Stealing The Heavens

In Dong Hai City, Wu Qi sat cross-legged in a secret chamber, spreading his divine sense outward to control the movement of his Blood-draining Celestial Fiends. Great Wu’s campaign had reached its climax. More and more soldiers, mountain spirits, and water demons had joined the army, and more and more immortal sects and itinerant cultivators had joined Great Wu, becoming the disciples under the imperial advisors.

After releasing Suiren Feng, who was captured by Wu Qi previously, and quickly disengaging with New Yu, Great Wu was doing great on both eastern and western frontiers. Basically, every day there were a few mortal kingdoms from outer heavenly realms swallowed up by Great Wu. At the behest of the Blood-draining Celestial Fiends, the emperors of these kingdoms were brought back to Great Wu’s capital city and beheaded by Wu Tianming himself.

As Wu Qi had expected, the emperor aura in those emperors had all fused with Wu Tianming. The emperor aura in him, which was purple and shaped like a dragon, had grown stronger and more vivid, and it now had a pair of eyes and was covered in scales. Even its tiny whiskers were clearly visible.

New Yu had flown into a rage at the fact that Suiren Feng was captured, and its emperor had even sent an army to attack Great Wu. But, it was almost at the same time that Great Yu launched a tentative attack against New Yu. Emperor Haozun himself had led a large army which split into thirty-six battalions and headed for New Yu’s border. In his army were ancient immortals and deities, and also a large number of divine beasts and birds who had taken human forms. New Yu was shocked, and its emperor had no choice but to mobilize all his forces to fight against Great Yu, no longer able to pay any attention to Great Wu.

While Emperor Haozun was attacking from the north, some of the deities under the Yan Emperor, Shennong, appeared in the southern frontier of New Yu with a great army. Composed entirely of countless strange species of humans, the army poured out of the great marsh and stabbed New Yu from the back.

With both north and south frontiers under attack at the same time, New Yu was going to have a hard time.

As Great Yu and New Yu began to clash, and Wu Qi’s Dong Hai army began to compete with the Ling Dynasty, Ji Ao’s army in the west seemed to be facing some mighty enemies. The actual situation was unclear, so Wu Qi had sent a few of his Celestial Fiends to find out what was happening there. If there were any chances, he would secretly provide Ji Ao some help, killing a few of his opponents in the dark.

Pangu Continent was considered officially at war, with the major powers in the east, south, west, and north all fighting fiercely with each other. Overall, Great Yu still had the upper hand. At least it did not show signs of losing ground, even though it was having wars on three sides simultaneously. However, no one knew how long this situation would last.

A wisp of Wu Qi’s divine sense transformed into a tiny electric pigeon and hovered in midair watching the army of Dong Hai attack the cities of Ling Dynasty from afar. The fist-size pigeon was a kind of lower-ranking divine bird. It was born with the ability to control lightning and could fly extremely fast. The reason Wu Qi transformed his wisp of divine sense into an electric pigeon was to make it easier to escape. After all, Ling Dynasty was very strong, and he did not want to let someone discover his divine sense and lose it for nothing.

Below him, the man attacking the city ahead with an army of 300,000 soldiers was Ying Ziying, the last emperor of Great Qin in those years. Dozens of descendants of Great Qin’s generals crowded around him. They all had the cultivation base of Gold Immortals, in accordance with the agreement Wu Qi and Zhang Tengyun had made.

Arrows were falling like rain, and swords and spears jutted upward like a metal jungle. Holding thick, heavy shields, the soldiers of Dong Hai were marching towards the city in an orderly square formation.

Pushed by countless soldiers, hundreds of huge war machines produced by the disciples of Mo Sect were approaching the city walls. They stopped when they were some twenty miles away from the walls. Large and thick legs spread out of these monstrous machines and thrust deep into the ground.

At a whistle, countless thumb-sized iron balls shot out of these machines, pierced through the void like thunderbolts, and struck the walls like a heavy downpour. The ground was shaking, and the deafening rumble made men lost balance while the blinding light stung their eyes. These iron balls were all meticulously forged by the disciples of Mo Sect, each containing the compressed essence of a heavenly thunder.

Countless iron balls bombarded the front-facing city walls, greatly weakening the city defenses. After that, a cranking noise was heard coming out of the machines, and in the blink of an eye, thousands of spears as thick as bowls were fired with deep, muffled whistles and thrust into the walls. The tails of the spears began to spin rapidly, and from the hollow shafts came falling out squares of yellow talismans, each measuring ten feet wide and hundreds of feet long.

On the surfaces of these talismans made with yellow silk were spread crimson runes that looked like some dragons. These talismans were all works of Guigu’zi’s disciples; they were all mountain-opening talismans that could suppress and distract the flow of energy in the earth veins. As soon as the spears thrust into the walls and the talismans unfolded, streams of blinding red light seeped into the walls and squeezed into the ground.

Amidst a loud rumble, the city walls crumbled and earthy yellow energy surged. Thousands of soldiers defending the city were thrown into the sky, shrieking and screaming. The energy ripped their bodies into pieces and killed them instantly.

