Necromancer, What the Heck Is Summoning 055?

"So the dwarves didn't put out the fire in time?"

"Guess again."

After several rounds of this, Commandery Princess Liushuang finally lost her patience. "Tell me already! Why was it?"

Chen Mo deliberately deepened his voice, pretending to be a dwarf as he replied in muffled tones, "When the explosion happened, I got blasted into the sky. It took me ten seconds to fall back down!"

"And guess what? That blackhearted factory owner said I'd skipped work for ten seconds! Said I'd broken my labor contract! He didn't pay me a single penny and... fired... me!"

The young commandery princess stared blankly for a moment, then doubled over with laughter.

Well, if she could laugh at that, she'd never been beaten down by society...

Then Chen Mo heard something that nearly made his heart stop.

"Chen Mo, Chen Mo, you're so much fun!"

"After I get married someday, come find me and let's have an affair, okay?"

"What???"

Chapter 62: The young commandery princess's invitation to have an affair

Chen Mo rubbed his eyes hard, making sure the delicately beautiful little girl before him really was Liushuang, the young commandery princess of Cloudmist Territory.

Then he cleared out his ears and asked in disbelief, "You... what did you just say?"

"I think you're lots of fun!" Commandery Princess Liushuang tilted her head, her big eyes looking impossibly innocent. "You work so hard, and you know so much! After I get married someday, come find me and let's have an affair. It should be lots of fun, right?"

Chen Mo froze as if he'd been struck by lightning. He instinctively looked around. Fortunately, none of Cloudmist Territory's leaders were nearby. He swallowed with difficulty, his Adam's apple bobbing, and spoke in a dry voice. "Um... Commandery Princess... Your Highness, do you know what 'having an affair' means?"

"Of course!" the young commandery princess answered as though it were obvious, even sounding a little proud. "It means playing with someone you like!"

"My second and third sisters have affairs all the time! They told me it's really fun!"

"Oh, right!" As though a good idea had suddenly occurred to her, Liushuang leaned closer and whispered, "You're so much fun, my sixth sister will definitely like you! I don't think she has anyone to have an affair with yet. We can all play together then!"

This was honestly too much. Chen Mo felt he could barely take it.

Hearing the young commandery princess say such outrageous things in such an innocent tone, he felt it was necessary to give her a proper lesson in the correct values of a harmonious society.

"Well, here's the thing. I think having an affair is wrong!"

"When you get married, you should be with someone you love and stay faithful to each other..."

Commandery Princess Liushuang's big, crystalline eyes widened even further, full of confusion. "How could that work? If you marry someone you love and then stop loving each other, wouldn't you have to get divorced?"

"...Right!" Chen Mo thought the young commandery princess's reasoning made sense.

"Then what would happen to the families? So, so many things would be mixed together. How could they be separated?"

After a difficult exchange in hushed voices, Chen Mo finally pieced together a set of principles governing the noble world of the Starry Continent, as taught to Commandery Princess Liushuang.

This was a world he found deeply unfamiliar, with rules entirely different from those he knew. Though some of those rules made his scalp tingle, they seemed to have their own grounds and value here.

According to Liushuang, there were many kinds of marriages between nobles. The most important were unions of interest between members of noble bloodlines.

Yes, unions of interest. Every marriage involving a direct descendant of a noble family was meant to make the family stronger and more prosperous. It was a duty no child of the family could escape.

Feelings had no place in such a marriage.

The reason was simple: love was an intangible thing. One moment, two people might love each other to death; the next, they might hate each other to the bone.

If two people in love married, intertwining the many interests of their two great families, only for their relationship to fall apart, perhaps even coming to blows and turning into bitter enemies, what would happen to the chains of interest already binding their families together?

In the long history of the Starry Continent, bloody cases abounded of love turning to hate, driving two great families to war and ultimately destroying them both. Thus, the nobles tacitly established a cold rule.

When it came to interests, leave feelings out of it.

Only without love could there be no hate!

Because of this tradition, within the great noble households, men taking numerous concubines and women seeking "lovers" had long become fashionable, even something of an unspoken norm.

After all, if the two had no feelings for each other, wasn't it fine for each to have their own fun? It wouldn't interfere with the family's grand plans, and it would satisfy their individual needs of both soul and body.

In the young commandery princess's eyes, putting Chen Mo first on her list of potential affair partners showed that she really did like him a little.

