The sheriff was in charge of one end, while Qianye and the one-eyed man handled the other. The three of them took a deep breath and with a synchronized effort, they lifted the massive one-ton gate and pushed it towards the city tower.
Though the one-eyed man hadn’t yet activated his origin nodes, he had been training diligently and was close to activating his first. His innate talent was physical strength enhancement. Qianye steadily displayed the strength of a Level 1 Warrior, nothing more, nothing less.
A seventeen-year-old Level 1 Warrior would only evoke envy, but a Level 2 Warrior at that age was different. Someone qualified to join the Imperial Special Forces wouldn’t be running a small bar in this desolate place.
By eight in the morning, the three were exhausted. But the repair of the gate was only halfway done, and the damaged steam boiler on one side needed parts from a major city.
The new parts would take at least a week to arrive. The bald sheriff, though worried, had no choice but to endure another anxious week.
At this time, it was already daylight in the Upperland. However, during the Dark Season in the Evernight Continent, the paths of several Upperlands intersected above it, blocking the sunlight.
On the Evernight Continent, the sky was only bright from ten in the morning to three in the afternoon; the rest of the time, it was pitch black.
In the night sky, the crimson full moon still hung there. In the legends of the Evernight Continent, whenever the Crimson Moon appeared, disaster followed. When the Blood Moon rose, the power of the dark races would increase, and the wild beasts would become even more ferocious and violent.
Seeing the Blood Moon in the sky, Qianye suddenly felt his blood surging, his senses becoming extremely sharp, especially his sense of smell, which increased a thousandfold. He could almost smell every person in the town. The scorching scent of blood nearly drove him mad!
Qianye bid farewell to the sheriff and quickly returned to the bar, locking the door tightly behind him. He then collapsed to the ground, howling like a beast and rolling around.
The thirst for blood was an almost unbearable torment, a pain and emptiness more intense than any addiction to “Euphoria.” If not for the willpower forged during his training in the Bingfa Art, which rivaled that of the Red Scorpion soldiers, he would have succumbed long ago, turning into a true blood slave.
Qianye lay on the cold floor, biting down on a towel to muffle his cries. One hand clutched a steel bar welded into the wall, while the other pounded the ground forcefully!
Boom! Boom! Boom!
Muffled sounds echoed from the bar, causing the entire building to tremble slightly. There were no customers at this hour, and the noise reverberated through the empty hall.
Several scavengers happened to pass by the bar. Hearing the strange, heavy thuds, they all turned pale and altered their course, avoiding the bar as if a demon were imprisoned within.
An hour later, Qianye finally managed to crawl up. He staggered to a cabinet, retrieved a blood bag, and carefully squeezed a few drops into his mouth before sealing it back up, exerting great willpower to return it to its place.
With just a few drops of blood, Qianye broke out in a profuse sweat, leaning against the wall, panting heavily.
Now, he needed a few drops of blood to suppress his bloodthirst. Initially, he could endure the bloodlust without any aid. But three months ago, he needed a single drop of blood to quench the thirst. Now, he required nearly a spoonful of blood to fool his body and stifle the craving.
Animal blood had gradually lost its effectiveness, while human blood’s allure had multiplied. Following this trend, Qianye estimated he could last no more than a year. Although his resistance had been remarkable, the future remained bleak.
His gaze fell on the cabinet again, this time not on the blood bag, but on the military knife beneath it. It was a standard multi-purpose knife of the Red Scorpions, with a battered silver coating. Qianye kept it there for the day when, unable to resist his bloodthirst, he would use it to end his life.
Beside the blood bag lay the black silk pouch.
Qianye smiled bitterly; he now had another option for suicide. The Demon-Breaking Mithril Bullet was lethal to even noble vampires, let alone him, a half-blood slave. Swallowing one would burn all his internal organs to ashes, leaving no external wounds.
At least he could die with some dignity, Qianye thought.
This was another change after being tainted by the dark blood, an instinctive appreciation for beautiful things.
Just as he hadn’t immediately committed suicide, he would never give up until the very end.
He walked to the power room behind the bar and added a few shovels of black stone to the metal behemoth. The steam engine could now run for an entire day, providing the necessary power for the bar and maintaining the temperature in the wine cellar. Qianye’s brew needed to ferment at sixty degrees for ten days to achieve its best flavor.
The town had a public black stone steam tower, but it couldn’t support such luxury. Manjushage and a few other households in the town had their own independent power systems.
