Liu Xuan ran all the way there. Before the sky had gone completely dark, he finally caught sight of the outline of a massive city ahead.
According to Finch’s map, this place was known as Dawn City.
Calling it a city was a bit of a stretch. It looked more like an enormous fortress. Its walls stood forty or fifty meters high, and in the darkness, it resembled a colossal beast crouching upon the earth.
What mattered most was the city’s sheer size. Even from the outside, it looked at least ten times larger than Orenburg.
That was not good news.
The larger the area, the more disadvantageous the main campaign would be for someone like Liu Xuan, who was tackling it alone.
For example, if one event occurred in the east of the city and another in the west, how could one person possibly handle both?
If Orenburg had been this large, Liu Xuan would never have completed the objective of closing the teleportation portal so easily.
“Forget it. I’ll enter the city first and see whether it triggers a campaign objective notification like Orenburg did.”
As Liu Xuan slowly approached the city gate, he noticed two enormous, imposing statues of swordsmen standing on either side.
However, the sword in one statue’s hand had already been broken. The massive stone blade lay directly across the gateway.
Liu Xuan slipped behind the broken sword and noticed several figures moving back and forth inside the pitch-black passage beneath the gate.
These monsters were powerfully built, and each wielded a greatsword larger than a person. There were six of them in total.
[Greatblade Destroyer (Elite)]
Level: 40
Attack: 2,000
Health: 100,000
Armor: 200
Magic Resistance: 200
Skills: [Heavy Crush: Unleashes a powerful attack against an enemy, dealing physical damage equal to twice the user’s attack power and reducing all healing received by the target by 30%.]
[Bone Shatter: Strikes an enemy four consecutive times. Each hit deals 3,000 physical damage, plus true damage equal to 1% of the target’s maximum health.]
[Execution: Can only be activated when an enemy’s health is below 10%. Instantly kills the target. This attack ignores all damage immunity effects and cannot be dodged or blocked.]
A hundred thousand health on an elite monster!
Liu Xuan’s heart stirred. If they weren’t very fast, he might be able to kite them the entire time and use Thunder Aura to burn them to death.
That would let him stack another hundred thousand damage in one go!
His aura was already dealing over eighty thousand damage anyway. Two activations would be enough to kill them.
Just as Liu Xuan was about to sneak over and give them an electric shock, he suddenly heard one of the Greatblade Destroyers speak.
“Why... did we... come here...?”
Liu Xuan froze for a moment, then realized that he could now understand the Destroyer tongue.
He simply remained hidden outside the city gate, pricked up his ears, and listened to their conversation.
“The south... was attacked... humans... may come here...”
“This city... has nothing... to give them...”
“Can’t let... them... easily go north...”
“More... of our kind... are arriving...”
“Humans... can’t come... this quickly... No need... to worry... for the next few days...”
The Destroyers spoke differently from humans, with awkward pauses and a stilted rhythm, as if their speech constantly jammed.
Even so, Liu Xuan more or less understood them.
Dawn City was different from Orenburg. Normally, there probably weren’t many Destroyers stationed here.
It was only because Liu Xuan had wiped out Orenburg that the Destroyers had begun sending reinforcements to Dawn City, preventing anyone from passing through and heading farther north.
Judging from the way these Greatblade Destroyers spoke, they were likely an advance force sent here ahead of the main troops. They weren’t permanent gate guards.
In other words, there definitely weren’t many Destroyers in the city at present.
They probably hadn’t expected anyone to arrive this early.
Under normal circumstances, it would still be some time before the northern expedition reached Dawn City.
Liu Xuan couldn’t help wondering: Could it be that the main campaign really couldn’t be started yet?
After all, the monsters hadn’t even arrived.
“I’m already here. I might as well take out these few Destroyers and treat it as interest.”
Liu Xuan waited there a little longer. When the monsters stopped saying anything useful, he decided to act.
He rushed out from behind the corner. These monsters seemed fairly intelligent; the moment they heard even the slightest sound, they immediately turned toward him.
They were completely different from ordinary monsters that only reacted within their aggro range.
The Greatblade Destroyers were quite surprised when they saw that the source of the noise was a human.
“Human...!”
“Not good... our kind... haven’t arrived...”
“Only... one scout... kill him!”
They raised their massive swords and charged at him.
Several bolts of lightning descended from the sky, instantly reducing all of them to critical health.
In the flash of lightning, Liu Xuan also got a clear look at them.
They resembled the ordinary Destroyers from Orenburg, but were more heavily built. Their arms were no longer shaped like sickles, but instead resembled the claws of lizards.
The Greatblade Destroyers had not expected to suffer such a heavy blow right from the start, and they were thrown into a panic.
“Hold... him back...”
“Inform... the High Priest...”
One of the six immediately broke away and flew deeper into the city, while the others charged at Liu Xuan in an attempt to stop him.
Liu Xuan wanted to pursue the one that had gone to raise the alarm, but the several “musclebound monsters” blocking the passage left him no way around.
Besides, he still needed to stack the damage from Thunder Aura. If he charged straight at them, the damage-over-time effect would kill the monsters.
So instead of advancing, he had no choice but to retreat.
Seeing this, the remaining Greatblade Destroyers assumed he was trying to flee.
