The snow had stopped falling three days ago, but the cold still clung to everything like a curse. Lin Yao could see his breath coil in the air as he stared at the rows of dead mules lined along the road—each one half-skinned, their flesh stripped by men who no longer cared about shame or orders. The soldiers had begun to eat whatever still had a pulse. Rats, dogs, even the leather straps on their boots.
The army was dying.
The banners of Zhen, once proud, hung limp in the wind. The red dye on the fabric had faded to a dirty brown, stiff with frost. The snow on the ground was stained gray from ash and human waste. The air carried no sound except coughing, groaning, and the dull thuds of men collapsing from exhaustion.
Yao had stopped counting the corpses two days ago.
He stood at the edge of a half-frozen stream, his thin hands trembling as he tried to pour dirty snowmelt into a cracked clay jug. The smell of rot followed him everywhere now—his clothes, his hair, his skin. It was the smell of a dying army, one he could not wash away even if he wanted to.
"Yao," a voice croaked behind him. It was one of the surviving quartermasters, face sunken, lips blue. "The commander wants the ration list."
Yao didn't look up. "There are no rations left."
"Then write that down," the man hissed. "He still wants to see a list."
He turned, cold eyes narrowing. "A list of what? Snow? Bones? Air?"
The man gave him a hollow stare before walking off, shoulders hunched.
The commander still wanted to pretend this was an army, Yao thought. Still wanted to issue orders, still demanded reports. Still clung to ceremony while the world around them fell apart.
The snow crunched under his boots as he trudged back toward the camp—if it could still be called that. Most tents had collapsed. The fires were little more than smoldering pits. He passed a soldier crouched beside a dead mule, hacking at the carcass with a broken sword. When Yao's shadow fell over him, the man froze, eyes wide and wild.
"I'm not stealing," the soldier rasped. "It's mine."
Yao said nothing. He simply moved on.
At the heart of the camp stood the command tent, patched together from scraps of canvas and animal hide. Inside, the air was thick with the stench of sweat and unwashed bodies.
General Han sat slumped at the head of the table, wrapped in a torn cloak. His cheeks were hollow, but his eyes still burned with the fury of a man unwilling to admit defeat. Around him, his officers argued in low, desperate voices.
"The northern route is gone," one said. "The bridge was destroyed."
"The southern road is ambushed every night. We lost another convoy."
Han slammed his fist on the table. "Then find another way!"
Yao stood silently near the entrance. He was no soldier, just a logistics slave elevated out of convenience. But his name had started to circulate—whispers of the man who could count without writing, who could track supplies in his head. The officers resented him for it.
Han's gaze snapped toward him. "Lin Yao," he said, voice sharp despite his fatigue. "You're the one who handled supply schedules before the depot burned, yes?"
"Yes, General."
"Then you'll find a new route."
Yao hesitated. "The snow has blocked every road within ten li. The only pass left is the ravine near Mount Sui. But it's narrow—too narrow for wagons."
"Then make it work." Han's tone was final. "Five thousand men depend on it."
Yao wanted to laugh. Five thousand starving ghosts, perhaps. He looked at their maps—crudely drawn, ink smudged from moisture—and realized they were meaningless now. Rivers had frozen, bridges collapsed, villages abandoned. But he nodded. "I'll try."
"Not try," Han said. "Succeed."
Outside, the cold hit him again like a slap. He crouched beside the fire pit, rubbing his hands to bring back feeling. The men stared at him as he passed—some with hollow eyes, others with quiet hatred. They saw him as the one who rationed their food, the one who decided who ate and who starved.
He spent the rest of the day mapping distances in the snow with a stick, drawing rough lines to simulate the routes. He knew the principles—shorter distances meant less strain on the pack animals, but they also meant more risk of discovery. Longer routes consumed more time and more lives.
A dead balance.
By nightfall, he had the beginnings of a plan. Rotating convoys—smaller groups of carriers moving in intervals, rather than one large column. If one was attacked, the others could still advance. It was a crude application of logic, but it was all he had.
When he presented it to the quartermasters, they balked.
