2024-08-23 15:07:01
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Chapter 664
One year ago.The lantern light in the governor’s private study had burned low. Changyi’s night sounds drifted up from the streets below—distant laughter from a tavern, the creak of a night watchman’s boots.Alex stood at the tall window, hands clasped behind his back, watching the city.Zhuge Liang spoke. “My Lord. Dong Zhuo holds the Emperor like a trophy. Yuan Shao and the other warlords circle the capital, each one dreaming of the dragon throne. Every ambitious man in Xia wants to be king.” He paused. “Don’t you?”Alex turned. The cold smile that touched his mouth did not reach his eyes.“A man has to dare to dream big,” he said. “But a man also has to know the difference between an opportunity and the kind of temptation that burns everything he’s built to ash.”He stepped away from the window and began to pace.“If I reach for the throne now, every warlord from here to Luoyang will mark Yan and Qing as the next battlefield. We cannot hold off attacks from one side, let alone two
Chapter 663
Chen Hao drove the shovel into the packed earth once more, the blade biting deep with a dull scrape. His shoulders burned.Sweat stung his eyes and ran in dirty tracks down the dust on his face. For a few heartbeats the rhythm felt almost right again—the old, simple rhythm of a man and the land.Then the Gaia voice came, sliding straight into his skull.“Chen Hao. Your scheduled instruction period begins now. Report to the training platform.”He froze mid-lift. The shovel stayed buried in the dirt.“I hate training,” he muttered.The words came out rough, almost childish. He was no scholar. Never had been. Before the rebellion he had been nothing but a dirt-poor farmer.Now these machines wanted to turn him into something else.The Wudang sect and whatever sorcery they had brought with them had given the governor power no man in Xia had ever held, and Chen Hao wanted no part of it.He wanted his hands on a hoe. He wanted the honest ache of muscle and callus. He did not want to learn h
Chapter 662
Zhang Hu woke to the taste of mud and blood.His head pounded like a war drum. Pain burned in his neck and thigh where the needles had struck.For a long moment he lay still, listening. No shouts. No clash of steel. No crackle of torches. Only the wind moving through dry grass and the distant croak of frogs.He pushed himself up on one elbow. The field stretched empty in every direction. The ten thousand men who had marched with him were gone. No bodies. No abandoned weapons.The ground where they had stood was trampled flat, but the rebels themselves had vanished as if the earth had swallowed them whole.Zhang Hu staggered to his feet, sword still clutched in one numb hand. "My men!" His voice cracked across the empty plain. "To me! Form ranks!"Nothing answered him but the wind.He searched for an hour, moving in widening circles, qi flaring from his Core Formation senses. He found only a single dropped sickle and a torn strip of rebel cloth caught on a thorn bush.No tracks led awa
Chapter 661
The moon hid behind thick clouds, leaving the borderlands in absolute blackness. A perfect night for thieves and rebels.Thousands of Yellow Turbans moved like a dark tide across the dry fields outside Willowbrook, the outermost town in Yan Province.Most of the rebels were peasants—gaunt, hollow-cheeked, and half-starved. They marched with little more than rusty sickles, crude spears fashioned from farming poles, and a handful of stolen swords.That was why they moved so slowly.At their head rode their leader, the wiry cultivator Zhang Hu, perched atop a gaunt horse. Torchlight danced across his face as he raised the flame high, his eyes blazing with years of accumulated fury.“Burn everything in this village and the next!” he snarled, glancing back at his ragged army. “Take what you can carry. Leave the rest in ashes. All the way to Changyi—we burn them all!”A savage cheer rose from the mob. They had done this before. Villages fell easily when the central government was rotten and
Chapter 660
Alex stood at the tall window of the governor’s private study, the city of Changyi spread below like a living map.Lanterns glowed in the evening haze. Behind him, Zhuge Liang waited in silence.“The projects will continue without me,” Alex said. “The dikes. The irrigation. The roads. Gaia will monitor the numbers. You will handle the officials. If any man steals or delays, punish him publicly. Make an example once. After that, they will remember.”“Your name is already ruined thanks to those thousand women. This might make it worse.”Alex smiled coldly. “Perfect. Warlords are everywhere. If the masses want to despise me and spread tales of my cruelty, who am I to disappoint them? Let’s hand them more ammunition.”Zhuge Liang inclined his head. “And the Yellow Turbans?”“I’ve prepared everything for our guests,” Alex said with a smirk. “Truth be told, I’m already bored. They crawl like snails. But you needn’t concern yourself. When they finally reach our perimeter, Gaia will activate
Chapter 659
A month had slipped past since the day Alex rode into Changyi at the head of five thousand Wudang disciples.The rumors still burned through every teahouse and barracks in the two provinces. But the compound that had once served as the province’s primary military training ground now bore almost no resemblance to its former self.What had been a place of sweat, steel, and shouted orders had become something else entirely: a palace built for silk, perfume, and the legend of a governor lost to his own appetites.Alex walked the central avenue with measured steps. At his side walked Zhuge Liang.“A month, my lord,” he said quietly. “The renovations are finished. Every hall, every private wing, every courtyard has been prepared exactly as you instructed. And in that time we have done as you commanded.”“We opened recruitment to every merchant, every clan head, every family in Yan and Qing that possessed a daughter or woman of notable beauty. Every woman slave we could find. Some came willi
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