Unlike Wu Kai, who strode across Zhuo Huo Pass with great swagger, the atmosphere on Xiaochuan's side, just a few days' march from the pass, was much more oppressive.
Why? It's not because Xiaochuan was full of ragtag troops with poor fighting spirit, but because they'd been so thoroughly thrown off by a diversionary maneuver that everyone was left reeling.
Just as Shen Hao had predicted earlier and as the Four Divisions' analysis deduced, the thirty thousand soldiers assembled here at Xiaochuan were all pulled over with a ruse, using false Orders as a smokescreen. The point of gathering here, of course, wasn't just to guard against the Barbarian Race sneaking in through the Ten Thousand Miles Bamboo Sea, but rather to do the unexpected and make use of the bamboo sea themselves.
