LIGHTNOVELONLINE Chapter 170: Underground Rats
Tuk tuk!
Tsenpo Ling reflexively tapped against her throne, deep in thought.
She hadn’t gotten much information out of Bibre. It had been years since the latter moved to the Tibetan Plateau, so most of what he knew about the Western Regions were outdated. Similarly, his intelligence about the Shu clan was worth something but not much.
Even so, Tsenpo Ling managed to grasp some vital information.
“Tenacity and resentment, huh?” she murmured.
Bibre had mentioned legends about vengeful spirits from the Central Plains, especially the two cruxes behind their strength. These two cruxes had pointed out the next move for her.
“Attacking the heart is the superior strategy. I’ll have to work on the Tang emperor.”
While Great Tang had been warring with the Tibetan Empire in recent years, for the Tang emperor, what was even more threatening than external threats like the Tibetan Empire were Protectorate Generals who had powerful armies in their grasp but refused to follow directives.
The last thing the declining Great Tang wanted to do was to fight enemies on multiple fronts.
That might just crush the ghost horsemen’s fighting spirit.
If they stood before the ghost horsemen with the Tang emperor’s edict, declaring that their emperor had forsaken them, their raison d'être would unravel. For whom would they be fighting for now? For whom would they be loyal to now?
No matter how tenacious those ghost horsemen were, how many of them would continue fighting when the faith that had driven them for the past few decades suddenly collapsed?
And the thing was that Tsenpo Ling had a good chance of pulling this off.
Great Tang had already long abandoned Beiting and the Western Regions, which meant that the Tibetan Empire was just asking for a redundant document of acknowledgment in exchange for years of peace.
The Tang court would surely be more than happy to oblige.
So, Tsenpo Ling got straight to action. She drafted a document and had her subordinate to pad it up before dispatching an envoy to Chang’an to meet the Tang emperor.
“Send some troops to Hexi and have them station at the west. We’ll send those Anxi ghost horsemen a little surprise…”
Other than that, she also instructed her men to continue investigating the Shu clan to see if they could find better ways to kill the enemy’s fighting spirit.
“Also, find an enlightened monk and check if he has any way to exorcize vengeful spirits…”
…
While Tsenpo Ling was busy coming up with a countermeasure, Weryomahners hadn’t been slacking around either. Her thought was simple: since Shu Yichao’s army was nigh unstoppable, she would stir things behind him instead.
“The Tang army has only just claimed Anxi’s three cities, so they shouldn’t have had time to reinforce their foundation. If I can convince the surrounding powers to attack Anxi, the Tang army will have no choice but to turn around and protect their bases.”
The Anxi Protectorate had only been restored, so it was in a shaky position. It couldn’t afford to lose any of its bases, and it didn’t help that it hadn’t had time to establish diplomatic ties with its neighbors and was thus surrounded by enemies.
That being said, not anyone would be brave enough to attack Anxi at this juncture.
That power would have to be strong and greedy enough, or else they wouldn’t dare to cause trouble for the Tang army from behind.
Weryomahners just so happened to know one power that fit the criteria.
All I have to do is to get Beiting to send a batch of goods over, and those short-sighed, foolish fellows will put their lives on the line for the Tibetan Empire.
“The Mole Tribe…”
The Mole Tribe was a mole-human mutant tribe.
No one knew how they came about. The Tangs thought that they were monsters. The Tibetans thought that they were chimeras created by some mage. The northern nomads thought that they were a bunch of downtrodden group…
Nevertheless, these giant blind moles formed a massive pack in the nearby Tianshan, numbering at least in the hundreds of thousands. Most of the time, they lived underground at the foot of Tianshan, surviving on mushrooms and potatoes.
But that didn’t mean that they had no ambition.
They had always dreamed of occupying Kucha and Shule, which were near the Tianshan, and they had attacked those places numerous times in the past. Unfortunately, their lacking fighting prowess resulted in them being crushed by the Tangs, the Uyghurs, and the Tibetans.
They were left with no choice but to give up on their ambition and lie low.
But now… Weryomahners thought that she could make use of them.
The Mole Tribe, albeit lacking in strength, had a huge number of tribesmen, making them a perfect match for the Tangs’ terracotta soldiers. It would be a fight between seas of weaklings.
…
In one of the holes inside Tianshan, a young mole stood with puffed up chests before a group of elder moles.
“Is this the huge deal you mentioned?”
The elder moles sitting on beast skin chairs looked at the young mole with rolled eyes.
Their underground produce itself was far from enough to feed their hundreds of thousands of mole tribesmen, so they often relied on their complicated underground network of tunnels to do some trading.
It was hard to get huge batches of goods into Tianshan due to Tianshan’s difficult terrain, but they still had to get whatever they could to relief their food shortage problem.
So, when the newly-crowned mole king claimed that he had negotiated a huge deal that would resolve the food shortage for their 800,000 moles, the elder moles excitedly rushed over.
But when they arrived, the mole king proposed for them to dispatch their troops to attack and conquer Shule while the Tibetan Empire and Anxi army had their hands busy with each other. That would not only secure fertile lands for the Mole Tribe, but important commercial routes too.
Once they succeeded, the Mole Tribe would no longer be a tribe but an empire!
“Young man,” the chief elder mole tapped the ground with his cane as he said, “our people have tried that time and time again over the past hundreds of years…”
“And all of them ended up dead,” the second elder mole completed the sentence.
The second mole elder even remembered the war he had fought.
Their mole tribesmen had gathered 50,000 soldiers, looking like an unstoppable force.
Yet, the Anxi army didn’t even bat an eyelid.
They dispatched 200 cavalrymen, and all the cavalrymen did was charge from one end to the other—they didn’t even draw their weapons—and that was enough to stomp countless mole tribesmen to death.
The moles tribesmen retreated and tallied their losses—they lost thousands of troops just like that.
This made them realize that this was a hopeless fight. How could the weak Mole Tribes oppose the Tang army’s powerful cavalrymen, let alone clam Shule and conquer the Western Regions?
Our king must still be drunk from last night’s alcohol.
“Let’s go.” The first elder mole waved his hand in disinterest. “The kings are getting less and less competent with each generation.”
“Wait! Elders, I’m not done yet!” the mole king exclaimed. “I understand that the chances are slim if we do it alone, but what if someone supports us?”