No wonder that Destroyer said there was nothing in this city.
He was right. There really was nothing left—only a single stretch of city wall.
“How was this even done?”
If the Destroyers were responsible, Liu Xuan would turn and run immediately.
But it didn’t seem quite right. Orlenburg had been in far better condition.
Although these monsters were called Destroyers, they shouldn’t have devastated the place to this extent.
Liu Xuan had just obtained the history of the White Stone Kingdom, and he couldn’t help wondering if the people of Dawn City had chosen to perish alongside the Destroyers back then.
But that was all history. What Liu Xuan cared about now was whether he could actually undertake the main campaign.
As if sensing what he was thinking, the system prompt appeared just after he entered the city.
[You have arrived at Dawn City.]
[The core battle of Phase Four is about to begin. Campaign branch: Dawn City Extermination Battle. Objectives:]
[Kill all Destroyers within the city and severely cripple the main force of the Destroyers.]
[Ding! The current time point has been detected as premature. Campaign difficulty will be greatly increased.]
[You have one minute to decide whether to continue.]
[Countdown: 59, 58, 57...]
The good news was that he could undertake the campaign.
The bad news was that the difficulty would be greatly increased.
Since the system had specifically highlighted the increase as “great,” it definitely wasn’t going to be minor.
It had even given him a full minute to think it over.
That made Liu Xuan feel somewhat puzzled. It said the timing was too early, so the Destroyers’ main army had yet to arrive. Why, then, would the difficulty be higher?
The campaign objective was to kill all the Destroyers in the city.
Could there be something in the city right now that was even harder to kill than an army of tens of thousands of Destroyers?
Liu Xuan thought of the “High Priest” mentioned by the Destroyers earlier.
If nothing unexpected happened, that had to be the one.
Thoughts raced through Liu Xuan’s mind.
A deserted city like this shouldn’t have had many monsters guarding it before.
The Destroyers had only decided to send troops here to stop the northern expedition after learning that Orlenburg had fallen.
Those Greatblade Destroyers had been dispatched at the last minute to guard the southern gate. So what was the High Priest’s mission here?
That was actually easy to guess.
If the High Priest were the commander of the Destroyer army, it couldn’t have come here alone this early. It would certainly have brought its forces with it.
Since it wasn’t the commander, yet had arrived so early, and considering the Destroyers’ abilities, there was only one possibility.
The High Priest had come to set up a teleportation portal!
Once the portal was established, it might leave.
The normal campaign would then involve fighting the Destroyer forces that came through the portal.
The problem was that Liu Xuan had no idea how powerful this High Priest was.
It wasn’t the boss intended for the normal campaign, which meant its level might be extremely high.
The countdown continued. Half the allotted time had already passed.
Liu Xuan had to make a decision quickly.
He didn’t actually have to take this risk. He could go back, improve his attributes, level up, and stack more damage. By the time he returned for the normal-difficulty Dawn City campaign, he would be able to crush it with ease.
That was what Liu Xuan had planned to do. He only had one life, after all. When caution was called for, he needed to play it safe.
But just as he was about to run, he suddenly noticed that the passive skill “Fleet of Foot” was still active.
“Am I out of combat?”
That made sense. He had been standing there for quite a while, and the wounded Greatblade Destroyer had already fled far away.
He should indeed have left combat.
But seeing “Fleet of Foot” gave Liu Xuan a new idea.
The system had given him one minute to think, but it hadn’t said that he couldn’t restart the campaign after the time was up.
What if he ran outside first and maxed out his speed? Would he at least be able to take a look at the High Priest?
He didn’t have to fight it. Observing its attributes from a distance shouldn’t be a problem, right?
If anything seemed wrong, he could simply run.
Even his current Agility alone was comparable to what an ordinary person would need to reach level forty and equip themselves with a full set of high-quality gear. With the passive skill’s twentyfold movement-speed bonus on top of that, even if the High Priest were dozens of levels higher than him, it might still not be faster.
Liu Xuan decided it was worth a try.
Before the countdown ended, he turned around and ran out of the city.
The system promptly issued a notification:
[Campaign terminated. Better luck next time.]