What was more, she even planned to introduce Chen Mo to her own sister...

"Really, my sixth sister is beautiful! I think she should like you too," the young commandery princess declared confidently, her eyes sparkling. "I'll take you to meet her next time, and you'll see!"

Chen Mo failed to set the young commandery princess straight. Instead, her words left him feeling a little stirred. In the end, he could only force out a smile uglier than a grimace and beat a hasty retreat.

Watching Chen Mo hurry away, the young commandery princess looked puzzled. She turned to Lady Linda, who was walking slowly out of the tent, and asked, "Does... does he not like me?"

Lady Linda patted the young commandery princess affectionately and replied thoughtfully, "No, who wouldn't like our young commandery princess? But he seems to have received a very unusual education. I'm beginning to wonder if he might be some family's first heir..."

Well, in the nobles' system, first heirs were allowed some autonomy and could be a little willful. After all, a meek and obedient child would lead a family into mediocrity, while someone full of rebellion would lead it into the abyss.

For the rest of the journey, Chen Mo switched back to diligent cultivation. He couldn't immediately think of a good way to respond to Commandery Princess Liushuang's exciting proposal. Accepting it somehow felt wrong, but he was also a little reluctant to refuse...

Forget it. I'll cultivate for now.

And so, with Liushuang's group in front and Gaoshi's squad behind, they traveled east, weary from the road. They waded through muddy wetlands and marshes, crossed valleys filled with jagged rocks, and forded the swift, icy tributary at the northern foothills. They were nearing the legendary overland passage at the eastern end of the Dark Forest-the Bloodred Corridor.

The vast Dark Forest was the last stronghold of the elves. Once a great race whose territory stretched for thousands of miles and whose armies numbered in the hundreds of thousands at their peak, they could now only shelter in the woods. The fall was more than the "haughty pointy-ears" could bear, and to this day, the entire Dark Forest remained forbidden to other races.

In the treaty establishing the five-race republic, the elves had insisted on a clause granting them exclusive control of the Dark Forest. They had the right to deal as they pleased with any member of another race who entered it.

Of course, if they completely severed contact between north and south, the human nations would likely destroy the elven territory at any cost. So, after repeated negotiations, the elves reluctantly left three routes open.

The western and central routes were airship lanes operated by the gnomes, who had obtained exclusive rights to them by supplying the elves with certain special materials.

The overland passage at the easternmost end, meanwhile, had been cut open more than four hundred years ago by a human seventh-tier Void Severing Sword Saint.

At the time, the Sword Saint suffered from a severe fear of heights and couldn't travel by flying ship, so he had chosen to reach the Southern Continent by sea. Then he was shocked to hear that his territory was under siege, and he had no choice but to race back day and night.

He requested passage through elven territory but was refused, so the Void Severing Sword Saint chose to force his way through.

The elves understood the threat posed by such a crazed second-advancement class holder and didn't want to lose their warriors, but they couldn't simply let a human break their rules. So they drove large numbers of jungle magic beasts and Ancients of War into his path.

In the eastern part of the Dark Forest, the Void Severing Sword Saint chose a long, narrow strip backed by a mountain. Alone with his sword, he hacked his way through. Corpses littered the ground, blood flowed in rivers, and the broken remains of ancient trees piled up like mountains.

By the end of the slaughter, even the fiercest predators in the jungle no longer dared intercept him. They could only watch as he raced away.

That was how the Bloodred Corridor got its name.

From then on, the elves established an unwritten rule: along the corridor the Sword Saint had traversed, anyone who could make it past the jungle magic beasts blocking the way would be allowed through without elven interference.

Of course, there was also a widely circulated, absurd ending to the Sword Saint's story, full of dark humor.

After braving countless dangers and finally returning to his imperiled territory, the peerlessly fierce Void Severing Sword Saint, who had treated the elven army as nothing, fought bitterly for several more days before finally driving back the powerful enemy.

Utterly exhausted and covered in wounds, he drank the "sacred healing medicine" personally offered to him by his worried wife...

Then the poison took effect, and he died.

After that, his wife and the young butler she had long been exchanging flirtatious glances with lived "happily" together...

Well, it was an unofficial tale, likely embellished and probably not reliable. But whatever the case, he had used his sword to leave a passage for the humans who came after him.

