Chapter 31
Ling Xu shook his head.
Not because he disagreed, but because he did not understand—because he would never be able to understand—why a man who could produce Lintang coins at an absurd speed, who could ascend to the Bright Sky realm whenever he wished, who could leave him behind in the dust if he wanted, would choose to remain at the same level as him, sharing coins that should have been his alone, just because he was "half lazy" and "didn't want to be left alone."
"Lazy bastard," he muttered, but at the corner of his lips, an uncontainable smile began to bloom—a smile no longer bitter, no longer resentful, but warm like a cup of ginger tea on a cold night, a smile born from the realization that in this cruel world full of betrayal, he was not alone, that beside him stood a lazy man who chose not to be the strongest alone, but to be strong enough together.
The third sky city they arrived at—Fengdu, a name that sounded like a curse uttered by someone on the verge of death.
Completely different from the previous two cities; here, the clouds supporting the city's foundation were not white or gray, but reddish-brown, like burial cloth soaked in blood that had dried for far too long, and from afar, even before their feet stepped onto the main gate, Ling Xu could already smell something all too familiar.
A metallic stench, the scent of blood, the smell of death creeping into the pores of the skin like a fog that refused to fade.
"Welcome, travelers," greeted a commander clad in iron robes with a flat voice, sounding like someone who had welcomed too many guests who would never return.
His weary eyes scanned Ling Xu and Huan Zheng from head to toe, no longer containing curiosity or hostility—only exhaustion that had long rotted into habit.
"You are now mercenaries of this city. There is no choice. No exceptions. If you refuse—"
He let out a long breath, then pointed toward the barracks behind him, filled with figures sitting weakly with empty eyes.
"… You will become shields. And believe me, being a shield here is worse than dying on the battlefield."
Huan Zheng, standing beside Ling Xu with his ragged robe and hood covering half his face, merely shrugged lazily—he had encountered situations like this far too often in his past as one of the three Wheels of Cultivation, where the world forced you to fight even when all you wanted was to sleep—then whispered softly to Ling Xu.
"Just go along with it for now, Liu Xin. We'll find an opening later."
Ling Xu gave a slight nod beneath his hood, his fingers hidden within his sleeves tightening around a small pouch of healing herbs.
Not to be used immediately, but as preparation—because he knew that on this chaotic battlefield, where dozens of small cities were still drenched in the fluids of gods and the blood of humanity that never truly dried, being a healer was a golden ticket to surviving longer than ordinary soldiers.
The days in Fengdu passed like a nightmare that never truly ended—every morning, before the sun could reveal its face behind the thick red fog, Ling Xu and Huan Zheng were already standing at the front lines with the other mercenaries, receiving commands from a different commander each day.
In a battlefield this chaotic, skilled cultivators and elders fell one after another, and command shifted hands like a torch passed through heavy rain.
"You, to the eastern sector!" shouted a female cultivator with a gaping wound on her arm, her voice hoarse but still carrying authority that made the mercenaries move without thinking.
"You, to the western sector! And you two—"
She pointed at Ling Xu and Huan Zheng, who were trying to remain inconspicuous at the back of the formation.
"You're coming with me to the medical post. I heard you can heal, kid."
Ling Xu, called "kid," only smiled faintly beneath his hood—because the label worked to his advantage, making him appear weak, harmless, unworthy of suspicion—then followed the woman with perfectly obedient steps, while Huan Zheng, walking beside him with his usual lazy gait, slipped a quiet whisper between their footsteps.
"We gather coins here," he murmured, his half-closed eyes scanning the surroundings with caution.
"You heal the wounded, I kill the attackers. But don't stand out too much. Let them think we're just lowly mercenaries who won't last long."
Ling Xu nodded without turning—he was already familiar with this pattern, already accustomed to the rhythm of healing and killing in turns, no longer finding it strange that the same hands that had just prepared medicine to treat a soldier's wounds would, in the next moment, release poisoned needles toward enemies trying to slip through the defensive gaps.
And for days, for weeks, amid swirling dust and blood that never dried, Ling Xu and Huan Zheng moved like two shadows unseen by the city's higher authorities.
They followed every command obediently, shifting from one commander to another without complaint, without standing out, without ever doing anything that would have their names recorded in battle reports.
In between, Ling Xu healed dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of wounded soldiers—from minor scratches to fatal piercing wounds, from low-ranking troops to mid-level commanders whose eyes grew moist with disbelief that someone still cared for them amid this ongoing apocalypse.
"Thank you, Miss," said a young soldier whose face was still covered in acne, his broken arm now neatly wrapped by Ling Xu.
His eyes shone with sincere respect, even though he did not know that the woman before him was actually the number one fugitive among the gods of the sky cities.
"I won't forget your kindness."
Ling Xu only smiled faintly.
A smile no longer bitter, no longer resentful, but calm like the surface of a lake on a quiet morning—then replied in a soft voice she would never use when speaking to Huan Zheng.
"No need to thank me. I'm just doing my duty."
Meanwhile, on the other side of the battlefield, Huan Zheng—with his usual lazy movements that had become the deadliest motions on this battlefield—managed to gather tens of millions of Humanity Star coins from the human cultivators he killed, without anyone ever suspecting a thing.
Every death looked like an accident, like coincidence, like the result of ordinary battlefield chaos—when in truth, behind every fallen corpse was a single lazy motion of a hand no one ever saw.
Amid the endless storm of battle, between clouds of dust and splashes of blood that soaked the ground into mud, Ling Xu suddenly found himself surrounded by twenty human cultivators at Supernatural Star Level 33—one level above him, one level that, in the cultivation world, meant the difference between life and death, between survival and becoming a corpse that had not yet fallen.
To be continued…