Before the army left the capital, a number of unconnected people congregated, all of them in a dither, acting as if the sky had fallen.

“What do we do? What do we do?” The volatile former pure consort, now Lady of Bright Deportment Li, paced back and forth. “What goddamn idiot actually changed the plot? With four important characters dead, the system must be a mess. What if I die now?”

“Do you even need to ask? It must be Huyan Xi, the genius of the herding tribes!” said the former worthy consort, Lady of Bright Deportment Wang. Her tone was calm, but she didn’t look happy.

Some of the women clustered together and couldn’t help breaking into tears. The sound made Prince Huainan’s head hurt. He stood up and said angrily, “Cry, cry, cry! That’s all you can do! You’ve been living comfortably in the harem all these years. With the emperor and empress gone, as long as the herding tribes don’t reach Jinluan Hall, none of you will die. But I’m going to be substituting for the emperor. Oh, my god, how many times did Emperor Jingren nearly get assassinated in the novel? If that happens to me now, what will become of me?”

Little Shunzi couldn’t help himself either. He fell to his knees and wept silently. “At least you’re all masters, with so many people around to protect you. But what about me? A eunuch who’s out of favor. Anyone at all can come along and throttle me!”

Eunuch Lian also wanted to cry, but luckily he still had a mainstay. Before he could start crying, he looked up and saw the empress as steady as a mountain in his seat. He said in concern, “The empress is going into battle. That will be the most dangerous place. Your Majesty…you must be careful.”

“I’m fine,” said the empress calmly. “And all of you can stop crying. The plot will follow the main characters. Emperor Jingren is leading this campaign personally, and I’m going to bring Su Huailing along as well. Without the two of them, all you have to do is behave yourselves, and nothing will happen to you. The harem operates under my rules. Until I return, no one will have the authority to kill anyone in the harem. You just pray that I don’t die in battle. As for you, Prince Huainan, keep an eye on Xu Qingyang and your other scheming aides, do your duty as regent, and don’t think about anything you shouldn’t be thinking about. Then you’ll be all right.”

“Fine, fine.” Prince Huainan nodded emphatically. “I’ll put Xu Qingyang under house arrest in my residence when I get back… No, I’ll send him to the Embroidered Guard’s prison. I won’t let him make any trouble. As for being emperor…anyone’s welcome to it. The thought never crossed my mind. You, though. When you go to Mobei, give Huyan Xi a good thrashing for me. Just look at what he’s done!”

The empress nodded, stood, and said, “Consorts, all of you let go of your possessions. Collect some gold, silver, and jewelry to convert into military supplies to be sent to Mobei. With that credit to your names, anyone who gets the idea to take you down won’t get any farther than that. As for Eunuch Lian and Little Shunzi, stick to Prince Huainan as he exercises his duties as regent. You can all help each other out. With Prince Huainan looking out for you, no one will dare to harm you.”

When he was finished, he left the secret room. The empress’s time was limited; he couldn’t stay here too long.

This secret room was a space provided for them by the system. It could be used in an emergency and wouldn’t be discovered.

The others feared for their lives, but the empress wanted to reassure these outsiders so they wouldn’t do something wrong in a panic and change the plot, giving him and the young emperor an enemy at their backs to deal with in addition to the one in front. Especially Prince Huainan: he had too many subordinates with ideas of their own. If one of them decided that this was a good opportunity to usurp the throne, the soldiers at the front would be in danger.

Only if Prince Huainan’s life was tied to the lives of the soldiers would he be nervous and keep a close guard on those would-be usurpers.

Making arrangements for these issues at the rear would let the empress march into battle without lingering concerns.

The empress returned to Qifeng Hall and saw Emperor Jingren sitting there quietly, holding a cup of tea that had gone cold. He was sunk in silence, thinking of something.

The empress went over and took Emperor Jingren’s hand. Soon the tea in his cup became steaming hot. The warmth called Emperor Jingren’s mind back. He heard the empress say with all the confidence of a sound plan, “Don’t worry, Your Majesty. Even if Huyan Xi commands soldiers like a god, I can still take his life before tens of thousands of soldiers. We will win this war.”

“Your martial talents truly are superior,” Emperor Jingren said thoughtfully. “We have asked Jing Xixian just how powerful a person’s abilities can be. He said that a trained expert can easily take on dozens of ordinary people, and the best of the best, armed, might be able to win against a few hundred. But the ability to use flowers and leaves as weapons exists only in legend. After the assassination attempt at the hunting grounds, Jing Xixian brought the corpses of the seventy-eighty assassins to a medical examiner, and the medical examiner said that he had never seen people with such powerful martial arts. Each one of those assassins was as good as a hundred men, yet someone had killed them with pebbles. This kind of divine skill is unheard of even in legend.”

The empress’s smile was frozen on his face. His expression was rigid as he regarded Emperor Jingren.

“After this, we ordered Jing Xixian to investigate the skills of Marquis Zhenbei’s family. What he determined was that the family was made up of expert military men, fully capable of surviving in the face of tens of thousands of troops, but they were still ordinary. We asked how the marquis compared against the master who had killed the assassins at the hunting grounds, and he said that he hadn’t a ten-thousandth of that person’s power.” Emperor Jingren blew on his tea, then drank it all in one gulp. The heat scalded his throat, but he still swallowed it. “Where did you learn your skills, Empress?”

“Does Your Majesty really want to know?” the empress asked quietly.

“We do, but you do not need to answer us now,” said Emperor Jingren. “We trust that you are a dauntless hero, and we will not suspect our own general on the eve of battle. We only want to ask whether your abilities are truly unmatched. Whether, even at the head of the army, you will come to no harm.”

