The job change is a bizarre and calamity; the nation begs me to tone it down.

There was no emotion in Yamamoto Furukawa's eyes.

It's not peaceful.

Calmness has warmth.

Yamamoto Furukawa's eyes were cold, a coldness that went to the bone, like an ancient well that had been sealed for who knows how many years, its water icy cold and unfathomable.

"Sir, you..."

Kanzaburo spoke cautiously, carefully choosing his words, "Your injury..."

"fine."

Two words.

Yamamoto Furukawa's voice was as hoarse as if it had been sanded.

But his tone was very steady.

It's unusually stable.

Kanzaburo opened his mouth, wanting to say something to comfort him.

But after racking my brains for a long time, I still couldn't find the right words.

How do you comfort a demigod who has been slapped in the face, stepped on, and kicked away in public?

"My lord, victory and defeat are common occurrences in war."

Are you sure you won't get killed on the spot?

Fortunately, Yamamoto Furukawa didn't expect him to say anything.

The demigod from the Sakura Kingdom slowly stood up and dusted off the rubble.

She moved with ease, even adjusting her collar—though the kimono was so tattered it was practically a rag, so adjusting it made little difference.

But this action itself illustrates one thing.

He is in control of himself.

With an almost abnormal self-control, he suppressed all the humiliation, anger, and murderous intent deep within his chest.

He can't collapse.

It's not that we don't want to collapse, it's that we can't.

Miyamoto Kenichi's words still echoed in his ears—the messenger of the false god was about to descend.

The fate of the Sakura Kingdom rests on this one gamble.

Why did he collapse at this moment?

Did he collapse because a junior slapped him?

joke.

He, Yamamoto Furukawa, has lived for hundreds of years. How many things has he endured?

The scene of being suppressed by Wang Cang not long ago is still vivid in my mind.

He endured.

Three hundred years ago, he confronted a demigod from the Northern Alliance in the North Sea for seven days and seven nights, and had three ribs broken, but he endured it.

A slap?

I also endured it.

We must endure it.

We will endure until the day our national destiny arrives, and then we will settle all accounts one by one.

Yamamoto Furukawa took a deep breath.

"Let's go back to Kyoto."

His voice returned to the calmness characteristic of a demigod, devoid of any emotion.

Kanzaburo paused for a moment: "Sir, what about the secret realm over there—"

"Don't worry about it."

"But that Sherlock—"

"I told you, don't worry about it."

Yamamoto Furukawa's tone was extremely flat.

But Kanzaburo realized that the flatness wasn't real flatness; it was flatness that appeared flat after reaching its limit.

Just like the surface of the water looks calm, but the undercurrents are about to overturn the riverbed.

Kanzaburo wisely kept quiet.

The group had just turned around to leave—

Rumble—!

A tremor erupted from the depths of the sky.

Everyone stopped in their tracks at the same time.

Yamamoto Furukawa abruptly turned his head, his gaze piercing through the night sky and landing in the direction of the Izumo Secret Realm.

Then he saw a scene that froze him completely.

The enormous, monstrous phantom hovering in the sky—the projection of the core monster of the Izumo Secret Realm that their Sakura Kingdom had been unable to deal with for centuries—was shattering.

It wasn't broken up.

It was crushed at the level of existence.

The pitch-black mist shot into the sky from the direction of the rift in the secret realm, like a black blade piercing straight into the sky, precisely penetrating the core of the worm phantom.

The insect hissed.

The scream stopped abruptly before it could even express the pain.

Then it exploded.

It shattered into a sky full of red powder.

The powder dissolved rapidly in the black mist, leaving not even ashes.

Clean and tidy.

It was as if that thing had never existed in the sky.

Yamamoto Furukawa's pupils suddenly contracted.

The saints behind him were completely dumbfounded.

Kanzaburo's mouth was so wide open that a fist could fit inside, and he couldn't close it for a long time.

They weren't shocked that the worm had been killed.

What shocked them was how quickly the worm was killed.

The Hidden Realm of Izumo.

SSS-level high-risk secret realm.

The number one forbidden place in the land of cherry blossoms.

For the sake of this secret realm, two saints from the Cherry Blossom Kingdom were lost.

They organized seven large-scale campaigns, all of which ended in failure.

In the end, they had to use three national treasure-level sealing artifacts and have a demigod personally oversee the operation.

Only then could they barely manage to seal off this secret realm.

blockade.

It's not about clearing.

If you really can't beat it, you can only surround it and pretend it doesn't exist.

This secret realm, which even the entire nation couldn't conquer, has now been taken over by a young man who changed jobs less than half a year ago—

"That guy..."

Kanzaburo's voice trembled: "He suppressed the secret realm?"

No one answered him.

Because the answer to this question is too obvious.

It's so obvious that no answer is needed.

Yamamoto Furukawa stood on the pile of rubble, looking up at the sky that had just returned to calm, his expression like that of someone who had swallowed a whole live toad.

bitter.

It's fucking miserable.

It wasn't because of the pain of being slapped.

That kind of suffering is just for appearances; you can endure it and it will pass.

The suffering we're experiencing now is more internal and deeper.

Once Izumo: Ghost Realm is cleared, what level of loot will it drop?

The rewards for clearing an SSS-level dungeon are among the best in the world.

Those props, materials, and even the potential for professional inheritance.

Any one of these items could sustain a power for a hundred years.

And now, all of these things have ended up in the pockets of that young man from Shenxia.

It's as if the treasure trove that their Sakura Kingdom spent hundreds of years, sacrificed the lives of two saints, and expended countless resources to seal away was easily pried open by someone else.

They took everything out of the house.

I moved it right in front of them.

How can I describe this feeling?

Imagine you've painstakingly cultivated fruit trees for ten years, and they're about to bear fruit. But your neighbor climbs over the wall and picks them basket after basket. You stand there watching, not daring to say a word like, "Stop picking them."

Because you can't beat them.

Yamamoto Furukawa closed his eyes.

My temples are throbbing.

A while later.

It will probably take a few minutes. Or it could take more than ten minutes.

Yamamoto Furukawa had lost all interest in keeping track of time.

Something bad has happened in the sky again.

This time it wasn't a tremor.

It wasn't an explosion.

It wasn't the screech of some monster.

Instead—the sky cracked.

At its highest point, the night sky was like a crack in a pane of glass.

The edges of the crack were not black, but white.

That dazzling, pure white that doesn't belong to this world.

After the crack was completely torn open.

Something fell out of it.

Seven-colored light.

Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet bloom simultaneously.

The light was overwhelming, turning the entire night sky into a flowing painting.

The object, like a meticulously polished gem, was falling towards the sea at an extremely slow pace.

The whole world has seen it.

Yamamoto Furukawa also saw it.

He was frozen in place as if he had been frozen in place by a spell.

Kanzaburo saw it too.

His heart was pounding at its limit at that moment, and it felt like his throat was being choked.

But he still managed to squeeze out a voice: "Lord Yamamoto... that... that is...?"