Gu Liubai moving through the shadows, his eyes filled with reverence.

By pushing everyone to the brink of death and letting them believe that all hope was lost, they had transmuted the collective fear into a frenzied resolve. One still and one moving, these two had accomplished in an instant what most frontier commanders could never achieve.

The people within the city could endure Xu Tuibei, but the Tibetans outside could not. A massive force of Tibetan cavalry had lined up in the direction of Yang Pass. Having prepared to devour any Tang reinforcements that might appear, they found the sight of Xu Tuibei standing on the walls utterly grating.

The walls of Peshawar were not particularly high. Before the order to storm the city was even given, a dozen riders charged straight toward the section where Xu Tuibei stood. The Tibetans lacked neither brave warriors nor powerful fighters, and as long as it did not disrupt the grand strategy, their generals generally tacitly approved of such reckless displays of valor for the sake of glory.

The sound of arrows piercing the air intensified. With arrows paving the way, two Tibetan warriors brandishing dual blades sprinted up the wall, their feet drumming against the stone as they ascended with the agility of mountain goats, appearing before Xu Tuibei in an instant. Their swift and ferocious posture drew a thunderous cheer from the Tibetan army below.

The two warriors had not expected to reach the wall so easily. Glancing at the sparse figures of the Tang soldiers, their look of surprise vanished, replaced by mocking grins.

But in the next heartbeat, their smiles froze. A mountain had appeared before them.

Xu Tuibei stood up, straightening his massive frame. He loomed over them like a colossal shadow. The heavy *mo dao* in his hands channeled his pent-up frustration into a frantic, violent energy, which surged through the intricate runes carved into the blade, instantly transforming it into a blinding strike of thunder.

A deafening thunderclap erupted from his long blade! It was as if he were stirring the very heavens, the sheer force shattering the protective *qi* surrounding the two Tibetan warriors.

One strike, four segments!

Unable to withstand the power of that blow, the two warriors saw their own blades sent flying, and their bodies were sliced open as easily as paper. Beneath the glow of the fires, the blood and shattered organs seemed to roll like waves before the eyes of the Tibetan army.

"Hahahaha!" Xu Tuibei laughed maniacally, spitting toward the dense mass of Tibetan cavalry below. "Killing the likes of you is no different than slaughtering pigs and dogs!"

Feng Shuqing stood silent by his side. When the two warriors had first charged up, he had felt a tremor of fear. The overwhelming pressure of the approaching army was unlike any opponent he had faced, and he knew that if he were caught in the middle of it, he would be quickly submerged. Yet, Xu Tuibei remained as steady as a mountain, moving with the speed of a thunderbolt. He finally understood why that young man had chosen to station Xu Tuibei on the wall, and why he had been tasked with guarding his back. This man was not just a powerful cultivator; he was a born killer, a formidable general worthy of respect.

...

A group of crossbowmen watched Xu Tuibei on the walls, feeling their blood begin to boil. They did not understand why they had been ordered to withdraw from the walls earlier, but just then, a scrawny, monkey-like youth ran over, waved his hand at them, and issued a swift order: "All of you, get to Xu Tuibei’s side. When someone gives the order to fire, ignore Xu Tuibei—empty your quivers! Not a single arrow left!"

"Who is that?" By the time the youth had vanished, they realized he had been holding a military tally.

Wailing horns sounded continuously, growing in volume. The Tibetans began their formal assault. Apart from the side facing Yang Pass, Tibetans were scaling the walls in the other three directions. Not all of them possessed the ability to traverse the vertical stone as if it were flat ground, but the first wave suffered almost no casualties. Other than the straw dummies placed to bait arrows, there seemed to be few living people left on the walls—only the mountain of flesh on the west side, still roaring with laughter.

"Aside from that man, have the rest of the Tang soldiers lost their nerve?"

No sooner had this thought crossed their minds than they were stunned. Arrows descended like a swarm of locusts. Everyone left in the city capable of drawing a bow was firing frantically at the walls. The Tibetans had never seen such a tactic. In any siege defense, one fired while the enemy was gathered at the foot of the wall; who ever heard of firing from a low position toward the top after the enemy had already breached the wall? A Tibetan soldier, confused, reached up to touch his head, only to find three arrows embedded in his hand and skull.

