Beside a tranquil river, an exploration team from the Holy Unicorn Mercenary Corps was resting on the bank. A dozen technicians sat by the water, sorting through the data they had collected. Inside the nearby mobile base vehicle, two cooks were preparing breakfast, the aroma of milk drifting softly in all directions. Over a hundred mercenaries, tasked with protecting the exploration party, yawned as they crawled out of their tents. A dozen sentinels, completely soaked, slowly dragged themselves out of their hiding spots in the brush, clutching their sniper rifles.

Two figures clad in white from the Dawn Detachment jumped down from the trees, their faces grim. A few fawning mercenaries cautiously offered them personal hygiene kits. The two white-clad men walked to the river’s edge to wash up.

The exploration team was already more than eight hundred kilometers from the main camp of the Holy Unicorn. Their mission was to survey the major mineral deposits nearby and map the terrain.

Since Siren had personally inflicted grievous injuries upon the first deputy commander of the Hell Angels several days prior, the Holy Unicorn mercenaries had not faced a single attack on this planet. It was a world almost unnaturally peaceful and tranquil; they had completed the majority of their survey work without any disturbance whatsoever.

The natural environment of this planet was outrageously pristine; the river water met the drinking standards of the Earth Federation. Emerald water grasses swayed in the clear, bottom-visible river, and large schools of fish swam freely through the currents. Two stern-faced men in white, drawn by the sight of the carefree fish, felt the tension in their taut nerves ease just slightly.

It was in this brief moment of carelessness that a face the size of a washbasin abruptly erupted from the riverbed silt. Two unnaturally thick arms smashed the water surface and clamped down hard on the throats of the two white-clad men. Before the two innate-level fighters could exert force to struggle, their windpipes were already crushed to dust. The long arms swung violently, sending the two men flying far into the distance, spitting blood.

“You fiends! How dare you offend the Honored One! Are you truly not afraid of heavenly retribution?”

Xinjia, towering three meters high, roared as he stood up from the river. With a sweeping motion of his long arm, an iron chain, thick as a small bowl, whistled out. The chain hadn't looked particularly long when coiled around Xinjia's waist, but upon release, it magically extended to hundreds of meters. The chain, writhing and twisting like a giant python, looped into circles of various sizes in the air, ensnaring over a hundred mercenaries in its coils. Then, Xinjia’s right arm pulled back fiercely, stretching the chain taut.

A chorus of unpleasant snapping sounds rang out, and the thick scent of blood slowly permeated the air. The iron chain (twisted and cut) the hundred-plus mercenaries in half at the waist. Over two hundred segments of flesh collapsed onto the ground. Mercenaries who weren't immediately dead shrieked desperately, clawing frantically at the earth. Blood spurted from their severed bodies, and tangled organs spilled across the ground. Soon, every one of them lost consciousness.

The two cooks inside the base vehicle watched in horror as Xinjia charged onto the bank, a figure like a demonic god. Trembling, they were just about to press the red alert button beside them when Xinjia flicked a finger. Two stones, the size of human heads, materialized from his fingertips. With two sharp whooshing sounds, the stones pierced the chests of the two cooks, splattering blood everywhere.

In the span of just two breaths, an entire exploration team had been wiped out. Xinjia’s terrifying brute force and inexplicable psychic abilities were a feast for the eyes of Gu Xichen, who watched from nearby.

Staring with wide eyes, he cautiously scanned the dense woods surrounding the camp. Once certain that all living beings had been executed, Xinjia’s massive body soared into the air. In two effortless bounds, he covered over three hundred meters, arriving before Gu Xichen. He knelt respectfully on one knee, his expression grave as he clasped his hands: “Honored One, your subordinate has eliminated the host of evildoers.”

Gu Xichen gently patted Xinjia’s shoulder, praising him: “Well done!”

Xinjia shook his head, sighing, “It is a pity that my primordial spirit is damaged and my magic has not recovered. Otherwise, I would have shattered the souls of those evildoers, scattering them to the winds so they could never be reincarnated!”

Gu Xichen’s mouth twitched. He forced a dry laugh, “You have done very well, exceptionally well!” Primordial spirit damaged? Magic not recovered? How powerful was this fellow at his peak?

Hearing this, Xinjia was overjoyed. He rose and asked, “Honored One, what are the next orders?”

“Hmm, next?” Just as Gu Xichen was about to outline his plan, two ground-attack aircraft roared overhead at low altitude. Gu Xichen couldn't help but curse, “Damn it, do they really treat this planet like their private hunting ground?”

The moment the words ‘Damn it’ left his lips, a fierce gleam flashed in Xinjia’s eyes. He raised both hands abruptly, and two stones approximately three feet in diameter materialized out of thin air. Xinjia glared and roared, “Go!” With two dull, heavy thuds, the massive stones streaked across more than two hundred meters, trailing white gangqi (a form of protective energy), and slammed into the bellies of the two attack planes.

The ten-centimeter-thick specialized armor on the underbelly of the ground-attack aircraft shattered like an eggshell. The stones reduced the two planes to heaps of scrap metal.

Two flashes of fire appeared as the pilots frantically ejected from their cockpits. Xinjia grinned menacingly, waving his right hand towards the sky. The iron chain shot upward with a clanging roar. After two harrowing screams, the chain pierced the hearts of the two pilots, stringing them together. Even as the two pilots died, the parachutes on their backs failed to deploy.

