The council members under Ye Xiao's command were also being targeted—witnesses claimed the assassins wore uniforms of the upper city's military forces.
Wealthy merchants, mid-level officials, and even quartermasters of the upper city fell victim to a series of assassinations one after another. No matter how heavily guarded their high-rise hideouts were, the killers slipped through with ease, employing poison gas, hand-to-hand combat, and brute force that even reinforced vault doors couldn’t withstand. The evidence left at the scenes pointed unmistakably to their origins—the lower city.
These relentless assassinations indirectly pushed the war to its boiling point. Both sides deployed every last card in their hands, but this time, without Fang Zhiyi and his allies, Ye Xiao was clearly at a disadvantage.
Marilyn remained carefree, indifferent to the chaos outside. As long as her steak and wine kept coming, nothing else mattered.
Watching the tall, unwavering figure before her, she knew—he would protect her well.
Yet, the protagonist remained the protagonist. Even when cornered, he made a decisive move: leveraging exorbitant bounties to rally the lower city’s drifters, thugs, arms dealers, and human traffickers, molding them into a makeshift army to reinforce his front lines.
Faced with Ye Xiao’s offer—one hand holding cash, the other a blade—they had no choice.
In the end, even the workers were handed guns. This battle, Ye Xiao was determined to win. He would be that girl’s knight, no matter the cost.
Through near-suicidal tactics, cracks began to form in the upper city’s defenses. Ye Xiao had prepared for this day, albeit hastily. But he was confident—those upper city parasites, rotted through by greed and power, were no match for him. Besides, he had been laying groundwork there for a long time.
"Today marks the thirtieth day." Mia approached Fang Zhiyi with a glass of water, concern in her eyes. He had been standing there for days, gazing at the distant battlefield.
"You’re a strange one," Mia remarked after taking a sip, then handed the glass to him.
Fang Zhiyi accepted it and drank. "Why do you say that?"
"I thought you were just a runaway kid. Didn’t expect you to have such... grand ambitions." She gestured widely with her hands.
"But I’m not sure—will this really make the world better?" In these days, Mia had followed Fang Zhiyi, witnessing every shade of human depravity. The guilty lived without care, while the good suffered endlessly.
Fang Zhiyi paused, a phrase flashing through his mind: "A single spark can start a prairie fire."
Mia’s eyes flickered with surprise. "That... doesn’t sound like something you’d say."
Fang Zhiyi shrugged. "It’s not mine. I heard it somewhere."
The roar of artillery gradually faded, replaced by faint cheers from the battlefield.
Fang Zhiyi picked up a communicator. "Begin."
The upper city had lost—inexplicably. Some of their officials suddenly defected, those who had taken Ye Xiao’s bribes long prepared to switch sides. But what they hadn’t anticipated was the sudden withdrawal of the upper city’s Second Corps. No one knew where they had gone; communications were dead. Panic spread like wildfire—rumors claimed the Second Corps had walked into an ambush and been annihilated.
Ye Xiao emerged victorious, though at great cost. But he didn’t care. With Marilyn in his arms, he stood atop a vehicle like a king surveying his newly conquered territory as they entered the upper city’s streets. The fear in the eyes of the onlookers pleased him—this was the respect he deserved, the status he had earned!
From this day forward, he would be the undisputed ruler of the entire ruined city!
All would bow to him—and to his beloved Marilyn! He would hold a grand wedding, a celebration of his triumph!
But then, an ambush shattered his fantasies. A force emerged from the supposedly pacified upper city, striking without warning.
Ye Xiao shielded Marilyn, shouting for his armed units—only for explosions to erupt behind him.
A remaining loyalist rushed to his side. "Boss, it’s bad! The lower city scum have turned on us!"
"What?" Ye Xiao couldn’t process it.
"They’ve rebelled! They’re attacking our rear!"
Ye Xiao whirled around, though he couldn’t see the chaos. The sounds of explosions and shouts grew louder, spreading disorder even among his own troops. But he had no time to dwell on it.
"A trap?" The possibility struck him. Of course—this had to be the upper city’s vile rulers’ doing!
Meanwhile, the advancing force was recognized by the defected officials—it was the missing Second Corps.
"This scent... so sweet..." A hyena soldier wearing goggles collapsed, legs giving out.
"Hey! You—"
A girl stood holding a spray device. "Take their weapons!"
Her followers surged forward, discarding clubs and pickaxes to seize guns.
"Requesting backup! Third line under attack!"
"Damn it! You can’t even handle a bunch of peasants?"
"Not peasants—their leader’s a monster! He doesn’t even—" A blade swung, embedding itself into Wang Meng’s shoulder, drawing blood but nothing more.
Wang Meng grinned, his expression unhinged. "My turn now?" Born with a manic disorder, he had always been restrained under Fang Zhiyi’s command—until now. This was the first time Fang Zhiyi had permitted them to kill on the battlefield.
"The battlefield is different from peacetime," Fang Zhiyi had said.
