Just after noon.
A carriage rolled out through the county town's east gate, swaying along toward Dayin Mountain in the east.
Li Yuanlong sat inside the carriage, while Chen Mo and Yuanzhu sat on the driver's bench, handling the reins.
As the carriage gradually left the county town behind, the roads around them grew narrower. Tall trees lined both sides, and not a soul was in sight. The place was desolate.
After more than two hours on the road, they finally reached the outskirts of Wuqiao Town.
Chen Mo lifted his head and saw Dayin Mountain towering into the clouds ahead, stretching thousands of miles. Like an immense bank of dark clouds, it covered several towns in every direction, leaving them with very little sunlight and shrouding them in its shadow all day. It was a truly eerie sight.
Chen Mo had never been here before, but he knew from the county gazetteer and what others had told him that Dayin Mountain marked the Great Gan Dynasty's southeastern border and stretched for three thousand miles. No one knew what lay beyond its far side.
According to the county's elders, when the Great Gan Dynasty was at its height, the late emperor had once harbored grand ambitions of crossing Dayin Mountain and expanding his territory to the southeast, hoping to make a name for himself in the history books.
But after several campaigns... every one of them ended in utter failure.
The late emperor even coughed up blood as a result...
Chen Mo had always thought it was just a folk tale, embellished beyond recognition.
After all, Honghe County was just a small town. How could it possibly stand in the way of an emperor's iron hooves?
But now that he was seeing the towering, magnificent Dayin Mountain up close, Chen