Burning Supplies
An enormous boom erupted at the head of the column, and the soldiers at the rear jumped in shock.
"Enemy attack! We're under attack!"
"Prepare to repel them!"
They drew their weapons and scanned the forests to either side, bracing for an assault. But trapped as they were in the long, narrow pass between the mountains, they had nowhere to flee and no way to strike back effectively.
Having already buried the elite vanguard in the gorge, the Sakpung Unit seized the moment of confusion and doubled back.
Without the luxury of pre-buried powder charges like the ones in the valley, three hundred men could not do much against tens of thousands. That did not mean they could do nothing.
"Fire the mortars."
At the Sakpung Unit Leader's command, the operators produced hollow iron-bamboo tubes—steel pipes—and the shells that went with them. The shells, shaped like the fat bodies of fish, were a portable mortar design Dang Unhwa had just created, using mercury fulminate so they could be launched without an open flame. The weapon had been sealed under the strictest secrecy to hide the existence of mercury fulminate; now, while Baek Beon was away in Beijing, they were committing it to live combat in secret.
One tube per three-man team: one hundred mortars ready. Ammunition was scarce. Even with the full weight of the Dang Family's workshops thrown into production, the sheer number of other projects meant they had only a hundred and fifty shells at most—not enough for two full salvos from a hundred tubes.
They made no effort to target the soldiers themselves. Powder weapons were already too few, and the enemy far too many. What they did have, however, were the same fire shells used in the bottle-shaped divine-machine rockets—filled with toluene emulsion—and the enemy's rear was choked with the yurts, wagons, and every other scrap of supply that a hundred thousand men had dragged along.
That was more than enough.
"Fire!"
They braced the iron tubes and loaded ordinary spotting rounds rather than the bottle-shaped incendiaries. The propellant charges at the base struck the firing pins; the shells leapt skyward with force.
Thoom-thoom-thoom-thoom!!
"Urgh!"
"Aaaagh!"
"Enemy! Enemy attack!"
Wherever the ranging shells landed, clouds of pink smoke burst into the air. The technique was the latest work of the famed alchemist Paracelsus—he had discovered how to tint the smoke of fireworks and signal charges by exploiting the different colors elements produced when they burned. The same principle that made the red signal flares of Noksan so vivid was now being put to lethal use here.
The Sakpung operators watched the drifting pink haze and adjusted the angle and direction of their tubes. Down below, chaos erupted.
"Poison! Poison gas!"
"Save me!!"
The smoke had nothing to do with poison, yet the trauma of the Lijiang gas attack still clung to them. Soldiers abandoned carts, horse reins, even their weapons and fled in the opposite direction. As the ranks threatened to collapse, the officers panicked.
"Do not run! The enemy is watching from above—where do you think you can go? Infantry! Take your spears and charge that ridge!"
No one seemed to hear. The poison-gas attack at Lijiang had left scars that deep.
And then—
Piiiiiiiuuuuuu———!
With the long, whistling shriek unique to their flight, the bottle-shaped shells arced over the heads of the army and plunged down.
The moment the weapon known in reports as the Bursting Hell Shell—abbreviated simply as the Burst Shell—finally stepped onto the stage of history. Hwiyeom had once tilted his head at the name, muttering that a "burst shell" could not possibly mean that kind of burst shell. Now the world saw what it truly was.
Boooom!!
The blast itself was not especially powerful, but the instant each shell ruptured it flung a viscous liquid in every direction—splash!—and the sparks from the detonation caught the liquid and spread like an explosion. The delay was so short that, from the side, it looked as if a wave of fire had simply erupted from the shell and rained outward.
—Fwoooooosh!!
The flames, fed by the cocktail of toluene, pitch, coal dust, and pine resin, raced across the Chagatai supply train in heartbeats. Yurts of leather and felt—homes and warehouses in one—were perfect kindling. Wagons loaded with grain became so much extra fuel.
Of course, not everyone was lucky enough to escape the rain.
"Aaaagh!!"
"It's hot—aaaaagh!!"
Soldiers whose clothes had caught fire thrashed and beat at themselves, but sticky, flammable sludge did not simply fall away. The sight of men wrapped in flame dying in screaming agony only drove the rest to flee the fire even faster.
Even so, the officers might still have restored order—until one of them tried.
"Put out those fires! Any man who runs, I will take his head myself—ghk!!"
A Noyan who had drawn his sword and was cutting down fleeing soldiers to force discipline suddenly clutched his throat and toppled from the saddle. A black-painted dagger was buried in his neck.
The Sakpung Unit Leader toyed with another dagger in his hand, eyes cold as he swept the battlefield. Already his men were flinging hidden weapons at anyone who looked like an officer, anyone who tried to restore control. One by one those who might have held the army together died. After that, no one remained who could command the soldiers.
They abandoned their baggage and fled the way they had come.
The Sakpung Unit did not pursue. Even for martial masters, meeting a force of that size head-on would have been a grim task. Time itself would finish the army for them.
The region was nothing but mountains. No villages to plunder, no grass fit for the steppe horses and sheep. They would have to live off the stores they carried, conquer quickly, and seize new grain—yet after sacking Baoshan they had received almost no further resupply. Baoshan itself was no granary of plenty. Even if they somehow took Lijiang, it was a mining city that lived off jade, not farmland. Yunnan's food situation was precarious to begin with; its richest lands were mostly tea plantations or Caffa groves. And now a hundred thousand men had thrown their entire grain train into a gorge and run.
