Chapter 36: Returning to Camp

The stockade gates of the Beiping Camp gave a heavy groan as they slowly swung open.

What entered was not a victorious army, but a horde of demons crawling out of hell.

There were fewer than six hundred of them. Their armor and uniforms hung in tatters, their bodies caked in coagulated black blood, their faces transformed into savage masks of dust and gore. They moved slowly, each step seeming to drag a thousand-pound shackle behind it. The air reeked of blood, sweat, and death, mingled into a foul and uncanny odor.

The sounds of drilling and clamor in the camp ceased the instant they appeared.

Everyone stopped what they were doing and stared blankly at the battered formation.

This was not the dejection of a defeated army, nor the relief of survivors who had escaped catastrophe. It was numbness—a bestial ferocity and deathly silence that had settled after being scoured again and again by bloodshed and slaughter.

It was as though this army had been stripped even of its souls.

“It’s the Vanguard Battalion! They’re Butcher Fan’s men!”

“Good heavens, did they run into the main Tatar army? How did they end up looking like that?”

“Look at their eyes… Why do I suddenly feel a chill down my neck?”

The whispers were hushed, trembling with fear.

Xu Da hurried out, surrounded by his personal guards. When he saw that Fan Tong’s force had been reduced to less than sixty percent of its original strength, a layer of frost instantly covered his awe-inspiring face.

His gaze swept across every soldier like a blade.

Such grievous losses were a capital offense!

But soon, Xu Da’s brows drew together in a deep frown. He had noticed something amiss.

Though these soldiers looked battered, their physiques seemed even more powerful than before they had set out. The knotted muscles visible beneath their ruined armor were nothing like those of an exhausted force that had marched long distances and endured a bloody battle. Most unsettling of all was the faint, bloodthirsty aura clinging to them—enough to make even Xu Da, a commander forged amid mountains of corpses and rivers of blood, feel a stab of unease.

Just then, another contingent of armored cavalry arrived from the distance. The leading general dismounted and strode toward Xu Da.

It was Lan Yu.

“Commander!” Lan Yu clasped his fists, his voice booming. He glanced at Fan Tong’s formation with a complicated expression. “Your subordinate is late!”

He gave a brief report of the battle, emphasizing how the Vanguard Battalion, though vastly outnumbered, had smashed through an encirclement of Yuan troops several times its own size; how they had held a ruined beacon tower to the death; and how they had finally launched a night raid on the enemy camp and slain its commander.

There was undisguised shock in Lan Yu’s voice.

“Commander, Commander Fan and those brothers of his… when they fight, they’re simply not human!” Lan Yu searched for the right words, but in the end chose the most straightforward ones. “Their fearlessness, their savage way of fighting—I have never seen anything like it!”

After hearing Lan Yu’s “testimony,” Xu Da’s expression shifted from livid fury to bewilderment, and finally settled into something deep and grave.

“Fan! Tong!”

Xu Da practically forced the two words through clenched teeth.

“Here, Commander! Your subordinate is here!”

The ferocious aura that had surrounded Fan Tong along the road vanished without a trace. He scrambled toward Xu Da on all fours, then flung himself before him and began wailing.

“Commander, you must stand up for me!”

Clutching Xu Da’s leg, Fan Tong sobbed like a three-hundred-pound child. He conveniently rubbed the tears and mucus from his face all over Xu Da’s gleaming armor.

“Just look! Look at my good brothers! We set out with more than a thousand men, and this is all that came back! I… I’ve failed you! I’ve failed my brothers!”

The surrounding generals stared in stunned disbelief.

Was this really the legendary Butcher Fan, said to be capable of tearing tigers and leopards apart with his bare hands? With acting like this, it was a crime that he had never taken the stage.

Xu Da kicked him away, furious enough to make his beard tremble. Yet, somehow, the fire in his heart had been extinguished by more than half.

His gaze passed over the rolling and sobbing Fan Tong and fell upon a silent figure within the formation.

Zhu Di—or rather, “Zhu Tiger”—stood there quietly. He rested his spiked mace against the ground. The flesh and brain matter congealed upon its head had not yet been cleaned away. He did not look at anyone. His eyes were lowered, as though everything around him had nothing to do with him.

Yet Xu Da could sense the explosive power hidden within that young body—a force so immense that even he found it alarming.

This was no longer the sharp brilliance of Prince Yan. It was a savage beast that had been awakened and had tasted blood.

Xu Da’s eyes met Zhu Di’s in midair.

Zhu Di did not evade his gaze. He simply endured it calmly. The clarity and pride of his former eyes were gone, replaced by an icy, bottomless pool. Beneath its surface raged a violent collision between the kingly way and primal savagery—a struggle, and a bewilderment.

