Commanding Wind and Cloud

The blue potion tasted slightly sweet and flew downward to the stomach. All of a sudden, the dried up reservoirs in his body were awakened and spouted out incessantly like spring jetting from the barren earth, reinvigorating his warrior energy to the peak status.

“How... how come?” Qian Jin got startled by the power recovering medicine in his hand. A tenth of the whole potion could reinvigorate his dried up energy in an instant!

A growl of a beast woke Qian Jin up from astonishment. With a horizontal chop of Zhanmadao, Qian Jin chopped off two thumb-sized bamboo pipes and the head of a Single-armed Ape.

In this hazardous environment filled with beasts, hiding on the tree wouldn’t prove to be a secure measure. The beasts with a good nose would eventually find one’s location with time.

Qian Jin carried his sabre and looked down at the ground through the branches where a crowd of wild wolves amounting to more than a dozen gathered. If they could climb the tree, they would have long pounced at him.

Tucking away the marvelous potion with care, Qian Jin decided to drop in the medicine store when available. Since the Blacksmithing Technique learnt in the Endless World could be of use, how about the knowledge of pharmaceutics? What if it could also function?

Jumping down from the tree, Qian Jin waved his Zhanmadao downwards and chopped off a wild wolf, which was skipping high, into half.

Leaving carcasses of wild wolves on the ground, Qian Jin carried on marching forward with Zhanmadao, which attracted his glance once in a while. Through consecutive fights, he found that this sabre with more than three-feet-long blade was really handy, yet it remained a little short. The best blade length ought to be five feet.

“When I forge my own warrior weapon, I’ll make a weapon with five-feet-long blade!” Qian Jin licked his mouth and grinned as he lowered his head to observe the map Blake gave him.

According to the map, his destination was less than two hours away.

“Walk faster and I can arrive there earlier.” Qian Jin put away the map.

With warrior energy filling his legs, Qian Jin watched out for the surroundings. Any move in the air would be received by his incisive chop, which extinguished the pouncing beasts and the decadent swordsmen nine times out of ten.

Rushing out of the luxuriant forest, Qian Jin suddenly stopped and found himself in a mountain headquarter!

This mountain headquarter was constructed in a strange way, with no front door but two semicircles joint by timber columns which were then connected with the outer trees of the forest. Traversing the forest, one showed up in the manmade headquarter.

Qian Jin’s unexpected arrival disturbed the silence of the mountain headquarter, and those decadent swordsmen who were then sitting or lying on the ground while basking under the sun instantly stood up, carrying their swords and wearing an atrocious look.

“Damn it! How could I be so unlucky? Blake’s map hasn’t marked such a place?” Qian Jin looked at these 70 or 80 decadent swordsmen, pulled his lower cheek and bitterly grinned, “Um... what if I say I walked here by mistake... Will you just ignore me?”

Oww! Just then, someone from the swordsmen uttered a strange howl, stirring up his fellows who were keeping their silence to raise their swords and rush at Qian Jin at full speed!

“Fxxk! Do you people mean it?” Qian Jin couldn’t help but curse. He did chop off quite a lot of enemies, but he hadn’t been confronted with such a large number of adversaries. Whether he would survive or not remained something unknown.

Qian Jin tightly carried Zhanmadao in his hand as he glided down like a falling meteor from the blue. The finely chosen blade made of quality steel kept shaking and rotating to both left and right, targeting at the enemies’ hands and shoulders, making it hard to judge whether it would fall on the left shoulder or the right shoulder.

Through multiple chopping and killing, Qian Jin began to understand the connotations and knack of Warrior Weapon chopping with his body, instead of performing moves for mechanical acting.

Puff! After chopping one person, Qian Jin didn’t take back his Zhanmadao, but flicked that swordsman’s weapon and threw it at another’s throat. Bouncing at the right side by slightly bending his knees, Qian Jin did not hesitate to run away as quickly as he could.

He himself was just a so-called number one warrior of Oakland Mage and Warrior Novice Academy, rather than a guardian of the city like Fabreidis. However gallant he might be, he would not try his brawn on fighting with seventy or eighty swordsmen equivalent to Level 5 Warriors merely with his Zhanmadao.

Fighting against a dozen on his own might be possible if Qian Jin was fully stimulated, but against a multitude of 70 or 80? Such a thing could only be counted on the powerful people like Fabreidis.

Qian Jin was not solely fleeing, but searching for opportunity for combat in his escape. He run about the peripheries of the mountain headquarter—a strategy he learnt from tactics course at school to mobilize the majority of the enemy, separate its group in movement, and offer them a fatal attack.

Either fighting between big troops or attacking a crowd on one’s own follows the same rule. Qian Jin seemed to be aimlessly running about, but in fact, he was gradually dispersing these decadent swordsmen.

“Opportunities!” Qian Jin suddenly stopped escaping upon seeing three sorehead swordsmen nearest to him. He turned back and chopped off these three and then began running away again.

Before long, the swordsmen found out their loophole. They formed small groups and then a big circle, contracting the moving space of Qian Jin.

One hour...

Qian Jin sat on the ground scattered with broken bodies as he heavily panted. Zhanmadao was stuck beside him. His body used to be stained with other people’s blood, but now a dozen scars with different depths appeared on it. A slight move would make him grimace in pain.

“It’s no wonder that the tactics teacher repeatedly stressed the important role of maps in war.” Qian Jin stripped one dead sorehead swordsman’s clothes with great efforts, took out the vulnerary from his leather bag, sprinkled the powder onto his scars, grimaced with his mouth wide opened, and then bandaged the scars with cloth strips.

Fastening the cloth strips tightly around his arm, Qian Jin nearly cried out. “Thanks to Blake’s map! Was it not for the absent mark of this mountain headquarter, I wouldn’t realize the importance of maps in war. If I join the army and step on the Human-Demon Battlefront, I will draw a map by myself, or else my life would be held by others, which is far too dangerous.”

Qian Jin stood up with the prop of his sabre, and looked about the messy ground which resembled the battlefield slaughtered by Shura. A sense of pride rose up inside him.