By all rights, he should have felt relieved in this situation.
Instead, he felt an intense sense of discord, an overwhelming unease.
If he had previously been like a wolf hidden among a flock of sheep...
Then now, he had the illusion that he was a sheep hidden among wolves.
Could it be that most of these civilians were soldiers in disguise too?
But if they were soldiers, something still felt wrong.
It was like... right, he remembered. It was a nightmare he had once encountered.
He had once encountered what were known as the living dead.
And the people around him gave off the same cold feeling as the living dead.
Was he standing amid a crowd of living dead?
What were the living dead?
Just as the name implied, they were monsters that looked like living corpses, like walking dead.
There had always been a rumor.
The tyrant Ying Zheng commanded a Living Dead Legion. These monsters did not fear pain and possessed no emotions.
So long as their limbs were not severed and they were not rendered completely unable to move, even if their hearts were pierced or their heads chopped off, these "people" could continue fighting.
And when that tyrant conquered the Six Nations, he had committed vast slaughter. Some cities had been massacred until no one remained.
In that case, those cities should have been full of corpses, shouldn't they?
Yet there had not been a single body to be found within those cities. Thus, rumors spread that the corpses of those he had killed were used to create the Living Dead Legion.
That was why the assassin had never really believed those exaggerated rumors about the Living Dead Legion.
But he did believe living dead monsters existed, because he had encountered one before.
That person's body had suffered numerous fatal wounds. Even his head had nearly been split in two, yet he could still move.
Furthermore, not a drop of blood had flowed from his wounds. It had been truly terrifying.
So at the time, he had been so frightened that he abandoned his companions and fled alone.
And now, at this very moment, he had the feeling that the civilians around him were not alive. He increasingly sensed the same invisible aura he had felt from the living dead he encountered back then.
"Big Sister, do you feel that these civilians..."
Lantigreese, one of the cross-temporal observers and a Valkyrie, had also noticed something unusual.
These ordinary civilians were far too strange. They had truly fallen silent at the exact same instant.
After all, some people had been blocked by those in front of them and could not have seen the First Emperor raise his hand to signal for silence. Even if they noticed that the people ahead had suddenly gone quiet, they could not possibly have become silent at the same time.
Normally, the silence should have spread outward from the people nearest the First Emperor.
Those farther back who could not see the First Emperor's gesture would react according to the people in front of them, so they could not have reacted at the exact same time.
But this perfectly synchronized silence was truly abnormal, as though everyone had been—
"As though they were being controlled, right?"
Brunhilde finished what her younger sister had wanted to say.
Because to achieve such synchronization, they would have to be trained soldiers. Yet there were also huge numbers of civilians, which made it exceptionally strange.
That was why Lantigreese suspected that the First Emperor possessed some strange technique that allowed him to control all the civilians.
Was that possible?
It was not impossible.
Hadn't they searched through the souls of historical figures earlier? Hadn't they discovered that many souls could not be found at all?
Hadn't they also seen Xiang Yu transfer his soul out of his original body?
Perhaps those missing souls had left behind empty shells, which the First Emperor controlled with some kind of technique.
In other words, the overwhelming majority of people attending this grand military parade might have been controlled by the First Emperor.
And those who intended to take this opportunity to cause chaos had likely already been exposed.
The moment they made their move, they would be greeted by attacks from one living dead after another.
But would the First Emperor truly commit such a horrifying act?
Would he strip the souls from countless civilians and turn them into puppets under his control?
And had the gods of the East failed to notice this at all?
Perhaps they discovered the First Emperor's dark art later, which was why this powerful dynasty collapsed after standing for barely more than a decade.
It was said that the First Emperor had done many things in pursuit of immortality. Could this extraction of human souls be part of the process by which he sought eternal life?
Could he have experimented with transferring human souls so that he could move his own soul into a stronger body?
And Xiang Yu's mechanical body that they had seen earlier was likely a product of that technology.
So why had such utterly incongruous technology suddenly appeared in this era?
Suddenly, war drums rang out. The fighting spirit contained within them jolted Brunhilde out of her thoughts.
This emperor had begun reviewing his invincible, battle-hardened army.
The soldiers, who had experienced who knew how many battles, arranged themselves in formation with perfectly unified rhythm.
From their marching steps, the arms that swung their weapons, their sharp gazes, and everything else, Brunhilde felt it would not be an exaggeration to call them the strongest army in this era—indeed, in this entire world.
They possessed hearts that would never waver. So long as their king gave the order, they would dare to slay gods.
And they were not the living dead. They were truly living people.
As the war drums grew ever more impassioned, the army's morale became so sharp that it seemed capable of piercing the heavens and startling the gods themselves.
