Chương 372: 372： A Victory that Ignited the Continent

As Meyer departed, a heavy silence settled back over the command post. Even though the search and rescue teams had been deployed, a deep, lingering anxiety continued to gnaw at Soren's mind. He knew with absolute clarity that scraping the swamp for scattered survivors would never solve his fundamental crisis.

"Even if those hidden villages are perfectly intact, how many living souls can we realistically drag back? Five hundred? Eight hundred?" Soren leaned heavily against the back of his chair.

"If I am forced to rely purely on absorbing scattered natives from the Misty Swamp to expand Greywater Town's military, it won't even be a drop in the bucket. It will outright paralyze the massive stone wall construction project due to a catastrophic labor shortage." It felt like he was trapped in an absolutely unbreakable dead end. Surrounded on all sides by lethal toxic miasma, possessing a completely barren interior population, and hemmed in by border defenses ruthlessly blockaded by the Capital's aristocrats...

he had been entirely, maliciously quarantined within this lethal death zone. However, in the very next second... As Soren's gaze drifted past the borders of the Misty Swamp on the map, landing upon the sprawling territories representing the Holy Halycon Empire, the Silvermoon Kingdom, and the massive continent divided among over thirty human nations... Every single ounce of that suffocating pessimism was violently, instantly eradicated! A cold, piercing sneer curled the corners of Soren's lips.

"Why the hell did I ever think I lacked a recruitment pool?" Soren abruptly shot up from his seat, planting both hands firmly on the back of his chair.

"My absolute greatest advantage isn't this rotting, mud-choked swamp! It is the apocalyptic, history-shattering victory I just forged—a triumph capable of completely overturning the absolute common sense of this entire continent's Dark Age!" Soren understood the brutal, underlying logic of this world better than anyone.

Set against the suffocating backdrop of four hundred and fifty years of absolute Orc oppression—an era where human life was cheaper than dirt, and the entire human faction was drowning in an ocean of abyssal despair... What was the absolute rarest strategic resource? It wasn't gold coins! It wasn't Mana Crystals! It wasn't even grain! It was HOPE!

It was the sudden, explosive rise of an idolized, peerless commander capable of continuously forging victories—a hero who could violently shatter and butcher those arrogant Orcs!

"Previously, the combat scholar Lucia published that exclusive feature detailing how Greywater Village buried the divine envoy and implemented a lifetime disability pension. That article already detonated the first massive wave of public uproar across the mainstream 'Daily Gazettes' of over thirty nations, forcefully shoving my name into the global human consciousness."

"But this time?"

"Zero casualties! Utterly annihilating thirty thousand enemy elites!"

"Executing Warchief Blackstone with a single sniper arrow!"

"This chain of earth-shattering battle records, combined with the absolute certainty that the Holy Halycon Empire will utilize their entire state apparatus to broadcast this everywhere for their own political gain..." Soren clenched his fists tight.

"Right here, right now, this battle report is undoubtedly spreading at a terrifying, explosive speed, saturating all thirty-plus nations across the entirety of the Erythian Continent!" Soren could practically see it with crystal clarity. In the distant, smoke-filled taverns of the Empire, on the squalid farmsteads bled dry by tyrannical landlords, and within the freezing, desperate refugee camps of the homeless...

when the masses heard this apocalyptic battle record read aloud from the Daily Gazette, what kind of frenzied, manic euphoria would detonate in their hearts!

"The high-ranking aristocrats in the Capital refuse to give me troops to suppress a political rival? I don't care."

"The Misty Swamp is choked with toxic gas and lacks a native population? I couldn't care less!" Soren declared with absolute, unshakable confidence:"As long as my image—as the invincible, Orc-slaughtering commander—is violently seared into the minds of all humanity through those Gazettes..."

"That sheer, unadulterated prestige will mutate into the most irresistible, absolute recruitment beacon in this entire world!" Soren had completely, flawlessly unlocked the underlying logic of this macroscopic feedback loop.

"This world absolutely does not lack hot-blooded commoner youths and wandering powerhouses desperately thirsting to violently rebel against Orc oppression!"

"What they lack is a leader worthy of entrusting their lives to! A commander who absolutely refuses to use them as disposable, pointless meat shields!"

"And my Greywater Town—a sanctuary that actively abolishes class oppression, eradicates racial discrimination, and upholds the ironclad law that no brother's corpse will ever be left behind... that is an absolute, irresistible utopia they will bleed to reach!" Soren could already hear the phantom thud of footsteps echoing from every single direction.

"Prestige effortlessly bypasses the physical blockades erected by the Capital's nobility! It completely ignores the hypocritical, invisible borders of the Silvermoon Kingdom!"

"I won't even need to send out recruiters! Those endlessly bullied mercenaries, those desperate human commoners with their backs entirely against the wall, those apex geniuses possessing immense martial power yet viciously ostracized by corrupt aristocrats... they will absolutely brave the agonizing, blizzard-swept treks, surging relentlessly toward the Misty Swamp!"

"They will actively seek me out! Even if they have to crawl through the mud on their hands and knees, they will drag themselves to Greywater Town to settle down and enlist!" A flawless, absolute path to exponential growth solidified in Soren's mind: Rely on logic-defying special-ops tactics to secure apocalyptic victories capable of shattering the world's common sense! Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Weaponize the prestige of those victories and the continent-wide broadcast of the Daily Gazettes to massively absorb bottom-tier populations and apex powerhouses from all across the globe! With a relentless, surging influx of manpower, he could forge endless phalanxes of heavy repeating crossbows and pikes! He could comprehensively construct those towering stone walls capable of shrugging off the impact of massive siege behemoths!

