The first batch of soldiers sent out by Gu Shenwei came back to the military camp, and Long Fanyun, the one in charge of the mission, reported to the Dragon King, “When we arrived, the sons of Shili Molo had already taken all their most potent fragrances and their Chief Priest away. We only found a dozen of disciples of the priest. I’ve already sent some soldiers to track down the runaways and bring the disciples back.”
Upon arriving at the camp, the young disciples, who had spent their entire lives living in a Flower Soul Forest isolated from the outside world, were frightened to death. Surrounded by a group of fierce-looking strangers, they were too scared to say anything and looked as if they had also inhaled some intoxicating fragrance and become walking corpses.
After the several tribal chiefs of the Land of Fragrance came to appease them, they finally recovered from their shock and were able to speak.
Unfortunately, it turned out that none of these young disciples were able to make an antidote for Indra Fragrance, as all of them were still at the stage whereby it was required of them to place all their attention on ancient texts and none of them had any hands-on experience.
The tribal chiefs of the Land of Fragrance were eager to please the Dragon King, so they immediately sent their men to fetch fragrance makers from their capital. Before long, nearly 40 fragrance makers were brought to the camp and all of them were disciples of the Shilli family’s Chief Priest. Everyone of them was able to make several types of fragrances, but none of them knew how to make Indra Frangrance and the antidote to it.
According to them, Indra Fragrance was recognized as the king of fragrances, and only the Chief Priest and his designated successor knew how to make it.
As such, the focus was shifted back to the young disciples again.
The chosen successor of the Shili family’s Chief Priest was a boy aged 14 or 15. Among all the Chief Priest’s disciples, only he was from the ruling class of the Land of Fragrance. He was handsome but timid; he could not even say a single word in front of the Dragon King.
Gu Shenwei had no choice but to let two tribal chiefs of the Land of Fragrance question him.
This time, the boy finally told them the whole truth.
Indra Fragrance could put a person under general anaesthesia, and in this condition, the person would only be partially conscious and unable to feel any physical pain. As such, those who inhaled Indra Fragrance would never struggle or fight back when being burned alive or stabbed by a knife.
Under the influence of this drug, the women being burned to death on the annual sacrifice ceremony of the Land of Fragrance could remain calm and peaceful throughout the whole process, which greatly increased the solemnity and sacredness of the ceremony.
Indra Fragrance had long-lasting effects. According to the ancient books, if someone who had inhaled the fragrance failed to take the antidote in time, he or she would be stuck in a coma, which would last about a month. During the process, the person’s symptoms would keep getting worse until he or she died quietly.
As the Land of Fragrance seldom used the antidote for Indra Fragrance, the Chief Priest’s successor only knew the formula for the antidote but had never made it. He expressed that he was willing to try out the formula but it would take him at least half a month.
Gu Shenwei’s disgust with the entire Land of Fragrance grew steadily.
“The inhabitants here seem to be weak and harmless, but they’re probably born with a strange mixture of simplicity and cruelty. They behave as if they were a group of spoiled children and show no respect for other people’s lives. The nobles here will never take the initiative to save anyone outside their own class unless someone powerful makes them to do so,” thought Gu Shenwei.
Things that happened a few days later further confirmed his judgment.
After conquering the Land of Fragrance, the Great Snowmountain troops did not enter the capital and were still stationed outside the city. If possible, Gu Shenwei wanted to completely isolate the soldiers from the locals. However, he was unable to do so.
He had to rely on the city to provide food rations for his army, and he could not stop the slave women from continuing to sneak out of the city and hook up with his soldiers. These women, who had been forced to seduce the Great Snowmountain soldiers previously, seemed to really like his soldiers, who were exactly the opposite of the men in their own country. Now more and more of them began to follow suit.
