Chương 101: Illiterate Desperadoes

Lord Coinsworth, of the Prosperity domain, surveyed the burning city from his command ship and felt his fortune bleeding away with every passing second. Crimson Lotus City had become a graveyard. Fires burned in every quarter, sending columns of black smoke into the evening sky. The commercial district where merchants once haggled over silk and spiritual jade had collapsed into rubble. The residential hills were now cratered and warped.

Warehouses along the docks had burst open, their contents scattered across streets. The dead lay everywhere. Foundation Establishment soldiers in crimson and gold sprawled across rooftops, their bodies twisted where flying swords had found them. Gold Core elders drifted face-down in the canals. Here and there, the massive forms of armored rhinoceroses lay cooling in the rubble, their gray and black plates cracked and leaking blood, their riders crushed beneath them or simply gone.

Lord Coinsworth counted seventeen of the beasts visible from his position. The Iron Rhinoceros Sect had fielded perhaps forty at the battle's start. Every single one had fallen. This was not how the battle was supposed to go. The three Lords had known Ironhorn would be difficult. The old rhinoceros had ruled this city for centuries, and he never shared information. He never attended conferences. He never responded to diplomatic overtures.

The sects and temples of the central provinces trusted him precisely because he kept to himself, and that secrecy had turned planning this assault into an exercise in educated guessing. They had guessed wrong. The profundity alone cost them half the vanguard before the real fighting began. Then came the coordinated sword formations on the walls. Then the firework batteries. Then the street-by-street resistance that turned every block into a death trap.

Lord Coinsworth's golden runes orbited his domain, each one a crystallized spiritstone burning away to nothing. He watched another cluster of runes crumble to dust and replaced them automatically. Two million Tier Three spiritstones gone. Twenty thousand Tier Four stones gone. His personal reserves, which he had sworn never to touch for military operations, had been bleeding for twenty minutes now. If retreat were possible, he would have ordered it half an hour ago.

A formation cannon fired from somewhere in the main armada toward a cluster of rubble where scouts had spotted movement. Three flying swords shot back from an adjacent pile of debris, their blades trailing spiritual flame, and punched through the ship before anyone could react. The ship listed, fire spreading along its deck, and began its slow descent toward the burning streets below. The Iron Rhinoceros Sect had lost their beasts, their walls, their defensive formations, and most of their Gold Core elders.

Now they resorted to guerrilla tactics. Teams of three or four cultivators moved through the ruins in constant rotation, never staying in one position long enough to target. They threw flying swords from behind collapsed walls, fired talismans from shattered windows, and vanished into the rubble before the fleet could respond. Lord Coinsworth's fleet answered with overwhelming firepower. Formation cannons swept the streets. Carpet bombardments flattened entire blocks.

His golden runes absorbed every attack that came close to the main formation. The exchange felt pointless. Both sides were throwing money at each other. Spiritstones against spiritstones. Treasures against treasures. The defenders couldn't break through his Prosperity domain. The fleet couldn't root out the scattered pockets of resistance. The entire battle had become an economic contest of attrition, each side waiting to see whose reserves would run dry first. And everyone was waiting.

Lord Shattervow, Lord Hollowfang and Lord Ironhorn had vanised. Teleported somewhere, but where? Lord Coinsworth sent his divine sense searching across the entire region. He felt nothing. Until they reappeared, the battle remained frozen. Lord Coinsworth's attention drifted to the Spirit Bell Pavilion. The pagoda stood at the center of the city, untouched. Every other structure within two hundred meters had burned, collapsed, or both. The pagoda remained pristine, as though mocking him.

They had tried to destroy it. Anything they threw at it simply vanished, Something about that building was connected to the profundity. Lord Coinsworth felt certain of it. Whatever Lord Ironhorn had activated, whatever had locked their entire fleet into forward-facing paralysis at the battle's start, the pagoda served as an anchor point. Destroying it might end the profundity's lingering effects. Or it might trigger something worse. Without Lord Ironhorn available for interrogation, there was no way to know.

