Chapter 49: A Conversation Between the Dead and the Living

"I... I, I, I..." Vice Commander Tebili felt his mind go completely blank.

A crowbar swung down with a vicious whistle through the air, instantly smashing his vision into a sea of white.

"Shut up. Not a word." Xiahou Yan tapped the crowbar against his palm and spoke softly. "I specifically sent everyone far away and forbade them from approaching because, before I kill you, I want to have a little chat. Just you and me. So shut your mouth and listen to me. If you dare make another sound without my permission, it won’t just be a swing of a crowbar."

Vice Commander Tebili opened his mouth but didn’t dare utter a single syllable. Even though his brain was still reeling from the heavy concussion, Vice Commander Jose Tebili realized one critical problem: "If I can’t speak, how am I supposed to offer bargaining chips for my life?" A trace of incurable despair crept into Jose Tebili’s eyes.

Xiahou Yan acted as if he hadn’t seen his prisoner’s hesitant expression. He pulled another chair from the corner of the tent and placed it in front of Tebili with the backrest facing forward. The Lord ungracefully straddled the chair, resting his arms over the back as he studied his captive with indifferent eyes.

Tebili felt tears rolling down his cheeks, unsure if they were from the heavy blow of the crowbar or sheer fear and desperation.

"What is your name? I’ll allow you to answer that," Xiahou Yan smiled at the captive.

"Jo-Jose... Tebili..." Tebili answered tremulously, feeling as though he had lost control of his own lips.

"Very good, Mr. Jose Tebili. You see, I haven’t been in the best of moods lately." Xiahou Yan rested his chin on the back of the chair, playfully twirling the crowbar in his hands. "So, I really needed to find someone to talk to, someone to vent my thoughts to. Unfortunately, there are just some things you can’t tell others. But Mr. Tebili, the Goddess of Destiny is truly merciful; she delivered you right to me! And you, Mr. Tebili, are the perfect listener! Do you know why?"

Tebili shook his head frantically, flinging the tears off his cheeks.

"Because you are a man who is about to die," Xiahou Yan smiled faintly, enunciating every word. "And dead men won’t leak my secrets."

"I, I, I, I, I..." Vice Commander Tebili stammered.

Another merciless swing of the crowbar came down. The force of the strike was so immense that it knocked Tebili and the chair he was tied to flat onto the ground with a resounding CRASH.

Xiahou Yan stood up from his chair and took two steps forward to right Tebili. Lifting the robust mercenary’s chin with the cold tip of the crowbar, he stared into the man’s tear-filled eyes and sneered, emphasizing every syllable, "Remember? When I speak, you shut up."

Tebili nodded in humiliation, but Xiahou Yan wasn’t looking at him. The Lord took two steps back, rested his left hand on the back of his own chair, and looked down at Tebili indifferently.

"Mr. Tebili—I don’t know what your rank is in your unit, so I’ll just call you Mr. Tebili—I believe you are still unable to accept your defeat. You must be filled with utter confusion as to why your cavalry’s mass charge failed to achieve its intended effect and completely crush the convoy’s defenses. Nine times out of ten, things in life don’t go your way, but you, Mr. Tebili, I bet you still can’t comprehend how today’s defeat even happened."

Tebili could only nod. What else could he do?

"Let me give you the answer. Your mistake was failing to realize that many things in this world are not what they seem on the surface," Xiahou Yan sneered. "When you saw my convoy, Mr. Tebili, you saw a tired and fragile group filled with the old, the weak, women, and children. You thought you had the eyes of a leopard, spotting a defenseless fawn just for yourself!

"But what you didn’t see was that within this group was a Thorn Knight with immensely rich combat experience, clad in ancient, epic-tier armor.

"What you didn’t see was that my Captain of the Guard is not only young and beautiful but also a master Swordsman with breathtakingly phenomenal swordsmanship.

"And what you especially didn’t see was my Chief Mage, whose Spirit Magic can turn the tide of a battle in an instant!"

Tebili, bound tightly to the chair, was slightly bewildered. "Doesn’t the Empire only have three ranks of Knights: the Lily Knight, the Rose Knight, and the Bauhinia Knight? Where did the title of ’Thorn Knight’ come from?" he wondered. Of course, after two heavy blows from the crowbar, he had long lost the capacity for deep thought.

Xiahou Yan paid no heed to the confusion in the man’s eyes and continued, "Furthermore, Mr. Tebili, your problem also lies in the fact that you didn’t just miscalculate your opponent’s strength—you even miscalculated your own!

"In your mind, the dozens of cavalrymen under your command should have been able to crush my convoy’s resistance with unstoppable force. Actually, you weren’t wrong about that. At the time, the only ones in my convoy still capable of fighting were the Thorn Knight, my female Captain of the Guard, and my Chief Mage..."

The Lord smiled contemptuously, flashing a number with his hands in front of Tebili.

"Mr. Tebili, you had sixty men! Sixty! Sixty against three. No matter how strong those three were, you should have been able to establish an overwhelming advantage with numbers alone. Perhaps the only thing you couldn’t handle was Clement the Thorn Knight’s heavy armor, but you were fucking cavalrymen! If your men had realized the advantage of their mobility, they could have easily ignored the slow Heavy Armor Warrior, used the absolute speed of their warhorses to slaughter my convoy in circles, and then swaggered off right under Clement’s nose!

"But what did your unit do? They merely suffered a single strike from Clement and completely lost their will to fight, breaking ranks and fleeing, which was exactly what gave my Captain of the Guard and my Chief Mage an opening to exploit!

"Mr. Tebili, perhaps in your mind, the cavalry under your command are the finest elites in the southern Wilderness, but let me tell you, they don’t make the cut! I’ll have you know that I’ve seen far too many armies like yours. They might be well-equipped and highly trained, but they have no conviction in their hearts! Mercenaries like your subordinates, who only ever fight for their own interests, might charge with unstoppable momentum, but when they rout, they collapse like a breached dam! They are jackals that tear at rotting flesh on the plains, but they are not pillars that stand firm amidst raging tides!"

Vice Commander Tebili gritted his teeth and stared at the young noble before him, various fluids mingling into a river down his face. Subconsciously, he knew this black-haired young man was right.

"Of course, these military issues aren’t my main point today," Xiahou Yan relaxed his posture and reached into his chest pocket, pulling out a dark object.

Tebili realized it was a notebook.

"Today’s main point is that the inside of many things isn’t what it appears to be on the outside," Xiahou Yan revealed a cruel smile, then lightly weighed the black diary in his hand. "And the former Lord of Eagle’s Rest Castle, Eliot Igor, is the perfect example. To the vast majority of people, young Eliot was just a useless playboy who only knew how to fool around with women. However, as I’ve been reading Eliot’s diary over the past few days, I actually discovered another side to him. And this discovery is precisely why I haven’t been in a very good mood lately."

Tebili was completely bewildered. He remembered that the Black-Haired Lord standing before him was named Eliot Igor. "Why is he talking about himself as if he were someone else?" he wondered.

Before the dumbfounded Tebili could process this, Xiahou Yan had already opened Eliot Igor’s diary and softly read to the Vice Commander of the Desolate Wind:

"Imperial Calendar, Year 993, September 10th. Sunny..."