novelraw Chapter 54 : Blood-Dyed Battle Robes at the Eastern Anxi
Chapter 54 : Blood-Dyed Battle Robes at the Eastern Anxi
Chapter 54: Blood-Dyed Battle Robes at the Eastern Anxi
Half an hour had passed.
Iskandar watched his Blue Wolf Army soldiers fall like harvested wheat, his expression growing increasingly grave.
He had tried to attack the Guan Ning Iron Cavalry charging through the battlefield, but Qin Qiong and Zhao Shuijiao constantly blocked his attempts, making it impossible for him to succeed.
After deflecting Iskandar’s assault once more, Zhao Shuijiao’s lips curved into a cold smile.
He could sense that Iskandar’s attacks were slowing down.
It was clearly because the Blue Wolf Army could no longer provide him with sufficient blood energy, forcing him to hold back!
Zhao Shuijiao glanced over the battlefield. The Blue Wolf Army, under the Guan Ning Iron Cavalry’s charge, had already lost more than half its numbers—barely ten thousand soldiers remained.
Meanwhile, the Guan Ning Iron Cavalry had lost only a few hundred men while achieving such a result. It was truly terrifying.
Qin Qiong also seized a moment to survey the field. Seeing the ground covered with Blue Wolf corpses, he couldn’t help but shudder.
The Black-Armored Cavalry’s strength wasn’t much greater than that of the Blue Wolf Cavalry.
Didn’t that mean that if the Black-Armored Army were to face the Guan Ning Iron Cavalry…
As he watched more and more of his men die—especially after Cheng Yaojin and Xu Fuzou finished off the two Blue Wolf cultivators in the Divine Power Realm—Iskandar’s fury deepened.
With their hands now free, Cheng Yaojin and Xu Fuzou inflicted immense carnage upon the enemy; every second, several foes fell beneath their blades.
“Damn it! This king will have your heads!”
With a furious roar, Iskandar’s spear thrust forward, wrapped in a surge of blood-red light so intense that even space itself cracked into fine lines.
That strike nearly drained half of the remaining Blue Wolf Army’s blood energy.
Nine blood-wolf phantoms coiled and roared along the spear shaft, faintly manifesting a heavenly phenomenon—the Blue Wolf Devours the Sun!
Zhao Shuijiao’s pupils constricted. He instantly raised his Thunderfire Godslaying Cannon to block.
The “Pojun” sigils carved upon the cannon’s surface flared violently as the blood energy of over ten thousand Guan Ning Iron Cavalry soldiers surged into it through the army formation.
“CLANG—”
With a thunderous explosion, Zhao Shuijiao was blasted back hundreds of feet, man and weapon alike. The armor on both his arms shattered, and blood flowed freely from his torn palms.
Yet his lips still curved upward in a cold smirk. “Bandit, why struggle in vain? Your Blue Wolf Army is finished!”
By now, the entire desert plain had become a Shura battlefield.
The Guan Ning Iron Cavalry’s killing efficiency was monstrous—every volley cleared entire swathes of ground.
Cheng Yaojin and Xu Fuzou were like gods of slaughter descended upon the mortal world, rampaging through the enemy ranks unchecked.
The remaining Blue Wolf soldiers were split into dozens of small clusters, hunted down one by one like lambs awaiting the butcher’s blade.
“No!”
Iskandar let out a soul-rending roar.
He could clearly feel it—the last thread of blood-energy linking him to his army formation… had snapped!
That meant all forty thousand Blue Wolf elites were annihilated.
“Even if this king dies, I’ll take you with me!”
Iskandar had gone completely mad.
He tore open the armor on his chest, revealing skin covered in strange, writhing tattoos.
Those tattoos moved like living things, ravenously devouring the surrounding spiritual energy.
In an instant, all spiritual qi within a hundred miles around him was drained into a vacuum. The nine blood-wolf phantoms solidified into colossal beasts, each as large as a hill!
“All Myriad Phenomena Return to Origin—Blue Wolf Devours the Heavens!”
It was the ultimate desperate art of a perfected Divine Power Realm cultivator—burning his entire life’s comprehension of the Myriad Phenomena to unleash a final strike!
The nine giant wolves transformed into the elemental powers of fire, ice, poison miasma, and lightning, pouncing from every direction toward Zhao Shuijiao and Qin Qiong.
“Form the array!”
Zhao Shuijiao roared.
The Godslaying Cannon disassembled, transforming into twenty-four floating barrels that orbited around him.
Qin Qiong bit his tongue and smeared his lifeblood across his Mo Blade.
The two stood back-to-back as the blood energy of both the Guan Ning Iron Cavalry and Black-Armored Army surged toward them through the formations.
“Bang! Bang! Bang!...”
Continuous gunfire echoed into the heavens. Zhao Shuijiao was clearly fighting with everything he had.
Meanwhile, Qin Qiong swung his blade, drawing down divine lightning to form a thunder prison around them.