It was scorched-earth warfare in all but name.
"Just let them live and go home… Ha. The Young Patriarch really does have a ruthless streak when you look at it this way."
We'll starve the enemy to death using the mouths of the survivors.
The more soldiers who lived, the faster the enemy would face famine. Once the supply lines withered, war became impossible. Wang Yangming had proposed stretching the enemy's logistics, harrying them with raids until the exhausted troops could be crushed at Kunming. The idea of using mortar-fired Burst Shells to burn nothing but the grain wagons had come from Hwiyeom himself.
"We don't have enough shells to burn everything."
"Once the enemy has mostly cleared out, we go down. Move some of the grain; leave the rest and smash the wagon axles."
"We're not taking all the food?"
"The plan is to hit them again when they come back later to salvage grain or repair the carts."
"Whoa…"
The deputy commander clicked his tongue.
"We are still the Sichuan Dang Family, right? Not the Zhuge Clan?"
"Watching the Young Patriarch, there are times I wonder whether even Zhuge Liang returned from the grave could match him."
"True enough. Zhuge Liang made wooden oxen and flowing horses—and that was about it. Listing everything our Young Patriarch has invented would wear out a man's jaw."
"Enough chatter. Time to prepare to move."
"Yes, Unit Leader."
The Sakpung Unit Leader watched the enemy soldiers fling down their carts and flee, then turned his gaze toward the mountain ridge to the southeast where Hwiyeom waited.
Young Patriarch… how far ahead are you seeing? How does this war end?
He wanted the answer.
Hwiyeom faced the Yunnan Provincial Commander and the other generals across a map.
"Once their advance stalls at Lijiang and the flanking thrust toward Kunming is blocked, the enemy will have only a few options left."
He tapped the map with his pointer.
"One is to abandon Lijiang entirely and drive straight for Kunming by the Liangshan detour. They might choose it because they cannot bear to leave the grain they abandoned in the mountains, and because the physical barriers they would still have to break are fewer."
"Even if they force Lijiang, the city will hold no supplies—only rotting corpses. Plague would be a real risk. Beyond Lijiang they would still face the outpost at Noksan, and past that they would have to reduce Dali all over again…"
"It's still the better road for a large army to travel—yet that advantage means nothing now that the element of surprise is gone. They would have to grind forward through successive sieges. Their siege train is little more than battering rams and catapults; our cannons and divine-machine rockets outrange them and out-kill them by a crushing margin. They know it. They will want to avoid a frontal contest."
"So the main force will come through Liangshan?"
"More likely than another attempt at Lijiang—but still not very likely."
"Why?"
"Empty outposts, reservoirs breached to turn the hill roads into mires, the vanguard annihilated by valley explosives, a long supply column burned. Put yourself in their place. They will conclude that the flanking strategy has already been discovered and that we are thoroughly prepared. Unlike the Lijiang approach, this route is a true mountain track—narrow, winding, hundreds of li long—where a large army cannot use its numbers. A surprise raid is one thing; entering that road after the enemy knows you are coming is another matter entirely."
"Hmm…"
Hwiyeom's reasoning was sound. The Yunnan Provincial Commander stared at the map and groaned.
"Then they're in a noose. Their advantages are numbers and the quality of their cavalry and mounted archers—but the Liangshan detour nullifies both and forces constant attrition, while the Lijiang axis is too hard to smash head-on against longer-ranged powder weapons. That leaves…"
"Abandoning Sichuan and Yunnan altogether and swinging around through Qinghai instead."
"Qinghai Province? Crossing the Kunlun Mountains? That is…"
He did not dismiss the idea out of hand; he examined it. That alone marked him as a capable commander. After a careful moment he spoke again.
"…Mongol horses of northern blood are small, light, cold-hardy, and can go long without water by drawing moisture from the grass. The losses would be severe, but yes—they could make the crossing. And once past the Kunlun, the open wastes of Qinghai are perfect ground for horse archers."
Just as Korea's terrain rose high in the east and flattened toward the west, so too did Qinghai, Sichuan, and Yunnan keep their mountains massed on the western side. If the enemy host crossed the Kunlun, marched south across the Qinghai wilderness, and struck Sichuan in the rear, the province might lose the advantage of its rugged terrain. Sichuan was cursed with mountains on the north and east as well, of course, but those approaches were far kinder than the western wall.
"Knowing that changes nothing. We cannot strip the armies from Yunnan and Sichuan."
They could not empty the main theater on the chance the enemy might circle around. Hwiyeom nodded.
"My family has already raised a separate detachment and is sending it toward Qinghai. The Qinghai Provincial Commander is there as well, and Beijing will not stay silent forever. For now we strengthen the defenses of Yunnan and Sichuan and wait."
"A separate detachment…?"
The Yunnan Provincial Commander's face clouded with suspicion, then twisted.
"I worry whether the Pi Clan of the military—men who hold no small grudge against you—will actually bestir themselves."
His prediction, however, was about to prove spectacularly wrong.
At that very moment, in Beijing—
In the imperial audience hall, Minister of War Pi Jae-hyeon raised his voice toward Emperor Sungui.
"Grant permission to dispatch the central army, Your Majesty—!"