The bitter winter wind was like ten thousand steel knives stripping flesh from bone, slashing wantonly across Qingzhou.
Goose-feather snow had fallen without pause for seven days, burying an already ravaged world beneath a deathly pale, silent tomb of ice and snow.
In Anping County, the newly completed Outer City wall rose twenty zhang high, cast from hard bluestone and molten Blazing Copper and iron.
Now, that towering wall resembled an ancient black dragon crouched amid the blizzard, coldly watching the boundless wilderness.
Snow fell soundlessly upon the battlements.
Eight hundred Black-Armored Guards stood motionless in the storm, like eight hundred lifeless statues of steel.
Their extraordinarily expensive [Gold-Averting Mystic Armor], superior-grade Qi Refining artifacts incorporating Blazing Copper and Gold-Devouring Rat hide, glimmered with a chilling dark-gold light.
Before snowflakes could accumulate on their armor, the furnace-like vigor of their blood quietly melted them, sending wisps of white steam curling upward.
Not one man whispered to another. Not one shivered from the cold.
Through months of frantic troop expansion and relentless war preparations, these eight hundred men had devoured the flesh of Qi Refining Late-Stage and even half-step Foundation Establishment Demon Beasts every day, supplementing it with Anping County's unique "Golden Jade Blood-Rice Porridge" to temper their bodies. They had long since transformed from ordinary County Yamen soldiers into an army of asuras, truly willing to grapple with Great Demons amid mountains of corpses and seas of blood.
Before the ranks, Hu Hao and Pang Song, deputy chiefs of the Demon-Suppression Office, stood like iron towers with hands upon their sabers.
The formidable pressure of the Foundation Establishment Early Stage circulated around them, forcing the swirling snow three feet away.
Behind the parapet between them stood Chu Bai.
He wore the Great Zhou Principal Sixth Rank Purple-Gold Python-Robed Cloak and