And finally, relying on that overwhelmingly powerful territory and invincible military, he would march out to secure the next, exponentially more glorious victory, continuously reaping an astronomical ocean of spoils!

"The ultimate feedback loop... has officially been ignited." Even as Soren stood inside the Greywater Town command post, meticulously blueprinting how to weaponize his prestige to siphon apex talent from across the globe... Thousands of miles away, the Capital of the Holy Halycon Empire was violently erupting with an unprecedented, earth-shaking roar!

Night had fallen heavily over the city, yet the massive, cavernous stone hall of the Empire's Royal Document Printing Bureau was illuminated so intensely it was blinding. Hundreds of brilliant magical lamps bathed the entire sector in a harsh light, completely eradicating every single shadow.

"Faster! Shove those freshly typeset magical lead plates directly into the Mana-Presses!"

"Push the kinetic arrays to absolute maximum capacity! Feed them more Mana Crystals!"

"This is a direct, Ironclad Edict from His Imperial Majesty! Before the sun rises, I want to see a staggering five hundred thousand copies of the Imperial Daily Gazette fully bundled and ready to fly!" The Empire's Minister of Intelligence personally stood on the second-floor balcony, violently waving his short staff of office as he roared his vocal cords completely raw. KACHUNK! KACHUNK! BOOM! A full hundred colossal Mana-Presses operated simultaneously, unleashing a deafening, mechanical roar.

Massive, heavy bundles of parchment and high-grade papyrus—radiating the rich scent of fresh ink and the faint, glowing halos of preservation magic—violently spewed from the output chutes in a relentless, endless tide. Yes, the Emperor of the Holy Halycon Empire had just issued a draconian decree in the Imperial Court, officially designating Soren as a Disaster-Class hypothetical enemy and placing Greywater Town under absolute defensive lockdown.

That was purely a paranoid, political calculation designed to secure the absolute hegemony of the Empire's rule. BUT! In this four-hundred-and-fifty-year Dark Age—in an era where the entire human faction was suffocating under the Orcs' butchering blades and drowning in bottomless despair! The Emperor understood better than anyone: these thirty-plus oppressed, bleeding nations were utterly, desperately starved for a single shot of adrenaline!

"Soren's meteoric rise is absolutely an existential threat to the future of Imperial authority. However, the death of Warchief Blackstone is a genuine, unrestrained carnival for the entirety of the human race!" That single, classified whisper from the Emperor became the absolute core operating doctrine for the Printing Bureau tonight.

To violently inject combat courage into all of humanity against the Orc Alliance, and to aggressively flaunt the Holy Halycon Empire's absolute monopoly over global information distribution... The Imperial High Command executed an incredibly rare maneuver: they activated every single official channel they possessed!

"The first batch of Gazettes has been completely sealed!" Amidst the deafening roar of the presses, thousands of elite couriers had already assembled in the massive courtyard outside. Some were securely mounted on majestic, magic-blooded Pegasi. Others had vaulted directly onto the broad backs of incredibly precious, low-altitude Imperial Griffons.

"MOVE OUT! Targets: The Silvermoon Kingdom, the Ironpeak Duchy, the Briar Knight Territories..."

"To every single province across the thirty-plus nations of this continent! To the mainstream taverns of every major city! To every single Mercenary Guild! Carpet-bomb them with this battle report!" Accompanied by the piercing, triumphant blast of war horns, the Holy Halycon Empire's apocalyptic intelligence network deployed in full force.

Relying on a terrifyingly efficient distribution web, that logic-defying, earth-shattering battle record was ruthlessly, perfectly scattered into every single, dark corner of the world. And as the Imperial state apparatus violently fanned the flames... Carried within this massive, suffocating tidal wave of Daily Gazettes, the previous publication—the "Exclusive Long-Form Feature on the Misty Swamp" personally penned by the combat scholar, Lucia—violently ignited a massive, secondary chain reaction!

In the aristocratic cultural salons, the gritty Adventurer's Guilds, and the roaring, chaotic taverns of every nation... Lucia's feature was currently being frantically passed around, fought over, and even screamed aloud by readers standing atop tables.

Just half a month ago, when Lucia's article painted Greywater Village as an absolute utopia—a place where "even bottom-tier raw recruits are equipped with Dark Silver Armor," possessing "Water Healing magic arrays," and where "all commoners and serfs are guaranteed a lifetime disability pension system"... Countless conservative scholars across the nations, alongside bitter, hardened military veterans who had eaten nothing but dirt and suffering on the front lines, had reacted with pure, unadulterated contempt.

"Absurd! This has to be some pathetic Knight's fairy tale spun by a third-rate, drunken bard!"

"Even the infantry of our Great Empire will violently bash each other's skulls in over a single piece of moldy black bread! The lives of bottom-tier grunts hold absolutely zero value! How the hell could a territorial system possibly exist that treats the lowest class as actual human beings, let alone promises to retrieve every single corpse?!"

"Exactly! Preaching absolute equality?! Greywater Village is a rotting, dilapidated border death zone! Just surviving there is a damn miracle!"