A black-and-white chessboard hung beneath the blood-colored sky, mist surging through its crisscrossing lines.
Bei Jiang kept his eyes tightly shut, his fingertips rising and falling rapidly.
His chess game held no compassion, no agonizing choices, no concern for soldiers' lives or deaths. From beginning to end, there were only two words: gains and losses.
Ordinary legion commanders deployed troops by spotting weaknesses through sight and perception, relying on experience to predict the course of battle.
But on the battlefield he commanded, the only measure for judging formation changes was the shifting energy of the battle that ran through heaven and earth.
Points of starlight flickered across the board, luminous strings streaming ceaselessly along its intersecting lines.
He captured and dissected every trace of change in that energy.
The surging movements of the Dark Tide Legion, the circulation of his soldiers' vital energy, the gaps where battle formations' qi and blood collided... none of the fundamental changes hidden beneath the bloody fighting could escape him.
He pinched two fingers together and placed a piece with decisive force.
Every command condensed at his fingertips and landed on one corner of the board.
The divine souls of the First Legion soldiers fighting bloodily on the front lines instantly received his pure will of command.
In a flash, the five-million-strong army's linked pact system abruptly switched.
The dense, interlocking formation that had connected everyone's qi and blood into a unified offense and defense instantly dismantled. Layer upon layer of vital-energy bonds were precisely severed, rising into dozens of battle formation phantoms.
Every squad's explosive power instantly reached its limit as they launched a ferocious advance.
The next second, another piece fell. The battle formation phantoms dissolved and returned to linked contract mode, connecting their qi and blood to hold the battle lines they