A Single Sword Strike Wiped Out an Army of a Hundred Thousand

Deathly silence reigned within the royal city.

The streets and alleys were deserted, and the shop doors were tightly shut. Now and then, a window would open a crack, only to close again at once.

Outside the imperial palace, court officials sat slumped on the stone steps in twos and threes. Some covered their faces and wept; others stared blankly at the sky. None retained the dignity they had displayed at court.

Muffled sobs drifted intermittently from the inner palace.

The hands of the soldiers on the walls trembled around their sabers. As they gazed at the vast, dark mass of enemy camps outside the city, only despair remained in their eyes.

Three days.

Their provisions would last only three more days.

Outside the capital, several hundred thousand soldiers of the Yan Kingdom had surrounded the city as tightly as an iron barrel.

Armored soldiers stood in formation, their blades and spears a forest of steel, their banners blotting out the sun. Cooking smoke curled above the sprawling camps, a stark contrast to the deathly silence within the city.

Beyond the outer perimeter of that vast army, a man was walking toward them from the horizon.

He walked at an unhurried pace, his steps steady,

a wooden sword in his hand.

It was a child's toy, its blade only as long as a forearm, its edge too dull to cut even paper.

A lookout in an outer watchtower was the first to spot him.

After he shouted down a few times, a captain climbed the tower, narrowed his eyes for a look, and spat. "Where did that madman come from?"

He waved a hand, and the messenger beside him raised his voice to shout at the approaching figure. "Restricted military grounds! No unauthorized entry! Take one more step and you'll be killed on sight!"

But the man did not stop.

The captain frowned and wasted no more words. He swept his right hand down.

A row of archers drew their bows into full moons. Arrows tore through the air in a dense arc, raining down on the man all at once.

The man neither blocked nor dodged.

Three feet from his body, the arrows struck what seemed to be an invisible wall. They bounced away and scattered across the ground.

The captain's expression changed slightly, but he did not panic.

The army had seen plenty of martial arts experts. Many could stop arrows; it was nothing unusual.

He gave an immediate order. A squad of twenty cavalrymen mounted up, leveled their spears, and charged at the man, their horses' hooves thundering.

A cavalry charge carried tremendous force and was not something an ordinary person could stop.

The cavalrymen charged out, but none of them ever returned.

Twenty warhorses lay sprawled in pools of blood, and twenty bodies lay on the ground, every one of them wounded in the throat.

The captain's face darkened completely. Instead of calling out again, he mounted his horse and personally assembled more than a hundred of his elite troops.

Cavalry and infantry mixed together, swords and shields in front, spears behind, with troops sweeping around both flanks—they would crush their way through.

The hundred-strong unit swept across the open ground, armor clanging, murderous intent surging.

Then the man swung his sword once.

No one saw how he made the strike. All they saw was an extremely faint flash of sword light.

Then the entire unit fell as one, men and horses alike, neat and orderly, as though an invisible sickle had swept them from the horizon.

The captain's corpse lay at the very front, still holding his saber aloft in death.

The flag slipped from the lookout's hand and fell to the floor of the watchtower. His lips trembled for a long moment before he let out a hoarse shout.

Horns rang out across the camps, and more and more troops surged in this direction.

A formation of two hundred charged out from the left, three hundred swept around from the right, and a force of over a thousand followed close behind.

Military formations spread out in layer upon layer, with archers arrayed in front and arrows pouring down like torrential rain.

Infantry formations held the center, their spears as dense as a forest.

Spearmen stood behind them, their iron armor imposing.

Heavy ballistae were pushed up from the flanks, their winches creaking as bolts as thick as a man's arm were aimed at the lone figure.

At this moment, Great Yan's army of tigers and wolves revealed itself in full: its commands were strict, its response swift, and its coordination exquisite. Even against a single man, it did not underestimate its enemy in the slightest.

Even if the Blade Saint at the Peak Stage of the Saint Tier came back to life, he would never dare meet such an army head-on.

Chen Du walked through the rain of arrows and strolled among the blades and spears. With every swing of his wooden sword, dozens or hundreds of men fell.

He reached a suitable spot,

a slight rise in the earth, not high, but enough to give him a clear view of the entire camp. Morning light shone from behind him, casting his shadow across the boundless formations.

In the distance, someone on the walls of Zhao Capital seemed to have noticed the commotion. The heads of several defenders appeared above the battlements.

Chen Du stopped and tightened his grip on the wooden sword.

The fury in his heart had begun to gather among the ruins of Qinghe Village. Along the way, he had seen countless stretches of scorched earth and countless corpses, heard the desperate cries of the maddened scholar, and seen the ashen faces of the soldiers on the city walls.

That fury had built up for too long, burning from his chest all the way to his fingertips.

Grandma, Niuwa, Wang Tiezhu, Li Erniu... every face flashed before his eyes, then was set ablaze by the crooked characters carved into the wooden sword.

