I became a god through frontier slaughter, and I crushed the academy's prodigies!

Tianyun City, the Zero Quiet Room deepest underground in the Tiangong Division.

The sealed chamber, constructed from a three-meter-thick layer of extraordinary alloy, was trembling violently at that moment.

boom!

The substantial mental ripples emanated from the quiet room, spreading outwards in a circular pattern in all directions.

Hundreds and thousands of cracks, each half a meter deep, instantly appeared on the thick wall.

In the center of the secret chamber, the three soul mother crystals that originally emitted a faint blue glow have now turned into a pile of grayish-white dust due to the massive energy extraction.

All divinity was completely devoured.

Guhe floated in mid-air, his white hair flying wildly, and the cluster of spiritual fire between his brows had completely transformed from pale blue to a dark blue that seemed to be solid.

Seventh-grade mental power!

The shackles of decades finally collapsed at this moment.

Gu He raised his head, a wild laugh surging through his chest. He had waited far too long for this day.

"Shen Tian, ​​young man, I have not let your precious treasure down!"

Guhe clenched his fists tightly, and his materialized spiritual energy surged around him like a storm.

"Seventh Rank! Looking across the entire Dragon Kingdom, I am now a top-tier Grandmaster!"

He could already picture the moment he pushed open the door, with his apprentice Chu Feng leading thousands of blacksmiths from the Heavenly Crafts Bureau cheering along the way.

Those two old guys, Lu Changming and Yan Jinghan, must be utterly terrified.

In the future, when Shen Tian is not around, it shouldn't be too much to call myself "the boss of Tianyun City," right?

Breakthrough to the seventh rank.

This helped Guhe shake off the pent-up emotions in his heart, and his whole mindset became younger.

He had even thought of the lines he would use to casually show off in front of the two of them.

With his hands behind his back and chin slightly raised, Guhe strode out of the ruins of the secret chamber with an air of indifference, ready to receive thunderous applause and adoration.

The wind passed quietly through the passage.

The air was filled with the smell of dust that hadn't been cleaned in a long time.

Guhe's expression froze.

The entire core area of ​​the Heavenly Crafts Bureau was deserted.

The most spectacular "Thousand Hands System"—thousands of automated mechanical arms driven by mental energy—now resembled a dead steel spider forest, its energy supply completely cut off.

The vast Tiangong Division was completely deserted, not even a ghost in sight.

Guhe's brain paused briefly, followed by a chill that shot from his spine to his head.

What happened?

I've only been in seclusion for a few months, how come the largest arsenal in Tianyun Prefecture has become such a horrible sight?

Could it be that that old scoundrel Xu Daozhen has really sent a large army to attack?

Shen Tian died in battle? Lu Changming was captured alive? Tianyun City has fallen?

Countless terrifying thoughts flashed through his mind like a revolving lantern.

He was well aware of the strategic significance of the Heavenly Crafts Bureau to the Heavenly Fortune Prefecture. If construction here were to stop, it would be tantamount to the Heavenly Fortune Prefecture's army being disarmed.

Gu He's eyes widened, and he unleashed his full seventh-grade spiritual power, radiating it outwards towards the earth's surface.

The mental detection wave, like a sonar underwater, swept across hundreds of factories throughout the Tiangong Division in an instant.

"Hmm?" Guhe raised an eyebrow.

At the outermost gatehouse reception area of ​​the Tiangong Division, his spiritual senses detected three faint signs of life.

The three individuals' vital signs were very stable at this time, and their heart rates even fluctuated with some kind of recreational activity.

The air around the ancient river was forcibly compressed, creating a white wave of air.

The next second, he traversed thousands of meters and appeared outside the gate of the reception area.

"A royal flush! Pay up! Pay up!"

"Old Zhang, are you cheating? How come you got three royal flushes in a row?"

Inside the guardhouse, three young men dressed in the uniforms of junior apprentices from the Heavenly Crafts Bureau were sitting around a table, waving cards around their hands with spittle flying everywhere.

There were also several half-empty bottles of chilled drinks and leftover barbecue skewers on the table.

Guhe felt his blood rush to his head as he watched this scene.

boom!

The explosion-proof glass of the guardhouse was blasted open by overwhelming mental force.

