When Su Quanzhong led his soldiers back to Chaoge, the home that had haunted their dreams, they gazed at every blade of grass and every tree that had grown unfamiliar, like children.
Countless times, they had imagined returning home with laughter. After all, their march ten thousand miles into the Northern Territory was an achievement without equal.
One year, two years, three years.
Their journey north had been bitterly cold, with snowstorms that struck without warning and fierce beasts whose names they did not know. Mountains and rivers, every stone and every tree-all had been unfamiliar.
Though they drifted in the wind, they had roots.
Helplessness, loneliness, and despair gnawed at everything like swarms of ants eating into bone. They clung to a single conviction: march north.
That conviction had sustained them to this day. Through their relentless pursuit, they had all become simple-minded, all become like Su Quanzhong.
They were not born warriors. Like all humans, they were small, fragile, ignorant, and arrogant.
Yet they had offered victory rites atop Wolf's Lair Mountain and forged an immortal achievement, nurturing flowers with suffering and heaping them into glory. How tenacious they had been.
The expression on Su Quanzhong's sharply chiseled face shifted slightly, and his grip left a finger-shaped dent in the Sky-Piercer Halberd.
The already darkened sky seemed to lose a corner as a giant of a man, six or seven meters tall, stepped into the Imperial Palace.
If Su Quanzhong was the soul of this force of Great Wall Guards, then Wu Wenhua was its backbone.
Without Wu Wenhua, these troops might never have returned, much less reached Spirit Mountain or brought back the man who had awakened.
Randeng looked at the Great Wall Guards and frowned slightly. This army of the human race was not bad.
Though