"You want us to split the supplies?" one scoffed. "That's suicide."
"It's survival," Yao replied. "If you send everything together, we lose everything together."
"You talk like you command us," another spat. "You're just a slave given a pen."
He ignored the insult. "Do it anyway. The General agreed."
They obeyed, but resentment simmered like rot beneath the surface.
The first convoy left at dawn. Yao went with them, walking beside the mules, counting every step. The cold sliced through his threadbare coat. The snow was deep, each step sinking to the knee. Around him, men coughed and muttered, dragging their feet through the slush.
By midday, one of the lead animals collapsed. The men stood around it, unsure whether to weep or curse. Yao stepped forward. "Strip it. Use the hide for your feet. Don't waste the meat."
They hesitated. Then someone began to cut.
That night, they camped beneath a cliff. The fire smoked but gave no warmth. Yao sat apart, writing with charcoal on a strip of bark—tracking distance, rations, and losses. His fingers were numb, but the act of recording steadied his mind.
In the distance, he could hear someone crying softly.
By the third day, the cold had grown worse. Frost clung to eyelashes, and breath froze against the cloth on their faces. The road was gone; they followed the sun by instinct alone. The men moved like shadows, half-alive, half-mad.
Then came the storm.
It descended without warning—a blinding wall of white that swallowed the sky. The wind roared, screaming through the ravine like the voice of the dead. The mules panicked, slipping on ice. One fell, dragging its load into the gorge.
"Hold the line!" Yao shouted, his voice snatched by the wind. "Don't scatter!"
But they did. Men vanished into the snow, their screams lost in the storm.
He stumbled forward, gripping the rope of the lead cart. His feet felt like stones. His hands bled where the rope had cut through his skin. The world had turned white and senseless.
When the storm finally broke, half of them were gone.
The survivors huddled together, eyes empty, lips cracked. The supplies were half-buried, half-frozen. Yao stared at the ruins of the convoy and knew the other groups must have fared no better.
They dug graves in the snow with their hands. There was no time for prayers.
By the time they reached the forward camp, only two thousand remained of the original five. The rest were bones under the frost.
The General awaited them, standing in front of his tent, his expression unreadable.
Yao dropped to one knee, too weak to stand straight. "We brought what we could," he said. "The rest—"
"I can see what you brought," Han interrupted. His gaze swept the starving men, the shattered wagons. "Two thousand?"
Yao swallowed hard. "The others… the storm—"
Han's tone was cold as iron. "You changed the route."
"It was the only way to avoid ambush. If we had gone south—"
"You disobeyed orders."
Yao looked up, disbelief cutting through the exhaustion. "If I hadn't, no one would have returned!"
The General's hand moved to the hilt of his sword. "And yet you cost me three thousand men."
For a long moment, no one spoke. The soldiers stood silent, the wind whispering through the camp like a ghost.
Yao felt something inside him break—not from fear, but from understanding. He saw it now. The truth didn't matter. Results didn't matter. Only obedience. Only the illusion of control.
He bowed his head. "Then I accept your punishment."
Han stared at him, eyes flickering with some buried emotion—rage, despair, perhaps even respect—but it passed. He turned away. "You'll live. For now. We still need someone to count the dead."
That night, Yao sat beside the dwindling fire, staring at the stars beyond the smoke. His hands trembled as he traced invisible lines in the dirt—routes that led nowhere, numbers that no longer mattered. Around him, the survivors muttered in their sleep, dreaming of food they would never taste again.
He closed his eyes. The hunger gnawed at his gut, but he barely felt it anymore. The cold had claimed even that.
All that remained was the slow, grinding sound of men dying quietly, one by one, under the indifferent gaze of the winter sky.
And in that silence, Lin Yao finally understood what kind of world he was living in.
A world where reason was weakness.
A world where obedience was worth more than truth.
A world that devoured its own just to keep moving.
He opened his eyes to the dark horizon and whispered to no one, "Then I'll learn to devour too."
The wind answered him with a long, hollow cry that carried across the frozen valley—
the voice of an army marching toward starvation, and a man walking deeper into the heart of its ruin.