The army of Dong Hai cheered, and Ying Ziying lifted the pike in his hand and pointed it forward. At the gesture, all the soldiers, except 100,000 who stayed back as a backup, marched toward the city in an offensive formation. They had been doing this along the way—breaking the city defenses with mountain-opening talismans, then attacking the city with a large number of soldiers, and plundering everything in it, including people and valuables. With this tactic, Ying Ziying had captured two of Ling Dynasty’s fortresses. This was the first major city of Ling Dynasty he had encountered.

Ling Dynasty had many soldiers, but it also had many cities and fortresses that needed to be garrisoned. When divided, a city manned by tens of thousands of soldiers was considered a great city. The city ahead of them had only ten thousand soldiers, of which about five thousand were already killed by the earth energy that surged when the walls crumbled. What remained of them now was less than two to three percent of Ying Ziying’s army.

Wu Qi looked down at the city with its walls crumbled, then looked up into the distance. Along the wide front, the army of Dong Hai had divided into hundreds of attack points, each with several small armies like Ying Ziying’s, advancing side by side. The hundreds of armies acted in cooperation with each other across great distances, and were still largely forming the seven regiments of Dong Hai Alliance, divided into three main attack forces.

None of this was for Wu Qi to worry about. The elites of the six states knew how to fight, how to cooperate with each other, how to suppress the enemy with waves of attacks so that they could not breathe and could not resist. In the hands of these freaks, bloody warfare had become an art.

Compared to this group of freakish figures from the six states, Ling Dynasty certainly had countless formidable generals, but their military attainment seemed to be no better than Great Yu’s generals. They were simple-minded, and the most common tactic used by them was to open the city gates and fight head-on against the army of Dong Hai.

With the grandmasters of military strategy and tactics like Sun Bin and Pang Juan around, these generals would have been better off if they just stayed in the city and waited to be beaten. Once they opened the gates and fought in an open field with the army of Dong Hai, it would be a certain death for them.

Thousands of miles away, a pillar of fire blazed into the sky from a wooded mountain. As he was flying at a high altitude, Wu Qi could see very far. Over there, one of Pang Juan’s great-grandson’s army had just taken advantage of the terrain to ambush twenty thousand soldiers of Ling Dynasty. Instead of attacking them with soldiers, he had broken open the earth’s crust and drawn out the underground fire, using it to burn all twenty thousand soldiers to death. Only their commanding generals had survived and escaped, but they were immediately surrounded by a large number of soldiers and subsequently killed.

Wu Qi could not help laughing. It seemed that Ling Dynasty had been on a roll in outer heavenly realms, because they simply did not know how to fight a war!

Just as he was enjoying the triumphant moment, Wu Qi heard Ying Ziying let out a muffled grunt, followed by the shrill cries of Dong Hai soldiers. When he looked down in horror, he saw a daoist with disheveled hair—dressed in a robe sewed with rags and holding an iron gourd—chasing and attacking the twenty thousand soldiers of Dong Hai.

Severely beaten and covered in blood, Ying Ziying and the many generals that followed him were fleeing for the rear, throwing away their armor and shields along the way.

A great plume of black smoke was gushing out of the mouth of the three-feet-tall iron gourd in the daoist hand. Countless hornets were swarming wildly all over the place, each as large as a thumb, pitch black, and looking as if forged of steel. Whenever they caught a soldier, they stung him hard. These hornets appeared to be some kind of special species. The soldiers of Dong Hai had at least cultivated their True Body of Heaven and Earth Scripture to the realm of Heaven Immortals, and their flesh was strong enough to resist thunderbolts. However, the hornets were able to easily pierce their venomous stings into the soldiers’ bodies, producing boils as large as fists on their skins, where yellow and green liquid kept oozing out.

A team of 5,000 Oracles had followed the army of 300,000 soldiers to the war. When they saw the hornets the daoist had unleashed being so vicious, they immediately flew up into the sky and sprinkled numerous talismans. Some Oracles even produced jars as large as fists and turned them over to pour out a black substance that came with a pungent herbal smell on every single soldier.

The substance sizzled when it was sprinkled on the soldiers. However, instead of healing, their wounds grew worse rapidly. The Oracles were scared out of their wits and hurriedly stopped pouring the substance.

Ying Ziying had three fist-sized boils on his forehead. With his vision blurred by the pus dripped out of them, he slammed right into a big tree. Luckily, his flesh was strong, and the tree was smashed to pieces by the impact. Like a wild boar who had gone frantic, he ran as fast as he could for the rear with hundreds of thousands of soldiers.

After chasing for a while, the daoist called back all the hornets. He laughed at the fleeing soldiers triumphantly and said, “I’m Daoist Bees, an idler who dwelt in Mount Guyin. The Human Emperor of Great Yu is a fatuous ruler. At the heaven’s will, I’ve left my seclusion to help the Sacred Emperor of Ling Dynasty unite the human race. This is a virtuous deed. I’ll spare your lives today, but if you come again, don’t blame me for being relentless!”

Wu Qi almost cast a thunderbolt to kill this Daoist Bees, who was only a sixteenth-tier Gold Immortal. Why was this plot so familiar? He remembered that when he was reading some novels in those years, all the daoists in the ‘Investiture of The Gods’ had used the same tone.

“Bast*rds, how could you copy that to Pangu Continent? An idler? Does this count as an outside intervention?”

After pondering for a brief moment, Wu Qi shook his head helplessly. This daoist had joined the war in his personal capacity…How could he be counted as an outside intervention?

“We are in big trouble now…” Wu Qi frowned in distress.