On the evening before Cloudmist Territory's party was to enter the Bloodred Corridor, a mounted scout arrived at a gallop, tumbling to the ground before the camp in a cloud of dust. His first words struck everyone like a thunderbolt.

"War! It's started!"

Chapter 63: Lightning charge, close-quarters combat

Ever since arriving in this world, Chen Mo had heard that, after years of warfare, the continent had finally achieved a hard-won peace.

The major kingdoms observed elaborate formalities, carefully protecting this fragile period of peace. The nobles favored elegant discourse and painstaking negotiations, while the Mercenary Guild had become a channel and bridge for settling disputes.

Apart from local border clashes and the orcs' annual autumn hunt, the vast human lands had not heard the horns of a full-scale war for centuries.

This was an era held up as one of "peace" and "stability."

But Chen Mo had sensed more than once the stirring force beneath the volcano, ready to erupt.

In the gloomy shadow of Black Raven Castle, he had witnessed nobles trample commoners with impunity. The eyes of those lowly people, who dared feel anger but not voice it, had been full of desolation and barely visible rage.

At Six-Leaf Camp and the Hedgehog Tavern, amid the clamor thick with the smell of cheap liquor and sweat, drunken gamblers crowded together, cursing the state of the world in coarse voices. No matter how they struggled, the copper coins they clutched always slipped through their fingers like running sand, leaving not a trace of hope.

In White Stone City, bankrupt mercenaries and farmers who had lost their land endured the cruelest exploitation just to scrape together a few leftovers for themselves and their families.

Chen Mo still remembered Old John's long sigh. "The way I see it, war's coming sooner or later."

According to modern political theory, when peace has lasted a long time, exploitation of the lower classes by the upper classes grows ever worse, and social tensions become irreconcilable, war will inevitably arrive.

Either the fires would spread within-people who could no longer survive would raise their sickles and take the masters' lives, or lose their own.

Or an enemy's iron hooves would trample from without-the blood of another race used to quench the resentment at home.

Whatever the reason, war had now truly arrived.

The mounted scout had brought limited information, but one thing was certain: the entire southern part of the continent had been drawn into this vast war, willingly or not.

"Green Pine... Green Pine and Creek Moon have both declared war on the Emerald Duchy! An urgent message came from home, telling you to retreat quickly. Otherwise, otherwise it'll be too late."

This was the worst possible news.

South of the Dark Forest lay the Creek Moon Federation; north of it lay the Green Pine Kingdom. That meant the people of Cloudmist Territory were now deep within a vast expanse of enemy territory, with enemies on every side.

The leaders of Cloudmist Territory immediately began a closed-door meeting. More than an hour later, Commandery Princess Liushuang emerged from the tent, pale-faced, and walked distractedly over to Chen Mo.

"Chen Mo, you should go. Hurry and leave."

Chen Mo frowned slightly, still not quite sure what was happening, when Captain Peiwen strode over and explained clearly, "Mr. Chen, war has broken out in the south. As members of the territory, we have to hurry back and fight. The journey will be very dangerous!"

"You're not from the Emerald Duchy, so you shouldn't stay with us. Find somewhere to hide for a while, or find a way back to your family! You'll be safer!"

Commandery Princess Liushuang nodded, forcing a smile onto her little face. "Yes. When the war is over, remember to come find me. You promised to teach me to recite my lessons."

Chen Mo's thoughts raced in a flash. Frankly, the longer he spent in this world, the more he saw the many different sides of its people.

Greed, cruelty, kindness, and integrity intertwined to form the true face of the Starry Continent. Whatever else might be said, the people of Cloudmist Territory were already the friendliest group he had met.

Otherwise, he wouldn't have ended up traveling with them all the way from Six-Leaf Camp to here through that series of coincidences.

"I... don't really have anywhere to go! Besides, Gaoshi's people are still on my tail. I can't leave even if I want to!"

Peiwen tightened his gauntlets. "They won't be troubling you much longer!"

Now that war had begun, how could Peiwen tolerate an elite enemy squad following behind them? Doing Chen Mo a favor would be a simple matter along the way.

In the camp, the auxiliaries deftly, carefully, and quickly wrapped the hooves of every warhorse in thick gray fur. Under cover of the tents, Cloudmist Territory's elite cavalry quietly mounted, clad in light armor, close-combat weapons in hand and heavy crossbows cocked-they were preparing a lightning assault!