“He... may be... out of moves...”
They thought Liu Xuan had unleashed his ultimate attack at the start but failed to kill them, leaving him with no choice but to run.
As a result, they pursued him even more aggressively.
The moment Thunder Aura came off cooldown, five more bolts of lightning fell.
Before the Destroyers could react, they were all lying dead on the ground.
The damage from Thunder Aura increased by a full hundred thousand!
Each Destroyer dropped one gold coin, and one of them even dropped the greatsword it had been carrying.
But Liu Xuan had no time to inspect it. He casually tossed it into his inventory and chased after the fleeing Destroyer.
The passage through Dawn City’s gate was extremely deep, stretching for dozens of meters. The other Destroyers had delayed Liu Xuan for several seconds, and by the time he caught up, the fleeing one had already exited the passage and entered the city.
When Liu Xuan followed it inside, he suddenly stopped dead.
“What... is this...?”
It wasn’t that Liu Xuan was imitating the way the Destroyers spoke. The sight before him was simply too shocking.
The entire interior of Dawn City had been completely flattened. Not a single building remained.
Only a field of rubble covered the ground, as if it had been crushed beneath overwhelming force.
From where Liu Xuan stood, it even appeared that only the section of wall surrounding the gate he had entered through was still intact.
The walls on the other three sides had vanished entirely.
They had been ground flat along with everything inside the city.
Liu Xuan stood atop the southern city wall, with a clear view of the scenes outside the city in every other direction.
“What on earth happened here?!”
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."
transmigrates into the world as the sect master of the Heavenly Yan Sect, which is on the verge of being wiped out. He binds a system that grants him cultivation power based on the number of disciples he has: for each disciple, he automatically gains a year's worth of cultivation every single day! Take one disciple: every day he gains 1 year of cultivation power. While others struggle through a year of bitter training, he gets the same just by sleeping through a single night. Take ten disciples: every day he gains 10 years of cultivation power. Foundation Establishment, Core Formation, Nascent Soul—he breezes through all bottlenecks without lifting a finger. Take one hundred disciples: every day he gains 100 years of cultivation power. Even a Soul Transformation Venerable before him can’t survive a single blow. Take ten thousand disciples: every day he gains 10,000 years of cultivation power! With a wave of his hand, he topples empires. With a single step, he crushes the sacred grounds of the universe. ... While others fight tooth and nail for secret techniques, Lin Yan casually hands out Nascent Soul-level cultivation manuals as beginner textbooks. While others strain to find talented recruits, Lin Yan opens his doors to anyone—so long as they’re human. In just three short years, the Heavenly Yan Sect went from a backwater sect made up of three crumbling huts to a sacred land that every cultivator under heaven would kill to enter. ... One day, otherworldly demon gods invade, with a million demon soldiers pressing down upon the realm. Lin Yan, yawning, rises from his lounge chair and glances at the system panel: [Current Disciples: 1.28 million] [Daily Cultivation Increase: 1.28 million years] He waves his hand casually, and the countless demon soldiers are reduced to ashes in an instant. “So noisy… interrupting my fishing.”
pression Bureau] Transported to a fantasy world overrun by demons and monsters, Gu Qingfeng becomes a jailer in the Demon Suppression Prison of the Great Yan Dynasty's Demon Suppression Bureau. From this point on, bizarre cases frequently occur in the Demon Suppression Prison, once known as hell on earth and infamous for its gloomy, terrifying atmosphere! Why do the demons and monsters in the prison wail miserably every night? Why has the corpse demon, capable of transforming into various beauties, donned black stockings and switched careers to become a foot massage therapist? Why has the eye demon, expert in soul-snatching and illusions, turned into a VR headset? Why is the fox spirit performing otaku dances? Are all these occurrences a twisted expression of demonic nature, or a descent into moral depravity? After peeling away layer upon layer of mystery, all clues ultimately point to a jailer named Gu Qingfeng. Gu Qingfeng: "Hehehe... My dear demons and monsters, whose card shall we flip today?"
e vast world of cultivation, where he becomes the master of the Heavenly Ruins Sacred Hall, a dying old man with barely a tenth of his former cultivation remaining. He is immediately confronted with a deadly crisis: his subordinates have rebelled, and his protectors are forcing him to abdicate. At the critical moment, the system descends from the heavens: [Ding! The host has been detected facing a life-or-death crisis. The system is now officially activated!] [As a gift, you have received the Supreme Beginner’s Pack and awakened the ultimate cheat: ten thousand years of pure cultivation essence every second!] Yin Tianjue: “Wait… ten thousand years of cultivation every second? That’s six hundred thousand years a minute, and in one day… I can’t even calculate it. Either way, I’m already invincible!” You’re a peerless prodigy rarely seen in ten thousand years? Sorry, I gain ten thousand years of cultivation every second. You’re an undying ancestor who has guarded a sacred land for countless ages? Sorry, I gain ten thousand years of cultivation every second. You’re the strongest chosen one, blessed with heaven-defying destiny? Sorry, I gain ten thousand years of cultivation every second. From this day forth, I have only one thing to say: “I gain ten thousand years of cultivation every second. Now, how exactly are you supposed to deal with that?”