What brutal attacking power, what swift reaction speed. Gu Xichen glanced at Xinjia in surprise. He had no doubt that this one man could handle at least two thousand of Siren’s puppets, and absolutely in a head-on, brute-force confrontation.

After sincerely praising Xinjia a few times, the giant’s face glowed with happiness. Gu Xichen led this killing god to the blood-soaked camp and copied all the data the technicians had been organizing onto a storage chip. Lightly weighing the small chip in his hand, Gu Xichen chuckled, “Siren, I’m back!”

Over the next few days, exploration teams from the Holy Unicorn Mercenary Corps were ambushed one after another, always leaving no survivors. What was worse, even twelve attack aircraft were lost!

Hearing constant bad news nearly drove Siren mad. Coincidentally, the Holy Unicorn Mercenary Corps’ second wave of transport ships arrived, bringing a large contingent of reinforcements and supplies. Siren dispatched an enormous search team once again. This time, the massive transport ships sent by the Holy Unicorn numbered twelve. In addition to nearly ten thousand mercenaries, the search party included over three hundred twenty-ton medium-sized combat vehicles and more than a hundred helicopters.

What astonished Gu Xichen, who was crouched on the branch of a giant tree, was the inclusion of nearly a hundred green-clad Spirit Race soldiers in the Holy Unicorn’s search contingent.

“Are these slave soldiers? Or did they collude with the Romans to hire them?” Gu Xichen slowly chewed the stalk of grass in his mouth, feeling a pang of difficulty.

The Spirit Race possessed miraculous racial talents; regardless of their environment, they could integrate with their surroundings extremely quickly, as harmoniously as a fish returning to water. For these naked Spirit Race warriors, tracking a single person through the dense forest was an incredibly simple task. These Spirit Race members would likely prove harder to deal with than Siren’s tens of thousands of puppets.

Xinjia sat silently on the muddy ground below. He had just felled a massive tree and was carving intricate, ancient patterns onto the heartwood—wood tougher and denser than refined steel—to fashion a terrifyingly huge bow. The great bow, over three meters long with limbs thicker than a sea bowl, was paired with arrows two and a half meters long, thick as a teacup. Gu Xichen could not even imagine what it would look like for such an arrow to strike a person.

“This is a true killing machine!” Gu Xichen looked at Xinjia, who was silently engrossed in his work, feeling a surge of exhilaration in his heart: “Thank the heavens he is mine!”

If it weren't for the fact that Xinjia had consumed eighty percent of Gu Xichen’s soul origin, requiring slow recuperation to recover, Gu Xichen would have been tempted to summon thousands of Yellow Turban strongmen like Xinjia in one go, just as Siren did. With so many powerful enforcers, Gu Xichen would truly dare to lead a direct assault on Siren’s camp.

“What a pity, the expenditure was too great!” Gu Xichen sighed with incomprehension, “Why is it so easy for Siren to summon puppets?”

Shaking his head in confusion, Gu Xichen jumped up.

“Xinjia, let’s get back to work! Push harder these next few days. I want to see Siren weep!”

Gu Xichen narrowed his eyes as he watched several transport ships wobbling as they took off from the camp. These transports were all ‘Hercules’ Ninth Generation models produced by the Gu Corporation.

“Products of the Gu Corporation. Excellent!”

A little over ten minutes later, a squad cautiously moving through the dense forest suddenly suffered a terrifying blow. Thick wooden arrows shot out from the woods, accompanied by soul-shaking whooshing sounds. Each wooden arrow pierced the bodies of at least three mercenaries. Blood soaked the ground. In less than the time it takes for three deep breaths, over a hundred and fifty impossibly thick wooden arrows swept down like a torrential storm on the group of over two hundred soldiers. Mercenaries, their arms and legs skewered onto the wooden shafts like barbecue, writhed on the ground. Their piercing shrieks scattered the nearby birds into a chaotic flurry of escape.

Two medium-sized magnetic levitation vehicles in the squad were stunned into immobility. By the time the drivers frantically swiveled their gun turrets to fire toward the source of the arrows, the rapid-fire cannon shells only leveled a patch of forest, failing to touch a single hair on any living thing.

One squad, two squads, three squads… This time, more soldiers were wounded, but not a single one was killed.

In the short span of three days, over a thousand mercenaries filled Siren’s camp, suffering injuries ranging from minor to severe.

Current Federation technology could not guarantee the safe passage of seriously wounded personnel through wormholes. These casualties had to be treated locally. Helplessly, Siren, with a crestfallen face, converted the largest Hercules Ninth Generation transport ship into a temporary field hospital. The hatch remained open as new wounded soldiers were continuously ferried in.

Gu Xichen, with Xinjia in tow, arrived once again outside Siren’s camp.

This time, Xinjia was carrying a 105mm artillery cannon stripped from a medium-sized combat vehicle. Beside him were ten neatly stacked ammunition crates.

Gu Xichen smiled broadly, pointing toward the camp ahead, and commanded: “Level it for me!”

Xinjia leveled the cannon, aimed it at the camp gate, and triggered the firing mechanism.

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