Clash

The newcomers felt nothing at the sound of Lin Shan's name, but every older person present looked stunned. They had all read the official history recorded in the Clan Artifact.

Lin Shan of the Human Race, its first Transcendent, had single-handedly brought seven more Transcendents into the fold before venturing alone into the Ash Fog.

If there were a ranking of strength, Pioneer Lin Shan would unquestionably be the strongest person in the Human Race!

Their shock was tinged with joy. The strongest among them had returned. How powerful must he be to have survived over a year in the Ash Fog? Perhaps there was still hope, and they would not have to take that step.

Nor did they doubt that this was truly Lin Shan. They all knew the man who had spoken: Jin Tianzong, one of the Human Race's Pioneers, the author of Curious Works, and one of its current leaders.

"Minister Jin!"

"Minister Jin!"

Everyone who recognized Jin Tianzong saluted him with a standard Chinese military salute.

Jin Tianzong waved them off. "I've told you before, there's no need for all this. I just handle construction."

Everyone knew the minister's temperament, so they nodded with wry smiles.

Someone asked, "Is this Mr. Lin Shan, the Pioneer?"

Before Jin Tianzong could answer, the newcomers beside them immediately crowded forward.

"A Pioneer?"

"Where's the Pioneer? Let me see!"

Seeing things take a bad turn, Lin Shan immediately grabbed Jin Tianzong by the shoulder.

Jin Tianzong felt a chill on his shoulder. The next second, he was a thousand meters up in the sky.

"Holy shit, this is too high! I'm still an ordinary person!" Jin Tianzong cried out in fright.

"Where can we talk?" Lin Shan asked.

"The wooden... cabins." Jin Tianzong pointed at a row of wooden cabins below.

The next second, the two of them appeared inside a cabin.

"Lin Shan, you're this incredible now? You can teleport!"

"Let's get down to business." Lin Shan rolled his eyes at him and asked, "How are things now? What's going on with the Cat Clan?"

"Ah." Jin Tianzong sighed. "Things are very bad. The Cat Clan is keeping us like livestock. They come over every day, kill a few hundred people, then retreat. Never more, never fewer."

"Zhang Zhonghua, Zhao Xiao An, and the others..."

Before Lin Shan could finish, Jin Tianzong interrupted him:

"The Pioneers are all still alive. For some reason, the Cat Clan avoids them."

"Do you know why they're doing this?" Lin Shan asked.

Jin Tianzong replied, "Most likely, it has something to do with clan fortune..."

Lin Shan said nothing, waiting for him to continue.

Jin Tianzong gathered his thoughts and slowly began:

"From our observations, whenever new members of our race cross over, the barrier around our territory expands. Whenever we suffer too many casualties fighting the Cat Clan, the barrier contracts."

"So we suspect that clan fortune is actually distributed within every member of the Human Race. The Cat Clan is keeping us alive to plunder it, letting more humans keep crossing over so they can slaughter us in an endless stream..."

After hearing this, Lin Shan fell silent for a moment, then asked, "Where's the front line?"

"Over there..." Jin Tianzong pointed in a direction.

"I'll take a look. We'll talk later." With that, Lin Shan opened the door, turned into a streak of red light, and vanished into the sky.

"If even you can't do it... then we'll have to prepare for the worst." Jin Tianzong murmured toward the direction where Lin Shan had disappeared.

Lin Shan flew out of the residential area. Before long, he saw a stretch of land stained red.

It was blood, most of it human.

Densely packed grass shelters stood beside that land. Rows of people carrying all manner of weapons ran around the tents, while others sat in circles chatting, sometimes bursting into laughter, sometimes seething with hatred.

They all wore coarse hemp clothing, every garment soaked in blood.

Lin Shan landed and followed the fence into the military camp.

"What are you here for? It's not time for the supply delivery yet."

Lin Shan was stopped as soon as he crossed the fence.

He looked at the person blocking him. It was only a boy of about eighteen, but his expression was solemn, and he gripped his spear tightly.

