At this moment, Yin Ji truly had nowhere to turn.
In terms of martial arts, although she was skilled, she was no match for Alfonso, a Grandmaster of Demonic Martial Arts.
More importantly, although her spiritual cultivation was extremely high, she did not possess Lan Ling’s heaven defying Golden Demon Body. After Lan Ling’s spiritual sea was injured, it recovered almost instantly, whereas she required a long time to heal.
Now, her entire body had lost control. She lay helplessly on the ground, able only to watch Alfonso pounce towards her.
She could even clearly smell the strong stench of alcohol on his breath.
If she lost her chastity to such a barbaric brute, it would truly be a fate worse than death.
At that moment, a cold snort sounded from outside.
Alfonso shuddered and abruptly stopped.
The person outside was his wife.
She was not particularly beautiful, nor was her martial skill exceptional. But she was the niece of the Black Demon Banner Lord.
Of course, the Black Demon Banner Lord had dozens of children. Even his own daughters were not especially valued, let alone a niece.
Even so, he was still the Banner Lord, the supreme chieftain over hundreds of thousands of square kilometres. Although Alfonso gained little from that connection, he certainly dared not offend him.
He had coveted Priestess Yin Ji for a long time.
Why had he never dared touch her?
Simply because he feared his sinister wife.
Besides, Alfonso had now fallen from power. He might have to rely on his wife’s status to intimidate others. Otherwise, the surrounding chieftains, all watching like hungry wolves, might truly move against both his Wild Horse Tribe and the Ankara Tribe.
Alfonso looked greedily at Yin Ji lying on the ground, his eyes filled with reluctance.
She was truly beautiful.
Her figure was absolutely irresistible.
Within several hundred miles, perhaps only Constantine’s seductive second wife could compare with her.
“Ah…”
Looking embarrassed, Alfonso left.
“Slap!”
A loud smack sounded from outside.
Without question, Alfonso had just been slapped across the face.
His wife truly was formidable.
But her fierceness was completely different from Gou Li’s.
One glance at Gou Li and anyone could tell she was a tigress, beautiful, fiery, fierce, and powerful.
Alfonso’s wife, however, looked merely average.
She was tall, thin, and bony.
Her face was not ugly, but it was gloomy. It was as though she had never smiled in her life and regarded the entire world with hostility.
She walked inside and looked coldly at Yin Ji lying on the ground.
A trace of jealousy flashed through her eyes.
This human woman was simply too beautiful.
So beautiful that she wanted nothing more than to slash her face with a knife until it was ruined.
“Know your place. Do not desire men you have no right to desire. Do not seduce men you have no right to seduce. Otherwise, I will make you regret ever being born.”
After speaking, she turned around and left.
Priestess Yin Ji did not bother explaining.
Although she was still young, she already understood human nature very well.
She knew explanations were useless.
In the eyes of a wife, the one at fault was always the other woman, never her own husband.
Only after quite some time did Yin Ji gradually regain control of her body.
She struggled into a sitting position.
Then tears silently streamed down her face.
Once upon a time, she had a fiery but loving mother.
A father who pretended to be stern, though his heart was soft.
And an elder brother as dependable as a mountain.
She had lived carefree within the Divine Dragon Temple, studying peacefully while waiting for the day she would marry.
Although she was not deeply in love with the man she was to marry, he was both her cousin and her classmate at the Divine Dragon Temple.
He was handsome, noble, somewhat pretentious, but ultimately a good man who adored her.
She had always believed she was the happiest girl in the world.
Then one day, all that happiness was destroyed.
Destroyed by Soren.
Her father died.
Her elder brother disappeared, his fate unknown.
Her mother was also killed.
She herself became a victim of political struggles, almost reduced to a prisoner.
For the sake of justice and fairness, she had exposed things that should never have been exposed, completely offending the supreme Divine Dragon Temple.
There was no longer any place for her within the Human Kingdoms, forcing her to flee south.
From the happiest girl in the world, she had become someone with nothing.
Once protected by her father, mother, and elder brother, she was now completely alone, bullied by others, with nowhere to belong.
What should she do now?
Today, Alfonso had revealed his true, greedy nature.
His wife no longer tolerated her either.
Did the Ankara Tribe still have any place for her?
Moreover, thanks to that bastard Lan Ling, her identity as a human had already been exposed, causing every Rakshasa to reject her.
If Alfonso had not been protecting her, barbarian experts would probably have come long ago to kill or violate her.
If she left the Ankara Tribe, where else could she go?
To Lan Ling’s Flame Demon Tribe?
No.
Absolutely not.
