When others held the knife and they lay on the chopping block, the women of Purple Cloud Palace were no strangers to the situation.
It was just that they had always been the ones holding the knife. Today, they were the meat.
To Pan Long, that was only fair. If they wanted to feast, they had to be ready to take a beating. Reward and risk were twins—twins who lived and died together. The greater the reward, the greater the risk; once the risk was gone, the reward was usually finished too.
It was like another world, where, before the Federation era, vast alliances of politicians and merchants had controlled enormous social resources. To the people of their day, they had seemed like mountains no one could topple. Yet by the time Pan Long died a century later, those behemoths could be found only in history books. Their final masters had, for the most part, met miserable ends.
...Even if the founding of the Grand Federation had not been as bloody as the first two world wars, someone still had to pay the price of progress.
Purple Cloud Palace had become a dominant power in the Southern Sea—even if only one of several. Its rise must have been steeped in blood, anger, helplessness, despair, and tears.
In the past, they had made others weep. Perhaps they had even laughed as those people cried. Now it was their turn.
Pan Long studied the women. Fear showed on their faces, but traces of their old arrogance and fierceness remained.
They were beautiful. Aside from his fiancée, Wu Cuigu, they were probably the most beautiful women he had seen in his life. Even Bai Yingxuan, who had left Cang Yuan pining after a single meeting, could only be said to have a beauty