He has been reincarnated through countless worlds, adorned with billions of mythological terms!

When the last lantern in Chunfeng Tower was lit, Xu Youlan closed the window.

The red light shone through the window paper onto her face, creating a play of light and shadow.

She walked back behind the zither and sat down, her fingers tracing the strings as she began to think about who to choose next.

She tightened the strings a little and began playing the second piece.

When the clone left Lanzhou, it was already completely dark.

The city gate closed behind him with a dull thud.

The soldiers guarding the city leaned against the doorway, their spears in hand, their eyelids drooping, completely unaware that someone was walking past them.

Instead of taking the main road, he turned north onto a small path and passed through a reed bed that was mostly withered.

The reeds rustled against the hem of my clothes, and occasionally a wild duck would be startled from the depths, flapping its wings and disappearing into the night.

After walking for about half an hour, he stopped under an old willow tree.

The willow tree was very old; its trunk was so thick that two people couldn't wrap their arms around it, and its bark was cracked like an old man's face.

The branches drooped down, bare, swaying gently in the night breeze.

Beneath the tree was an abandoned well. The bluestone rim of the well had been worn smooth as a mirror by the years, and a thick stone slab sealed the well opening, covered with a thick layer of fallen leaves.

He needs to think about it.

Xu Youlan guessed that he was a Level 1 Authority User, but that in itself was not important—because it was the original intention of the entity to have him act as that Level 1 Authority User.

She said that whether she told anyone or not wouldn't have much impact on the outcome: those who believe will believe, and it's useless for those who don't believe to tell anyone anyway.

What's more important now is to report on the entity itself.

Who is the next target?

……

The Great Qian Dynasty, Northern Border, Yan Hui Pass.

Yan Hui Pass is a canyon.

The two mountains, to the north and south, appear as if cleaved in two by a god with an axe, leaving a narrow passage no more than thirty feet wide, so narrow at its narrowest point that only three riders can pass side by side.

The mountainside is riddled with countless arrow holes, like a honeycomb, or like hundreds of dark eyes staring at the valley entrance.

This is the first perilous pass in the north, and also the last iron gate for the Great Qian Dynasty to resist the northern nomadic tribes.

Sixty years ago, 100,000 Hu cavalrymen marched south and rammed into Yan Hui Pass for forty-one days, leaving behind a field of corpses. In the end, they could not cross this canyon.

Three thousand soldiers were stationed in the fortified city.

Three thousand men are more than enough to guard a valley entrance that is thirty feet wide.

Therefore, the garrison at Yan Hui Pass was the laziest of all the armies in the northern border—they trained only sporadically, and if they could avoid patrolling at night, they would do so as little as possible. The bowstrings in the armory were loose and no one tightened them, and the arrowheads were rusty and no one sharpened them.

The lieutenant general's surname was Liu. It was a hereditary military position, and his greatest skill was reselling military rations with the quartermaster.

Such people are as numerous as hairs on a cow in the northern border of the Great Qian Dynasty; one more won't make a difference.

So when the soldiers at Yan Hui Pass all had the same dream on the same night, no one thought it was abnormal.

In their dream, they stood on a boundless grassland. The grass was withered and yellow, waist-high, and the wind made it undulate like ocean waves.

The sky was low, and the clouds were pressed close together; they weren't white, but a dark, iron-gray, like an overturned pot lid.

At the edge of the grassland, there is a black line that is moving—from far away to near, from thin to thick, from blurry to clear.

They were cavalry.

The Hu tribe's cavalry, numbering 100,000, is exactly the same as the one from sixty years ago.

The sound of horses' hooves shook the ground, crushed the withered grass and sent it flying into the air, and the halberd reflected a cold arc of light in the iron-gray skylight.

Three thousand defenders stood on the grassland, spears in their hands, with no city walls beneath their feet.

They wanted to run, but their legs wouldn't move;

I wanted to shout, but no sound came out.

The cavalry drew closer and closer, their hooves growing louder and louder until the entire world was filled with that one sound.

Then the lead cavalry charged forward, their sabers raised high, the blades magnified infinitely in their field of vision—

wake up.

Everyone woke up at the same time, their bedding soaked with sweat.

The next night, during a night patrol, someone heard the sound of horses' hooves outside the city walls.

Not many hooves, just one horse.

Okay, okay, okay.

The sound came from the dark wilderness beyond the pass, unhurried and gentle, like someone tapping on a door very far away with their knuckles.

The defenders raised their torches and shone them outwards, but the light could only reach the ground a dozen or so feet away; beyond that, it was all thick, impenetrable darkness.

The sound of horses' hooves echoed in the darkness for a while, then stopped.

No one appeared on horseback, nor was there any sound of anyone leaving—it just stopped, like the horse standing still in the darkness, watching them through the firelight.

On the third day, when a sentry looked out through the arrow hole, he saw a person standing in the wilderness outside the pass.

It was too far away to see the face clearly, only a blurry outline, sitting motionless on a horse.

The sentry rubbed his eyes and looked again, but both the man and the horse had vanished.

On the fourth day, General Liu died in his study.

The manner of his death was quiet—he sat in a grand chair, still holding an account book in his hand, as if he had fallen asleep while doing accounting.

But after the coroner examined him, his face turned even paler than the corpse's: General Liu looked as if he had suffered some kind of torture before his death.

On the fifth night, all three thousand soldiers guarding Yan Hui Pass had the same dream.

The same dream as last time—a withered grassland, an iron-gray sky, and 100,000 barbarian cavalry pressing in from the horizon.

The difference this time is that the dream did not end when the blade fell.

The knife fell.

They felt the skin on their necks being cut open, felt the blood gushing from the wound, felt the warmth in their bodies flowing away with the blood, felt their consciousness gradually fading, and finally sank into a cold darkness.

The next morning, none of the three thousand soldiers guarding Yan Hui Pass woke up.

Three thousand people lay peacefully on their beds, their breathing steady and their heartbeats normal—like a group of people sleeping soundly.

But I can't wake him up.

You can't wake him up by splashing water, you can't wake him up by pricking him with a needle, and you can't wake him up by banging a gong next to his ear.

Their consciousness was completely empty, just like the adjutant: not damaged, not injured, but everything had been taken away.

It took two days for the news to reach the nearest prefectural capital, and five days for it to reach the capital.

The urgent dispatch, which took eight hundred li, killed three horses. When the messenger delivered the military report into the Ministry of War's main hall, he fell off his horse, his knee hitting the stone steps and leaving a bloody mark.

After reading the military report, the Minister of War remained silent for a long time before saying something:

"Yan Hui Pass is gone."

All three thousand garrison troops were fast asleep, and the most formidable pass in the north had become an empty fortress.

No enemy attacked the city, no large army pressed in, and no one even crossed the canyon.

But Yan Hui Pass is gone—because the person who guarded it is gone.

On the third day after the news spread, a man in a gray robe walked out from under the city gate of Yan Hui Pass.

He walked slowly, with strides that were neither too big nor too small, like someone who wasn't in a hurry but wouldn't stop halfway.