Not even in death.
Yin Ji herself did not know why she refused so stubbornly to go there.
It was as though a demon waited there with its jaws wide open, ready to swallow her whole.
It was all Soren’s fault.
He had destroyed everything she had.
“Soren, one day I will tear your body into countless pieces!”
And so, although Yin Ji wanted to escape, she had nowhere else to go.
She could only remain by Alfonso’s side.
Fortunately, after sobering up the following day, Alfonso came to apologise.
He promised he would never offend her again.
That eased Yin Ji’s mind slightly.
But it was obvious that their relationship could never return to what it had once been.
…
Thirty days after the great battle.
The population of the Flame Demon Tribe officially exceeded thirty thousand.
An army of thirteen thousand had been organised.
Originally, they had planned to establish only one thousand cavalry.
That was now nowhere near enough.
The force was expanded to two thousand cavalry.
However, the entire Flame Demon Tribe possessed only about two thousand warhorses, which was far from sufficient.
By this point, the number of refugees arriving each day had finally begun to decline.
Both Suo Mo and Lan Ling breathed sighs of relief.
Such rapid expansion and such explosive population growth had nearly exceeded what they could handle.
On the thirty first day, following the original plan, Lan Ling ordered Gang Duo and Duo Long to each lead seven hundred cavalry away from the tribe on raiding missions.
Originally, each was only supposed to command five hundred cavalry.
However, because the tribe had expanded so rapidly, and many of the newly joined Near Human warriors had originally been cavalrymen, leaving them unused would have been a waste.
Lan Ling’s first target was the iron mine belonging to the Chimera Tribe.
…
The Wilderness did not lack iron ore.
In fact, there was plenty of it.
However, a mine like the Chimera Tribe’s was extremely rare.
It was an open pit mine.
There was no need to dig tunnels.
One could simply pick up ore from the surface and smelt it.
Furthermore, the iron ore here contained a very high iron content with few impurities.
Its sulphur content was especially low, producing exceptionally high quality iron and steel, superior to that produced by other tribes.
Unfortunately…
Iron mines were not nearly as rare as salt wells in the Wilderness.
The entire Silver Alliance possessed three iron mines.
Although Constantine earned considerable wealth from this mine, iron could never command the astronomical prices that salt from the Silver Tribe could.
Thus, he never became as fabulously wealthy as the Silver Tribe.
Most of the iron was therefore used internally.
It was forged into swords and weapons.
Even the city gates were reinforced with ten thousand jin of iron plating.
Why not make armour?
Because armour was far too complicated.
The local blacksmiths lacked the necessary skills.
Besides, the Rakshasa barbarians considered wearing armour disgraceful.
In their view, armour was something worn by the weak Near Human race.
They believed fighting in armour was inconvenient.
The Chimera Tribe’s iron mine covered more than two thousand mu.
It employed around one thousand mining slaves.
Yes, slaves.
Not miners.
All these mining slaves were native barbarian races captured from the deep mountains.
Wolfmen, Leopardmen, and Tigermen were far too powerful, so ordinary tribes avoided provoking them.
However, there were also less intelligent races such as Goatmen and Bullmen.
They were obedient, immensely strong, and not particularly intelligent.
They made the perfect mining slaves.
Besides the one thousand mining slaves and more than one hundred smelters, the remainder of the personnel were soldiers guarding the mine.
Originally there had been five hundred.
However, after the Chimera Tribe’s main army was nearly annihilated, only three hundred mine guards remained.
The commander of these guards was none other than Suo Mo’s former adopted son, Du Yan.
…
Du Yan was miserable.
He was furious.
First, Nini An had revealed her true colours.
She had humiliated him with merciless words, tearing away the affectionate mask she had always worn.
She had described him as a toad dreaming of eating swan meat.
Before he had even recovered from the shock and anger, an official transfer order removed him from Constantine’s side and sent him back to the Chimera Tribe under Constantine II’s command.
After being wounded by an arrow, Constantine II had become especially irritable.
The moment Du Yan returned, he kicked him aside and humiliated him repeatedly.
Afterwards, Du Yan was sent to the tribal mine.
Every day he slept outdoors, surrounded by Goatmen and Bullmen.
Because he was a Near Human, and because Lan Ling had already led the foreign army in rebellion, even his own soldiers spoke to him with contempt and showed him no respect.
His days became unbearably miserable.
His heart was filled with bitterness and unwillingness.
Yet there was nothing he could do.
He could only endure each day.
At that moment, Du Yan looked up at the sky.
The endless sound of hammering echoed throughout the dusty mine.