Before the climbers could grasp the situation, more than half had tumbled back down. The Tibetan generals made no adjustments. Having reached the walls, why wait? In their subconscious, breaching the walls meant the city was as good as fallen.

The sound of the horns drowned out the whistling of the arrows. The Tibetans surged forward, wave after wave.

Two officials from the Bureau of Historiography remained with Gu Liubai and Pei Yunque. Terrified, they nonetheless gripped a spear and a blade respectively, desperate to prove they were not cowards. They witnessed how Gu Liubai issued orders through Pei Yunque and her subordinates, and thus they grasped his intent faster than any of the city's generals.

Ordinarily, in a pitched battle, no side would empty their quivers at the very start. But Gu Liubai had no intention of defending the walls; he wanted urban combat. Peshawar was a fortress with dense housing; once thick smoke filled the streets, even the best archers would struggle to find targets, and with cover everywhere, arrows would be useless. By letting the enemy climb the walls, the attackers grew careless, abandoning their shields and failing to disperse their ranks. Consequently, whether on the walls or once they spilled into the city, the Tibetans would remain a dense, vulnerable mass. Every arrow would achieve maximum lethality.

The Tibetan generals still had not realized it! The sound of the arrows and the falling soldiers led them to believe the walls were teeming with Tang defenders. In response, they merely urged more warriors to climb, pushing more of their own into the killing zone.

Throughout this process, Xu Tuibei drew the vast majority of the Tibetan generals' attention. Most of the Tibetans who survived the arrow rain on the walls did not rush to open the gates, but instead could not resist charging toward the position held by Xu Tuibei. The lure of the bounty was too great. Before the horns sounded, the generals had declared: whoever took the head of that mountain of flesh would be granted land for a hundred households and five thousand strings of cash.

"You filthy curs think you can take my head?"

Xu Tuibei never once considered a path of retreat. With Tibetans screaming from every direction and heavy armor-piercing arrows whistling past, making his skin crawl, he felt only exhilaration.

"You little runts! A single hair from my body is thicker than your waists!"

With a savage grin, he swept his blade, thunder roaring from its edge, cutting down everyone in his path.

"Shouldn't we send a few more cultivators up to help him?"

Pei Yunque was no longer afraid. She found that Gu Liubai was right: when few people died, one felt nauseated, but once the slaughter began and blood washed down the walls like a waterfall, she only wanted to kill. She could no longer associate that "lump of rotten meat" with the Xu Tuibei before her. He was a fierce general who had been obscured by dust for too long. In the time it took her to speak, he had felled at least five more men.

Yet, more and more Tibetans climbed the walls. In her mind, she saw a fat green caterpillar being swarmed by black ants, slowly, slowly being eaten alive.

"He won't die for a while yet, and the city will soon be the main battlefield." Gu Liubai’s gaze landed on the quivers many were still carrying. By his calculation, in ten breaths at most, the archers in the city would be out of arrows. At that moment, regardless of whether the Tibetan generals realized the trick, the gates would surely be forced open.

"I’ve concentrated our forces here on the west side; I’ll abandon the east gate and let them in."

"Understood!"

Pei Yunque usually rebelled against everything, but now she followed Gu Liubai’s every word, moving quickly to execute them like a junior officer. She knew only that Gu Liubai was the true master of this city, and even though the walls were lost, the city remained orderly and firmly under his control.

"Open the gates!"

The Tibetans realized the situation faster than Gu Liubai had anticipated. A general in golden chainmail kicked one of his own men, who was charging toward Xu Tuibei, right off the wall. This short but immensely powerful Tibetan general had only needed to sense the *qi* vibrations in the air to know that Xu Tuibei’s bulk was no mere illusion. That man possessed deep internal arts; his massive *mo dao* was invincible in the cramped space of the wall—the more corpses piled around him, the more hindered his attackers became. Moreover, behind him stood a terrifying swordsman, one more formidable than any Tang swordsman he had ever encountered.

Every arrow that flew toward Xu Tuibei had been deftly deflected by that swordsman’s blade. For arrows that would have missed, the swordsman simply ignored them. The perception was perfect; the swordplay was precise.

"Open the gates? Did you ask your father's permission?"

A gaze from hundreds of feet away had caught Xu Tuibei’s attention. To the Tibetan general's dismay, Xu Tuibei began hacking his way through the crowd, heading straight for him.