Gongsun Jing forcefully exhaled a turbid breath, feeling some sourness in the palm of his hand that grasped the sword.
The fighting was ceaseless. Even as a Middle Third Rank Martial Artist with enduring inner strength, relentlessly confronting these formidable opponents from Jianghu without retreating was not sustainable in peak condition for long.
In the sky, the battle between Wang Anfeng and the towering Swordsman had been raging for a while. Sword Qi rolled through the sky like muffled thunder, occasionally sending broad and vigorous strips of Sword Qi piercing into the densely packed clouds above, triggering the thunder to roar.
Gongsun Jing spat out a mouthful of bloodied spittle and roared as he struck with his sword.
At this moment, the Fairy Sword that could startle the heavens lay hidden among them. The Longsword, capable of summoning millennia of snow from Heaven and Earth wailed incessantly in the shadows but was firmly pressed inside the Sword Scabbard, unable to be drawn.
In the Sword Dao, there are ways to conceal and nourish a sword, to draw and kill with a sword. That intention that spanned the skies, now restrained within the mere three-foot Sword Scabbard, resonating and trembling, awaiting to shoot straight to the heavens the moment it was drawn, reaching the realm of the Heavenly Sect.
If Gong Yu acted prematurely, everyone would perish, including Divine Martial.
By now, one by one, the Qing Taoqi were losing their strength. Despite rigorous daily training, the members' arms gradually slowed during the real combat, and their chopping blows lightened.
A blow that could have decapitated someone now merely left a wound.
A strike that should have dismembered an arm now only managed to shave off a piece of flesh and bone.
As the blades slowed and lightened, even with the support of comrades in the Military Formation, they could not escape the specter of death. Beside Gongsun Jing, members of the Qing Taoqi fell intermittently, but Gongsun Jing's motions remained steady, unchanged, as if he had a heart of stone, untouched by the death around him.
Gong Yu's eyebrows furrowed slightly as he slowly raised his right hand. Suddenly, Gongsun Jing bellowed aloud.
It was hard to imagine that such a bellow from a war-weary Great Marshal contained a trace of a sob. Gong Yu stopped, staring at his figure, which seemed no different from usual, and ultimately did not draw his sword.
That figure was like a mountain.
Gongsun Jing hastily wiped away the blood, panting rapidly, his body covered in blood everywhere.
Three hundred Qing Taoqi, in formation combat, had forcibly dragged down nearly two thousand famed warriors of Jiangnan Road. Naturally, his body was covered in blood, except there were two twisted and comical streaks running down from the corners of his eyes.
He glared fiercely like an enraged wolf at the Jianghu folks who gradually kept their distance.
Behind him, only a little over a hundred comrades remained standing.
"All those stories say, eh, when someone dies in battle, they should shout something like 'even in death, I still...' Ah, it's all lies," a cheerful rogue patted his head twenty-two years ago.
Back then, he was just a youth, having just experienced his first significant and brutal skirmish, shaking so much he could barely hold onto his sword.
That rogue, Wu Zheng, told him that when someone dies in a fight, they wouldn't react in such a way; if they had that much strength, they'd be better off biting the enemy's neck fiercely.
Most soldiers die silently in fierce battles, like red-hot charcoal thrown into water, making a slight hissing noise as the blood flows, then quietly collapsing to the ground, unable to say a word.
When he fell, during the attack on Yan Country, he truly fell like intensely burning charcoal thrown into icy water, hitting the ground heavily without making a sound.
He did it to pull back a furious Gongsun Jing.
When he died, his back was full of Wolf Fang Arrows.
Gongsun Jing had heard that dull thud too many times over more than a decade wandering through Jianghu. He almost thought he had become immune to that sound.
But now, every time someone fell heavily behind him, his heart would violently twitch, the feeling of losing comrades mingling with memories, tormenting his heart as though reliving the past...
Yet back then, he was just a young lad.
He was the youngest in the Commanding Generals Camp, protected by the Great Marshal, by General Li, by Advisor Yuchi, and by many towering figures. He could afford to feel distressed, to weep bitterly, to fight furiously, to even disregard his own life and to drown his sorrows in drink and tears.
But now, things were different...
The figures that stood before him, tall, distinguished, and elderly, had blurred into shadows and disappeared one by one. Unknowingly, such a reckless man, the once young boy, had become the leading Great Marshal.
He had come to realize what those stoic generals, who wouldn't cry, felt inside. They were human too; how could they not feel? But they simply could not afford to.
The world is full of compromises, willing or not.
When they became generals, they were no longer entitled to weep openly or bleed freely. This compromise was for those behind them, for many more to have the chance and the right to do so