Time rewound to more than an hour earlier.
Mingsha Fort Training Base, all-terrain simulated arena.
Ancient city ruins.
The wind swept up yellow sand, letting out a ghostly howl as it skimmed over the broken walls and ruined remains.
Zheng Ye was drenched in blood, with cuts of all sizes covering his body.
At that moment, he was leaning against a half-collapsed earthen wall, using his heavy Guan Dao to prop himself up and stubbornly keep from falling.
Blood slid down the shaft of the blade, pooling into a small dark-red puddle at his feet.
A young and frivolous male voice drifted leisurely from the ruins in every direction, teasing and elusive.
"Major Zheng, before we entered the arena, I think I heard you say that we weren't true geniuses."
"Tsk, tsk. How arrogant..."
The voice paused, and malice overflowed as though it had become tangible.
"So now that you can't even beat us 'false geniuses,' does that prove you're even more useless?"
Zheng Ye did not even lift his eyelids, utterly unmoved by the provocation.
He merely held his breath, his ears twitching faintly as he focused all his attention on his hearing, trying to pinpoint the speaker's location amid the strange echoes.
However, the ruins were riddled with passages and the terrain was complicated. After several refractions, the sound had long since become distorted.
Moreover, he had lost too much blood, and his consciousness was already growing hazy. He had no way to catch the source of the voice.
At that moment, another acrid female voice joined in, echoing through the ruins.
"A-Che, why waste your breath on someone like this?"
"He's just a stinking soldier who's spent his whole life in the military. What has he ever seen? Does he even know what a genius is?"
Her