Gu Shenwei turned a blind eye to this. He did not forget about the speech he had made to his soldiers the other day. He just did not want to be excessively strict with them. “As I’ve already stopped them from carving up the Land of Fragrance like bandits, I’d better not ask them to give up the other ‘benefits’,” thought Gu Shenwei.
At present, the real headache for him was the new recruits in his army.
The Land of Fragrance had a population of around 60,000, and nearly 10,000 of its residents were men aged between 15 and 50. Gu Shenwei had conscripted 6,000 of them into his army, and the remaining men in the country were craftsmen and men who were old, weak or sick.
At the beginning, Gu Shenwei let the 6,000 men from the Land of Fragrance form a troop of their own and selected some swordsmen and machetemen to train them. A few days later, he had to admit that it was a wrong decision. Over the past few days, the new recruits had tried every way to stay away from the weapons and some of them even had secretly destroyed the weapons distributed to them.
There was no iron in the Land of Fragrance, and the Great Snowmountain troops did not have enough extra weapons for the new recruits. As such, most of the new soldiers were just equipped with wooden sabers or wooden swords, which could easily be broken or burnt.
Gu Shenwei decided to correct his mistake by dividing the 6000-person troop into two parts and asking them to join the swordsmen and machetemen troops respectively. He hoped that the battle-seasoned swordsmen and machetemen could exert a subtle influence on the new recruits and make them tough.
This was a risky decision, as the new recruits significantly outnumbered the veterans in the army. Once the veterans got assimilated by the people from the Land of Fragrance, the Great Snowmountain would lose more than it gained.
Soon enough, a more serious problem arose.
Among the 6,000 or so new recruits, 1,200-1,300 new soldiers were nobles of the Land of Fragrance and the rest of them were slaves. The former openly refused to fight side by side with the latter. They even loathed training together with the slaves.
They treated their peers gently and politely and the soldiers of the Great Snowmountain with profound awe and respect. Nevertheless, they could never accept their slaves as their equals. On many occasions, these noble men, who wished to stay away from weapons forever, picked up their wooden sabers or swords to beat the slave soldiers. They acted so cruelly and abusively that even the battle-seasoned veterans found their behavior very shocking.
Gradually, this kind of thing happened more and more often. The noble soldiers even asked the slave soldiers to serve them like before, which caused great disturbance to the military training.
Gu Shenwei summoned all the tribal chiefs of the Land of Fragrance and sternly commanded them to renounce their rights to the slaves and treated all the soldiers equally.
Nevertheless, these nobles, who had surrendered without putting up any resistance and given up all their wealth and women to please their conqueror, resolutely refused to treat the slaves as their equals.
Gu Shenwei finally came to know how stubborn these cowardly men could be.
They did not give him any reasonable explanation or bargain with him. Instead, they all knelt down, wailing and begging for the Dragon King’s mercy. They were willing to accept punishment, but refused to accept their slaves as their comrades.
When Gu Shenwei expressed that he wanted to kill one of the chiefs to set an example for the others, all the chiefs rushed to take the responsibility. Upon seeing that, he knew that this method was useless.
To solve this problem, Gu Shenwei separated the slaves from the nobles. The former was commanded to join the machetemen troop and the latter was conscripted into the swordsmen troop. The Dragon King supported the slaves in gaining equal status with the nobles, but the slaves kept sneaking out of their own troop to serve their former masters and even took pride in this kind of behavior. If a slave did not do anything for his former master in three days, he would be despised by his peers.
This ridiculous situation made Gu Shenwei doubt himself. “I might be wrong about them. The men in this country can never make qualified soldiers. If I had followed my soldiers’ advice and made these captives slaves of the army, the situation would’ve been better. Or, maybe I should lead them to leave this place as soon as possible. The nobles and slaves may change and stop being so divided after they see the outside world and fight a few major battles together.” With this in mind, he put most of his effort into collecting food and horses for his army.
At the moment, both Shangguan Ru and Maid Lotus were still unconscious and thus could not remind the Dragon King that he was repeating their mistake by having engaged in an irreconcilable clash of interests against the nobles.
