The King's Mate - Part 1: Banyue

Chapter 10

Notes:

!!!!! PLEASE READ !!!!!

Okay so... I know I said I wasn't gonna upload these chapters for long time yet, but heck if so many people's opinion differ I'll listen.
I'm not brave enough to against such a majority.
But! I just don't think it's fair to people who really have to deal with the war much more personally than most, so I'll do it like this:

I'll post the whole chapter the way I wrote it last year and I'm not making any changes to the original version.
However, after the chapter is done, there will be 2! lines, and under those lines I'll put the summary version of the chapter which has already been here for the previous months.
So, if you don't want to read anything too closely related to war, you can skip the chapter, and just read the summary version at the end in order to keep up with what's happening at least a little bit, despite the overarching content.

I'll also put this explanation in all the notes for chapter 7 to 11, and I won't add anything else so you can just skip those notes if you're here for the whole thing.

Personally, I still think it's too soon but I hope this way works for everyone, somehow x.x

Chapter Text

After Xie Lian had rejoined his troop, they immediately made their way deeper into the country.

Xian Le wasn't a densely populated country to begin with, and the route they had chosen didn't pass by any other towns, or even villages, so there should have been no further disruption until they reached the capital.

However, as luck would have it, they met a small entourage of Yong An soldiers, only about an hour after they'd left the border town. Xie Lian had no doubt the soldiers were on their way to collect more taxes and slaves from that town, and he was quite eager to prevent that.

The battle that followed was less of a fight and more of a one-sided massacre. Xie Lian gained no joy from killing anyone, but he knew there was no way around it in a situation such as this, and he'd already prepared his mind beforehand. They had won swiftly, and Xie Lian shrugged the encounter off as a minor inconvenience.

They travelled further towards the capital, until they reached their meeting point with the other troops that had invaded from the north east and south east borders. The troops led by Xie Lian and Quan YiZhen arrived there first, which was expected. After all, their route had significantly less towns and villages to get through than the others had.

They used the wait to eat lunch as well as to hydrate. Some even took the liberty of taking a nap. Xie Lian was too high strung for that however, and although he knew it would be wise to catch up on some sleep, the adrenaline rushing through him prevented him from even thinking about closing his eyes. After all, how could he have the nerve to sleep when he was in the middle of trying to get his country back?!

They also used the time to talk about the incident in the border town.

According to Quan YiZhen's theory, the king of Yong An had no interest in assimilating Xian Le into Yong An, and just hadn't decided on how to use his new property yet, or maybe he didn't think the outskirts were worth looking into for further development. Either way, Xie Lian disagreed with that theory; he highly doubted that the king of Yong An couldn't decide on how to deal with Xian Le. In fact, he was pretty sure that his encounter earlier was very much part of that king's agenda.