At his age, he should probably be in high school... Lin Shan thought.

"I'm looking for Zhang Zhonghua, or any of the other Pioneers. Could you please let them know?" Lin Shan said.

"You're looking for Minister Zhang?"

"Yes."

"Well..." The boy hesitated.

"Just tell him my name is Lin Shan. Sorry for the trouble. I'm an acquaintance of his."

"Lin Shan... that sounds familiar." The boy scratched his head. "All right, wait here for a bit."

With that, he headed deeper into the camp along the tents.

Just then.

"Woooo!"

A long, resonant horn call rang out.

Hearing the horn, Lin Shan looked ahead to where the barrier met the Ash Fog.

He immediately stopped waiting, spread his blood wings, and flew toward the very front of the battlefield.

Along the way, he passed the Human Race's army, more than ten thousand strong. They all wore white hemp clothing and carried weapons of varying designs: sabers, spears, swords, halberds, staffs...

At the edge of the Ash Fog, the Cat Clan's army gradually emerged. There were only a little over a thousand of them, but every one was a pseudo-transcendent! They wore sturdy armor and carried finely crafted weapons.

Lin Shan searched for the human Transcendents and finally spotted the two races' Transcendents off to the side. To his surprise, he discovered that several Transcendent auras were concealed within the army, disguised as ordinary soldiers.

The Cat Clan had also sent only seven Transcendents to lead the advance. A cursory assessment told Lin Shan that some had greater spiritual strength than he did, even reaching beyond the sixth stage.

Below, battle erupted at the slightest spark. The two armies collided amid a chorus of slaughter, severed limbs littering the ground. In an instant, another layer of fresh blood stained the earth.

Lin Shan noticed that more than ninety percent of the dead were human. The Cat Clan suffered very few deaths, and most of those were inflicted by the Pioneers hidden within the human army.

Zhao Xiao An raised the long saber formed from heart light in her hand and cleaved an armored enemy in two. Blood splashed across her face, but she paid it no mind. Panting, she continued attacking the enemies on the other side.

The fighting had not lasted long, perhaps not even five minutes.

After a single charging assault, the Cat Clan began to retreat, leaving the ground strewn with corpses.

Lin Shan had been waiting for this opportunity. As the Cat Clan withdrew, he quickly followed, hovering over a hundred meters above them. Without a spectral object like the Red Lantern, they could not possibly see him.

He had not plunged into the battlefield. He could now kill ordinary people in great swathes, but pseudo-transcendents were different. They could wield spiritual power themselves. Even with dozens of times their spiritual power, supplemented by supernatural power, Lin Shan would run dry after killing at most a hundred.

Based on his earlier experiences, Lin Shan deduced that spiritual power was all equal in quality. The difference between the strong and the weak lay in quantity. In a head-on charge, the saying that enough ants could bite an elephant to death held true even in the world of Transcendents.

Still, a truly powerful individual would never foolishly compete with an opponent in raw spiritual power. They had more flexible ways to attack!

That was precisely what Lin Shan was doing now. With his blood wings, his speed was definitely in the top tier of Sequence 9. Even entering Cat Clan territory would not put him in danger, provided they truly had no Sequence 8 among them.

The Cat Clan seemed to possess a unique ability to find their bearings, or some special form of guidance. They had been walking in a straight line through the Ash Fog the entire time.

Suddenly, something changed within Lin Shan's body.

His heart light had broken through without him noticing, officially entering the fifth stage. He had already touched the threshold of the fourth stage before obtaining his blood wings. In the year or so since advancing, he had not only crossed into the fourth stage but also come very close to the fifth. This breakthrough could only mean that his digestion of the potion had reached the necessary point.

Lin Shan did not know whether this pace was fast or slow. It had taken him three years to reach the fifth stage, and he had even taken spirit medicine along the way to accelerate the process.

We're here!

Lin Shan saw the Cat Clan's army vanish outright after passing a certain point.