Luling in peril

West Jiangnan Circuit.

Luling Commandery.

The mountains and rivers here were treacherous, the forests dense and dark.

Even in ordinary times, it was a foul land overrun with pestilent mists and venomous insects.

Now.

It was shrouded in black vapor visible to the naked eye.

Day after day, it never saw the sun.

Amid the towering mountains and precipitous ridges.

What had once been uninhabited wilderness now bristled with spears and halberds, its banners blotting out the sun.

As far as the eye could see.

Camps stretched for ten miles, their watches grim and vigilant.

Countless tents spread thickly across the ground like mushrooms, extending all the way to the edge of sight.

Cold winds howled.

Besides the Demon Suppression Office's elite troops, clad in black with crimson patterns.

There were also vast ranks of hardened soldiers in iron armor, bearing long halberds, their expressions solemn as though facing a formidable enemy.

Normally.

The Demon Suppression Office specialized in slaying demons, but seldom mingled with military formations like these.

After all.

Most soldiers possessed only ordinary cultivation and trained in the methods of battle formations.

Against human armies that likewise fought in formation, they were all but unstoppable.

But against demons that came and went like the wind, wielding strange and treacherous arts.

Such cumbersome formations became living targets.

Unless there was absolutely no other choice.

Why would the court order soldiers ill-suited to fighting demons to travel a thousand miles to their deaths?

There was only one explanation.

The threat posed by those demons...

Had already grown so immense...

That the Demon Suppression Office alone could no longer handle it.

Even if they had to build a defensive line out of flesh and blood.

They had to keep the demonic calamity from spreading another half step.

Inside the central