Tuo Nengya returned to the camp. He had searched everywhere in a 50-kilometer radius around the capital but still failed to find Old Man Mu. During his mission, he had burnt down all the Flower Soul Forests to the ground, and thus he brought all the Chief Priests and their disciples in the forests back to the camp.
Among all the 10 Flower Soul Forests of the Land of Fragrance, only the one located within the royal palace was uninhabited, and in each of the other nine forests, lived a Chief Priest. These nine Chief Priests were experts in their respective fields, which included fragrance making, pharmacy, medicine, gardening, scriptures, ceremonies, fortune-telling, clothes & accessories and kung fu.
After exchanging a few words with the Chief Priests, Gu Shenwei were disappointed to discover that these people were all obedient slaves and extremely bookish people. In the past 100 years, they had just insisted on a rigid interpretation of the doctrines in the ancient books and never expanded on them.
As such, Gu Shenwei kept only the two Chief Priests, who were good at pharmacy and medicine respectively, and these two priests’ disciples in the camp. As for the other Chief Priests and their disciples, Gu Shenwei set them free and allowed them to return to the city or join the army.
He deliberately spent more time talking to the Chief Priest whose expertise was kung fu, but he got as disappointed as Shangguan Ru and Maid Lotus had been. This old Chief Priest patiently answered all his questions, and some of the priest’s views did delight him for a moment. However, all of the old man’s views were from the ancient books. They consisted mainly of comments and not practical instructions.
That led Gu Shenwei to secretly dub the priest “chicken ribs”—tasteless when eaten but a pity to throw away. The only reason he decided to keep this priest in his army was that this old man’s lower body was paralysed. Asking the priest to leave the camp would be no different from sentencing him to death.
Gu Shenwei planned to have a good talk with the priest when he had plenty of time to do so. He still wanted to try to get something useful from the pedantic man.
Although now building a strong army was the core measure to enhance his competitiveness against the Golden Roc Fort, he still had to improve his kung fu skills. Without superb kung fu, he would be unable to command and subdue his swordsmen and machetemen.
Gu Shenwei was planning to bring his newly recruited soldiers to the outside world to see what a real war looked like, but before he could do so, someone brought it to him.
It turned out that the 7 sons of Shili Molo had not just escaped with their Chief Priest, they had also returned with an army of their own. The Land of Fragrance was not completely isolated from the outside world, but the privilege to communicate with the outside world was enjoyed by only a small group of people, which included Shili Molo and his sons.
According to the scouts, a 3,000-strong army from the northeast was heading for the capital of the Land of Fragrance and would arrive there three days later.
Gu Shenwei considered it a great opportunity for him. He was confident that he would soon be able to find a route to return to Western Region and turn his new recruits into real soldiers.
He secretly ordered all the swordsmen from the Great Snowmountain to keep a close watch on their slave soldiers and prevent them from contacting their former masters.
In the meantime, the machetemen were ordered by the Dragon King to disseminate the news about the Shili family’s rebel troops to the nobles in their ranks.
As Gu Shenwei had expected, the night before the arrival of the Shili family’s army, more than half of the nobles made up all kinds of excuses to return to the city and then defected to the Shili family after leaving the camp.
He did not send any troop to stop them, and in fact, he wanted to see more defectors. To encourage the remaining 400 or so noble soldiers, who were not brave enough to escape, to flee, he commanded his troops to withdraw 15 kilometers to the southwest, leaving the capital of the Land of Fragrance to his enemies. He made this decision, as he intended to fight a perfect battle. As for his soldiers, they did not understand his decision but still carried out all his orders dutifully.
Soon enough, the last batch of nobles fled. They even took lots of money and women away from the city.
“Now, the burden has been shifted to the enemy. It’s time to engage,” thought Gu Shenwei.
This was going to be the first war fought in the Land of Fragrance in this century.