Raise the Pickaxe, Rebel

“Don’t kill me! Please don’t kill me!”

A miner was shoved onto the high platform, escorted by two knight-guards.

Luo Ku drew his knight’s sword and pressed it against the man’s neck.

“If you don’t want to die, tell me what you know!”

The miner’s eyes darted, but he still insisted he knew nothing.

“Nothing? Listen to yourself—your voice is full of vitality, your face is even flushed! Dare you say you haven’t eaten the food that person gave you?”

The miner gritted his teeth, finally lowering his head in silence.

“Puff!”

Luo Ku swung his blade without a blink, decapitating the man in one clean stroke, and said coldly,

“Next.”

The miner’s blood stained the platform red.

The people kneeling around hung their heads low, the atmosphere suffocating.

The next man brought forward was Old Zhang.

Old Zhang stood completely unflinching, laughing up at the sky.

“Go ahead and kill me! As a human, living to this age is already a win! Hahaha!”

Luo Ku rested the still-dripping knight’s blade against Old Zhang’s neck, his voice dripping with malice.

“Rather die than betray that man? You weak, spineless humans—when did you get so courageous?”

Just as Luo Ku’s sword was about to swing, one of the kneeling miners stood up.

It was Chen Two.

“Enough! I’m the one who gave them the food!”

As a doppelgänger, Chen Two had no fear of death—he could just be summoned again tomorrow. He’d planned to observe the situation and feed intel to his original body, but seeing another person about to die, he decided to step forward.

Luo Ku sized Chen Two up carefully.

“I should have guessed it was you, a man of colorful fate. But there’s no way you could come and go freely around the mine—where did you get so much food?”

Chen Two stood with a slouch, arms crossed, posing like the Chinese character for “commoner.”

“I whipped it up out of thin air!”

“Heh, with your paltry post-innate martial arts cultivation, creating something from nothing? Are you mocking me?”

“Damn! Tell the truth and nobody believes it!”

“Then conjure something and let me see.”

“You want me to perform on command? Who do you think you are?”

“You… I’ll kill you!”

Several knights in bucket-thick plate armor started walking toward Chen Two.

Just then, another person stood up.

“He didn’t conjure that food! I did!”

It was Liu Ying.

Liu Ying’s body trembled slightly.

Luo Ku eyed Liu Ying suspiciously.

“Then conjure something now, let me see.”

Liu Ying looked left and right, stammering,

“With so, so many people around, I, I can’t do it…”

“If you can’t, I’ll kill you!”

Before Luo Ku finished, even more miners rose to their feet.

“I conjured the food! It’s got nothing to do with them! Kill me instead!”

“No, I’m the one you’re looking for!”

“I did it!”

“I did it!”

The human miners sprang up like bamboo shoots after rain, rising from their kneeling positions!

Old Zhang watched this scene, his heart surging with emotion.

“Good people, all of you! Without our benefactor’s rice gruel, many of us would have starved long ago! We must never betray him! We humans have already lost so much—we can’t lose our spine too!”

“Thwack!”

Old Zhang’s head flew high into the air, blood spraying several meters from the wound on his neck.

Luo Ku’s eyes turned icy. He casually tossed the bloody knight’s sword aside.

“How annoying!”

With that, his gaze swept over the workers who should have been kneeling but were now standing, glaring at him with murderous intent.

“Are you trying to rebel?!”

No one dared to answer. Fear of the alien race had been etched into their subconscious.

Suddenly, a roar came from the nearby mine tunnel.

“That’s right! We’re rebelling!”

Luo Ku turned his head and saw you slowly walking out of the mine tunnel.

He was stunned.

Hadn’t you been standing right in front of him just moments ago? When did you slip into the mine?

He turned his head and saw that Chen Two was gone.

Because Chen Two had already been reclaimed by you.

He turned back to look at you and saw your hair turn golden, standing on end!

In the next blink, you rushed toward him like a gust of wind.

“A mere innate martial artist, don’t over…”

He didn’t finish before your fist slammed into his face.

“Huh?!”

Your punch sent Luo Ku flying in place, several of his teeth knocked loose!

The knight-guard detachment that followed Luo Ku had never seen such a sight.

The lowest of the low humans on Blessing Star, daring to hit the most noble Winged God Clan?

A worker worth less than grass in the mine, daring to strike a White-robed Priest?

And on top of that—he actually sent the man flying!

You stood on the high platform where Luo Ku had been, facing all the miners of Mine Number One.

You picked up two pickaxes from the ground, raised them high above your head, and crossed them together.

“Folks! Things have come to this—life or death, we’re all in the same boat! Let’s fight them to the bitter end!”

In the hearts of these miners, you were already no different from a god—conjuring food from nothing and manifesting external avatars. If that wasn’t divine, what was?

With one word from you, their pillar of support, you instantly ignited the fire in everyone’s hearts.

The miners grabbed their pickaxes as adrenaline took over their minds.

“Let’s fight!”

“They work us to the bone and don’t even feed us! And when someone gives us food, they try to kill him! We’ve had enough!”

“Rebellion! Better to die than suffer under these alien oppressors any longer!”

The miners were ordinary people, essentially none of them cultivators. Even if some had once been cultivators, spending time in the mines had wasted them away.

At that moment, a full hundred knights of the guard were stationed at Mine Number One. Every one of them was an innate or post-innate martial artist, and their commander was at the Qi Condensation stage. They were fully armed with sharp weapons and heavy armor!

On the surface, the odds seemed overwhelming, but don’t forget—this was the real world.

In the real world, the rules were sterner, meaning the actual gap in combat power between ordinary people and low-level cultivators was not as vast as in the void world.

Innate and post-innate martial artists were, compared to ordinary folk, merely stronger, faster, and quicker in reflexes.

These two cultivation stages had no true qi, and in the real world, they couldn’t even use divine marks (in the void world, they could use divine marks without true qi, but required specific mediums).

Mine Number One had a thousand miners. When they charged all at once, they held the advantage of numbers.

Though the knights could cut down the ones in front with their sharp blades, they were soon overwhelmed by more miners, who climbed over the corpses of their comrades.

The miners pinned the knights down, with groups working together against a single enemy.

First, they grabbed their weapons, then stripped off their armor.

The disarmed knights were even harder to deal with than the numerous miners.

Countless pickaxes rained down on the knights’ heads, smashing them into bloody, unrecognizable messes.

Only two people left the miners completely helpless.

One was a Scale Clan cultivator of the Qi Transformation Realm leading the troops, and the other was the white-robed priest Luo Ku.

But the opponents of these two were... you, the sternest father among the alien races!