The seething slaughter had turned the city into a roaring sea, explosions rolling one after another, and now and then the bone-chilling howl of an inner-strength master’s cry could be heard cutting through it all.

After an exchange of flag signals, the Huaxia Army pulled back from part of the road along the western front held by the Heavenly King’s forces, letting the arriving Beiwei Guard take over the advance there. In exchange, Yin Ping, Yue Yun, and several elite Beiwei Guard members, disguised, managed to slip through a side road and break into the inner perimeter.

As the elite forces of the two armies that had come from the southwest and the southeast respectively, the two sides sized each other up for a moment.

“See how they fight?” Yin Ping said quietly as they hurried through.

“Their rifles are fierce… and they’ve got no shortage of masters,” Yue Yun answered from behind her.

Ahead, their prearranged contact had already appeared beneath a crumbling courtyard wall, his face full of anxiety.

“…We agreed you’d move under cover of the chaos — why in the world did the Black Banner people come charging in?”

“We’re just as surprised. What’s wrong? Everything all right?” Yue Yun tilted his head at him.

“It’s fine… the fighting’s just too fierce. If you two hadn’t come when you did, my men would’ve had to be sent up to the front…” The man shook his head, then waved. “Come on, I’ll take you in.”

Led by this inside contact, the group made their way through the complex inner defenses of the courtyards, and before long reached a courtyard at the very core of the inner perimeter. He pointed ahead.

“The next courtyard over is where Luo Yan’s personal guard is stationed. Past that is the main hall where Luo Yan issues his orders. I can only take you this far.”

Yin Ping nodded. The man turned to leave, but Yue Yun stepped over and tapped him on the shoulder. “You’re not going anywhere.”

Then the others who’d come with them began unwrapping the large bundle from their backs — a bundle with a fuse trailing from it — and set about placing it in the corner of the wall.

“This thing going to work? Won’t fail on us right when it matters, will it?” someone asked.

The man setting the charge gave a cold smile. “We’re students of Master Zuo. Southwestern craftsmanship… just wait and see.”

The firewood had already brought the water to a boil; throughout the city, the roar of battle churned like a rolling pot. Up in the teahouse where they watched the fighting, though Zuo Xiuquan hadn’t given away much real information, once the Beiwei Guard had entered the field and the flag signals had been exchanged, the scarred young woman had more or less pieced things together.

“So Old Master Zuo has been brokering a deal on behalf of that emperor of the southeast with the Heavenly King. That makes sense… it seems only this ‘Mountain-Opening General’ Luo is truly out of the Heavenly King’s favor…”

“Miss Qi, what are you saying. Mountain-Opening General Luo Yan is the Heavenly King’s most trusted commander. This old man, for his part, has placed his bet on He Wen, and has agreed to act as his counterpart. Only, He Wen may not be entirely honest with you all — I doubt he’ll deal with you in good faith.” Zuo Xiuquan smiled pleasantly. “As for you, Miss Qi — you grew up in Jiangning, did you not, and studied under Master Ning as a child? You must have met His Majesty and the Princess Imperial back then, surely?”

“We crossed paths a few times, yes. The Princess Imperial was remarkably clever back then, and quite forceful — while His Majesty, as I recall, had a rather gentle, easygoing temperament…”

“Do tell me more, Miss Qi. When this old man returns to Fuzhou and mentions it to His Majesty, he’ll be delighted.”

Zuo Xiuquan changed the subject with seeming casualness, and Xiao Qi went along with it, reminiscing about the past with a smile, asking no probing questions in return.

In this chaotic age, the Zuo family — an entity on cordial terms with all sides — had nonetheless always held fast to its own principles. Ever since Zuo Duanyou’s time, they had regarded the Black Banner as Huaxia’s last hope in the direst of circumstances, and had, within their means, given it considerable help — this rooted in the larger cause of resisting the Jurchens and carrying forward the Huaxia Army’s legacy.

But in most other respects, they had never abandoned their identity as orthodox Confucians. When the Martial Dynasty produced a promising emperor like Jun Wu, they had thrown themselves wholeheartedly into rallying support for him — and even though they no longer needed to depend on the emperor’s favor for their livelihood, they still served him with loyalty. And this stance, before anyone, was stated openly and honestly — a path entirely different from Dai Mengwei’s Confucian approach.

This trip to Jiangning, his charge was to lobby on behalf of the southeast — and given that, the old man’s seemingly offhand lie carried within it, more than anything, a reminder and a courtesy extended toward the southwest. This kind of cordial distance was, for the time being, the best possible arrangement for both the southwest and the southeast.

The two chatted and laughed for a while, and then, from within the territory held by the Heavenly King’s forces, an explosion suddenly roared out, followed by smoke and dust billowing skyward.

