I Came from the Mountains

Heaven Dou Empire, the lowest level of the Royal Death Prison.

The thick reek of blood mingled with the stench of excrement and clung to the dark, damp passageway.

Torches crackled on the walls. Their dim yellow light flickered, stretching the shadow of the figure in a bright yellow dragon robe at the corridor's end into something long and eerie.

Xue Ye slowly emerged from the torture chamber at its deepest point.

Only hours ago, the empire's supreme ruler had lost his composure to fear.

But now, the madness that had shown so plainly had miraculously faded from his aged face.

Inside the torture chamber, Yu Xiaogang of the real world had been tortured beyond all human likeness.

Thick Black Iron chains held him suspended in midair. Not a patch of skin remained intact, and blood dripped from his toes onto the stone floor.

"Blast Furnace... cannon..."

Yu Xiaogang's eyes had rolled back. Murky drool ran from the corner of his mouth as he babbled senselessly on the rack.

"Go to town... Tack Town... I can't make guns... stop hitting me... Tack Town..."

Tap.

Xue Ye's dragon-embroidered boot stopped on the final step out of the death prison passageway.

With his back to the torture chamber, he gripped the white jade beads in his hand so tightly that veins stood out across its thin skin. Something had occurred to him.

"Tack Town."

Xue Ye repeated the name under his breath. Beside him, several trusted imperial officials and a high-ranking mental-type Soul Douluo in charge of interrogations instantly thought of Lin Fan in the Firmament.

"When that madman was barking orders in the Firmament, he said his base—the place where those iron tubes and cannons were forged..."

"I think it was Tack Town!"

The mental-type Soul Douluo froze, then broke out in a cold sweat. "Your Majesty... that's a place in the Firmament's world. What happens there has nothing to do with our reality..."

"Fool!"

Xue Ye cut him off coldly. After countless bouts of impotent rage, the keen instincts of a ruthless ruler had finally awakened in him.

"The images in the Firmament match the geography of our world exactly! The same mountains, the same rivers—even Spirit City's layout is identical down to the last detail!"

Xue Ye stepped closer. "If the Firmament can show us the life of another Yu Xiaogang, then some divine law of correspondence must exist between these two worlds!"

"If that demon is in Tack Town right now in the Firmament's world, using some resource there to mass-produce weapons of slaughter, could the real Tack Town in Fasinuo Province be hiding the same secret?!"

Xue Ye spoke faster and faster as his reasoning narrowed with frightening precision.

"Perhaps a forbidden mineral vein lies beneath the real Tack Town—the very thing he uses to make those high-pressure firearms! Perhaps its magnetic fields and space have become so distorted that they hide a passage through the void to the Firmament's world! Perhaps... the real Yu Xiaogang could crawl out of that very location at any moment and descend on Heaven Dou Imperial City with his steel army!"

Every senior imperial official present felt a chill down their spine. Their court robes soaked through with cold sweat. Xue Ye's deductions bordered on obsession, yet none could find a flaw in his logic.

It was the sharpest—and deadliest—move a competent ruler could make when cornered!

If they could not kill him in the Firmament, they would dig up his roots at their real-world location!

"Pass down my highest secret decree!"

Xue Ye raised the solid-gold Scepter that symbolized command of the imperial army and roared like an aging Lion baring his fangs.

"Seal the death prison! Anyone who breathes a word of what happened today will have nine generations of their family executed!"

"Take my gold token and summon the empire's most secret Royal Dragon Soul Guard at once! Every member is at least a Soul King. They are to march for Tack Town in Fasinuo Province tonight, in secret!"

"Seal off that town and everything within a hundred li of it! Not even a fly gets out! Dig thirty meters down if you must. Turn the whole town upside down, but find out what forbidden secret it hides!"

"If you find any of that so-called Hematite or Saltpeter, confiscate it all! If you find a spatial rift... seal it at any cost!"

"As you command!"

In the darkness, several figures radiating terrifying Soul Power dropped to one knee, then vanished like ghosts into the prison's shadows.

Just half an hour later.

At a hidden military camp outside Heaven Dou Imperial City, heavy pig-iron gates slowly opened.

Hooves struck in unison, their thunder muffled but relentless.

