Three classes, three completely different paths, lay before Chen Ye.
The Mechanist specialized in disabling mechanisms, the bane of every treasure vault and secret chamber, but was somewhat weaker in direct combat. The Thousand-Faced Guest excelled at disguise and infiltration, playing on human nature and trickery, and was best suited to infiltrating enemy ranks.
As for the Nightwalker...
Chen Ye's gaze remained fixed on the description of the Nightwalker.
It was almost the purest, most direct enhancement and advancement of the burglar class! Rather than branching off into technical skills or disguise, it took stealth and assassination to their very limits.
And what was he best at?
Movement, speed, and the swift blade!
Mechanisms and disguises were useful, but they weren't his core strengths. The path he wanted to walk was one of slaughter, advancing through the darkness and crushing everything with absolute strength.
I choose Nightwalker.
Chen Ye made his decision.
The next moment, the text on the system panel abruptly shifted and finally settled.
[Class change successful!] [Name: Chen Ye] [Class: Nightwalker (lv1)] [Talent: Child of Shadow (You are a darling of the shadows, born able to merge with the darkness. Your presence, sounds, and form will be greatly concealed in the shadows, making you almost impossible to detect)] [Existing skills: Deft Hands lv10, Swift Blade lv10, Running on Eaves lv6]
A warm current instantly flowed through his limbs and bones, and Chen Ye felt a wondrous change taking place in his body. His breathing grew longer, his heartbeat steadier, and his eyes seemed able to see farther and more clearly in the dark.
He simply stood there in silence, yet his whole body seemed on the verge of merging with the darkness around him.
It was a feeling unlike any he had ever experienced.
Stirred, Chen Ye tentatively took a step forward.
There was no sound.
His foot touched the ground without raising even a speck of dust. Like a weightless ghost, he simply glided a short distance through the shadows.
He tried twisting and darting around the cramped room. His figure moved like a ghost, his movements completely silent, even the faint rustle of his clothes suppressed to a minimum.
If Light as a Swallow had let him run faster and jump higher across rooftops, then Child of Shadow had made him a true part of the night.
The former was skill; the latter was instinct.
Chen Ye pushed open the window and leaped into the shared courtyard.
He didn't deliberately seek out the shadows, merely strolling through the courtyard at his leisure.
Even so, his presence was still reduced to a minimum.
Even the old cat in the corner of the courtyard, normally the most alert of creatures, noticed nothing. When Chen Ye walked past it, it didn't so much as lift an eyelid.
A surge of indescribable excitement rose in Chen Ye's heart.
With this talent aiding him, was there anywhere under heaven he couldn't go?
Even those heavily guarded mansions of the rich and powerful would have trouble keeping him out.
The days that followed passed peacefully. Chen Ye kept to his habit of mingling in the streets by day and cultivating alone by night. Only now, he had one more thing to practice-how to master the Child of Shadow talent perfectly.
Before he knew it, the Mid-Autumn Festival in the eighth month had arrived.
It was a day for families to reunite, but just then, a swift horse from the north burst into the city at breakneck speed.
The people guarding the city gate didn't dare stop him. Instead, they had to clear the way for him at once, for the rider was none other than a messenger wearing a wild-goose-feather cap.
That signified an eight-hundred-li express dispatch, military intelligence of the utmost urgency. He could therefore enter the imperial palace directly, and anyone who dared obstruct him would be killed without mercy!
Soon, the messenger galloped down the long avenue and charged straight into the imperial city, leaving the citizens behind him to discuss it with faces full of shock and uncertainty.
"What's going on? Could something have happened at the border?"
"Who knows? Let's hope everything's all right!"
But contrary to their wishes, news of the battle report spread just half a day later.
The steppe barbarians, who had long eyed them like tigers stalking prey, could finally no longer contain their greed and brazenly launched an attack. The border defenses had been neglected, and in a single night, Yu Pass, Stone Pass, and Ningwu all fell.
The news was like a basin of ice water poured over the capital, extinguishing its festive mood.
An emotion called panic began to spread silently through the crowd.
In the days that followed, the situation grew more chaotic by the day.
One day, news came that the steppe cavalry had broken through Xiong Prefecture and slaughtered its people for three days, until blood flowed like a river. The next, another city was under siege, its defenders in desperate straits. Bad news came from the north in a ceaseless flurry of snowflakes.
Meanwhile, natural disasters and man-made calamities sparked uprisings among displaced people in several southern prefectures. Though the uprisings were small and quickly suppressed by government troops, sparks of a prairie fire had already quietly ignited on the parched grassland of Great Zhao.
To resist the steppe cavalry, the court began frantically expanding its army, conscripting soldiers across the land and forging weapons. The enormous military expenditure, like a bottomless black hole, quickly drained the already depleted treasury.
As for where the rest of the money would come from?
The common people would simply have to suffer a little more.
And so all manner of exorbitant taxes and levies appeared one after another. Grain prices rose three times a day, and the meager reserves in ordinary households soon ran out.
The people in the capital were somewhat better off. After all, they lived at the Son of Heaven's feet, and the court had to preserve some face. But the countryside outside the city had long since become a hell on earth.
Countless farmers labored for a year, only to harvest too little grain even to pay their rent and taxes. With no other choice, they could only sell their sons and daughters, pawn their wives, and sell their land.
For a time, the people had no means of living, and the bodies of the starved lay across the fields.
Great numbers of villagers who could no longer survive took their families and converged into torrents, pouring toward cities like the capital in the hope of scraping out a living.
On the streets of the southern city, displaced people with sallow faces and emaciated bodies could be seen everywhere, dressed in rags. They huddled in corners, watching passersby with numb, vacant eyes, while the air was thick with the scent of despair and death.
Chen Ye watched it all with a cold eye.
He saw a mother sell her daughter, who was only seven or eight, to a human trafficker for half a cornbread. He also saw an old man kneeling on the ground, knocking his head bloody as he begged someone to spare him a bite to eat.
At that moment, he knew that the Great Zhao Imperial Dynasty was like a battered ship sinking beneath the waves. Everyone knew it was nearly finished; they just didn't know when it would finally go under.
Yet, absurdly, even under such circumstances, the noble and powerful families perched high above the clouds and the imperial relatives continued to live in a drunken dream.
The banquets in their mansions never stopped. They even took advantage of soaring grain prices to hoard supplies and profiteer, squeezing the last bloodstained copper coin from the skeletal common people.
They seemed entirely unconcerned that this towering tide of popular resentment might turn on them, and had no idea that the wealth soaked in blood and tears might well become the money that bought their own deaths and buried them in the future.
Or perhaps they had thought of it and simply didn't care.
And as this troubled age loomed, Chen Ye began to act.
He intended to use his own strength to try to change this fucking world.
Even if one person's strength was feeble, doing something was better than doing nothing!
The first target he chose was the grain shop run by the Lin Family.