The return of the Vanguard Battalion was like a block of ice dropped into the cauldron of boiling oil that was the Beiping Camp.

Night fell.

The commander’s tent blazed with lamplight.

Xu Da did not mention Fan Tong’s crime of marching out without orders, nor did he reward him for his military achievements. He merely had a guard bring Fan Tong a stool and pour him a cup of hot tea.

“Sit.”

“Thank you, Commander!”

Fan Tong folded his hands and sat upright, wearing the honest and harmless expression of a country bumpkin.

“The soldiers under your command are not bad,” Xu Da said casually as he held his teacup and gently blew away the steam. “They certainly know how to fight.”

“Heh heh. It’s all thanks to your excellent leadership, Commander. The brothers eat well and train hard—that’s how they got so strong.” Fan Tong began playing dumb.

“Eat well?” Xu Da set down his teacup, his gaze sharpening. “I heard that what you gave them was a ‘specially prepared’ tonic?”

Fan Tong’s heart gave a jolt, but his smile only grew more guileless.

“What tonic? It’s just meat! They get meat at every meal! You know me, Commander. I have no other talents—I just like figuring out what to feed people. If you feed soldiers like pigs, naturally they’ll have the strength to take the field and kill the enemy!”

Xu Da stared at him and said nothing more.

For a time, the atmosphere inside the tent solidified.

After a long while, Xu Da spoke again, abruptly changing the subject.

“That Zhu Tiger. How did he perform on the battlefield?”

“Zhu Tiger?” Fan Tong’s eyes lit up, as though he had finally found an opportunity to show off. “Commander, you should have seen him! That boy is a born general, a once-in-a-thousand-years martial prodigy! When I put the others through my devilish training, they all cried out in agony. But he gritted his teeth and endured every bit of it! If he hadn’t led men to cover our retreat this time and held back the Yuan army’s assault, not one of us would have returned!”

Fan Tong showered Zhu Di with extravagant praise, proclaiming him unmatched beneath heaven and earth. With great skill, he attributed Zhu Di’s “growth” entirely to his own “careful instruction” and Zhu Di’s “exceptional natural talent,” never once mentioning the potion.

Xu Da listened in silence, his fingers tapping unconsciously against the table.

He knew Fan Tong was lying, evading the heart of the matter.

But Lan Yu’s battle report did not lie, and neither did the changes in Zhu Di.

Xu Da waved a hand, cutting off Fan Tong’s endless torrent of words.

“I don’t want to hear you boasting. Your merits and faults in this battle cancel each other out. Now get out.”

Fan Tong looked as though he had been granted a pardon.

“Very well! Commander, I’ll get out at once!”

As he scrambled from the tent, he muttered inwardly, Why does the commander keep asking about Zhu Tiger? Could it be because Zhu Tiger is better-looking?

Once Fan Tong had crawled away, Xu Da reached into his robes and drew out the letter handwritten by Zhu Yuanzhang.

“A fledgling eagle must leave the nest. Without weathering the storm, how can it soar through the heavens?”

Was this not precisely what the Emperor wanted—the fully transformed, bloodthirsty “Zhu Tiger” standing before him?

Fan Tong’s methods were sorcery, a demonic path. Yet that demonic path had produced the soldiers the Emperor wanted most, and the son he wanted most.

Should Xu Da lift the lid and completely disband this strange force, or… tacitly permit its existence and cultivate, for the Great Ming, a true trump card that obeyed no reason?

But the Vanguard Battalion was already difficult to support. If several more such units appeared, they would likely drain the entire treasury.

Xu Da sank into a profound struggle.

Elsewhere, in Zhu Di’s barracks—

He stripped off his ruined armor, revealing a broad chest covered in scars yet honed as hard as iron. His own face stared back at him from a basin of clear water.

It was a strange face.

His eyes were cold and severe, his lips tightly pressed together. Between his brows, not the slightest trace remained of Prince Yan Zhu Di’s former refinement and composure. Only the wildness and brutality of “Zhu Tiger” remained.

Who am I?

Am I the Prince of Yan of the Great Ming, who studied military treatises by heart and held the kingly way within his heart?

Or am I this beast that survived amid mountains of corpses and seas of blood, living on raw flesh and slaughter?

What, in the end, was the essence of strength? Was it the mastery of strategy described in military texts, or the sensation of brains bursting beneath a spiked mace?

He could find no answer.

Books could not give him one. Neither could his father’s teachings.

In his mind appeared Fan Tong’s chubby face—the face that was always grinning, yet saw through things more clearly than anyone else.

Perhaps only the man who had created the monster known as “Zhu Tiger” could give him the answer.

Zhu Di suddenly rose, threw on a coat, and strode out of the barracks.

His destination was Fan Tong’s tent.