Three thousand Royal Dragon Soul Guards, clad in dark dragon-scale heavy armor with cold iron masks over their faces, melted into the night and charged southwest toward Fasinuo Province!

Every rider exuded the battle-hardened menace of at least a Soul King.

They were the Heaven Dou imperial family's last hidden trump card, the empire's true hunting hounds.

When they rode out, the empire had reached the brink of life and death.

The real-world Tack Town, once an unremarkable slum, was about to face a storm that could overturn heaven and earth.

Meanwhile, within the Firmament's time and space.

The sun blazed over rugged mountains.

Clang!

A crude Geological Hammer slammed into a piece of dark red ore.

Lin Fan was bare-chested, wearing nothing but coarse-cloth trousers. Coal and rust had stained his once-fair skin bronze.

He panted hard. Sweat ran along the sharp contours of his muscles and carved two clear tracks down his coal-blackened face.

But he had no time to wipe it away.

"The first batch of ore is pure enough, but the Firebrick kiln still isn't hot enough."

Lin Fan tossed the broken Hematite into the bamboo basket on his back, then grabbed the ragged towel around his neck and swiped at his face. "At this rate, three more days of mining will barely keep the Blast Furnace fed. But if I want steel I can machine into cannon barrels, the temperature's still too low."

He glanced at the earthen Blast Furnace in the distance, belching black smoke day and night. His brow furrowed, then relaxed.

"Still, once you start grinding in this sandbox farming mode, it's damn addictive!"

As Lin Fan pried at a massive chunk of raw Coking Coal with an iron bar, he slipped, utterly unguarded, into his "Single-Player Gamer's Rambling" mode.

"Those idiots at Spirit Hall are probably scrambling all over the place right now, huh? They'd never guess I'm not in Tack Town at all. I'm hiding in the mountains!"

"So what if they send a Soul Saint? So what if Spirit Hall sends its enforcers?"

Lin Fan straightened and looked toward the earthen Blast Furnace, already taking shape in the distance. Absolute confidence shone in his eyes.

"As long as I can hunker down in this natural heavy-industry mining region, improve resource efficiency, and get the Blast Furnace and Matrix Machine Tool running, once steel output hits the mark, one Soul Saint won't matter. Hell, even ten of them would just be elite mobs serving themselves up to me!"

Boom!

A group of ordinary boys shoved a huge boulder over a cliff. It struck below, throwing dust into the sky.

Hands on his hips amid the dust, Lin Fan laughed without restraint, as though he could already see the triumphant ending where he steamrolled Spirit Hall and cleared the game.

But...

Lin Fan's smug muttering was nothing more than a keyboard warrior's Versailles-style bragging while playing a game. Yet through the Firmament, every word rang out in every corner of the real world.

Countless commoners across the continent, barely able to breathe under the saltpeter ban, heard him clearly. So did the powerful elites watching the Firmament's every move.

On an imperial road in the Heaven Dou Empire.

The commander of the three thousand Royal Dragon Soul Guards, racing through the night, yanked hard on his reins.

His warhorse whinnied and reared, its forelegs high in the air.

Through his cold iron mask, the commander looked up at the Firmament in the night sky.

"Tack Town's natural heavy-industry mining region..."

"As long as I can hunker down here..."

Listening to Lin Fan's brazen rambling in the Firmament, the commander broke into a cold sweat.

"The emperor was right!"

"That world-overturning demon's source of power—that so-called natural heavy-industry mining region—really is in the mountains around Tack Town!"

The commander drew his heavy sword and pointed it forward. Excitement made his voice hoarse. "All troops, heed my command! Forget stealth! Advance at full speed, whatever the cost! Ride the horses to death if you must, but reach Tack Town before dawn!"

"Dig through those mountains inch by inch! We cannot let the wretches of the real world get their hands on that ore!"

Rumble!

The three thousand armored riders surged faster, sweeping toward Fasinuo Province with a desperate, all-or-nothing ferocity.

Inside the Firmament, Lin Fan was still eagerly chipping away at a piece of Coking Coal, humming some tune from his previous life.

He had no idea that one offhand complaint had set the real world on a course toward that border town, which should have remained peaceful.