Ruan Yingxun breathed a sigh of relief, yet his face had gone frighteningly dark.

He'd worried all along that the enemy would lay an ambush at Hundredfold Ridge. He'd never expected them to raid his camp at night outside it.

He'd lost his archer battalion in this fight. Six thousand archers!

Good archers and good cavalry were the hardest troops of all to train.

Six thousand archers lost, more than four thousand of them dead... The rest had gotten away, but he couldn't feel the least bit glad about it.

What galled him most was that he still didn't know whether the attackers were Ning Chen's men or the De Emperor's.

Prince Wu had gone over to Ning Chen with the hundred thousand men of the Xuanling Army, but they hadn't changed uniforms.

A hundred thousand uniforms couldn't be made overnight.

So Nanyue had no way to tell whose troops had attacked them.

Ruan Yingxun led his battered troops all the way back to Hundredfold Ridge.

By now it was broad daylight.

After a hard fight and hours on the move, men and horses were exhausted.

To Ruan Yingxun's relief, the baggage train had been saved.

As long as they still had their supplies, everything else could be dealt with.

If the supplies had been taken, they'd have been in real trouble!

"Pass my order. We rest here!"

Ruan Yingxun gave the order.

The Nanyue army came to a halt and fell out to rest!

Ruan Yingxun picked up his water skin. He'd barely taken a sip when he noticed the little pebbles on the ground were moving... He stared at them for a moment before he realized it wasn't the pebbles that were moving. The ground was shaking.

"Report..."

A scout came galloping in, yelling, his voice full of panic.

When he reached them, he leapt off his horse... and was so flustered he fell flat.

The scout scrambled up, ran to Ruan Yingxun and said, his voice shaking, "General, a huge force has appeared ahead... The Ning'an Army is leading it!"

Ruan Yingxun's mind went blank. He stood…