Chapter 42: Viewing Death as Returning Home

Xu Tuibei let out a cold snort without even batting an eyelid.

Gu Liubai did not speak to him further. Instead, he gave a slight bow to Feng Shuqing, who remained entirely uninjured yet was utterly exhausted, before walking to the outermost edge of the gate tower. He exposed himself completely to a position where the eyes and arrows of the Tibetans could easily reach him.

The area outside the city suddenly grew somewhat quiet.

Many Tibetans were gazing in this direction.

A great many were secretly whispering among themselves, questioning whether the eerie youth with green eyes truly existed.

Yet at that very moment, they saw a young man quietly looking down at them.

Within the youth's eyes, a faint, ghostly green flame flickered.

In the wailing wind, a subtle voice seemed to murmur, "We haven't even used the good stuff yet, why are these people leaving already?"

It was also at this instant that the hair on the backs of many Tibetans finally stood on end.

A hunchbacked, ghostly figure flashed through the shadows of the gate tower behind the youth and flew back into the city.

Pei Yunqu watched the youth’s quietly standing figure before her, and then gazed at the dense sea of Tibetans beyond the city walls. A profound sense of unreality, coupled with overwhelming fatigue, washed over her, causing her to feel a wave of dizziness she could scarcely suppress.

……

As the sun began to rise, Chen Tu looked at Gu Liubai, who had just woken up, his face full of admiration.

This rascal truly slept more soundly than a pig.

After the Tibetans retreated outside the city, Gu Liubai had merely shown his face on the ramparts before finding a nearby stack of hay to sleep in, and he had slept straight through until now.

"Aren't you genuinely afraid that the Tibetans might launch a sudden night raid?"

"If they decide to launch a raid, there's nothing I can do about it anyway. At worst, I'll just die for them to see." Gu Liubai still seemed to be suffering from a bit of morning crankiness. After muttering those words, he added, "However, I don't think they will. Unless their paranoia has reached an absolute extreme, they wouldn't have pulled all their vanguard troops back out. Since they've done that, their commander must intend to wait until daylight before making a move. I reckon that even if there wasn't a single wisp of smoke in the city from the middle of the night onward, they'd be even more afraid to attack; they'd only suspect that we were cooking up some new trick."

Pei Yunqu had also huddled in the hay for half the night. Wrapped in a leather cloak, she was still feeling somewhat chilled and shivering uncontrollably. Her hair was matted with dried grass, and her body was caked in dried blood; she looked precisely like some unfortunate girl who had been severely beaten and marked with a straw sign, waiting to be sold off in the market.

She hadn't slept much, yet a surge of nervous excitement kept her mind exceptionally sharp.

What Gu Liubai had done seemed like a gamble with his life, but to her, it was clearly nothing of the sort. His strategizing was tightly linked, ring within ring, and his guesswork regarding the enemy commander’s mindset was equally interlocking, calculated down to the smallest detail.

The previous night, he had deliberately exposed his head on the ramparts precisely to let them catch a glimpse of his two green eyes, ensuring he could sleep soundly through the second half of the night.

"How many men do we have left, and roughly how many did the enemy lose?"

Gu Liubai gave Xu Tuibei a kick.

This god of slaughter, who had terrified the Tibetans out of their wits the day before, had pulled every last arrow from his body and now lay as limp and lifeless as a puddle of rotting flesh.

Struck by Gu Liubai's kick, he replied feebly, "There are still just over two thousand men left in the city who can still fight. Those Tibetan dogs lost at least four thousand."

Pei Yunqu's heart sank.

Earlier, in the eastern sector and around the granary, she had felt as though her eyes were filled entirely with Tibetan corpses, leading her to believe the garrison had suffered minimal casualties. But calculated this way, the fighting on the western side had been unimaginably fierce; they must have lost at least a thousand or two hundred men here alone.

"Not bad."

Gu Liubai looked somewhat satisfied.

This could be considered his first time joining forces with the Yinshan bandits to face a formidable enemy, and the battle results were already slightly better than he had anticipated.

With so many Tibetans dead, coupled with the loss of commanders like Mangbuzhi, it should be enough to cow the Tibetan leader.

……

Three beacon towers within the city of Peshawar simultaneously billowed with thick smoke.

Three straight pillars of smoke soared directly into the sky.

Zanzhuo, the hitherto undefeated Zanpu outside the city, had not slept a single wink all night.

