Chapter 1870 - 1873: Silent and Unseen
"Liu Fang! May you die a miserable death! You betrayed my trust! You traitor! You ungrateful bastard biting the hand that feeds you! I’ll tear you limb from limb and eat you alive! I..."
Hong Hu was roaring!
He was staring at Liu Fang and roaring!
Roaring nonstop!
He was very unwilling to accept this!
He couldn’t understand it!
He was furious!
However, obviously no one cared about his roaring, and even less about how he felt.
Watching the roaring Hong Hu, Liu Fang couldn’t even summon the slightest bit of guilt.
Yeah, he wasn’t like those spies in novels who betray their side and then start feeling regretful and guilty and all that crap!
He felt nothing at all!
Because this Hong Hu was a complete idiot, through and through!
The only reason he’d become the top leader was purely because his strength was high!
He never cared about his close subordinates, he didn’t give a damn about city governance, and he laughed uproariously at the chaos in the city.
He even thought he’d treated Liu Fang as a trusted confidant, but Liu Fang had never gotten a single bit of benefit from Hong Hu.
This was a man who was utterly unfit to be a leader, inside and out; any manager in the Lu Group did a better job than him, never mind Young Master Bu.
So for Liu Fang, with a leader like this, forget loyalty—if not for the mission, just seeing this kind of person would make him feel sick.
Since he’d never invested any emotion, where was the guilt supposed to come from?!
So, amid Hong Hu’s roaring, Liu Fang quickly finished him off, and wiped out those natives as well.
He was not about to commit the rookie mistake of a villain who dies because he talks too much.
After that, once the great hall was cleaned up, the banquet started again.
Only this time, the stars of the show had changed—it was now Liu Fang and their hundred thousand Iron Cavalry!
That night, it was the banquet that changed hands; the next day, it would be the city’s master changing hands!
The change of ownership went very smoothly—so smooth it didn’t even raise a ripple!
Because at the grassroots level, as far as they were concerned, the master hadn’t changed at all; it was still the same people as before!
As for the news that the top leader Hong Hu had announced he was shutting himself away and wouldn’t come out—who cared?!
After all, even when Hong Hu did go out, hardly anyone recognized him to begin with!
And so this small town, without a sound, became the first forward outpost Gourd Island nailed down on Sword Island!
𝚏𝐫𝚎𝗲𝕨𝐞𝐛𝕟𝚘𝐯𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝗺
...
Liu Fang’s success became the starting gun for the hundred thousand Iron Cavalry to start seizing territory.
A day later, another small town belonging to another faction, located around the mine, also silently fell into the hands of the hundred thousand Iron Cavalry.
Three days after that, two cities under these two factions coincidentally experienced explosions; the source of the blasts was the ore shipped into the cities.
At the same time, the City Lords of both cities received intel that the other faction was preparing to attack them, and that the explosions were just the opening salvo.
In a fury, the two City Lords charged out with their armies, and clashed violently not far from the mine, the slaughter turning heaven and earth upside down!
Then, for some reason—maybe because the fighting was too intense—it triggered a collapse of the ground, and a huge pit swallowed all those who were hacking each other to pieces.
For a Cultivator, falling into a not particularly deep pit was no big deal, but the deadly part was that the moment they fell in, the pit actually exploded!
Both sides suffered catastrophic losses on the spot!
So the two factions had no choice but to call a truce, each pulling back to their own city to rest and recover, while sending urgent requests for help up the chain to their superiors.
Under the guidance of the "advisers" played by the hundred thousand Iron Cavalry, the two City Lords both chose to chalk the whole thing up to the other side’s sinister plot; they claimed they’d fought desperately and forced the enemy to abandon their plan to seize the cities, turning their blunder into supposed merit, while quietly burying the incident of the giant pit explosion.
To be safe, the sixth child of the hundred thousand Iron Cavalry led men to set up a dragnet along the only routes the messengers of both factions had to take.
In the end, both factions’ messengers were captured, and the Iron Cavalry’s men impersonated them to deliver the messages!
The bosses of the two factions flew into a rage after receiving the news, and immediately dispatched reinforcements to the cities!
Meanwhile, the fourth and fifth children laid another dragnet along the road; with planning against the unprepared and using every trick they had, they intercepted and captured all of the two factions’ reinforcements!
Once they had extracted all the information they wanted, the hundred thousand Iron Cavalry impersonated those troops again and entered the two cities.
Up to this point, these two cities—which had just suffered huge losses in that earlier battle—finally received a "replenishment" of fighting strength; but neither City Lord realized that this fighting strength had already, without a sound, become people of a third-party force!
Following almost a carbon copy of Liu Fang’s plan, after replacing the vast majority of the cities’ combat power with the hundred thousand Iron Cavalry, they seized an opportunity and silently took away the ownership of the two cities once more.
Thus, with the mine where the Transmission Array was anchored as the center, and the two cities that originally belonged to different factions as the boundary, the area within was completely turned into an unshakable foothold for the hundred thousand Iron Cavalry!
And Sword Island as a whole still hadn’t shown any reaction; they thought nothing had happened and everything was business as usual!
Xiao Zhi also arrived on Sword Island according to schedule, and immediately started constructing the Transmission Array!
Normally, building this kind of cross-island Transmission Array was insanely time-consuming and labor-intensive, and would cause a huge commotion.
But since the surrounding area already belonged entirely to the hundred thousand Iron Cavalry, that meant no matter how many materials were needed, they were supplied in full; no matter how big a commotion it caused, it was suppressed completely!
In the end, persistence paid off!
A Transmission Array that could almost decide the Fate of two islands was quietly set up on Sword Island’s turf.
From this point on, there was no longer any barrier of communication between Gourd Island and Sword Island.
However, Lu Xiaobu did not enter Sword Island, because once he set foot on Sword Island, that would mean the war had officially begun!
His not going in didn’t mean things couldn’t; thus, massive amounts of combat supplies from Gourd Island started pouring into Sword Island through the Transmission Array!
Slowly, a strong bloody, iron-and-steel stench began to spread silently outward from the mine, sending chills down people’s spines!
But there is no wall in the world that doesn’t let the wind through.
So, after being kept secret for so long, the operation finally started drawing attention because the warlike atmosphere grew thicker and thicker.
The only reason Gourd Island’s movements had stayed secret for so long was because no one had been paying attention; those at the top usually only cared about the revenues here.
Now that some people who weren’t completely brain-dead started paying attention, those secrets stopped being secrets; layer by layer they were peeled back, and outsiders gradually began to see what was really changing here!
They just hadn’t thought to look toward another island yet; they only knew someone had seized power and usurped control!
So for the moment, the two original faction bosses here were burning with rage!
War was on the verge of breaking out!