Chapter Seven
Jian
This was going to go horribly wrong.
That thought rolled through Jian’s head as he watched his new unit train. As one of many training camps, men trickled into the area near Kanyuan from central Piao over the weeks, each more ill-prepared than the next. Some were convicts, sent to fight for their freedom. Others were little more than boys who’d probably never seen the sharp edge of a dao.
And then there were the older men, the ones who were probably the least likely to make it out of this. Yet, they’d chosen to come. They should be home working their farms, but the empire was at stake. Too much of Piao’s army had already been lost to the Kou. They needed bodies.
And they needed people like Jian to train them. The surviving members of his old unit were with him, here