In the morning light, gazing at the sparse and scattered Tang soldiers atop the city walls, he gripped the leather whip in his hand so hard his knuckles turned white, already on the verge of issuing the order for another assault.

This time, he would exclude the demoralized vanguard troops entirely and deploy the army commanded by Rukun—troops into whom he had spent the entire night instilling flexible combat doctrines.

As everyone knew, ghosts—whether of the Great Tang or of Tibet—could never manifest in broad daylight!

Yet at that exact moment, the warning horns sounded from the direction of Yangguan.

From Yangguan, cavalry had sallied forth through the pass!

"These people aren't entirely stupid after all." Seeing the movement from the direction of Yangguan, Gu Liubai let out a long breath. "Leave it to your Pei family."

Pei Yunqu wore a stern expression. "You've been waiting all along for the cavalry from Yangguan to come and throw their lives away?"

Gu Liubai cast a sympathetic glance at the groaning Xu Tuibei not far away, and said softly, "These people aren't Xu Tuibei; they aren't going to chase after a glorious death. Once they gauge the number of Tibetan soldiers, they won't charge in blindly. This handful of cavalry isn't even enough to serve as whetstones for the Tibetans."

Crack!

A leather whip lashed through the freezing air with fury.

The veins on Zanzhuo's forehead writhed like earthworms.

He had made up his mind: if he chose to retreat now, Peshawar would forever remain his greatest humiliation!

At that very moment, the thunderous sound of hooves erupted.

The Tibetans outside the eastern gate of Peshawar saw a massive surge of warhorses pouring out from the gates.

"What are they going to do next?"

Pei Yunqu watched the torrent of warhorses in the distance, then glanced at Gu Liubai, who was having several veteran soldiers help Xu Tuibei strap on his armor. For the life of her, she could not guess Gu Liubai's next arrangement.

In any case, compared to this scoundrel, those young talents she knew back in Chang'an and Luoyang weren't even worth dog dung.

To say nothing of outmaneuvering the Tibetans ring by ring; those fools would likely have wet their trousers the moment they laid eyes on an army laying siege to the city the previous night.

As for the military treatises they usually studied, they were utterly useless.

In a matchup with such a stark disparity in strength and no natural barriers to defend, every military manual gave the exact same answer: scatter, break through the encirclement, and run; survive however many you can.

"Draw them into another fight."

Gu Liubai instructed the veteran soldiers to pull the leather straps of the armor tighter, specifically telling them to bind extra plates around the spine. According to him, even with severe injuries, having support along the back would make it much harder for him to collapse.

Xu Tuibei was squeezed so tightly he squealed in pain and cursed vehemently, yet he offered no resistance at all.

"If they attack on their own initiative, they might probe repeatedly, and the more we fight, the more our cowardice will show. But if we draw them into a fight, whatever confidence they've just regained might be shattered in a single blow. Is that it?" Pei Yunqu asked as she thought it through.

She was beginning to grasp Gu Liubai's train of thought.

This Tibetan army had no weaknesses other than their paranoia.

Every step Gu Liubai was taking now was aimed squarely at this fatal flaw.

"Yes. This time, the fight will be at the eastern gate, and everyone in the city must go to the eastern gate. If they fail to push even a few miles down the main avenue inside the eastern gate this time, coupled with whatever trouble is stirred up outside, they might well fall into despair."

Hearing these words, the two officials from the Bureau of Historiography nearly burst into tears.

They didn't know much about military command, but they were cunning schemers.

When it came to reading the wind and guessing people's hearts, they were experts!

Combining this with yesterday's battle, Gu Liubai's current deductions seemed nothing short of brilliant to them—towering like two or three city walls combined!

"Next, we're going to throw all our strength into the eastern gate and fight a decisive battle to the death against their elite!"

The youth whom they had regarded as a heavenly general descending to earth had now wiped the smile from his face, his morning crankiness entirely replaced by a bone-chilling intent to kill. "Chen Tu will pull a few more stunts inside the city to make that Zanpu believe there is an even more formidable army lying in ambush."

"As for the supplies they want, I'll have them displayed more prominently so they focus their attention on looting this fat meat rather than rushing to harvest heads. After this battle, even if every last one of us dies in combat, they will suffer massive casualties. The more plunder they take, the heavier a burden those goods will become on their retreat."

"Their speed in returning to the heartland of Tibet will inevitably slow down, and if we're lucky enough, it might even prevent them from recovering their vitality for years to come."