Qinghe Prefecture City

"Hm?" Dongbo Xueying looked up. A dense rain of arrows was flying toward him, each arrowhead glinting with a cold metallic sheen as it tore through the air with tremendous force.

"Know your place." Dongbo Xueying swiftly drew the two sections of his spear from the weapon case on his back.

Whoosh!

Each section was over a meter long. Dongbo Xueying casually swung them in his hands. The Snow-Treading Colt was racing so fast that only a dozen or so arrows reached him. With a few swings of the spear shafts, he knocked every one of them aside. Not a single arrow touched him—or even the horse.

Then Dongbo Xueying leaped off the Snow-Treading Colt and charged straight up the mountainside, joining the two spear sections together as he went.

"He's tough. Fall back!" The leader above had been stunned by how effortlessly Dongbo Xueying deflected the arrows. He knew they'd picked a fight with someone they couldn't afford to provoke.

Whoosh!

"Chief!"

"Oh no—"

"We've brought disaster upon ourselves!"

The chief and the other leaders, along with every bandit, were terrified.

They stared in horror as the black-clad young man who'd dismounted shot upward like a shadow. He was racing along the mountain's sheer face, but he moved so fast their legs trembled and their hearts clenched with fear. Too fast—he was unbelievably fast! Even though they were on the mountain, there was nearly two hundred meters between them and the ground below.

And the steep mountain path was difficult to climb. They should have had plenty of time to escape.

But the black-clad young man below was charging up at a terrifying speed. Rocks and trees did nothing to slow him, nor did the sloping, precipitous cliffs. He raced through the forest even faster than the Snow-Treading Colt had galloped along the road. The bandits couldn't make out his exact form; all they could see was a blurred black afterimage.

"How could this happen? How could we run into a Title-level expert?" The chief felt as though his head were about to explode. Sweat soaked his clothes in an instant, and his legs went weak. "He's that fast even on the mountain. He has to be Title-level! A Silver Moon Knight isn't this fast. I could at least see a Silver Moon Knight's movements and try to fight back."

"There are only so many Title-level experts in Qinghe Prefecture. Where did he come from? Where?"

"How could this happen?"

"No, no..."

The chief couldn't accept what was happening before his eyes. Despair, terror, and a jumble of other emotions welled up inside him. He didn't even think of resisting—the gap between them was simply too vast.

A Meteor Knight might be able to put up a fight against a Silver Moon Knight...

But a Silver Moon Knight who encountered a Title-level expert was usually killed in a single move! Even a Silver Moon Rank Archmage couldn't cast a spell in front of one.

That showed just how powerful Title-level experts were.

They represented the limits of mortals—the equivalent of an army unto themselves! A Meteor Knight couldn't fight back at all against a Title-level expert!

"Spare me! Spare me, sir!" The burly, fearsome chief suddenly dropped to his knees and begged for mercy.

Thud!

A spear's shadow swept across in an instant. Terror filled the chief's face, but he had no time to block it. The spear struck him in the chest with a thunderous boom, caving it in and crushing his internal organs. He flew backward like a broken sack and slammed into a distant tree, which snapped with a crash. He fell to the ground, blood spraying from his mouth, eyes wide open. He was already dead.

"Run!"

"Get out of here!" The other leaders and bandits went mad with panic and immediately scattered. It was like creatures of different orders encountering one another: though the bandits vastly outnumbered their opponent, every one of them was terrified to the depths of their souls, with only one thought—escape!

Swish, swish, swish!

He was too fast.

To the bound captives, Dongbo Xueying moved so quickly that they saw seven or eight afterimages, as if seven or eight Dongbo Xueyings were thrusting their spears at once. The bandits were too slow to block him—and even if they had tried, it would have been useless. Thump, thump, thump... Every one of them was pierced by his spear, including the two other Meteor-Rank Knight leaders and even a Heaven-Rank Mage who'd barely managed to cast a spell.

As for the spell? The laughably simple spell had formed a blade-like edge, but the high-pressure airflow raised by Dongbo Xueying's spear immediately crushed it. It couldn't even reach the spear shaft.

He killed more than thirty bandits in all.

The rest fled in every direction, some charging down the mountain and others scrambling up it. Dongbo Xueying didn't pursue them. Once a bandit gang lost its core members, the remaining underlings wouldn't amount to anything.

"Hm?" Dongbo Xueying glanced over the corpses of the strongest bandit leaders. His senses had grown sharper, and as he walked past the bodies, he noticed that the chief wore a storage bracelet.

He tapped it with the spear tip.

Clang.

The force of the blow knocked the bracelet off the chief's arm. Dongbo Xueying flicked it up with his spear tip, sending it into his hand.

"Save us, sir!"

"Please, sir, save us!" Several well-dressed elderly and middle-aged men, along with a young boy and girl, looked at him hopefully. They were afraid the bandits would capture them again after this powerful man left.

"Thump, thump, thump..." Dongbo Xueying walked over and casually swung his spear. The sharp blade beside its tip sliced through the ropes, freeing all a dozen or so captives in an instant.

