"What?"
Zhou Xiong's body trembled violently.
"What did you say? Fort Alum Mountain has fallen?"
"Impossible!"
"Absolutely impossible!"
"Fort Alum Mountain has steep slopes strewn with rocky gullies, complete fortifications, reinforced with solidified plaster, plus thousands of firearms and thousands of defenders."
"How could it possibly fall?"
"Besides..." Zhou Xiong clung to reason after reason, refusing to believe the messenger's report: "How far is Fort Alum Mountain from here?"
"Even if it were truly attacked, a single signal flare could have me dispatch reinforcements in an instant. We'd form a pincer attack, and Ren Tianye's army would be doomed to defeat."
"How could it fall?"
"And in such a short time!"
"Go again—reconnoiter and report!"
"If you dare lie about military intelligence again, I'll have you executed on the spot!"
The messenger had no choice but to turn and go investigate again.
But what was there to investigate?
His information came straight from Fort Alum Mountain.
Now the fort was bristling with banners bearing the surname "Zhang"—the flag of General Zhang Shi, under the Duke's command. How could Liu Xu, the garrison commander of Fort Alum Mountain, have lost his mind and planted General Zhang Shi's banners for fun?
"Well... Captain..." the head of the law enforcement squad began, "Do I... do I still go?"
"Go, why not go?" Zhou Xiong's face was terrifying. "The messenger lied about military intelligence—you don't actually believe that, do you? Go at once!"
"Yes, yes, go quickly, go with full fanfare!" Nanny Sun chimed in loudly. "When you reach Fort Alum Mountain, let the Duke's men capture you, and surrender along the way."
"Since you're going on a military errand, even if Zhou Xiong had a hundred guts, he wouldn't dare touch your family at a time like this. This is your chance to carve out a bright future!"
As they say, the older the ginger, the hotter it is. Nanny Sun's casual remark was incredibly practical. In an instant, the squad captain envisioned the entire sequence of events in his mind—how to feign capture, how to genuinely surrender, how to keep up appearances so everyone would think he was still a loyal servant of Pukou City, forcing Zhou Xiong to hesitate...
Zhou Xiong could no longer hold back.
Pointing at Nanny Sun, he said, "Sun Rong!"
"Oh, I heard you—my ears aren't deaf yet!"
"You..."
"What about me?"
"You're delusional. Fort Alum Mountain absolutely cannot have fallen!" Zhou Xiong's chest heaved up and down, but he barely managed to calm himself. "Do you have any idea who Liu Xu's wife, the garrison commander of Fort Alum Mountain, is?"
"What's to ask?" Nanny Sun laughed. "She must be beautiful, kind-hearted, righteous, longing for the light, and eager to serve the Duke—so she simply surrendered."
"Hmph, you were right about the first part, but the rest... is far off the mark. Liu Xu's wife is a member of the League of United Hearts."
Zhou Xiong sneered coldly. "She joined the league years ago and is now a member. She's a primary target for Ren Tianye. You could say she and Ren Tianye are natural enemies, incompatible as fire and water."
"Surrender to Ren Tianye?"
"Absolutely impossible!"
"This is precisely why, despite the strategic importance of Fort Alum Mountain's terrain, I never sent a trusted subordinate there. With Liu Xu's wife there, Ren Tianye can't easily take the fort, and it remains my eternal shield."
"As long as they don't surrender, Ren Tianye's men can never capture Fort Alum Mountain without a trace."
"So Fort Alum Mountain has not fallen!"
This gave Nanny Sun pause, then she smiled faintly. "Zhou Xiong, have you forgotten what your master does?"
"Have you forgotten what I do?"
"With the Demon-Suppression Bureau in place, there are those with insight who can still see the light and turn over a new leaf."
Zhou Xiong cut her off. "Impossible."
"Other people might have that chance, but someone who truly joins the League of United Hearts can never find that enlightenment. Therefore Liu Xu's wife can never reform. Therefore..."
"Fort Alum Mountain has not fallen!"
