"Beside the black warhammer stood a girl in a black cloak, standing amid a field of tulips that seemed to have been bathed in black blood. Her jet-black hair hung down her back, swaying at her waist in the wind. The black armor beneath her cloak clung to the curves of her body. Rather than looking sturdy and heavy, it was made of thin plates engraved with mysterious runes, fitted together in the shape of a short skirt. It was not a design suited for battle..."
Gu Qing'an looked from the passage describing the novel's heroine on his e-reader to the little black figure in an abandoned factory, who seemed to be preparing to tear the entire place down.
Gu Qing'an took a photo with his phone, then put it away and walked over from the wall, slowly drawing closer until he could gradually make out the little black figure.
Jet-black long hair.
Swaying at her waist in the wind.
A black cloak.
Beneath the cloak was black skirt armor.
A huge black hammer.
The long handle of the massive iron hammer was roughly 1.6 meters long. One end of its head was square, while the other called to mind the Jian Gu base of Marquis Yi of Zeng. Countless large and small dragons were tangled together, their bodies entwined, innumerable little dragons with interlocked heads and tails coiling upward. It looked ever-changing, vivid, and full of spirit.
Gu Qing'an looked again at the huge hammer, identical to the heroine's weapon in the novel. When the author had described it, the inspiration had probably come from the real-world Jian Gu base of Marquis Yi of Zeng.
The girl wielding the enormous hammer did not even seem as tall as its handle, yet in her hands, the massive weapon looked as light as a toy inflatable hammer in an ordinary person's grip.
It was obviously no toy. With every blow, half-meter-thick concrete walls shattered, steel pipes as thick as arms snapped in two, and a three-story factory building was smashed into ruins, on the verge of collapse.
She showed no intention of stopping.
Finally...
"Boom!"
"Crack!"
"Clang! Clang!"
The factory's battered walls and supports finally failed to bear the weight of the roof. The entire structure gave way and collapsed.
"Heh... heh... heh..."
The girl responsible for it all looked at the scene before her and let out a strange laugh, though the pride in it was unmistakable.
She stared at the collapsed factory for a few moments, then carried her hammer toward another building.
It was a ten-story building with an iron tower more than ten meters tall on its roof. Such a towering structure stood out sharply among the surrounding buildings, clearly catching her attention and becoming her next target.
This was a zinc factory abandoned in the last century. Due to industrial restructuring, environmental pollution, employee resettlement, and other issues, it had repeatedly shut down and resumed production from the 1980s onward before finally going bankrupt in the mid-to-late 1990s. Now it was completely deserted, with scarcely a soul in sight.
Gu Qing'an had no idea what she was trying to do, but if she kept demolishing the place like this, it would cause trouble sooner or later.
"Your Majesty!"
Gu Qing'an called out loudly.
The girl paused, but she did not turn around. She merely raised her hammer again and, without hesitation, sent a storage tank blocking her path flying.
That was a ten-meter-long explosion-proof storage tank.
The tank flew through the air and landed atop the ruins of the factory she had just demolished.
"Boom, boom... clang!" Several more earthshaking crashes followed.
"Zhou Nan!"
Gu Qing'an called out the girl's name again.
Her Majesty, Zhou Nan, a girl, a giant hammer, abandoned factory buildings, chimneys, water towers, and Gu Qing'an raising a hand to greet her.
In the gloomy sky, ink-stained cotton-like clouds churned and rolled. There was none of the brazen spectacle of lightning and thunder, only a heavy wind carrying the clouds along. Occasionally, a few rays of sunlight broke through thinner patches of cloud on the distant horizon, only to be swallowed by the spreading cloud cover an instant later.
It was eight in the morning, yet it felt as though dusk was near.
"Were you talking to me?"
Zhou Nan turned around. The girl's slender figure was like a beautiful yet delicate flower beneath the gloomy sky, adding a splash of brightness to the drab, oppressive colors. Yet her gaze was exceedingly cold.
A few wisps of bangs rested lightly over her brow. The hair by her ears was cut neatly and evenly, a style commonly known as a princess cut, or a hime cut in District 11.
"Who are you?"
Zhou Nan turned with her hammer in hand and walked toward Gu Qing'an step by step. His figure entered her cold eyes, and a trace of puzzlement appeared within them, making her clear pupils seem all the more lively.
"Please forgive me, Your Majesty. In order to catch Your Majesty's attention, I had no choice but to address you by name. My name is Gu Qing'an. I am from the Gu family of the island, one of the Thirteen Islands in the Hanguang Sea Region of the Kingdom of Zhou." Gu Qing'an lowered his head slightly, not looking directly at Zhou Nan. His gaze rested only on the girl's shoes, which had walked through dust without gathering so much as a speck upon them.
"One of the Thirteen Islands in the Hanguang Sea Region, the island?" The Kingdom of Zhou's territory was vast beyond measure, spanning countless seas and continents beneath the heavens. Even Zhou Nan, as emperor, had to think for a moment before recalling it. "The island... that would be Carp Island, the one famous for producing carp?"
