Artillery Sweeps the Ground, Ten Thousand Swords Killing Formation, Mountain Collapse Returns, the Gorge Crumbles

The Jade Cauldron Civil War had dragged on for twenty years.

Battles had flared up one after another, countless clashes winding through twists and turns before finally converging on the Accumulated Thunder Nine Mountains.

Luo Chen knew a great deal about the civil war.

He had even assigned the Luo Tian Association's intelligence division to gather every scrap of information it could.

Whether the reports were reliable or mere hearsay, he had never stopped trying to learn more.

Time and again, he had surveyed the whole situation and traced its course, trying to predict when the war would end.

Luo Chen believed that, apart from the Golden Core higher-ups of the various sects and those two elusive Nascent Soul True Persons, he understood the war far better than most sect disciples, vassals, and rogue cultivators.

Yet the more he learned, the more puzzled he became.

Because!

This was not how a war should be fought!

As he understood it, when one side was strong and the other weak, the strong side fought a lightning war, a war of annihilation.

It struck with the force of ten thousand thunderbolts and secured victory in a single blow!

Just as the Luo Tian Association had done against the Fu Family and Duan Family.

It would never drag matters out for twenty years.

If both sides were strong, there were two possibilities.

They either sat down and talked, or settled into a long war of attrition.

The former was impossible. With a Fourth-Order Spiritual Land needed for a Nascent Soul True Person's cultivation at stake, there was no chance talks would succeed.

That left the final possibility—a war of attrition!

On the surface, the situation seemed to fit that familiar pattern.

But something was wrong!

A genuine war of attrition should at least have