“Heh-heh. I’ll definitely do better next time.”
Liu Xuan began running outside the city walls.
The passive skill “Fleet of Foot” had two restrictions: he couldn’t enter combat, and he couldn’t stop moving. If he stopped for more than five seconds, the bonus would be interrupted.
The bonus increased by fifty percent for every minute of running, up to a maximum of ten times. Liu Xuan ran for a full twenty minutes before reaching the maximum.
His speed felt as though he had taken flight once again, but after traveling all day at this pace, he had more or less grown accustomed to it.
Worried that some minor monster might be guarding the city gate and interrupt his passive skill, Liu Xuan chose to enter from another direction this time.
After all, the gates on the other three sides were already gone.
Come to think of it, if Dawn City had to undergo a promotion defense battle later, having no walls would make it rather difficult to defend.
Liu Xuan shook his head and banished the thought. That was still a long way off.
He raced along the city wall until he reached the western side of the city.
Only a short stretch, barely a dozen meters long, remained of the wall there. Liu Xuan easily made his way into the city.
Now he had to find that so-called High Priest.
Night had already fallen, but the moonlight made things relatively easy. The entire city had been flattened, so finding someone might have been troublesome, but anyone constructing a teleportation portal should create at least a little commotion.
Relying on his incredible speed, Liu Xuan searched through the city.
Dawn City was enormous. Even moving at his current speed, it took him more than ten minutes before he finally spotted a place in the darkness emitting a faint glow.
Someone was casting a spell.
At that point, Liu Xuan was still several kilometers away and couldn’t make out who was there. He cautiously moved closer.
His eyes remained fixed on the direction of the light. As soon as “Eye of Insight” activated and revealed the monster’s attributes, he would immediately decide whether to fight or run.
When he was about half a mile away, Liu Xuan vaguely saw several figures standing there.
“More than one?”
Even counting the Greatblade Destroyer that had fled earlier, this meant there were still other monsters present.
Liu Xuan gritted his teeth and moved a little closer. Fortunately, “Eye of Insight” finally took effect.
[Infiltrator “Spikes” (Boss)]
Level: 45
Attack: 4,000
Health: 450,000
Armor: 400
Magic Resistance: 300
Tenacity: 50%
Skills:
[Rapid Flash Assault: Charges at a target, then darts among nearby enemies at incredible speed, slashing them repeatedly. Each attack deals 4,000 physical damage.]
[Pierce: Uses the spikes on its fists to launch a ferocious thrust in a straight line, dealing 4,500 physical damage to all enemies it passes through and reducing their Armor by 10%.]
[Devastating Backstab: Pounces behind a target and, upon landing, drives the spikes on its fists viciously into the target’s back, dealing physical damage equal to three times its Attack.]
It was indeed a fairly high-level boss, but this guy wasn’t a High Priest, was he?
Besides, how could a single boss possibly be harder to deal with than an entire army of Destroyers?
Liu Xuan shifted his gaze to the other figures nearby:
[Purger Dreadfang (boss)], [Carnivore Ironhide (boss)], [Blooddrinker Redwing (boss)], [Unhinged Manyarms (boss)].
Good grief—there were five of them, and every single one was a boss!
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...
s + Rent Collection Wealth】 At the start, he inherited a rundown house in the urban village from his grandfather. The house had no tenants, but the moment he was diagnosed with a terminal illness, a self-proclaimed empress from the Tianxuan Continent arrived as his first tenant. Ye Chuan soon discovered that with every new tenant moving in, not only did he receive massive daily payments, but he also obtained unique items related to their backgrounds. 【Acquired Bai Qianshuang’s related item: Tiger Strength Pill—dramatically enhances physical power!】 【Acquired Bai Qianshuang’s related item: Deer Blood Pill—significantly boosts vitality!】 …… From that day on, all sorts of bizarre tenants began appearing in the house: the empress from Tianxuan Continent, an apocalyptic sorceress from the Magic Realm, a mysterious scientific girl who fell through a spacetime rift… Every single day, he received strange, powerful items and endless money. Then one day, he suddenly realized—he had become invincible. Enough, enough! Stop giving me more!
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."
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?”