So Lord Coinsworth sent teams. The first team of twelve Foundation Establishment soldiers never returned. The second team of eight Gold Core elders lost six in the first exchange. The survivors' reports painted a grim picture: a group of perfectly coordinated flying sword cultivators capable of outputting high Gold Core equivalent power. One among them possessed extraordinarily sensitive divine sense, allowing the team to react to threats instantly.

But the most unsettling detail concerned a Qi Refining cultivator who could output peak Gold Core equivalent power while moving with impossible agility. A Qi Refining cultivator. Lord Coinsworth dismissed the report as panic-induced exaggeration. Then he watched the third assault through a scrying formation. The boy moved through combat like water through cracks.

His blade appeared and disappeared, striking from positions that should have been impossible, finding gaps in defensive formations that the Gold Core elders hadn't known they left open. His divine sense swept the battlefield in constant waves, and somehow, impossibly, he perceived everything at once. Lord Coinsworth sent a fourth team. Eight Gold Core cultivators armed with Tier Four treasures specifically selected to counter the defenders' equipment.

The Qi Refining cultivator killed two of them in the first three seconds. After that, Lord Coinsworth tried saturation bombardment. The fleet concentrated fire on the pagoda's base. Hundreds of formation cannon bolts screamed downward in a wall of destruction that should have vaporized everything within fifty meters. The four defenders simply walked behind the pagoda. And the structure absorbed every shot.

Lord Coinsworth would have loved to advance his fleet directly over the pagoda and crush the four cultivators personally. Every time he and his fleet began to move, the guerrilla fire from the ruins tripled in intensity. Trap formations activated in the streets below. A team of cultivators detonated a cache of explosive talismans directly beneath his advance guard's position, destroying two warships. The message was clear.

The defenders couldn't hurt him directly, but eliminating them would cost him an enormous amount of spiritstones from his own pocket. A stalemate of mutual frustration. For the past thirty minutes, the exchange had settled into a predictable rhythm. His fleet fired the occasional opportunistic shot when scouts spotted movement. The guerrilla teams threw the occasional flying sword when an opening presented itself. Neither side pressed for advantage. Everyone was waiting.

Somewhere out there, three Nascent Soul Lords were locked in a bitter fight no one could see. Until one side won that battle, nothing else mattered.

Lord Hollowfang, of the Greedy Wolf domain, had never felt this troubled. He had escaped the profundity. Shattervow burned his own blood to punch a hole through Ironhorn's domain, and Hollowfang slipped through before the gap closed. He was supposed to meet up with Coinsworth and then bring the main army down to crush that demonic rhinoceros once and for all. Now he was chained to a chair in the middle of a strange pagoda.

Half his body had rotted from poison, the flesh blackened and weeping where the toxin had spread through his meridians. The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation. The moment he escaped, he had been in bad shape. Shattervow's blood-burning technique had destabilized everything within fifty meters, and Hollowfang caught the edge of it. And before he could recover, a Qi Refining junior attacked him. A Qi Refining junior. He had tried to stop the boy.

He threw wolves and vines, summoned the full weight of his Greedy Wolf domain. But the junior moved like he could see the future. Lightning-fast shifts carried him past spectral wolves while they were still half-formed. Impossible dodges that shook off his vines and spell arts. The only thing Hollowfang could do was set up a final trap. A kill-zone that would guarantee mutual destruction if the junior pressed his attack. The junior took the trade gladly.

The dagger sank into Hollowfang's back before the wolves tore the boy apart. And the poison on that blade was devious. It bypassed his flesh entirely and attacked his Divine Infant. He poured every scrap of spiritual qi and divine sense into holding it at bay. He did not know what the poison would do to his infant, and he refused to gamble on anything that could touch it. The most troubling part was that his captors spoke some language he did not recognize. And they were arguing.

"Kongjian jiezhi!" the old angry one shouted for what had to be the fifteenth time. He shook a bottle of antidote in one hand and pointed at Hollowfang with the other.

"KONGJIAN JIEZHI!" The pronunciation was atrocious. It sounded like he had learned exactly two words of Common and had practiced neither of them. But Hollowfang was fairly certain the old man was demanding his storage rings.

"I have told you," Hollowfang said to the timid one, the only one who spoke Common, "I had three storage rings. The first held all my spiritstones and military supplies. I gave it to Lord Coinsworth before the battle. The second I have already unlocked and surrendered. The third contains secrets I would rather die than reveal. If you try to force it open, it will self-destruct." Kevin translated. Arthur shouted something back.

