"Battalion Commander, this is the place!"
They parted the still bamboo flanking the dark forest trail. Below lay an unbroken mountain range, stretching as far as the eye could see like a hundred thousand miles of mountains, all blanketed in bamboo.
At the end of the bamboo grove, beside a cliff, the air seemed to ripple. Three towering crimson figures suddenly emerged from the transparent air.
They were Ju Zi, who had set out on the punitive expedition, and the two confidantes she had personally selected over the past few days.
Although Huo Qing had recommended both of them, that had saved her a great deal of trouble.
"It looks like they've all assembled. No, they'd already prepared for this battle." A woman's voice rang out from the leading crimson mecha, crisp as an oriole's song yet edged with the chill of war. Clearly, Ju Zi had quickly settled into military life over these past few days.
"Yes. The drones' soul power scans detected a full five Soul Douluos of Level 8 strength, seventeen Soul Saints, and quite a few Soul Emperors and others. Fortunately, there aren't many low-ranking soul masters. The total number of people emitting soul power fluctuations barely reaches a thousand, and that includes Soul Grandmasters..." Another voice came from the crimson mecha beside her.
Inside the mecha.
A short-haired woman rapidly swiped her hand across a light screen, zooming in and out. The screen displayed a synchronized feed from the unmanned soul tool hovering overhead. Though they were in a bamboo forest, under the soul power source scans, the soul masters concealed beneath the bamboo might as well have stripped naked, laid bare before the eyes of the Fire Phoenix Soul Engineer Corps.
"As for the rest of that so-called Hundred-Thousand Army, they're nothing but clay