The nine colossal wolves slammed into the layered defenses one after another, the resulting shockwaves shaving the ground around them three feet deep within a hundred-zhang radius!
When the final blast faded, the sight at the center froze everyone’s breath.
Iskandar was kneeling on one knee. His Devourer Spear had snapped in half, and his once-proud “Blue Wolf Devours the Sun Armor” lay shattered beyond recognition.
More horrifying still, the tattoos upon his chest—the runes that had burned his Myriad Phenomena comprehension—were now devouring him in return, disintegrating his flesh inch by inch!
“Cough… cough… I didn’t expect… my great ambitions would end here. If—if I had only another half year, I’d have reached the Myriad Phenomena Realm…”
He looked up at Zhao Shuijiao, who now hovered above the battlefield. The light in his eyes gradually faded.
The tyrant of Anxi Prefecture—the leader of the Blue Wolf Army, Iskandar—had fallen.
News of Iskandar’s death swept across Anxi like a desert gale.
Storytellers in teahouses slammed their wooden clappers, farmers in the fields paused and looked north, and even women deep in their boudoirs stopped their embroidery.
Everyone knew that the Blue Wolf banner, which had dominated the eastern reaches of Anxi Prefecture for more than a decade, had finally fallen.
By late May, in Loulan County, the last of the routed Blue Wolf soldiers fled across the desert.
When Aruba drew his hornbow to full tension, the arrowhead gleamed red under the setting sun as it pinned a Blue Wolf general—his golden armor torn and broken—to a poplar tree.
The white-feathered tail trembled without end, like the final elegy of the Blue Wolf Army. Thus, the Blue Wolf Army became history.
After taking Loulan County, Jiang Zhaoming decided to strike while momentum was hot—to completely unify the eastern half of Anxi Prefecture.
In June, the war drums thundered once again, and iron cavalry from four routes swept across the land.
Jiang Zhaoming launched simultaneous campaigns to pacify the four remaining counties.
By mid-June, Zhao Shuijiao’s Guan Ning Iron Cavalry—like a black torrent—flattened Suiye County south of Loulan and north of Kuqa in twelve days.
A rebel general who dared raise his curved blade atop the city wall had his skull blasted apart from two miles away by the Thunderfire Godslaying Cannon; even in death, his eyes remained wide, unable to believe such a weapon existed.
Zhu Mei’s southwestern army was even more ruthless.
The noble coalition defending the stronghold in Jinman County on Loulan’s southwest border was crushed in a single day.
Those aristocrats who escaped across the desert river ran straight into Zhao Shuijiao’s gunfire.
Their corpses floated on the water for three days.
The most perilous battle was at Xuanchi County—east of Loulan and west of Yili—where Qin Qiong and Cheng Yaojin personally led dozens of elite warriors to scale the sheer cliffs by night.
When the first light of dawn touched the city wall, the defenders were horrified to see—
The Black-Armored Army’s wolf-head banner had already been planted atop the tallest watchtower, beneath which hung three freshly severed heads still dripping with blood.
By August, in Ronglu County—the westernmost of the Eastern Ten Counties—the Queshe Army wrote a new legend of speed and slaughter.
Ten thousand Queshe riders crossed the Death Desert, strangling the final Ronglu rebels with their lasso ropes.
Upon the windswept sands, the Queshe Warriors tore strips from their bloodstained robes, dipped them in enemy blood, and wrote on their tattered banner:
“Slay the foe across ten thousand miles—Queshe shall not disgrace its mission!”
The mortal world churned; waves of fate rolled unceasingly.
At the Black Soil Hills, the crops were harvested again and again; the rebels’ heads were severed again and again.
At last, the eastern lands of Anxi Prefecture, long lost to chaos, welcomed peace and unity.
By September’s golden autumn—
In Anxi Prefecture, within Anxi City, at the main hall of the Prince of Anxi’s Mansion—
“His Highness, the Prince, arrives—!”
At the herald’s cry, the gathered civil and military officials bowed like a field of rippling grain.
On the left stood the armored generals led by Qin Wei; on the right, the robed officials headed by Fan Kang.
All eyes turned toward the man whose hand brushed the carved dragon armrest of the sandalwood throne before he sat down firmly.
“Your Highness, your ministers (and soldiers) pay their respects!”
“You may rise.”
They raised their heads, reverence filling their gazes toward the one seated above—the Prince of Anxi himself.
Jiang Zhaoming lowered his eyes, meeting the officials’ gazes one by one.
Then, slowly, he clenched his fist. His voice was deep and commanding, like distant thunder rolling across the golden hall:
“Anxi’s eastern lands—decades of war and turmoil—end today.”
Once again, the court prostrated themselves. The sound of foreheads striking the golden tiles spread like a rising tide.
At an unseen angle, the new Prince of Anxi’s lips curved slightly upward.
Outside, the autumn wind swept through the corridors, carrying the scent of harvest into the skies above the Ninth Heaven.