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Chapter 213 - 213: 148: Running a Local Business

Under the sunlight, a few hundred soldiers who had just retreated from the front line were disarmed and made to kneel on the ground, trembling with fear.

Quickly, a group of battle supervisors walked over. Without a word, they pulled out several unlucky souls among them. While the chosen ones cried for mercy, they were pushed to the ground and their heads chopped off.

As the blood splattered and heads rolled, the remaining soldiers who were spared watched in terror and trembled even more.

Some of them were even frightened to the point of madness, but nobody cared.

Even sending the madmen to the battlefield to charge with the others would consume some of the enemy’s arrows at the very least.

They must die on the battlefield.

The soldiers, already accustomed to the cruelty of warfare, understood that if they didn’t send in the vanguard to storm the city, it would be their turn next. So, they had no sympathy or compassion.

It’s always better for others to die than oneself, and cold-blooded people always live the longest.

After dealing with one wave of fugitive soldiers, the second wave of vanguard forces continued carrying the siege weapons and charged toward the walls with screams.

Inside the city, the number of Seven Star Sect rebels was still quite high.

Although nearly half of the ten thousand rebels were conscripted civilian workers with no battle experience, they still managed to make numerous mistakes as they scrambled to defend the city.

Many of the rebels didn’t even dare to take a life, closing their eyes even just to throw a stone down from the wall.

However, they had the advantage of numbers.

With tens of thousands of them, even if divided into several rounds of rotating defense, they filled up every side of the city wall.

Relying on their sufficient numbers, Lu Yuan had already sent several waves of soldiers. Thousands of corpses lay at the foot of the city walls, but the city’s defense still held strong.

The city walls stood firmly on the ground, and the attacking soldiers seemed as insignificant as ants trying to shake a tree.

“This can’t go on.”

Having observed the city’s defenses for a day, Lu Yuan frowned as he saw another group of vanguards retreating.

The Shaoyang Prefecture City eventually became a large city that was incomparable in size and difficulty to the small and simple camps they had fought in Changning.

The city walls were thirty feet high, twenty feet thick, and equipped with various towers, arrow towers, and rolling oil-producing structures.

To take such a strong city with a defending army of ten thousand, one would need to spend years and suffer tens of thousands of casualties to even stand a chance.

Yet, Lu Yuan had just six months left and only twenty thousand soldiers under his command.

He didn’t have the time or the manpower to waste on a slow siege.

“Master, this city is too strong. It’s difficult to break through relying solely on force,” Zhou Qing also observed the siege and had realized the difficulty of capturing the city, feeling a headache coming.

In fact, even in a world of martial arts like this one, ancient battles and sieges were never easy tasks.

Otherwise, the imperial court wouldn’t have spent years making little progress on campaigns against Jinghai Country in the south, the Shu Thieves in the west, and Liang People in the north against Guangling Prefecture.

Your army may be strong, but if the enemy is determined to defend with all their might, what can you do?

You can hardly risk spending years and countless lives trying to capture just a few cities.

Even if you don’t lose all your soldiers and resources, you still risk a revolt.

In the end, you’d lose before the war was even won.

That’s why Liang People’s three-year campaign against Guangling Prefecture, with millions of soldiers and tens of thousands of deaths and countless expenses, ended in their withdrawal in disgrace.

The imperial court’s campaign against Jinghai Country had nearly emptied the southern Southsea and Yulin Prefectures, and took three years just to make minor progress.

As for the western Xichuan campaign, it was still ongoing.

And what about the Miao People in Dongting Prefecture? What did their numbers of several tens of thousands amount to?

Facing a resolved imperial defense with only thirty to fifty thousand soldiers, it took them a whole year just to make progress, and they’d only taken four prefectures so far.

Back then, Lu Yuan had relied on his unyielding defense to divide the Miao People in Shaoyang.

He never thought he would find himself facing such a turtle shell now.

“How’s the food supply in the city?”

Lu Yuan pondered for a while and then turned to ask.

“The food in the city?” Zhou Qing was momentarily bewildered before he realized that his master was considering a siege to deplete the enemy’s food supply.

It was indeed a common strategy employed during a siege.

However, Zhou Qing truly had no idea about the food situation. After all, he had only recently arrived there, just like Lu Yuan, and couldn’t possibly know.

Fortunately, there were some in their camp who did know.

Among the volunteer soldiers who had joined them, there was a man named Tian Jing, who had been summoned. He had been in charge of the city’s warehouse before the rebellion and was familiar with the food supplies.

Tian Jing had managed to escape the city with a group of warehouse soldiers during the Seven Star Sect’s rebellion. They survived only because of the support from some local officials who were loyal to the imperial court.

When he saw Lu Yuan leading the imperial forces to quell the rebellion, Tian Jing had not hesitated to join with his warehouse soldiers and several hundred volunteer soldiers supported by the local officials..