Meanwhile, the system voiced its disbelief. "You... you actually sent these people to lead a civilian uprising?"
Fang Zhiyi barely lifted his eyelids. "Uprising? More like reclaiming what’s theirs."
The system pressed on. "You’re oversimplifying this. These civilians won’t obey you!"
Fang Zhiyi smiled. "I never expected them to. Remember the survivors who lost everything?"
The system paused. It had been so focused on persuading Fang Zhiyi to cooperate that it had ignored the others.
"You mean those helpless ones? Children, women, frail men?" It recalled the struggling underclass, certain its host had lost his mind.
"Let me teach you something. Power isn’t always the ultimate advantage—ideas are. Even in a lawless place, thought takes root." Fang Zhiyi tapped his temple. "People die. Ideas don’t."
The system didn’t understand. "So what? The upper city won’t recognize them."
"Won’t they?" Fang Zhiyi laughed, genuinely amused.
At that moment, the upper city’s fleeing elites heard the distant sounds of battle—from Ye Xiao’s direction. Seeing a glimmer of hope, they halted their retreat.
This displeased one man.
"Hey. Who gave you permission to look away?"
s the Eldest Princess, renowned for her cold and aloof detachment, became the most docile of lambs, obeying his every command without question. But when the final move was played on the chessboard, as Gu Chenghan seized everything and ascended on the verge of apotheosis, that very Princess suddenly embraced him from behind, her tone carrying a dependence never heard before: "Wait... you haven't yet... commanded me to love you forever." Gu Chenghan froze abruptly. She... hadn't been hypnotized?! ... [The Eldest Princess's Diary] [When my soul was extracted, becoming the sole spectator outside my own shell] [At first, there was overwhelming fury, until I saw] [How he used my sword to effortlessly shatter my inescapable doom] [How he wielded my authority to eradicate fatal conspiracies I had never even detected] [Like a deity, he rescued me from the deep mire I was trapped in] [If not for those annoying vixens, he and I would be a match made in heaven] [I think I am ill, gravely ill] [My deity should belong to me alone] ... "Hypnosis? Oh, it succeeded, my dear Master." "Only this time, it's my turn to hypnotize you."
nd fell into a coma while saving his younger sister from an out-of-control car. He became a vegetable. No one knew that his consciousness had crossed into a world of cultivation. Over the course of sixty years, he began as the lowest kind of mine slave, struggling to survive amid mountains of corpses and seas of blood. By sheer chance, he eventually obtained the complete memories of a fallen Immortal King. Alchemy, medicine, formations, feng shui, physiognomy, artifact forging… Every great inheritance of the cultivation world was now his. But when he opened his eyes again, he discovered that ten full years had passed in the modern world. To pay for his treatment, his father had sold the family’s shop and house, leaving himself covered in lasting injuries and illness. His mother had cared for him day and night, and more than half of her hair had already turned white. His younger sister, who had been only fifteen back then, was now twenty-five. To help repay the family’s debts, she had been forced to lower her head and put on a smiling face in places of glittering lights and endless revelry. Only then did Chen Xuan understand that what he had lost was not merely ten years. He had lost the life his entire family was meant to have. The good news was that he had brought back the memories of an Immortal King’s entire lifetime. The bad news was that his soul had returned alone—his cultivation had not come with him. Spiritual energy was scarce, resources were depleted, and the modern world still had firearms, surveillance, capital, and laws. If he wanted to protect his family, break free from everyone’s control, and become truly invincible beneath the heavens, he would have to start all over again.
end. Thus one must continue to cultivate, and become a saint or great emperor, in order to prolong one's life. Chen Xia, however, completely reversed this. Since his transmigration, he has gained immortality, and also a system that awards him with attribute points for every year he lives. Thus between the myriad worlds, the legend of an unparalleled senior appeared. "A gentleman takes revenge; it is never too late even after ten thousand years." "When you were at your peak I yielded, now in your old age I shall trample on you." - Chen Xia
he colors of other people’s emotions. Light red meant anxiety. Gray meant exhaustion. Orange meant excitement. Yellow... meant repression. At the same time, he could gain unlimited control over one of those colors. Pale cyan: relaxation. Using this ability, he started offering “two-yuan hugs,” spending an afternoon exchanging emotional-color experiences with others. Then came his final female customer of the day— a girl whose emotional color was pure black... —— A week later, Xu Chuan had become skilled at using pale cyan—Relaxation—treating it like a bottle of menthol balm whenever he needed it. That was when he discovered he had unlocked another unlimited emotional color: Purple, the color of fear. So these emotional colors refresh every week? Fine, I take it back—I’ll never call you useless again... —— Much later, after Xu Chuan had accumulated countless emotional abilities, one night, he suddenly found himself inside someone else’s dream. There, he could use the emotional colors he possessed to paint. And in her dream, he painted her a shower of pink shooting stars, spreading across the depths of the night sky...