"Thank you for saving our lives, sir." A white-bearded old man bowed respectfully, then quietly instructed the others beside him, "Gather up everything and offer it to the sir."

"Yes."

The merchants were all shrewd. They immediately collected the valuables from the goods the bandits had stolen, along with gold notes and other precious items from the bandits' corpses. Before long, they had gathered a large pile, including a great many Star-Breaking Crossbows, gold coins, and gold notes.

"Sir, these are the things the bandits left behind. We offer them to you as well, in gratitude for saving our lives." The white-bearded old man spoke respectfully.

Dongbo Xueying glanced at the pile.

The thick stack of gold notes was indeed worth a lot. The other two Meteor-Rank Knight leaders among the Eight Eagles of Cold Qiong hadn't had storage treasures, so they'd carried their money with them.

"Very well." Dongbo Xueying promptly took the stack of gold notes, which were worth eighty or ninety thousand gold coins. "Keep the rest for yourselves. Take the Star-Breaking Crossbows too; they might help you protect yourselves. What happened to your merchant caravan? Where are your horses?"

"Everyone else was killed. The horses were left farther ahead. The Eight Eagles of Cold Qiong didn't care about them," the white-bearded old man replied.

"Understood."

Dongbo Xueying nodded. "Hurry up. I'll escort you out of the Cold Qiong Mountain gorge. Once we're through, you're on your own."

"Thank you, sir! Thank you!" The white-bearded old man dropped to his knees and kowtowed. The others knelt too, expressing their gratitude. The Cold Qiong Mountains were crawling with bandits, and with so many old and young among them, they'd have little chance of making it out of the gorge alive without Dongbo Xueying.

"Move quickly. I won't wait if you're too slow." Dongbo Xueying had already leaped down. He didn't hesitate at the nearly two-hundred-meter drop, jumping straight to the ground below. The earth shook when he landed, yet he didn't even bend his knees.

"Not bad." Dongbo Xueying refined the storage treasure. Its space was somewhat smaller than his mother's. "The gold notes from these bandit leaders add up to over one hundred and fifty thousand gold coins! Snow Stone Castle is short on money, and now I've come into a windfall."

In recent years, he'd earned nearly a hundred thousand gold coins from selling Shadow Leopard pelts and other materials. But the year his younger brother broke through to become a formal mage, Dongbo Xueying had given him a fairly good storage treasure and a mage's staff. The staff hadn't been expensive—it had cost only a little over five thousand gold coins. His younger brother was still weak, after all, and couldn't have made use of a more powerful staff. But the storage treasure had a fairly large space and had cost a full fifty thousand gold coins—its space was even larger than his mother's.

When Dongbo Xueying reached Title-level strength, he'd replaced the armor under his clothes with a second-tier alchemical cuirass, so he could at least protect his vital organs when fighting other Title-level experts.

He'd also replaced some of his boots and clothes with alchemical items, but those were relatively cheap. Only the cuirass had been expensive, costing thirty thousand gold coins!

So Dongbo Xueying was a little short on money now.

A mighty Title-level expert...

And yet he was delighted over a hundred and fifty thousand gold coins. The other Title-level experts would probably laugh if they found out. After all, what sort of standing did a Title-level expert have?

After escorting the dozen or so people who'd been lucky enough to escape with their lives out of the Cold Qiong Mountain gorge, Dongbo Xueying left them to their own devices and urged the Snow-Treading Colt to full speed.

He galloped all the way, stopping for the night at an inn in Huanglong City.

He set out again early the next morning and continued riding until dusk, finally reaching Qinghe Prefecture City.

"Two whole days, but I finally made it. So this is Qinghe Prefecture City?" Dongbo Xueying gazed into the distance. A towering city stretched so far that the eye couldn't see its end. Its walls were made of gray-white stone, their countless crevices bearing witness to a long history. The walls stood a full hundred meters high! A hundred-meter-high wall... it was practically a mountain.

A black sphere stood every li along the towering walls, each marked with golden patterns. The vast city radiated an invisible force. Ordinary people couldn't sense it, of course, but Dongbo Xueying's perception of auras was sharp enough to detect it.

Qinghe Prefecture City had a permanent population of over ten million! Its history was longer than that of the Longshan Empire.

Provincial capitals and prefectural cities generally had long histories. Dynasties rose and fell, but these ancient cities were continually reinforced, and their magical formations grew more powerful with time. Provincial capitals were even more impressive, with permanent populations exceeding a hundred million. They were so vast and majestic that they resembled independent nations. It was said that even the power of the Deities couldn't shake a provincial capital's many defenses.

"It really opened my eyes. I have a feeling that if the magical formation protecting all of Qinghe Prefecture City were activated, the power unleashed by those spheres could kill me instantly. This is truly supernatural power." Dongbo Xueying marveled, unaware of just how astonishingly costly it was to activate such a formation even once.

"Let's go in."

Riding the Snow-Treading Colt, Dongbo Xueying entered the magnificent Qinghe Prefecture City.