A strong gust of wind rushed in, sending the playing cards and bamboo sticks on the table flying everywhere.

The three apprentices felt as if a mountain had suddenly pressed down on their shoulders; the terrifying seventh-grade mental pressure made them stop breathing.

"Enemy...enemy attack?" Old Zhang's eyes widened in horror.

"Are you all blind?! Look who I am!"

As Guhe stepped into the room, his white beard and hair moved without any wind.

The three apprentices struggled to lift their heads and finally saw the face of the person who had just arrived.

"Director...?"

"Master Gu! You've emerged from seclusion!"

The apprentices were so frightened they almost cried, and they screamed in trembling voices.

Gu He grabbed the apprentice named Lao Zhang by the collar, suspending him in mid-air, and demanded sharply:

"Tell me quickly, what happened at the Heavenly Crafts Bureau? Where is Chu Feng? Where are all the weapon forgers and equipment cores?! Has the Heavenly Pivot Bureau attacked?!"

Old Zhang's eyes rolled back as the collar tightened around his head; he flailed his arms and shook his head frantically.

"No...no one called, Chief..."

"Bullshit! If no one attacked, how could the Heavenly Crafts Bureau, with its thousands of men, be just an empty shell!"

Guhe was furious, and his mental pressure caused the surrounding steel walls to crack and creak, teetering on the verge of collapse.

"They...they've all moved away!"

Another apprentice lying below quickly answered,

"They started moving three months ago! The advanced equipment, the material warehouses, all the weapon forgers and spirit masters—they've all left!"

Guhe stood there, stunned, and the strength in his hand loosened slightly.

Move away?

Where to move to?

He simply couldn't understand where in the southern border region was safer or more suitable for large-scale weapon forging than Tianyun City.

The three apprentices looked at each other, swallowed hard, and answered in unison:

" Went to Forge City."

"Forge City?"

Gu He frowned, his mind rapidly filtering through the names of all the main cities in the Dragon Kingdom, but he had absolutely no memory of this city.

"That's a city that Director Shen ordered to be newly built."

Old Zhang explained, panting heavily.

"They say it's because the Tiangong Division's production capacity is severely insufficient, affecting the equipment upgrades for the frontline army. So Director Shen directly allocated a piece of land and, along with Chief Steward Chu Feng and the others, went to do something... a fully automated assembly line to mass-produce troops."

Insufficient production capacity?

Guhe's cheek muscles twitched violently twice.

In the eyes of a traditional master weapon maker like Koga, high-level weapons must be works of art, forged through countless hammer blows and imbued with his heart and soul.

Assembly lines are only good for making ordinary iron; how could they possibly be capable of forging extraordinary equipment?

With a sudden flick of his sleeve, Gu He unleashed a tornado of violent cyan spiritual energy within the cramped space of the guardhouse, instantly shredding several playing cards suspended in mid-air into dust.

Old Zhang was so frightened that he trembled and lay on the ground, not daring to even breathe.

Guhe was so angry that his beard trembled, but after only a few seconds, his raging anger was abruptly halted as if doused with a bucket of ice water.

"This kid's actions are always unpredictable and cannot be judged by common sense."

Guhe secretly calculated in his heart,

"Moreover, given his vision, the fact that he dared to empty out the entire Tiangong Division to set up some kind of assembly line was definitely not a whim."

Thinking of this, Guhe's anger vanished, replaced by a curiosity that felt like a cat's claws scratching at his heart.

"Where is that Forge City located?"

Guhe bent down and stared at the apprentice lying on the ground.

Old Zhang quickly pulled a tactical tablet from his uniform pocket, his fingers trembling as he pulled up a set of location coordinates.

"Chief...Chief, these are the backup coordinates left by Chief Steward Chu Feng three months ago before he left. He said that if you come out of seclusion, you should go here to find him."

Guhe grabbed the tablet and glanced at the flashing red dot on the screen.

That location is a full two thousand kilometers away from Tianyun City, deep in the vast wilderness that was once occupied by high-level alien beasts.

In just ten minutes, a dark-painted military vertical takeoff and landing transport plane from Tianyun Prefecture took off from the Tianyun City military airport with a deafening roar of its engine, soaring straight into the sky.