Several hundred soldiers sat carelessly on the ground.
Laughter rang out again and again.
The object of their ridicule was Du Yan himself.
They mocked him for being a toad dreaming of eating swan meat.
He had actually imagined he could marry Miss Nini An, who was now the Little Barbarian King’s concubine.
These men dared laugh at Du Yan.
But they dared not laugh at Lan Ling.
Deep down, they already feared him.
Lan Ling had not only rebelled and established his own tribe.
He had also slept with their chieftain’s wife.
In the most recent battle, he had wiped out more than ten thousand elite soldiers of the Chimera Tribe.
The duel between Du Yan and Lan Ling had become yet another reason to mock him.
They laughed at his arrogance.
How dare he challenge Lan Ling?
Who was Lan Ling?
A monstrous genius.
A bringer of death.
For Du Yan to fight him had been nothing but self humiliation.
Just then, the ground suddenly began to tremble.
The thunder of galloping hooves echoed like an incoming tide, growing louder and louder.
Du Yan instantly came to his senses.
He rushed to higher ground and shouted,
“Enemy attack! Enemy attack!”
The Chimera Tribe’s mine sat within a sunken valley.
Its entrance, about two hundred metres wide, was protected by a massive wooden stockade built from huge logs.
It was extremely sturdy.
The mine guards were also elite soldiers.
The moment they heard the alarm, they stopped laughing and hurried onto the walls, drawing their bows.
Only a few minutes later…
A vast cavalry force came into Du Yan’s view.
There were more than one thousand horsemen.
Leading them was Lan Ling.
The man Du Yan had once hated to his very bones, and who had now become unforgettable.
Had Lan Ling never appeared, Du Yan might still have been the proud genius of the Chimera Tribe.
Even if he could not marry Nini An, he might have married Dina.
He might even have become the supreme commander of the foreign army.
It was the Lan Ling before him who had dragged him from the clouds into the mud.
Lan Ling’s cavalry advanced to within five hundred metres of the mine.
Inside the stockade, the defenders turned deathly pale.
Their limbs trembled.
This was Lan Ling.
The terrifying bringer of calamity who had slaughtered nearly twenty thousand warriors of the Chimera Tribe.
Lan Ling rode forward alone.
His mount was not a warhorse, but the Golden Griffon.
The enormous beast walked steadily until it stopped one hundred metres before the gate.
No one dared fire an arrow at him.
His fearsome reputation had already spread throughout the entire Silver Alliance.
Lan Ling looked up at the soldiers on the walls, then at Du Yan.
He said coldly,
“I will count backwards from ten. If you have not opened the gates and surrendered before I finish, once we break in, I will slaughter every single one of you. Not one will be spared.”
“Ten!”
“Nine!”
“Eight!”
…
Lan Ling finished counting.
No one surrendered.
No one opened the gates.
Lan Ling rode the Griffon forward to the gate.
He raised his several hundred jin greatsword.
Gripping it with both hands, he gathered the power of his bloodline into a devastating strike and slashed fiercely at the gate.
“Bang! Bang! Bang!”
He could not cut through the mighty gates of the Chimera Tribe itself.
But the gate of a mere mining stockade was another matter.
“Bang! Bang! Bang!”
The deafening impacts echoed continuously.
His reputation was so terrifying that, even while he hacked at the gate, not a single person dared shoot an arrow at him.
After the tenth strike…
“Boom!”
The stockade gate collapsed.
Lan Ling swung his greatsword forward.
“Charge in. Kill them!”
Immediately, more than one thousand cavalry surged into the mine like a flood.
The Chimera mine guards returned fire with arrows.
They dared not shoot at Lan Ling.
That would have been suicide.
Everyone knew of his unbelievable archery.
But they still dared shoot at the Flame Demon cavalry.
Lan Ling did not use his bow.
Otherwise, those mere three hundred defenders would not have been enough for him to kill alone.
His goal was to train his soldiers.
Real combat was the best training.
They needed to see blood.
…
One hour later, the battle was over.
Of the three hundred mine guards, more than two hundred had been killed.
The remaining few dozen knelt and surrendered.
Among those kneeling…
Was Du Yan.
Du Yan had actually knelt before him and surrendered.
Lan Ling had never expected such a thing.
Ling Ao had chosen death rather than kneel before Regent Soren.
Yet Du Yan was willing to surrender to his greatest enemy, Lan Ling.
Seeing Lan Ling’s gaze fall upon him, Du Yan lowered his head to the ground and said,
“This humble one, Du Yan, greets the Chieftain. For the sake of my adoptive father’s memory, please accept my surrender!”