He Chunhua instinctively glanced at He Lingchuan. Luckily, his eldest son had warned him in time.

He pointed toward the city gate. “Reinforce it immediately!”

Men rushed off at once to haul over sandbags and pile them against the inside of the gate.

As He Chunhua climbed the gate tower, he asked, “Where did the attackers come from?”

“We still don’t know,” Zhao Qinghe replied. “After we stopped the men at the gate, we came up here to investigate. We fired several flaming arrows out, and by their light, we spotted enemy troops about four hundred meters away!”

That made the entire sequence of events clear.

The enemy had approached under cover of darkness, sending a small team ahead to infiltrate the city and seize the gate from within. Once the fire arrows exposed them and their attempt to steal the city failed, they stopped bothering with concealment and simply launched a full-scale assault.

In theory, they had executed their plan beautifully. They set fire to the government...