Follow Me into the Mountains for Guerrilla Warfare

In Tack Town, inside a makeshift command post.

The air still reeked of choking gunsmoke and blood.

Out on the wasteland beyond town, the civilian refugees had dragged away and buried the bodies of the Spirit Hall enforcement squad. The captured Storage Soul Tools and gold coins were piled in a corner, but Lin Fan barely glanced at the spoils.

He sat alone before a table cobbled together from ammunition crates. At that moment, system alerts were flashing wildly.

The arrogant look Lin Fan had worn while crushing weaklings vanished.

[Warning! The host's actions have drawn the intense attention of Spirit Hall's leadership!]

[The next suppression force will be much larger!]

[Enemy deployment: Led personally by a Soul Saint above level seventy. Soul Kings and lower ranks will not participate in this operation.]

"A Soul Saint..."

Lin Fan drew a breath and frowned.

He was a player, so he was acutely sensitive to information like this.

"Level seventy is an enormous threshold in the Douluo system. A Soul Saint can activate a Martial Soul Avatar. That doubles every attribute and brings a qualitative change that lets them commune with heaven and earth."

Lin Fan glanced at the smoothbore cannon that had done such good work, wariness flashing through his eyes. "Black Powder and the muzzle velocity of a smoothbore cannon might just break through a Soul King's protective energy. But punching through a Soul Saint's Martial Soul Avatar? Probably not! A bullet might not even leave a white mark!"

Almost without thinking, he slipped a hand inside his clothes and touched the slightly warm token Bibi Dong had pressed into his hand before leaving—the Saintess Token.

"Should I use this quest item to call that girl over as backup?"

The thought flashed through Lin Fan's mind, but he immediately rejected it. "No. Spirit City is too far away. Distant water can't put out a nearby fire. And the moment I use the Saintess Token, I'll trigger that old bastard Qian Xunji's aggro lock. Then it won't be one Soul Saint pushing my base—a whole pack of Titled Douluo will come wipe it off the map!"

He tucked the token safely against his body again, then did something no one expected...

He picked up the smoothbore cannon, whose barrel had already begun to crack, removed the thickest piece of steel from its body, and scraped his fingernail hard across the metal.

Steel shavings fell in a rustle. The crack deepened.

"The material really isn't good enough." Lin Fan's brow furrowed.

"This scrap iron has too many impurities. It can't even withstand one shot. Without good steel, I can't make a weapon that'll pierce a Martial Soul Avatar. Without good weapons, people will have to pay with their lives."

He raised his head. His gaze crossed the open country outside the window and settled on the gray outline of barren mountains at the horizon.

"If I remember right..." He narrowed his eyes, recalling the basic geology he had studied in his previous life. "Barren mountains like those have nothing on the surface, but there's often ore underground. Iron and coal are both standard for terrain like this."

"We can't stay here and wait to die! We'll fight guerrilla-style! Into the mountains!"

He slapped the steel plate onto the table, strode out of the command post, and shouted to the civilian soldiers drilling outside:

"Load every bit of gunpowder and every lead bullet onto the carts! Anyone who can mine, knows how to fire a kiln, or has a strong back—come with me!"

"The rest of you will go with A Mu and spread out through the surrounding mountains. Stay in contact with the flag signals I taught you. No one engages the enemy head-on without my order!"

"Into the mountains! We'll fight guerrilla-style!"

Beyond the Firmament, the entire continent saw it.

The setting sun stretched Lin Fan's shadow long. He walked at the front, followed by more than a hundred civilians carrying pickaxes and muskets.

They headed toward the barren mountains and vanished into the vast dusk.

But Lin Fan's plans inside the Firmament, seen through that barrier in the void, sparked speculation in the real world almost as terrifying as the end of heaven and earth.

The Firmament showed a clear close-up of Lin Fan:

Inside the dim command post, the young man who had always been arrogant beyond measure saw the report that a Soul Saint was bearing down on him. For the first time, his face turned grave.

Yet under the pressure of life and death, he did not panic. He slowly reached inside his clothes and touched the Saintess Token representing Bibi Dong with extraordinary care.

Then he held the token close to his heart, turned without looking back, and walked alone toward the mountains full of unknown dangers.

In the real world, at the Papal Palace in Spirit City.

Clack!

Watching the scene in the Firmament, Bibi Dong could no longer maintain her papal dignity. Two streams of hot tears spilled down her cheeks.

"Xiao Gang..." Bibi Dong covered her mouth to keep herself from sobbing aloud, but the heart-rending grief felt as though it would tear her soul apart.

From her perspective, Lin Fan had not touched that token because he was thinking about some "aggro mechanic." Facing certain death, with his life perhaps nearing its end, he had reached for the one thing he could not bear to leave behind!

"He's afraid... Not of dying. He's afraid that if he dies, he'll never fulfill the vow we made to work together from within and without to overthrow the old world!"

"Facing a Soul Saint... he knows that scrap metal can't stop one. Is he going into the barren mountains to find some forbidden power that will let him take the enemy down with him?!"

Bibi Dong was not the only one. The major powers of the real world were dumbstruck too.

"Seven days... Spirit Hall in the Firmament has actually sent a Soul Saint to eliminate him. Even Spirit Hall must have realized what a threat this madman is!"

"But he abandoned the defenses he'd already built and plunged into mountains so poor they don't even have Soul Beasts. What is he trying to do?"

"Something forbidden! He must be looking for some forbidden ore that can destroy heaven and earth! Quickly, send men to seal off every barren mountain in the Heaven Dou Empire! We absolutely cannot let this happen again in the real world!!!"

As the entire continent watched in terror, wild speculation, and awe, Lin Fan's Seven-Day Grind inside the Firmament officially began.

In the Firmament's world, amid the vast mountains outside Tack Town.

Lin Fan had no idea that the people outside had imagined him as a tragic saint preparing to "sacrifice himself and offer up heaven and earth."

He led his hundred-odd people deep into the barren mountains and set up camp.

With no proper camp, they built shelters from branches and rags.

With no tools, they stripped iron parts from their muskets and tied them to wooden handles as pickaxes.

Now, with dozens of the sturdiest refugee boys in tow, he wielded a crude Geological Hammer and hammered at everything throughout the mountain forest like a machine that never tired.

"Sir, it's nothing but lousy rocks out here. There isn't even a decent medicinal herb. What exactly are we looking for?" A Niu wiped the sweat from his face and asked between gasps.

"Something that can twist a Soul Saint's head off!"

Lin Fan's eyes lit up. He shoved past A Niu and lunged toward a dark-red rock face.