Chapter 406 – Young Blade God, Martial God - Part 3

A week later.

Xie Yu barged into Xie Wei’s quarters, fuming. “Those two have eloped, haven’t they?”

Li Yuan and Xie Feng really had fought for seven days and nights straight.

Under the general’s onslaught of attacks, Li Yuan kept himself capped at the peak of a normal sixth rank, and the lessons came thick and fast.

On the seventh morning, Xie Feng dragged him to the Ocean Province armored cavalry camp.

“Come scare some discipline into the brats,” he said, “let them taste your weird style.”

Li Yuan went and found 30,000 seventh rank cavalrymen, 12 sixth rank company commanders, and 4 fifth rank advisors. It was no wonder the armored cavalry intimidated the whole province.

The cavalry’s size itself wasn’t frightening; it was the fact that these 30,000 seventh rank soldiers fought as one.

Facing them, Li Yuan used nothing above unranked strength. Their charges were lightning and thunder; he moved like drifting smoke, his hits feather‑soft and toppled them one by one. Their disbelief only fed his practice, and he stayed there for three whole months.

When Li Yuan was awake, he’d practice the blade. When he fell asleep, he’d ponder the blade.

Soon the cavalrymen learned exactly how horrid their general’s brother‑in‑law was, and someone—or everyone—started calling him the Young Blade God.

The

young

stuck because legend already spoke of a true Blade God.

Li Yuan scarcely cared for empty titles, though curiosity itched; whenever he went home, he would rummage through the Xie Clan’s library for that predecessor.

˙·٠✧🐗➶➴🏹✧٠·˙

Spring coaxed peach blossoms to blazing pink around the stockade. Two fourth rank meat fields nearby streamed blood‑yang into the air, barely enough to sustain thirty thousand seventh‑ranks.

Li Yuan stood on the review platform watching the drill. Sunlight shattered on their armor, shadows flooded the dirt. As one, the armored cavalry roared—

“Breach the line, no life, only death!”

“Breach the line, no life, only death!”

Identical death‑willing glares flashed in every eye, which only roused a greater savagery. Suddenly they merged before Li Yuan’s inner sight into one colossal organism.

He had sparred with many of them; what struck him most was how nearly all their thoughts beat to the same drum. Now he felt their blood energy knitting together—through motion, through training, even through breath—into a single, wondrous flow.

In that instant, insight struck. Even warfare in this strange world obeyed Yin and Yang.

Yin ruled the soul, uniting the soldiers’ minds, and the current was pure Yin energy.

Yang governed the flesh. Through a secret regimen, the soldiers fused their bodies and blood, forging their Yang energy.

Yin and Yang interlocked, and suddenly the whole army moved like a single man, an overwhelming might no lone warrior could match.

But forging such power, then keeping it, was devilishly hard and fraught with risk.

Once Li Yuan grasped the trick, every drill on the parade ground became, to his eyes, nothing but the wheel of Yin and Yang. It was no different from personal cultivation.

At seventh rank, a martial artist possessed only raw blood energy,

shadow blood

.

After breaking through into a sixth rank, they would glean a

seed

, a tiny flicker of thought that comprised a larger whole. Their blood energy still remained shadow blood because the thought was too small.

Once they reached fifth rank, they would be granted the complete ancestral seal, a stronger will that allowed shadow blood to be refined into

source blood

.

Beyond that, fourth rank merely amplified that source blood; the visible blood of the martial artist stayed the same, but the invisible self swelled.

Yet the whole system was limp from birth; the ancestral seal was too feeble for the flesh it had to steer, and the flesh could be steered by nothing else. A congenital handicap.

Compared with that, the military formation almost looks saner. At the very least, the unified

will

of the soldiers matched their muscle.

However, it also wasn’t without its weaknesses. If the army’s morale was broken, the whole edifice would collapse, and raising a fresh army cost a king’s ransom. The general, too, was vital.

Li Yuan studied the helmet‑less man leading the cavalry with the chant. He immediately understood that this army lived and died by his brother-in-law. Put another in command and the machine would seize up.

The drills ended at least.

A messenger ran up to Li Yuan and Xie Feng, panting, “The Third Miss has waited outside for ages. She’s asking for Young Master Ximen.”

Li Yuan glanced at Xie Feng.

The general laughed. “Off you go, Young Blade God. The armored cavalry salutes you.” He waved to the ranks. “Well, lads?”

The 30,000 throats boomed back, laughing as one.

In three short months, Li Yuan had subdued them with skill, then won them with his single‑minded purity.

The title Young Blade God was no cheap tavern nickname; once the Xie Clan’s armored cavalry christened someone, the whole province would soon know.

Li Yuan clasped his fists in thanks, tapped the earth, and drifted skyward like a wandering white cloud. He still bathed and changed clothes every day, even in camp.

No one was awed by flight; a fifth rank flier above the armored cavalry was just a bird, one blade stroke away from tumbling back down to earth.

“The White Cloud Blade God sounds nicer,” a trooper mused.

“Nah,” another said. “Until he stands with the real Blade God, the

young

stays.”

“Makes sense,” a third agreed.

A company commander ventured, “General, why not sign your brother‑in‑law on? With that power, our armored cavalry would grow new fangs.”

He was a shrewd man indeed. If Li Yuan could fell battle‑hardened seventh ranks with unranked strength, who knew what havoc he’d wreak unleashed?

Xie Feng watched his silhouette fade and merely barked, “That’s all for today. Dismissed!”

˙·٠✧🐗➶➴🏹✧٠·˙

Outside the camp, between some green willows stood a young woman and a white horse.

From the saddle, Xie Yu glared like a wounded kitten at the man dropping out of the sky. “Do you realise you’ve been gone for months?”

“Wasn’t it just a few days?” Li Yuan answered, genuinely puzzled.

She balled a fist and began thumping him.

˙·٠✧🐗➶➴🏹✧٠·˙

Several days later.

In the Xie Clan library, Li Yuan sifted through their private collection and finally uncovered a note on the legendary Blade God, a terrifying fourth rank martial artist from over a millennium ago.

As for exactly how frightening this figure was, the scrolls did not say. Times were different back then. With fewer ghost domains and fewer high rank meat fields, fourth ranks were as rare as phoenix feathers.

In the present, ghost domains multiplied and merged, and meat fields abounded. So, high rank powerhouses were popping up everywhere like weeds.

𝐟𝐫𝕖𝗲𝘄𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝕧𝐞𝚕.𝕔𝕠𝐦

Li Yuan was about to close the volume, when a single line leapt out at him—

“The Blade God was defeated. His conqueror was the Martial God.”

Who in the world is the Martial God?

Curiosity burning, he dug deeper.

After a month of dusty scrolls, he found a pattern. Roughly every century, a fourth rank would earn the title of

something God

... And then without fail, they would lose to the same man, the Martial God.

Now obsession blazed. Li Yuan ransacked the shelves until, in a stray miscellany, he found the only description—

“The Martial God appeared like a deity, hair bound beneath a three‑pronged coronet, dark‑gold armor with beast faces devouring the helm plates, a great halberd in his grip, unrivaled across the realm.”

Li Yuan’s brows knitted. That image pointed to one man, Lu Xuanxian. Yet even a fourth rank lived for only five hundred years at most, and the Martial God had been walking around over a thousand years ago. Every record called him merely fourth rank.

So if Lu Xuanxian truly was the Martial God, had he broken through to the third rank...or had he long since fallen dead?