Admittedly, Zhou Xiong's understanding of the League of United Hearts was deep and accurate. Ke Xunfang, Liu Xu's wife, would never surrender to Ren Tianye or Ren Tianye's subordinate Zhang Shi.
But...
Ke Xunfang and Liu Xu, the garrison commander—
had divorced.
"Joyous divorce!"
Inside a room at Fort Alum Mountain, Ke Xunfang held the legal document of their consensual separation and jumped up in excitement again.
It had been a few days since she and Liu Xu divorced, but every time she saw the paper, she got thrilled. Always before her eyes, a golden road stretched forward—leading either to a domineering prince in her fantasies or a knight in shining armor.
"The only pity is..."
"My lifelong best friend A Ning has been missing these past few days. I can't share this with her right away. Oh, I was able to divorce Liu Xu because A Ning urged me to come to my senses—she's the true hero! How can she be unfindable?"
"Where has she been these past few days?"
Thinking this, Ke Xunfang decided to search again.
Fort Alum Mountain was only so big. Even if her best friend A Ning were a needle, she couldn't disappear into the sea.
So she stepped out of the room.
A few steps later, she felt something was wrong.
—Something was off on this mountain.
She strode out into the courtyard and looked toward the edge of the mountain. She was stunned.
Now she knew what was wrong.
—Why were there so many soldiers on Fort Alum Mountain not wearing the uniform of Pukou City's army?
She looked closer.
"Isn't that Ren Tianye's troops? The League of United Hearts always talked about them—why are they on Fort Alum Mountain?"
"Wait, no..."
"Are they Ren Tianye's men who conquered the fort?"
"Impossible! Fort Alum Mountain is so easily defended and hard to attack; how could it be captured so easily? Even if it were attacked, there would have been noise."
"Not a single sound?"
Ke Xunfang strained her mind, trying to piece it together.
Luckily, the situation wasn't too complex for her to grasp.
She gasped. "Did Liu Xu surrender?"
"Right, Liu Xu surrendered!"
"Excellent. Liu Xu knew full well that I'm a member of the League of United Hearts and that I'm his sworn enemy, yet he dared to surrender to Ren Tianye?!"
"This is outrageous!"
"Liu Xu, how dare 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.”
ut it can buy an entire year of absolutely perfect training results! Su Yu stared at his empty wallet and decisively opened up various online loan platforms. “Borrow a thousand bucks! Recharge my vitality!” Boom! His vitality broke a hundred points, shattering the limits of the human body! “Borrow ten thousand bucks! Recharge my combat skills!” Boom! A basic punching technique so common it was everywhere instantly maxed out, revealing the ultimate assassination technique of Five Elements Unity—Inner Force! When a rich kid hired assassins for a midnight ambush, aiming to break both of his legs, they instead ran headfirst into a monster—a human-shaped tyrannosaur, brimming with dragon-like vitality. With just two fingers, Su Yu snapped a steel staff reinforced with alloy. Staring at the killer’s stash of stolen cash—a staggering quarter-million dollars—he showed a corporate-sincere smile: “Thanks for the pre-exam gift pack, Mr. Zhao! I’m gonna go re-invest this!” Three days later, at the National Martial Arts College Entrance Exam, while everyone else struggled just to reach the passing line, Su Yu threw a single punch—and more than a thousand vitality points literally detonated the entire arena!
world slacker. But a genius female disciple just had to get clingy, insisting that he take her as a disciple. Not only that, she was always making advances on him, thoroughly disrupting his peaceful slacker life...
ing gift was a patch of barren land, and disciples were all picked up along the way. He spent fifty years diligently building three "ramshackle little sects," thinking he could finally live a carefree life relying on his disciples. But right at the fifty-year mark, he was suddenly swept away by a spatial rift and exiled to the Chaos Desolation, the Disorderly Ruins. There was no spiritual energy there, only slaughter. Relying on the cultivation feedback from his disciples, Gu Changyuan hacked his way through a sea of blood for eleven hundred years. When the system finally fished him back out, he discovered the ramshackle little sects he'd built back then had developed a rather... unusual style. Hold on... I vanished for a thousand years, so how did my ramshackle little sects become holy lands?!
