The world, for Lin Wei, had become a study in mud, manure, and monumental scale. The victory at Three Rivers Gate was a memory, the parting of the hammer a strategic fact. What remained was the grinding, colossal reality of moving the Anvil.
The column was not an army on the march; it was a city of hundreds of thousands souls pulling up its roots and lurching forward a few miles a day. It stretched beyond the horizon, a serpent of humanity and suffering so vast it created its own weather—a permanent haze of dust in dry stretches, a sea of churned, sucking mud in the damp lowlands.
The air was a thick broth of scents: the tang of unwashed bodies, the sharp reek of latrine trenches, the smoke of a thousand cooking fires, the sweet-sick odor of the horse lines, and beneath it all, the earthy smell of raw, trampled geography.
Lin Wei rode a small, patient mare at the head of his medical caravan, a hundred wagons of suffering-in-waiting. His world was stratified into three relentless layers.
From a low hill at midday halts, he could see the beast. The vanguard of Yang Zaixing's personal troops, a dark, disciplined smudge at the head. Then the siege, with its disassembled towers and catapults like the skeletons of giant beasts on their wagons, groaning behind teams of twenty oxen.
Then the infantry, a flowing river of faded green and brown.
Then the supply train, a chaotic, sprawling metropolis of carts bearing grain, salt, arrows, and spare parts.
Then, trailing like the beast's vulnerable tail, his own medical corps, the quartermasters, and the camp followers.
And on the flanks, always, the cavalry screens—endless, watchful patrols keeping the Jin scouts at bay. The directive provided a constant, sterile commentary:
"[Rate of Advance: 21 li per day. Average. Water Source Purity Ahead: Questionable. Morale Index: Steady/Weary.]"
The ten yards around his horse. Scholar Zhang, now perpetually ink-stained and squinting, rode beside him, reading from a scroll. "The lime supply is depleting faster than projected. The latrine digging crews are complaining about the soil hardness of the northern lands. Also, the wine for desinfectant has turned sour... Is it still usable like vinegar?"
A harried sergeant from the quartermaster's train cantered up. "Surgeon-General! The wagon carrying the bundled arrow shafts has a cracked axle. We need to offload the shafts to a grain wagon, but the grain master refuses. He says shafts are not victuals and his order is for grain only. There is a… dispute."
Ox Li, a silent, massive shadow, merely grunted and turned his horse. He rode back towards the dispute. Lin Wei did not need to give an order. Ox's presence was the order. The argument would be settled, the shafts moved. Efficiency, enforced by sheer, terrifying presence.
The ache in his thighs from days in the saddle. The grit in his teeth. The low, constant hum of calculation in his mind. He was no longer just treating wounds; he was managing a public health crisis in motion. His medics, now organized into sanitation squads, were as likely to be inspecting latrine depth and water boiling as they were stitching wounds. Disease was the silent enemy marching with them, a more patient killer than any Jin archer.
The problems were mundane and monumental. Dysentery broke out in the Third Infantry Division after they drank from a tainted stream. Lin Wei ordered the unit quarantined, its latrines dug a hundred yards downwind, and had precious charcoal stores broken up to make filtering kilns for their water. It cost them a day's march. Yang Zaixing sent a terse message asking for explanation. Lin Wei sent back morbidity and mortality projections with, and without, the quarantine. The delay was approved.
They lost seventeen men to the dysentery. They would have lost two hundred. The system logged it as a 91.5% reduction in preventable fatalities. Lin Wei saw it as seventeen families that would get ashes in a pot, instead of a son coming home. The numbers were a cold comfort.
At night, the camp was a galaxy of fires stretching to the edge of sight. The sounds were a vast, layered symphony: the clang of a smith's hammer repairing a wagon rim, the lowing of oxen, the murmur of ten thousand conversations, the distant challenge of a sentry, the cry of a baby from the followers' camp.
Lin Wei walked the medical lines, checking on the sick from the dysentery outbreak, now recovering. He saw a boy, no older than sixteen, shivering under a blanket. Not from fever, but from the sheer, overwhelming enormity of it all. Lin Wei wordlessly handed him a cup of warm, weak broth from his own flask. The boy drank, tears cutting tracks through the grime on his cheeks. No system could quantify that terror.
Days bled into one another, marked not by sunrises but by crises resolved. A measles scare in the Fifth. A near-riot over the distribution of rancid butter. A flash flood that wiped out a latrine field and threatened to poison a creek. Each was a fire Lin Wei and his corps put out, their work invisible, unglamorous, and the only thing holding the delicate biological integrity of the beast together.
The land began to change. The endless plain gave way to low, rolling hills. The farms they passed were not just abandoned; they were scorched earth. The Jin were applying their own policy of denial now, retreating before the Anvil and leaving nothing but cinders and poisoned wells. The mood in the column grew grimmer, harder. The war was no longer about meeting the enemy; it was about conquering a wasteland.
Then, on the seventeenth day of the crawl, the horizon changed.
It was late afternoon, the sun a bloody orb sinking into a haze of their own dust. Lin Wei was reviewing a report on leather rot in the suture material when the column ahead simply… stopped. Not the usual ragged halt, but a profound, wave-like cessation of motion that rolled back down the line until the only sound was the wind and the jingle of harness.
He urged his eyes to stare upward, past stopped wagons and clusters of silent soldiers. He reached a vantage point where the vanguard had gathered. Yang Zaixing and his officers sat on their horses, a quietly against the dying light.
Before them, the land fell away into a broad, river-laced valley. And on the far side, rising from the plain like the fist of a buried titan, was Yancheng.
It was not a silhouette. It was a statement. Walls of dark grey stone, thirty feet high, stretched for miles, punctuated by squat, formidable towers. A stark, towering citadel dominated the city's heart.
The Jin serpent banner hung limp from its highest rampart. The setting sun painted the western face a fiery orange, while the rest lay in deep, cold blue shadow. A thin, constant stream of smoke rose from within—the breath of a garrison preparing for a long, hard feast.
No one spoke. The immensity of the task, theoretical for weeks, was now a physical, geological fact before them. The directive in Lin Wei's mind, which had been chattering about water purity and latrine depth, fell silent. Then, it displayed a single, new line, stark against the vision of the fortress.
"[Primary Objective: Yancheng. Status: In Sight.]"
"[Siege Casualty Projection Model: Initializing…]"
"[Estimated Pre-Combat Preparatory Phase: 14 days.]"
"[Projected Fatalities (Siege Assault, Phase 1): 1,200 - 5,800.]"
The numbers hung in his vision, superimposed over the darkening city. A few thousands of souls. Names, faces, boys who missed their mothers, men with sweethearts, all reduced to a statistical range. The medical corps, his pride, his life's work, was a bucket beside an ocean.
Yang Zaixing finally moved, shifting in his saddle. He didn't look at his officers. He kept his eyes on the city. His voice, when it came, was quiet, but it carried on the hilltop wind.
"Make camp," he said. "Here. Dig the first trench line there," he pointed to a rise two li away from the city walls. "The siege of Yancheng begins at dawn."
Lin Wei turned his horse and rode back down the hill towards the waiting sea of his corps. The crawl was over. The butchery was about to begin.