"He doesn't believe you," Kevin said.

"I am an Embroidered Uniform Guard!" Hollowfang strained against his chains, veins bulging at his temples.

"Imperial Secret Police! The characters on that token carry the weight of the Dragon Throne itself! Can none of you read?" Kevin picked up the token from where it lay among Hollowfang's confiscated belongings. He turned it over in his hands, squinting at the characters. The old one snatched the identity token from Kevin's hands. He examined it briefly, shrugged, and stuffed it into the folds of his robe.

"No," Kevin admitted.

"I can't read any of it."

"You cannot read?"

"I can read! Just not... this." The three Foundation Establishment rogue cultivators launched into another animated discussion. Their strange language bounced off the pagoda walls. The old angry one gestured violently. The mild-mannered one made calming motions with his hands. The timid one kept glancing nervously at Hollowfang as if expecting him to explode. They did not seem to reach a conclusion. Then the mild-mannered one simply vanished. Hollowfang blinked. He had not felt any spatial fluctuation.

No teleportation array. The man was simply there, and then he was not. Maybe they had a falling out and betrayed each other. But the other two did not seem concerned. They waited. So Hollowfang waited with them. After several minutes, the mild-mannered one returned. He brought news, and they discussed for a while longer. They looked troubled. Kevin walked over. Hollowfang sighed.

"I cannot believe I was captured by illiterate hacks. I am going to die, am I not?"

"No, Leo said you can't die. He says we're not supposed to kill you."

"Who is Leo? The one who can disappear and reappear?" Kevin shook his head.

"No, Leo was the one you killed. Long story. But here's the problem." He gestured toward Arthur.

"That old guy won't trust you unless you personally unlock your storage ring and let him inspect everything inside. He doesn't believe you'll be honest about what's valuable and what's not." Hollowfang drew himself up as much as the chains allowed.

"I have told you. I cannot let you take imperial secrets." He tilted his head back, exposing his throat.

"Strike cleanly. I will not resist." Kevin did not move.

"We don't want secrets. Shen Tianyi won't even buy them from us. He says his family doesn't deal in intelligence." Hollowfang snapped his head back.

"The Shen family? You know them?"

"Yes. Mike talked to Leo in real life, Leo talked to Vivian, Vivian talked to Shen Tianyi back in the game, and Shen Tianyi got the message back to us. Apparently your Imperial Secret Police identity is legitimate." Hollowfang clutched at this newfound lifeline.

"What did Shen Tianyi say to do with me? Has the Shen family paid my ransom?"

"Look." Kevin rubbed his temples.

"I don't care what the Shen family wants. All I know is that old guy over there is going to spend the rest of his life telling everyone what an idiotic chump I am if I don't get your storage ring open." Hollowfang considered this.

"Then let us bind ourselves with a Dao Heart oath. This Seat swears to surrender all material treasures. You all swear to leave the sealed documents untouched." Kevin turned and gestured toward Arthur.

"Would you trust his Dao Heart oath?" Arthur stomped on his foot, pointed a finger to the sky and shouted in common.

"INJUSTICE!" He then mimed an explosion with his hands, fingers spreading outward from his dantian. Great. The old one knew another word. Hollowfang turned to Kevin.

"Did he just threaten to self-detonate?" Kevin shrugged.

"Bad habits. Just ignore him." Hollowfang's mind raced. There had to be a solution. These cultivators were clearly powerful enough to have captured him, but they were also clearly idiots. Powerful idiots. The most dangerous combination. Then it came to him.

"I have an idea," Hollowfang said.

"None of you can read, correct?

"I can read! Just not what's on this token."

"Same thing. How about this? I will open the storage ring for you. You can empty it out completely. And you give me back all the useless books, scrolls, and jade slips that you cannot read anyway." He leaned forward.

"Paper is worthless, yes? Burn it for all I care. I will agree to this arrangement as long as you do not open any books or scrolls. Just put them back in my hands." Kevin turned to translate. Arthur's face went red. He shouted something that needed no translation.