The drumming grew faster and faster. Its sound seemed to possess a kind of magic, piercing the barriers of time and space and disturbing Brunhilde's heartbeat, making her feel a faint sense of dread.
As the drums came to an end—
"Who says we have no clothes? We shall wear the same robes. When the king raises his army, we shall ready our spears and halberds, and share the same enemy..."
Not only the reviewed soldiers, but the king, his ministers, and even the civilians all sang loudly.
Hm?
Brunhilde noticed that the Six Nations assassins mixed among the civilians were finally about to make their move.
A short blade hidden on one assassin's body quietly revealed a flash of sharpness from his sleeve, then viciously slashed across the neck of a civilian in front of him.
The skin was torn open, and the trachea was nearly severed completely. No matter how one looked at it, it was a fatal wound.
After doing that, the assassin did not pay attention to what happened to the civilian. He had already moved to attack his next target.
The tip of his blade stabbed viciously into the chest of another civilian beside him, directly where the heart should have been.
Then he was confused, because the blade met far greater resistance than expected. Had he happened to strike a rib?
He exerted force again and drove the sharp blade in hard. Then he yanked it out. Blood should have gushed out immediately.
But in reality, no blood flowed out.
When he pulled out the blade, its edge seemed to have chipped. It also tore open the clothing, revealing the chest beneath and the puncture wound.
That wound left the assassin frozen. There truly was no blood, and through the gap in the wound, he saw a scene that made his scalp crawl.
There was no flesh inside.
Furthermore, the other party completely ignored his actions and continued loudly singing the war song.
Thinking of something, he turned to look at the first person whose throat he had slit. He saw that person still standing, with strange, inarticulate sounds emerging from his throat.
At that moment, the assassin's scalp went numb.
It was not just him. All the assassins were petrified where they stood.
Every person involved in this attempt to assassinate the First Emperor stood frozen in place.
The ordinary people they had attacked first were meant to trigger widespread panic, yet the abnormal phenomena before them had frightened them into stillness.
"Big Sister, could these all be—"
A slightly trembling voice escaped Lantigreese's cherry-pink lips.
Even she had been a little frightened by the scene before her.
The wounds on the attacked civilians did not bleed because there was no flesh within them at all.
Through the slashed gaps, mechanical components could be seen inside.
In other words, nearly all these civilians were not human. Like Xiang Yu, their souls had been transferred into mechanical bodies.
Having become like this, they seemed to have lost all sense of pain and ignored any attack.
Such a sight sent chills down one's spine.
At the same time, it made Lantigreese feel that it was incredibly cruel.
She did not believe that such an enormous number of civilians—nearly the entire population of the city—had willingly abandoned their flesh-and-blood bodies to become such mechanical constructs.
They no longer even felt pain. No, it seemed as though their other emotions had been stripped away as well, and they were being controlled too.
Perhaps they had been brainwashed.
In that state, they had been completely stripped of their identities as human beings. They were merely machines and puppets without selves.
They were even worse off than Xiang Yu. At least when she had seen Xiang Yu, aside from his mechanical body, he had appeared in every way like a human with feelings and emotions.
Looking carefully, some of those who had not yet acted seemed to truly be ordinary civilians.
Some among them were startled when they saw people nearby suddenly rise up and kill others, but afterward, they trembled even more at the abnormalities of those who should have been dead.
Others had not witnessed any sudden killings nearby, yet they too noticed that the people around them had become strange.
So what was going on with these people?
They should have been people who knew there would be a military parade today and had come from elsewhere simply to watch.
So they were real people of flesh and blood.
But having witnessed such a secret, they would presumably meet the same fate.
Their souls would be forcibly extracted from their bodies, transferred into machines, imprisoned within machines, and turned into puppets controlled by the First Emperor.
It was precisely such a legion that could remain undefeated.
Ordinary human soldiers could never defeat mechanical puppets that feared no pain.
"Don't be so quick to get angry, Lantigreese."
Her older sister suddenly spoke from beside her, as though she had seen through her thoughts and knew why she was becoming angry.
"Think carefully. From the time the review began until now, has anything changed?"
She reminded her of that as well.
Could it be that things were not as she thought?
Lantigreese carefully recalled the changes in the scene since the First Emperor had stepped onto the reviewing platform.
Hm? There did seem to have been something slightly unusual. The scene had experienced a faint ripple? A blur?
It was like an image being played had suffered a subtle tremor due to some interference. But because the image was moving, and the ripple had been so brief, one would never notice it without paying close attention.
But what was wrong with that?
Lantigreese could not discern any issue from such a minor change.
No, Lantigreese noticed another problem.
For example, the person originally standing before her had been one hundred seventy-five centimeters tall, right?
Before you continue