After a lengthy silence, the empress shook his head and said, “Against others, I am certain that I am the best. But Huyan Xi is an unknown. I cannot be sure.”

Aside from the surpassing skills he had brought into the game, the empress’s fighting abilities had been enhanced by the system in order to aid him in accomplishing his mission; naturally he had a cheat code that allowed him to defeat others. But if Huyan Xi was the doctor, then he could get around the system and raise his own fighting stats. The empress didn’t know what that would mean.

Emperor Jingren sighed at length. “We regret our decision now. We thought that your skills could not be matched in this world, Jinyi, that you would come to no harm regardless of the difficulties you faced. We relied too heavily on your abilities and forgot that we are the one who must protect you.”

“Your Majesty,” the empress said heavily, “when two armies meet in battle, it isn’t the martial skills of each general that determine the victor. However skilled Huyan Xi might be, at most the two of us will be nearly on a par with each other. The difference cannot be too great. No one in the world can be that skilled.”

On this point, the empress had a great deal of self-confidence. Even to the doctor himself the system wouldn’t give fighting stats that exceeded what this world could accommodate.

After receiving this answer, Emperor Jingren looked slightly less concerned. The empress knew that the emperor was asking these questions out of concern for him and couldn’t help feeling pleased. He reached out to embrace Emperor Jingren. Kissing his face, he said, “Your Majesty, we set out tomorrow. Let us get some rest tonight. It will be hard to get a good night’s sleep on the road, with all that rattling.”

This meant he wanted to fool around again. But Emperor Jingren didn’t resist. He allowed the empress to carry him to bed, where he shed his imperial robes and faced him openly and sincerely.

The next day, the army marched. Emperor Jingren stood atop a tower in the capital’s walls to provide encouragement to the soldiers and sway the army in favor of the new General of the North. After intoning a brief vow, the army moved.

Everyone with any abilities at court who could accompany the army did. They were afraid lest Emperor Jingren come to harm. Even Jing Xixian followed the company with a hand-picked team of Embroidered Guardsmen in case of any attempts against Emperor Jingren’s life on the road. The Embroidered Guard was after all best acquainted with the ways of the world.

As Jing Xixian was leaving the palace, he naturally brought Su Huailing. Perhaps her good luck could help Emperor Jingren score a victory. Though women did not belong in a military camp and Su Huailing in men’s clothes was unmistakably a woman, her ability to blind everyone around her to this fact was also first-rate. But, just in case, Jing Xixian had Su Huailing stay close to him, so he could look after her in case anything happened.

Though Jing Xixian was a ruthless man, he had taken good care of Su Huailing ever since she had come to the Embroidered Guard. He often helped her get word of her foster brother in the palace and her friends outside of it. When she learned that her foster brother had recovered from his illness and had been given a position as assistant manager at the Supply Depot, Su Huailing was relieved. Through Jing Xixian’s subtle influence, she understood that her friends and family were doing so well because she was working with the Embroidered Guard. Because of this, she stayed and did her work, helping find out information and such.

And Su Huailing had a good disposition, never voicing complaints about hardship or weariness. Though she knew that it would be dangerous for her to accompany the army to war, upon hearing that Mobei was in crisis and needed help, she came along without a word of complaint and never said “no,” however rough the going got.

Jing Xixian had seen strong women before. Well-trained, skillful women weren’t in short supply among the Embroidered Guard. But they were different from Su Huailing: they had been trained from childhood. Su Huailing was an ordinary girl, and a little naive too. She ought to have been living a pampered life, but now she walked till her feet were blistered and clenched her teeth, saying nothing about it; when her menses started and her belly ached, she didn’t make a sound.

When the army marched, not everyone had a horse to ride. To reach Mobei as soon as possible, apart from a few people riding on horses or in carriages, all the ordinary soldiers trotted after the company the whole way. This wasn’t a brief run, but a continuous jog lasting several days. Even the well-trained elite soldiers and expert officers were exhausted at the end of each day, let alone Su Huailing, a young woman with no martial arts training.

After a few days of this, her face was as wan as candle wax, and her blooming countenance looked like a desiccated eggplant. On top of that, her menses had started, and it seemed that the intensive running was making the bleeding worse; it lasted seven or eight days.

Resting in their tent at night, they slept on the ground. Su Huailing moaned quietly as she lay wrapped in her bedroll. The noise kept Jing Xixian from sleeping, so he couldn’t resist giving her a sliver of his internal force. Su Huailing seemed to feel better. She closed her eyes and quietly thanked him.

When they set out the next day, Su Huailing hadn’t gone two steps before Jing Xixian knocked her unconscious and simply hoisted her over his shoulder like a sandbag. He took care not to be seen by the soldiers as he walked, following at a considerable distance behind the army. He only caught up when it was time to make camp for the night.

Su Huailing endured no further hardships all the way to Mobei, and she began to look much better. The only trouble was that she felt embarrassed about undressing in a tent with Jing Xixian. Whenever she saw him, she blushed slightly.

Jing Xixian was quite dismissive on the subject. He looked Su Huailing’s figure up and down and said tepidly, “I’ve peeled the skin off more than a few young women like you. There’s no need to feel embarrassed in front of me.”

Su Huailing was silent.

The main army progressed as fast as such a large force could and at last reached Mobei on the fifteenth day.

The vanguard had gone on ahead at speed, reaching Mobei within three days, but it was too small, and in the meantime Huyan Xi’s injury had healed; he and his army had attacked the city. Without support from the reinforcements His Majesty was bringing to look forward to, Mobei would by now have been thoroughly demoralized.

And when Emperor Jingren arrived, the city was nearly out of ammunition and provisions, on the verge of falling.