"He says you're trying to trick us," Kevin reported.

"I am giving you everything of material value! Weapons, pills, spiritstones, treasures, all of it! I am only asking for worthless paper!" More shouting. The mild-mannered tried to calm them down. Arthur shouted back. An explosion rocked the pagoda from outside, showering dust from the rafters. Kevin held up his hands between Arthur and Hollowfang, speaking rapidly in their strange tongue. Arthur's face cycled through several shades of red. The mild-mannered one nodded along. Finally, Kevin turned back.

"Okay. Fine. We accept. Unlock your storage ring. We dump everything out. We give you back anything that looks like a book, scroll, or jade slip, plus the antidote." Arthur cracked his knuckles and began rubbing his hands together. Hollowfang watched the old cultivator's eager expression. A thought occurred to him.

"My identity token," he said.

"Do you think I will get that back as well?" Kevin laughed and shook his head no.

Unfortunately for Lord Hollowfang, he ended up spending much more time with the three desperadoes. He learned that nickname through Kevin, and it seemed fitting. It took Lord Hollowfang quite some time to cure the poison that was threatening his divine infant. Apparently the one called Arthur was too cheap to actually buy four doses of antidote, and instead watered it down and split one dose four ways. One of which was lost when Leo died.

Somehow Hollowfang pulled through with his watered down antidote, which was a relief, because none of them knew what the poison actually did. However, now that his identity was exposed, the last people he wanted to face were Lord Shattervow and Lord Coinsworth. An Embroidered Uniform Guard, captured and extorted by three Foundation Establishment nobodies? He would lose so much face that his ancestors would feel the shame in the afterlife. So he decided to just stick with the desperadoes.

At least they seemed to have a plan. Unfortunately their plan was to hide on the far side of the city, away from Lord Coinsworth, and wait. The battle outside settled into a lull. The stingy Lord Coinsworth refused to do anything substantial. The defenders stopped risking their lives as long as Lord Coinsworth held back. Hollowfang spent the time explaining what his confiscated spiritual treasures did. Arthur kept making snide remarks, which Kevin did not translate. Hollowfang appreciated the courtesy.

It took a few more hours, but the moment Lord Hollowfang detected the profundity had stopped working, he escaped the city along with the three desperadoes. There was still no sign of Lord Ironhorn or Lord Shattervow. They flew back toward the Savage Mountains. After all, Hollowfang was robbed penniless. He needed to find someone to borrow spiritstones from so he could pay for teleportation back to the capital.

Shen Tianyi already knew of his humiliation and had the spiritstones to loan, so talking to him kept the circle of shame from growing. They would have made it back hours ago, but they had to stop multiple times so the mild-mannered one could vanish again. Kevin explained that Mike was "picking up his kid from daycare" and "getting the kid to nap." Hollowfang stared at them. They were in an active warzone. Four Nascent Soul Lords had torn a city apart around them. And he was worried about daycare?

The other two seemed unbothered, so Hollowfang decided he was unbothered too.

Lord Shattervow, of the Army Breaker domain, emerged victorious into an empty city. He had beaten back Ironhorn, broken out of the profundity space, and arrived just in time to conquer several thousand tons of smoldering rubble. The whole affair left a foul taste in his mouth. As his mentor had said: when the battle makes no sense, look for the hand you cannot see. Something stunk of the Embroidered Uniform Guards. Lord Coinsworth had fled hours ago, along with what remained of the Western Seat's fleet.

After Coinsworth saw Hollowfang flee, he cut his losses and ran. The rest of the defenders fled afterwards. Most of their prepared defenses were spent, and there was no point defending ashes and craters. Shattervow did not really know what to say when Lord Ironhorn crawled out of the profundity space and into reality. The two Nascent Soul Lords did not even bother to restart their bitter fight. They just looked around and checked for the umpteenth time that yes, they were the only living souls within sight.

Shattervow gestured at the empty streets, the piles of rubble, and the absolute absence of anyone to fight.

"Was this your plan?" Ironhorn sighed. Blood still dripped from his ears. His robes hung in tatters. His domain had contracted to barely ten meters around his body.

"The next time Leo Chen offers assistance," Ironhorn said, "I will say no."