Prologue

At first, everyone had taken it for a rumor.

As the heart of the realm, Hongnong held irreplaceable strategic importance for both the court and the Sect Alliance. Such a strategic stronghold had fallen without any warning?

What kind of joke was that?

Yet when the Sect Alliance's grand army faced the Imperial Guard stationed along the northern bank of the Heavenly River, with the river between them, the rumor finally became reality. Shock, fury, fear—every kind of emotion gradually spread through Di'an City.

Many had never imagined that the imperial court would lose. Compared to the Sect Alliance, the Great Yan imperial court possessed absolute institutional superiority in the early stages of the war. Thus, since the civil war erupted, talk of a swift victory had been rampant throughout the court.

The imperial court did not need to standardize cultivation arts, adjust production lines, or endure the Sect Alliance's countless internal constraints and debates. Therefore, many believed the court could crush this rebellion outright before the Sect Alliance had found its footing. The course of the war across the country had likewise confirmed and fueled this atmosphere.

The iron hooves of the Black Scale Army ravaged Jiangnan.

The Western Pacification Army, joining forces with Great Yan's border troops, launched an eastward expedition across provinces that nearly linked the court's scattered enclaves of direct control in the southwest into one.

And across the broader expanse of the nation, the court's line of direct control had been steadily pushing south.

But Hongnong fell at this very moment.

Within Great Yan, the river called the Heavenly River ran from east to west, dividing this land into north and south. North of Hongnong, which bordered the Heavenly River, lay the bridgehead from which the court's southbound military thrust linked together its many southwestern