Volume 1, Chapter 59 – Breakthrough

Shi Lan rubbed her faintly aching left arm, lifted her head to glance at the full moon above, then drained the rest of the wine in the jar. She pushed off from the roof, dropped back down into her room, and went inside.

…

Early the next morning, just as the sun was peeking over the horizon, a harsh gong sounded through the City Lord’s residence.

Shi Lan slowly drew her cultivation to a close, flipped off the bed, donned her armor, left her room, took her jiao horse, and headed straight for the training ground.

By the time she reached it, many people were already there. The few who were seriously injured hadn’t come—they were clearly recuperating.

Aside from the newcomers who had only recently joined the Demon-Suppressing Army, there were also a hundred veteran Demon-Suppressing Army soldiers present, standing in formation, quietly waiting.

Once everyone had arrived, Huangfu Yun didn’t waste words and gave the order to move out.

The group left Twin Moon City in a long column and entered the wilderness.

They had gone not even thirty li from the city when they ran headlong into a beast horde of over a thousand demonic beasts.

Seeing the surging tide of beasts, Huangfu Yun’s expression didn’t change. He just made two quick hand signals.

Everyone immediately formed into two ranks, drew their bows and set bolts. After two or three volleys of arrows, nearly half the demonic beasts had lost the ability to move.

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“Kill!”

Once the horde drew close, Huangfu Yun let out a thunderous shout, vaulted from his horse, and charged toward them. He swung his horse-cleaving saber in midair, sending out a white arc of blade qi nearly twenty zhang long. Like a strip of white silk, it instantly sliced more than twenty demonic beasts clean in half!

The Demon-Suppressing Army behind him all drew the weapons at their waists and threw themselves at the horde. The hundred veterans in particular were fighting like their lives were already spent, going all out to cut down every demonic beast in reach!

They looked like wolves fighting over food, even crazier than the beasts themselves, almost every one of them killing with blood-red eyes.

Shi Lan swept a glance over the battlefield and thought of what Huangfu Yun had said last night. Her feelings turned complicated. This madness was all for those two words—battle merit. Even if they died on the field, they could still earn a sizable inheritance for their families.

Her halberd didn’t slow for a second, but in her heart she remembered something else Huangfu Yun had said the day she joined the Demon-Suppressing Army.

Once demons and devils are swept clean, the world will know peace!

…

In less than a quarter of an hour, the horde was completely wiped out. On the Demon-Suppressing Army’s side, twenty-six were lightly injured and three seriously injured, with no deaths. It could be called a complete victory.

Huangfu Yun sheathed his horse-cleaving saber and sent two men to ride jiao horses back to the city with the three seriously injured soldiers, and to call people out to clean up the battlefield. The flesh and blood of these demonic beasts, as well as the refined steel bolts, all had to be recovered.

Once the arrangements were made, Huangfu Yun led the troops out again. He no longer took them far from Twin Moon City, instead hunting down clustered demonic beasts in the area thirty to forty li outside the walls.

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Shi Lan rode with the column. As the number of battles piled up, she gradually grew numb, until in the end she was just mechanically swinging her halberd, cutting down one demonic beast after another.

Only once the sun had fully set did Huangfu Yun finally call a retreat and lead them back toward Twin Moon City.

The fighting that day had been far fiercer than in the previous days. On the way back, Shi Lan didn’t even have the strength left to hold her halberd up; she could only lay it across her front on the horse’s back.

The bone in her left arm, which had been just on the verge of healing, had snapped again in the intense fighting, worse than before. Her right leg had also been grazed by the fang of a saber-toothed tiger, leaving a wound nearly four cun long.

She had no attention to spare for the pain in her body. Her nerves, which had been strung tight all day, finally slackened, and she was exhausted to the extreme, feeling like she could fall asleep the moment she closed her eyes.

The others were in little better shape, all of them weighed down with fatigue.

And just as Huangfu Yun had said the night before, there had been casualties that day. Of the forty-one new recruits, five had died, and even among the veterans two were killed. One more had lost most of a leg and was half-crippled.

Compared to the number of demonic beasts killed, the Demon-Suppressing Army’s losses were almost negligible. But in the Twin Moon City of today, every martial artist that died was one fewer defender, while the number of demonic beasts seemed to have no end in sight.

Once back inside the walls and returned to the City Lord’s residence, Huangfu Yun first arranged for people to put the bodies of the fallen soldiers in coffins and bury them on the spot. Then he began distributing healing pills. They had to restore combat strength as quickly as possible. At a time like this, there was no luxury of slowly recuperating from injuries.

Shi Lan received a Bone-Mending Pill and a packet of Flesh-Regrowing Hemostatic Powder. Their effects were far better than she had expected.

Once she applied the Flesh-Regrowing Hemostatic Powder, the wound on her right leg stopped bleeding almost instantly, and most of the pain vanished.

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The Bone-Mending Pill’s effect was even more unbelievable. After the medicinal power spread, the bone in her left arm, which had already been broken again, actually began to mend faintly. It was healing even faster than when she’d recovered using spirit crystals!

After taking the medicine, Shi Lan took a bath, then collapsed onto the bed with her whole body aching. Right now she didn’t want to do anything except close her eyes and sleep.

…

She slept deeply through the night, and when the gong sounded, Shi Lan opened her eyes feeling light all over. Her body had already recovered from yesterday’s exhaustion.

After moving her left arm a little, she was surprised to find that she could already put some strength into it.

Just like the day before: leave the city, clear out the roaming demonic beasts nearby, then return to the city, covered in wounds and caked in blood, bringing back a few comrades’ mangled corpses…

This was the Demon-Suppressing Army’s daily life. It was also Shi Lan’s daily life.

And so it went, day after day. In the blink of an eye, more than ten days passed.

The distance the Demon-Suppressing Army could operate outside the city grew smaller and smaller. Recently, they could only move within twenty li of Twin Moon City. Any farther, and they risked running into a horde of nearly ten thousand demonic beasts.

So many days of marching in and out, always returning with their bodies stained in foul blood, wrapped in a thick reek of slaughter, and dragging in so many demonic beast corpses—there was no way the people in the city wouldn’t start to imagine things, especially with the city lockdown order in place.

Rumors in the city grew wilder by the day, the atmosphere turning jumpy and on edge.

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…

As usual, Shi Lan took a bath, then went to the back kitchen for some demonic beast meat. She returned to her room, sat down on the bed, devoured the meat, and ran the Jade Tempering Art to refine it.

Two days earlier, Shi Lan had already touched the bottleneck of the ninth stage of the Body Tempering Realm. But her Bone-Forging Pills were long gone. All she could do now was keep devouring demonic beast meat, slowly absorbing the energy to impact the bottleneck.

After two days of pounding away, the bottleneck to the ninth stage of the Body Tempering Realm had already begun to waver. A breakthrough was close.

Shi Lan cleared her mind of distractions and channeled the stream of energy refined from blood and flesh essence, slamming it against the bottleneck again and again.

Soon, the barrier was trembling under the impact of the energy flow, the vibrations growing stronger and stronger.

“Crack—”

All of a sudden, Shi Lan seemed to hear a sharp snap. The bottleneck shattered, her strength surging up a level and flooding into every limb and bone.

The instant she broke through, the System, which had been quiet for a long time, finally reacted.

【Main Quest issued: Step into the Innate Realm within one month. Quest rewards on completion: two chances at a basic lottery draw, Jade Purity Creation Art. Quest failure: host will be erased, System will initiate self-destruct.】