Amid the churning haze, Yue Yun covered his nose and mouth and charged like a cannonball at “Mountain-Opening General” Luo Yan, who was caught in the midst of the chaos. Beside him, Yin Ping’s Five-Step Thirteen-Spear technique arrived like the wind.

The operation to decapitate Luo Yan, one of the Heavenly King’s chief commanders, had begun.

…

Just as things were heating up everywhere, at the edge of the fighting on the eastern side, “Cold Crow” Chen Juefang flashed like lightning, his fast blade cutting down several masters who had charged in.

Blood soaked the ground all around, but on the battlefield the Undying Guard had built up, the tide of killing had not managed to push inward.

“I am ‘Cold Crow’ Chen Juefang!” he bellowed after cutting several men down, leaping up onto a nearby rooftop, his fierce voice ringing across the battlefield. “Anyone who’s not satisfied — come and fight me!”

As one of the jianghu’s foremost masters, Chen Juefang’s blade ran red with blood, and for a moment it greatly bolstered the morale of the Undying Guard beneath him.

Kuang Wenbai, standing on the second-floor corridor of the outer perimeter, was shouting orders to the men nearby, directing them into the fray, when suddenly a great commotion erupted on the roof above — a master had charged up and was already locked in combat with the guards there.

He grabbed his steel whip, but before he could say a word, two bloodied figures came tumbling down from the roof. The enemy landed close beside Kuang Wenbai, already throwing a punch his way.

Normally, Kuang Wenbai would have met such an attack head-on with his steel whip, but this time he suddenly threw himself backward instead. The enemy’s fist swept past right in front of his mask, and for a moment both men froze.

Then it dawned on Kuang Wenbai — the man before him, with this punch, had once again been aiming for his nose.

The first time his nose had been broken, it had happened at night, and the punch had seemed entirely natural — he’d assumed it was mere coincidence. The second time, at the Gold Tower, he had thought someone had simply picked out his weak spot to attack. But with this punch now, it suddenly struck him — those first two times had very likely both been the deliberate work of the same person, and that person had clearly just shown up again.

The instant he realized this, fury surged up in his chest — along with a certain admiration for his own quick reaction just now; after all these days of training, his martial skill had finally grown.

The next moment, his body jerked, and his vision went black, then flashed white, and a stunning pain exploded through his skull.

Someone had struck him from behind — just now, a heavy blow to his groin. In that instant, he felt something shatter between his legs.

The man who had thrown the punch that missed froze for a moment, and then — even behind his mask, one could see the twitch at the corner of his eye — he took a step back, seeming reluctant to throw the second punch.

“Oh…”

Kuang Wenbai made only the faintest sound. His legs had already clamped together, and in the last moment of consciousness he turned slightly, trying to see just who this cowardly attacker was. Emerging from the pale sunlight behind him was the silhouette of a tall woman, who reached out without hesitation and ripped off his hideous mask, then delivered a heavy, brutal punch straight to his face.

Crack—

Kuang Wenbai’s nose and mouth were shattered for the third time.

His body tumbled backward and slammed into the corner of the second-floor corridor, blood pouring freely from his ruined face — and even unconscious, his tightly clamped legs seemed to still be seeping thick blood.

Liang Siyi’s gaze was cold as ice as she shook the fist that had just struck him.

Ahead of her, You Hongzhuo, who had witnessed the whole scene, felt his eyelid twitch. He instinctively reached up to cover his mouth, and muttered something he himself had never expected to say.

“That’s… that’s a bit much… a bit much for the crime…”

“Pfft—”

Like an iceberg cracking, a smile suddenly broke across Liang Siyi’s face. But the next instant, she froze that smile in place, turned, and looked toward a figure atop a nearby building, drawing the blade and sword from her back.

You Hongzhuo sighed and shook his head, then turned to charge alongside Liang Siyi toward Chen Juefang…

…

The tide of battle surged like a rising sea toward the old martial yamen at the center. At some point, a burst of lightfoot technique sent a storm of ginkgo leaves whirling into the air, an enormous figure sweeping through — and behind that figure, Wang Nantuo, Tan Zheng, Tang Qinghua, and figure after figure of other masters came rushing toward the southwestern edge of the battlefield.

These masters, one after another, surged with roiling inner strength, roaring at the top of their lungs as they charged, like a boiling storm of demonic shadows filling the sky. At the same time, on the southern battlefield, the large-scale counterattack organized by “Avici Butcher” blade-chief Peng Tiangang had pushed things to a white-hot pitch. With heavy artillery joining in, explosions crashed like ocean waves — and it seemed the hundred-odd fighters who had come from the southwest were not going to have all the glory for themselves. The Yama King’s masters were fighting back savagely, apparently managing to bottleneck the Huaxia Army’s advance somewhere along the second-street defensive line.

