The next morning, early.

Prince Wu arrived at Hundredfold Ridge with his men.

Yuan Long had sent word to Prince Wu the night before about how things stood on his side.

The hills of Hundredfold Ridge folded over one another and gave natural cover. Hiding tens of thousands of troops in there would be no problem.

Under the plan Ning Chen had laid out, Prince Wu would stay at Hundredfold Ridge and guard the prisoners.

Yuan Long would take the Ning'an Army and forty thousand Xuanjia troops to Liangzhou.

After a brief discussion and handover, Yuan Long set out with his army.

According to the plan, Ning Chen was already on the road to Liangzhou with his own army.

Yuan Long had to reach Liangzhou at the same time as Ning Chen.

Along a desolate old road, an army of a hundred thousand stretched as far as the eye could see, like a giant dragon whose head you could see but never its tail.

The hundred thousand were drawn from the Xuanling Army and the Xuanjia Army, and Ning Chen was leading them himself.

Half a month flew by, and the army closed in on Liangzhou.

Liangzhou now had a garrison of seventy or eighty thousand, the men who had pulled back from Yangzhou.

Liangzhou. The army camp.

A lean, wiry soldier rode up to a tent.

"Report... Urgent news!"

The soldier was already shouting as he swung down from his horse.

Inside the tent, a middle-aged man with a long, thin face was talking with an elderly man.

The middle-aged man was Song Gaozhuo, Liangzhou's current garrison commander.

The old man was none other than Prince Xiang. He had lived in Yangzhou... Now that Nanyue held Yangzhou, he'd been forced to fall back to Liangzhou.

Forced, because Nanyue held Yangzhou—but more than that, because his family was in the capital.

Prince Xiang held no real power. The De Emperor didn't trust him at all.

He'd been sent to garrison Liangzhou only because the men now in Liangzhou had all retreated from Yangzhou with him.

Prince Xiang's job was to…