At ten in the morning, when the sky just began to brighten, the bar’s door opened, and a heavily tattooed man walked in.
He saw Qianye and approached, patting him warmly on the shoulder. “Brother, there’s another bet! Young Master Zhao sent me to find you. This time, the trip is a bit far, so we need to leave early. As usual, I’ll watch the store. You go ahead!”
Qianye nodded, took a bottle of strong liquor from the shelf, and handed it to the man. “As usual, this is yours.”
The man grinned and gave Qianye a hearty punch on the chest.
Moments later, Qianye arrived at a cluster of large industrial buildings in the northeast corner of the town. After the Dawn War, it had been a substantial mechanical parts factory, rumored to also produce military goods. But as the elite citizens of the Empire moved to the better Upperlands, the factory was abandoned.
Now, the buildings served as the stronghold for Young Master Zhao and his followers.
Young Master Zhao was young, not yet thirty. He was handsome and possessed a neatness and elegance rare among the natives of the wasteland. Rumor had it that he was the illegitimate son of a prominent imperial family, exiled to the Evernight Continent for some reason. The townsfolk called him Young Master Zhao, but no one knew his real name.
In the Empire, the surname Zhao held special significance. The Zhao clan was a prestigious lineage with a history of over a thousand years. An ancestor of the Zhaos had fought in the Dawn War and was one of the seven founding marshals. Today, their influence had only grown, ranking alongside the Zhang, Bai, and Song clans as one of the four great families, second only to the Zhangs.
Thus, the rumors were hard to believe. Even a distant branch of the Zhao family wouldn’t be reduced to collecting protection money in a dilapidated town on the Evernight Continent.
Young Master Zhao indeed had some power. As a Level 1 Warrior, he easily controlled his dozen or so henchmen. But his ambitions seemed to extend beyond Lantern Town, and he often interacted with the forces of nearby towns.
Interactions led to disputes, and these disputes were often resolved through gambling battles, a popular and relatively mild way of settling conflicts. After all, formal warfare between factions always resulted in heavy losses, and the defeated faction would surely perish. But even if the victor paid too high a price, they would eventually be swallowed by other factions.
Seeing Qianye arrive, Young Master Zhao beamed and embraced him, saying warmly, “Finally, you’re here! Brother, this time we’re going to make a big bet. You can’t lose! If you win, I’ll pay for Meier to spend three nights with you. If one woman isn’t enough, you can pick any of my women, except A Yun!”
“Virtual combat again?” Qianye asked.
“Of course! You’re the king of the arena!”
“Alright, I don’t need the women. I want those medicines as payment.”
“No problem! But the next merchant caravan won’t arrive in Black River City for ten days. You might have to wait half a month for the medicines. If you win, I’ll buy double!”
“One bottle is enough.”
Young Master Zhao patted Qianye on the shoulder, laughing, “I, Young Master Zhao, never go back on my word. Double! That’s settled! This bet is very important to me, so just win it.”
Outside, the heavy rumble of engines filled the air as two cargo trucks pulled up. Young Master Zhao, along with Qianye and two other men with a murderous aura, climbed into one truck, while the other twenty thugs piled into the other.
These were old-fashioned steam-powered trucks, preferred on the Evernight Continent for their durability and ease of repair, despite being slower and noisy, unsuitable for the upper class.
The trucks crawled at a snail’s pace of thirty kilometers per hour for four hours, miraculously without breaking down. Ahead, the outline of a large city came into view. This was no small place like Lantern Town, but the populous Black River City, home to over a hundred thousand people.
From afar, the ten-meter-high walls of Black River City were much more imposing than Lantern Town’s, with exposed blue stones revealing a menacing metallic frame. Every few hundred meters along the wall, a cannon and two ballistae were mounted.
In the Evernight Continent, these old ballistae were more effective than cannons against dark races and large, fierce beasts, making them quite popular. The steam-driven, gear-operated mechanisms made re-loading and firing the ballistae much easier and more practical.
Black River City also boasted several colossal smokestacks, spewing clouds of black smoke—the city’s core energy facility, the Perpetual Tower.
Most striking, of course, was the ever-burning lighthouse. Unlike the modest twenty-meter structure in Lantern Town, this one was a towering 150-meter monolith, serving as a beacon for the surrounding area and preventing airborne vessels from crashing into the energy zone.
Compared to Lantern Town, Black River City was a formidable, heavily armed beast.
The two trucks chugged into Black River City. Young Master Zhao was indeed well-known in the region, and they were allowed to enter without paying the entrance fee.
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