The Huaxia Army’s snipers had only managed to pick off a few of the soldiers manning the cannons, while a great many masters and sharpshooters had already noticed the danger posed by the riflemen on the various rooftops, and had begun trying to root out these venomous, wasp-tail threats — using arrows, hidden weapons, and even high-speed lightfoot assaults.

Two successive waves of masters, mobilized by Peng Tiangang, had by now thrown themselves into the front line of the fighting, posing a tremendous threat to the Huaxia Army’s advance.

Chaos everywhere, front and back, left and right.

Ning Ji fought his way forward at a dead sprint, cutting down enemies as he went.

He had trained in martial arts since childhood and had exceptional talent, but his learning had always been a patchwork — Xigua taught him blade work, Hongti taught him swordsmanship, Chen Fan taught him boxing. In more than ten years of building his foundation, he had learned the deepest inner-strength techniques of several schools, and then, after synthesizing the most effective self-defense and battlefield killing methods from each, had gone on to master them all. During this time, out of fear that a strong swimmer might one day drown, Ning Yi had also drilled into him a great deal of life philosophy — that a real man follows his own heart, that living to fight another day beats dying in a blaze of glory, and that running away when you can’t win is nothing to be ashamed of.

Later, in order to go to the front lines, Ning Ji had reached a compromise with his father and become a combat medic. Though the study of the human body didn’t conflict with martial training, it had left his overall martial development remarkably well-rounded — his fighting style was versatile, never forcing him to rely on any one weapon; to him, all eighteen classes of weaponry were simply tools.

But this time alone, the fury in his heart drove him to hurl himself at the Yama King’s defensive line with unrestrained violence, his blade drawing on Overlord Blade techniques with a spirit of charging forward though ten thousand men stood against him. In the past, his father had occasionally lectured him on grand principles — things like “heaven and earth show no mercy, all things have spirit” or “the scholar’s ruler, the warrior’s blade” — dialectics he hadn’t quite been able to wrap his head around. But in this moment, he seemed, faintly, to grasp something of the heroic spirit his grandfather Liu Dabiao — the man who believed “a chest full of bristling hair makes a true hero” — must once have embodied. As this round of slaughter surged through him, his blood boiled hot, and he almost wanted to throw back his head and roar to the heavens, to subdue everyone around him the way some great monk might.

Had his inner strength already surpassed Lin Zongwu’s, he would have done just that — but since the man had already let out his own roar first, Ning Ji had the sense not to invite humiliation.

Of course, as the Yama King’s side began firing their cannons in a large-scale counterattack, chaos spread across the entire dividing line of the battlefield. Some Huaxia Army soldiers fell from rooftops; others were caught by stray hidden weapons in the confusion. His battlefield-honed reflexes had him immediately joining the effort to rescue the wounded.

And the men he went to rescue this time were also battlefield veterans; the fighting, chaotic as it looked — especially once the artillery joined in and whole buildings and walls began collapsing — had nonetheless left most of the front-line soldiers with cover already found. Even as the enemy behind them was being driven toward the thick of the bombardment, when Ning Ji ran over to help, the man was already rolling and crawling through the rubble — bleeding some, but seemingly fine — and even waved him off vigorously upon seeing him coming.

“Go back, go back…” Ning Ji sprinted low and fast toward him, only for the man to say, “Get down, get down.”

“Don’t move if you’re hurt—”

“How the hell should I know if I’m hurt? Get back!”

“Concussion from a shell blast can be serious too…”

“I know, don’t touch me, I’m fine — you go left first—”

“You just coughed up blood, let me check.”

“F— your father—”

Out of the smoke, an enemy master came charging at them. The wounded man, still cursing Ning Yi, leapt up off the ground almost in the same instant as Ning Ji, and the two of them hacked the man down with their blades from left and right, sending him rolling like a felled gourd.

“See? Where the hell am I hurt…”

He too was a skilled fighter in the army. Ning Ji ran off, still muttering curses, and after a moment rejoined the line of men treating the wounded.

Weaving through the chaos on the front line like this for a while, he caught sight, off to one side, of Li Yanfeng being chased his way. Behind him, moving with obvious lightness of foot, was clearly their own bald-headed junior brother, Wu Kong — but what was really sending Li Yanfeng fleeing with his tail between his legs was another man, in his thirties, named Han Yue, a major master from Hei Niu’s team. In Ning Ji’s estimation, this was a reliable comrade whose skill was more than enough to overpower Hei Niu single-handedly. He had no idea what unforgivable thing that unlucky monkey had done to earn himself such a chase.

Of course, though Han Yue’s skill was formidable, the monkey’s staff work was no slouch either, and with his sly, venomous streak, in fleeing he kept steering the pursuit toward his own “comrades” under the Yama King’s banner. Han Yue and the young monk kept finding their chase blocked, unable to truly corner him.