"Precisely." Gu Qing'an remained neither servile nor overbearing. The Thirteen Islands of the Hanguang Sea Region had once flourished in the Kingdom of Zhou and were renowned across the land as prosperous places. Now they had declined so far that even the current Her Majesty the Empress had little impression of them. She had not even remembered the island's formal name, referring to it with faint disdain as "Carp Island."
But that no longer mattered. Neither he nor Zhou Nan was in the world of the Kingdom of Zhou anymore. In this world, the gap between their identities and status was no longer as impossibly vast as before.
Even ants had their chance to approach the sun.
Besides, Gu Qing'an had another identity. He did not consider himself insignificant.
"Why are you here as well?" Zhou Nan nodded and asked calmly, showing no intimacy or anticipation at encountering one of her subjects in a strange world.
The Kingdom of Zhou was immense. Its remote regions were no different from another world. Zhou Nan had not yet fully accepted that this was truly another world; perhaps it was merely some western foreign land beyond Zhou's borders.
Gu Qing'an presented the e-reader to Zhou Nan with both hands.
Zhou Nan accepted it. Its thin, unfamiliar material was unknown to her, but the text and content displayed upon it possessed the tangible texture of print in a real book.
The text was densely packed and written in the same language as the Kingdom of Zhou. With a light tap of her finger, pages turned just like those of a book. Zhou Nan tapped here and there, her expression calm, though inwardly she was slightly astonished.
"Your Majesty, this is a novel. It records every experience you and I have had." Gu Qing'an raised his head and looked directly at Zhou Nan.
Now that he and she had come to this world, there should no longer be such an enormous distance between them. Besides, he already knew his own identity. In the future, Zhou Nan might merely become one of his women.
"A novel? A novel from this world? Why would it record every experience you and I have had?" Zhou Nan frowned, rapidly flipping through the novel on the e-reader.
The words Kingdom of Zhou, Zhou Nan, Gu Qing'an, Hanguang Sea Region, Thirteen Islands, the island, and more appeared throughout the text.
The earlier parts were mostly about Gu Qing'an's life, cultivation, and trivial happenings within the Gu family on the Thirteen Islands of the Hanguang Sea Region.
Clan tournaments, marketplaces, pill refining, auctions, street fights, gaining fame, entering school, trials, and so on.
There were also extensive descriptions of Zhou Nan's daily life and personal information whenever the perspective shifted, even scenes of Zhou Nan speaking with imperial officials in the palace.
There should have been no possibility of such scenes leaking out. No third party had been present, nor had there been any court scribes. Yet at this very moment, they were recorded in the novel.
Even some of Zhou Nan's thoughts, which no second person could possibly know, had been recorded in painstaking detail as words for anyone to read.
"Your Majesty, when I first learned of this... I found it hard to believe as well. But we have no choice but to accept the truth. The Kingdom of Zhou where we lived, the world we once inhabited, was not real. It was merely fabricated by a novel." Gu Qing'an lowered his head again, the corners of his lips lifting slightly. The young Her Majesty the Empress had lost the lofty authority she possessed in the empire. In this bizarre, unfamiliar world, he was the only person she could currently rely on.
Going by the plot developments not yet described in the novel, Zhou Nan would sooner or later become his woman. In the real world before them, she would become his woman as well.
Her Majesty the Empress. Zhou Nan. Once, those had been such distant words.
"When I was young, I received a revelation at the altar. The emperor of the empire would change surnames, and I would become the empire's final emperor bearing the Zhou surname. My husband would hold the Emperor's Hammer. According to this novel's hints, you are my husband?" Zhou Nan flipped through the novel at an unhurried pace. She raised her expressionless face and finally fixed her gaze on Gu Qing'an's handsome features again, lightly tapping the handle of the Emperor's Hammer with her finger.
"That would be me..." Gu Qing'an calmly met Zhou Nan's scrutiny. He was the novel's male lead. He would gain everything. He would gain countless outstanding women: martial arts seniors and renowned masters, genius girls, heads of financial conglomerates, famed courtesans from brothels, and even Zhou Nan, the empire's emperor.
These women differed in identity, personality, appearance, and figure, blooming like a dazzling profusion of flowers that confused the eye. Yet in the end, every one of them would be won over by him.
He would have them. They would become his harem. They might occasionally become jealous of one another, but because they loved him deeply, they would willingly accept that he had other women as well... Though the novel's plot had abruptly ended before Zhou Nan formally met him, everything after that had already been laid out.
"Then go die."
Gu Qing'an had been staring at Zhou Nan's delicate, flowerlike lips, already imagining countless future developments. For a moment, he was stunned by her words.
Until that enormous hammer descended like a dark cloud blotting out the sky.
A great hammer infused with the authority of the Great Zhou Empire's empress.
Zhou Nan swung the hammer and crushed Gu Qing'an into a pulp with a single blow.
The male lead, dead.
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