The full power of the Heaven-Human Realm erupted at that moment. He raised the wooden sword and slashed at the boundless Yan Kingdom formations ahead.

That single strike contained all the power of the Heaven-Human Realm.

The sword light became a pillar of radiance spanning heaven and earth, stretching from one end of the horizon to the other.

Hundreds of thousands of Yan Kingdom soldiers looked up as one, and then the sword light descended.

The earth shook violently, and soil was flung hundreds of feet into the air.

A raging wind swept stones and severed limbs in every direction. Dust and smoke blotted out the sky, reducing the sun to a blurry patch of light.

After the explosion came a deathly silence, as though heaven and earth themselves had held their breath for that strike.

When the sword light faded, a massive fissure several miles long appeared in the very center of the Yan Kingdom's main camp.

The tents, siege equipment, and catapults on both sides of the fissure had vanished without a trace. The people who had stood there had already turned to dust in the wind.

Before the rise, an army of a hundred thousand had been reduced to ash and smoke!

Inside the central command tent, S itu Zhen sat upright behind the commander's table, holding a cup of tea that was still warm.

He raised the cup and was about to take a sip when the ground suddenly shook violently. The cup slipped from his hand and shattered on the table.

The tremor had come not from the direction of the besieged Zhao Capital, but from the outer perimeter.

S itu Zhen jerked his head up. Before he could ask what had happened, one of his personal guards came scrambling into the tent.

The man's face was as pale as paper, and his lips trembled too hard for him to utter a complete sentence. He could only point outside the tent.

S itu Zhen shoved the guard aside and strode out of the tent.

Then he saw the sword light...

That sword light spanning the sky!

It slashed down from the horizon, as though a white fissure connecting the heavens and the earth had suddenly appeared between them!

At the place where the sword light fell, his army of a hundred thousand stood in formation, ready for battle.

He saw the soldiers' faces. Though several miles separated them, he knew those faces must still have been frozen in the expressions they had worn a moment before.

Proud and fierce—those were the expressions the Yan Kingdom's army of tigers and wolves always wore as they swept across the world!

Then the sword light fell.

Everything in its path was silently annihilated.

Armor, weapons, warhorses, tents, catapults, ballistae, and those hundred thousand living souls all became the tiniest specks of dust between heaven and earth in that instant!

A raging wind swept smoke and dust in every direction, making the commander's banner behind him snap and flutter and overturning the brazier in front of the tent, sending sparks flying.

S itu Zhen stood motionless, letting the sand and dust strike his face and lodge in the deep wrinkles at the corners of his eyes.

He saw the man at the center of the sword light...

Beyond the smoke and flames, beyond the lingering warmth of a hundred thousand souls not yet dispersed, the figure was not tall or broad; he was even somewhat slight.

He wore coarse clothes covered in mud and bloodstains, and carried a long sword he had picked up from who knew where.

His steps were neither hurried nor slow. With each one, he trod on scorched earth and the ashes of the Yan Kingdom's soldiers.

Morning light shone from behind him, enveloping him in a faint golden halo, but S itu Zhen felt not the slightest warmth.

All he felt was an emotion so fierce it was almost tangible, spreading from the man—hotter than the raging flames behind him, more intense than the blood flowing across the ground.

Boundless wrath, enough to burn the very heavens to ashes.

That wrath was like a fire, burning out from the man, burning through the heavens, burning through the earth,

burning through the heart of iron and stone S itu Zhen had forged over decades of warfare and slaughter.

In a daze, he seemed to see a wrathful vajra of legend descended into the world, or a Wisdom King emerging from the flames of nirvana, or perhaps an asura described in Buddhist scripture.

An asura who fought for the wrath of all living beings, never resting for eternity.

He had fought all his life and killed as countless as hemp, never believing in ghosts or gods, but now his knees were trembling slightly.

S itu Zhen was not afraid of death. What he feared was that the pride of his entire life, the glory of the Yan Kingdom, and the fearsome reputation of that army of three hundred thousand tigers and wolves did not even amount to a joke before a strike like this.

He had fought all his life, sweeping through six kingdoms, fighting from north to south, and had never suffered a true defeat.

He had thought his Saint Tier cultivation enough to look down on all heroes, thought that an army of several hundred thousand could trample flat everything in the world, thought that the Blade Saint was nothing more than a martial brute with the courage of a common man.

Now he knew:

before true power, all schemes, formations, troop strength, and cultivation

were nothing but paper lanterns, extinguished with a single breath.

In the distance, the figure seemed to turn his head slightly and glance in his direction.

Their eyes met for only the briefest instant, across miles of smoke, dust, and firelight, but S itu Zhen clearly felt that gaze pierce every obstacle and fall directly upon him.

S itu Zhen knew only this:

that man was the Immortal of Wrath,

and his fire was burning!