Ning Ji raised his long blade, ready to charge forward and cut the monkey down — when across the way, the young monk spotted him and shouted at the top of his lungs: “Big Brother!”

“…Huh? You pig-headed—”

Ning Ji froze for a second. He’d meant to close in on Li Yanfeng as quickly and quietly as possible, but with that shout, Li Yanfeng spotted him too, his staff swinging aside as he veered off. Ning Ji was about to curse when he heard the young monk cry, “Brother Xue… Brother Xue was beaten unconscious by the monkey!”

“…”

Ning Ji’s expression darkened.

Li Yanfeng dashed past not far ahead.

The next moment, Ning Ji sprinted with everything he had toward the place he had come from. He was young and hot-tempered, quick to anger when trouble arose — but the instant he learned one of his own had been hurt, his medic’s instincts always came first: save them, then settle the score.

His figure flashed through the courtyard and sped toward that long street, going in the opposite direction from Li Yanfeng, who was still bounding and flipping away like a monkey.

At the same moment, the roar of battle down that street had begun to fade, and a strange atmosphere settled over the place.

“Feather Blade” Qian Luoning leapt up to a high vantage point on a nearby building, long blade in hand, and began scanning the field ahead.

One after another, figures belonging to the Huaxia Army’s elite fell quiet at nearly the same moment. Xiao Hei stopped in his tracks amid the chaotic courtyards, frowning up at the nearby sky, listening intently for something.

The fighting in the city had not let up; commotion was coming from every direction.

Ahead of the front line, “Avici Butcher” blade-chief Peng Tiangang seemed to have received some news; he raised his broadsword and pressed toward the front line, and people could hear him shouting through the crowd.

“Men — follow me and kill!”

A great crowd surged forward from ahead like a tide.

Suddenly, Qian Luoning noticed something. His figure shot forward like lightning.

Everyone’s eyes turned that way — toward an unremarkable little courtyard which, because of the structure of its buildings, had been used by four Huaxia Army soldiers, including one sniper, as a temporary vantage point and foothold. But in that instant, the men atop the roof suddenly sensed something was wrong. One of them raised an iron rod and slammed it furiously downward toward the roof below.

Within everyone’s sight, a thunderous crash sounded, and a figure came bursting up through the roof tiles like a giant dragon, like a wrathful Buddha, hurtling into the sky above; the iron rod that had come crashing down was blasted away by a flying half-section of roof beam. In the air, tiles, stones, splinters, and human silhouettes tangled together, and behind them, the sniper’s spotter swung his long blade and charged straight at the bursting figure, trying to cut him down.

The two men ahead were sent flying amid the whirling tiles; the wrathful Buddha-figure threw a punch, and the tiles scattering from that direction seemed to transform into cannon shells hurled forward. Under that overwhelming force, the soldier wielding the blade somehow managed to dodge the punch and tried to hold his ground against the man, while the sniper raised his rifle to fire.

The next instant, shadows swirled atop the roof — a massive roof beam was flung into the air, the entire frame of the roof twisting and deforming; the wooden beam flipped skyward, then came crashing down toward the front. One side of the wall collapsed, and a figure was flung out amid the falling bricks and tiles, coughing blood.

That enormous, wrathful-Buddha-like figure crashed down through the second floor of the wooden building straight to the ground floor — in that instant, it was as though he had launched himself into the sky and then calmly crashed back down to earth.

The Huaxia Army soldier who had fallen from the building tumbled through the rubble and flying bricks, trying to scramble up right away, staggering forward — and the enormous figure came smashing through the wall after him, charging in for the kill.

One courtyard over, the instant that figure had burst into the sky, Xiao Hei’s gaze had already taken in the tiles flying everywhere.

He spun around at once and sprinted that way with everything he had.

The wrathful Buddha sank down to the ground floor and smashed through the wall; Xiao Hei had already vaulted over a wall and was leaping forward.

“Hey—!”

He roared, his footwork compressing distance in an instant, his fist swinging out to intercept the man before he could strike his comrade.

That massive figure, still charging, shot him a single glance — then threw a punch straight at him.

Two hurtling figures collided head-on.

An overwhelming force crashed down like a collapsing mountain.

Xiao Hei’s chest went numb, followed at once by a faint sweetness at the back of his throat.

Boom—

Under that high-speed impact, the ground caved in, as though invisible footprints were spreading outward. Xiao Hei’s body was sent flying. Ahead of that massive figure, the staggering Huaxia Army soldier who had been trying to dodge was struck flying in the very next instant, slamming all the way into a stone wall at the side of the courtyard — hanging there for a moment before finally crumpling to the ground.

Xiao Hei tumbled across the ground, then hauled himself back up and charged forward again.

“Lin Zongwu—”

Everyone on the battlefield heard his furious roar.

“I’ll f— your mother—”

“The world’s number one” — Lin Zongwu.

Had arrived.