Demon-Subduing Warriors

"East Forest Garden. Sounds a bit like a garden. Tsk, doesn't sound all that impressive."

Clicking his tongue in disappointment, Li Hai looked up at the great hall before the desk.

Then he saw that the black mist filling the doorway on the left at the far end of the hall had vanished without a trace.

In its place was a long, narrow stone corridor.

Without hesitation, Li Hai's figure flashed forward, crossing a hundred zhang in an instant and flying into the newly revealed passage.

After speeding onward for several hundred more zhang, he reached the end of the corridor.

When Li Hai pushed open the bronze door at the end, a vast but barren wilderness came into view.

It was called a garden, but nowhere within sight was there a single proper tree.

There was nothing but sparse, yellowing grass and cracked earth furrowed with ravines.

In short, the whole place was bleak and lifeless.

"Must be because no one's been maintaining it."

Li Hai stepped into the wasteland, looking around as he walked at an unhurried pace, searching for anything out of the ordinary.

But he was disappointed.

After that, Li Hai walked a full ten li.

Yet aside from a handful of dead trees that had rotted completely apart and a few crooked, crumbling stone steles bearing blurred inscriptions, he found nothing else of value.

Still, though Li Hai was growing impatient, a faint stir deep within him "told" him:

Just hold on a little longer. Keep going, and you'll find something.

Li Hai knew exactly what it was: a mysterious premonition born from the convergence of his Level 2 Wildness and Level 2 Spiritual Inspiration.

He suspected that the Level 2 Wildness trait or Level 2 Spiritual Inspiration trait alone might not have had this effect.

But once he possessed both, they must have influenced each other and sparked some strange reaction.

That vague stirring was the result.

"Fine, fine. I've got nothing better to do, so I might as well keep going and see what turns up."

With that thought, Li Hai steeled his patience and continued onward.

After walking another five or six li, he finally saw something wholly unlike the dead trees, withered grass, and broken steles.

It was... hundreds, perhaps thousands, of corpses clad in dark armor and carrying all manner of weapons. They were plainly lifeless, yet neither rotted nor decayed.

At first glance, they looked like a band of defeated soldiers who had all perished in a brutal battle.

They lay scattered across the vast wasteland before Li Hai. Ninety-nine percent of them were damaged, missing arms, legs, or heads, or broken clean in half at the waist.

Only a sparse few had managed to retain all their limbs.

Even so, the armor and weapons on these corpses were riddled with cracks and holes, making for a truly pitiful sight.

But that was only what Li Hai could see. Whatever had truly happened had long since vanished into the mists of history.

"A whole field of corpses... What could be worth anything here?!"

Li Hai furrowed his bald brows in displeasure, but still entered the field of bodies, looking this way and that for anything useful.

Martial arts manuals or spell books, for instance. Or, failing that, even gold and silver would do.

But once he started searching, he was disappointed.

Forget manuals and spell books. After poking around for a while and searching more than a dozen bodies, Li Hai hadn't even found a single copper coin.

He did make an unexpected discovery, though: these so-called corpses... weren't human.

No, that wasn't quite right.

He should have said that these corpses were basically machine-like contraptions.

From a distance, the withered grass had obscured them, so Li Hai hadn't been able to see clearly. But once he drew closer, he noticed something.

The broken openings in their bodies revealed not flesh, sinew, and veins, but intricate, precision-engineered mechanisms.

And what those mechanisms connected and enclosed wasn't a jumble of colorful wires or circuit boards. Instead, there were pieces of jade in all shapes, sizes, and colors, covered in exceedingly intricate symbols and patterns. They looked both mysterious and ancient.

Those symbols weren't carved only into the jade. The mechanisms around it, whether intact or damaged, bore them too—though far fewer and more sparsely.

The precision mechanisms visible through the holes in the bodies weren't all made of metal, either. Most were fashioned from strange materials like bone, wood, porcelain, and stone, with metal accounting for only a small portion.

"What's this supposed to be, ancient robots? Mechanized puppets?"

Seeing this, Li Hai couldn't help thinking of a web novel he'd read in his previous life—Terror Infinity.

It seemed to have had something called Yellow Turban Warriors, made by cultivators using who-knows-what rune technology.

Li Hai suspected that these corpses across the wasteland were something similar to Yellow Turban Warriors, combat tools manufactured by the Naihe Mansion.

"But whatever they are, these robots are all wrecked now. What use are they to me...? Sigh. What a waste of time."

Shaking his head, Li Hai sighed and began slowly walking away from the field of corpses.

But after a few steps, as he passed a burly corpse holding a door-sized saber and missing half its face, it suddenly opened its eyes and swiftly sat up.

"Huh?!"

Li Hai stopped in his tracks and stared at the half-faced corpse that had just awakened. "You... can still wake up? Was it because you got close enough to me and were activated?"

At the sound of his voice, the half-faced corpse immediately turned to look at Li Hai.

The next moment, it swiftly pushed itself upright, then dropped to one knee before Li Hai with a thud and spoke in a muffled voice:

"Demon-Subduing Warrior No. 3970 of Guiyou Grotto-Heaven pays respects to its master!"

"...Good. Very spirited."

Privately pleased to have suddenly gained a follower, Li Hai beamed and said, "I'd like to know, is your recognition of me as your master connected to the Naihe Mansion higher-ups' Seed Project?"

"Reporting to my master."

The Demon-Subduing Warrior replied in a deep voice, "This subordinate has lost all memories of the past and does not know what the Seed Project is. This subordinate knows only that you are the master of Guiyou Grotto-Heaven, and therefore this subordinate's master."

"All right."

Li Hai clicked his tongue. "Looks like there's no way to learn what happened at the Naihe Mansion back then, at least for now. By the way..."

Then he pointed at the Demon-Subduing Warriors sprawled all around them and said, "Which of your companions are still functional, like you? Can you find them? It'd be too much trouble for me to walk around activating them one by one."

"Reporting to my master."

The burly warrior replied respectfully, "This subordinate can locate and activate all operational Demon-Subduing Warriors. Please wait a moment."

With that, it turned and sprinted in a certain direction, leaving a string of afterimages and explosive cracks in its wake. Its speed was astonishing, no slower than Li Hai, a top-tier Steel-Grade Martial Artist.

So the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Demon-Subduing Warriors on this wasteland might all be... no weaker than Li Hai in martial combat and physical strength.