Chapter 65: Bell's Order—Support the Sun God Priests

The next morning, which was also the fourth day since the start of the counterattack plan, Jier indeed waited for the messenger who had departed for Yemei Town the previous evening and was now returning early in the morning.

The man jumped off his horse, panting, and personally handed a scroll containing Bell's orders and a letter to Jier.

"You've worked hard, go get some rest."

Jier still opened the scroll in public, read its contents aloud, and informed the Warriors who were eating nearby.

【To Knight Qiao-Jier: Having learned that you easily took Kangkaiqi Village and, after successfully escorting the villagers of Kangkaiqi Village back to resettle, also took the opportunity to clear out the monsters entrenched in Enlier Village, this outstanding initiative is worthy of encouragement. The news of this victory has uplifted the people in Yemei Town and has made the Warriors and Soldiers still fighting monsters everywhere firmly believe that our counterattack plan will ultimately succeed! I will record this merit separately and provide extra rewards to the Warriors on your route! However, our counterattack plan must be paused today. Knight Jier, upon receiving this order, you must lead your Warriors, immediately take carriages, and rush north to the temporary camp of the Sun God Priests to support their route. Alternatively, Knight Jier, you may decide for yourself to first take Bitter Water Village, which is their destination, and then head south to support them. As for me, I will pull out some Hunting Squads to patrol the surroundings of the southern villages that have already been resettled by carriage, hunting down sporadic monsters. Bell-Sasi】

The surrounding Warriors were all surprised, as they did not know the specific losses on the Sun God Church's route, only that every night, they could see light splashing down from the north of Yemei Town, making the night as bright as day.

So they naturally assumed that the Sun God Priests over there were so powerful that there shouldn't be any problems, right? Perhaps they were even slaughtering monsters!

Who would have thought that on the morning of this fourth day, Young Master Bell would actually need to personally issue an order for them to rush over to provide support.

Thus, the Warriors began to discuss it, guessing at all sorts of possibilities.

Jier ignored their wild guesses; once everyone arrived later, they would naturally know the specific situation over there. He threw the scroll to the Yemei Town official responsible for recording this operation and opened Bell's private letter to understand the situation in more detail.

Bell first spoke about the situation on his side.

His Hunting Squad, composed of Refining Qi Soldiers and young people from Knight Families, had basically stabilized the situation around Celebration Village and had begun to draw manpower southward to include the several villages Jier had settled into their mobile protection range.

These Hunting Squads could easily move quickly by carriage in open areas and safely hunt down groups of Parasitic Monsters numbering five or fewer. Furthermore, each squad had a Priest participating to ensure that the Warriors could receive on-site, rapid treatment for minor injuries without needing to return to Yemei Town for processing.

Bell himself was defending Celebration Village and had trained a group of Town Guards and Armed Civilians holding Long Spears within the village to serve as the main force for the third phase of the counterattack.

After Celebration Village was secure, Bell had even taken the time to ride a horse and fight side-by-side with the Sun God Priests for half a day; the situation there was very bad, with monsters attacking regardless of day or night. Personnel losses were secondary; the main issue was that the constant attacks left everyone unable to rest peacefully.

And at night, the camp was brightly lit; the intense light made the Villagers and Town Guards unable to distinguish between day and night, leaving them exceptionally exhausted.

Seeing this, Jier finally understood one thing: Humans need to distinguish between day and night. If it is always day or always night, the human body and mind will find it very difficult to adapt, leading to various psychological and physical problems, both large and small.

It would be fine if it were only for a short day or two, but with three consecutive nights having passed, the ordinary people on the Sun God Priests' route probably hadn't had a good night's sleep.

"That's truly miserable," Jier curled his lip and continued reading the letter.

The latter half of the letter was filled with Bell talking about the necessity of Jier's route supporting the Sun God Priests' route, as well as telling Jier to try not to provoke the unpleasant Church Priests when the two routes converged.

After all, when the counterattack plan was being discussed, they had been very boisterous, almost patting their chests to guarantee success. As it turned out, once the plan began, both Bell's and Jier's routes were very smooth, and only their route had gone wrong.

The Priests were high-spirited but thin-skinned; if mocked in public, it would likely cause big trouble.

"I'm not stupid; why would I say something like that?"

At the end of the letter, Bell also told Jier a guess of his own—or perhaps it wasn't a guess, but a little secret revealed to Bell by a Priest of the Church of the God of Wealth.

Why was the Evil God behind the Parasitic Vine Monster so hostile toward humans? Legend had it that in the past, the Empire had initiated a conscription and sent a coalition of various churches to annihilate a small alien nation that the Evil God had once ruled.

It was a very cruel war because the alien Kingdom was in a no-man's-land within the southwest border of the Empire, and the Empire had promised that after the alien Kingdom was annihilated, the local land could be converted into the earthly Divine Kingdoms of the various churches participating in the coalition, establishing direct holy sites for each god—a kingdom within a kingdom.

It was considered a piece of land the Empire specifically approved for waste utilization.

Therefore, the church coalition annihilated the entire alien population on that land and hanged a large number of aliens who had surrendered and were willing to be slaves on gallows.

Since then, the alien god had transformed into an Evil God specifically dedicated to opposing humans and had been trying every possible way to cause trouble for humans in the last few hundred years.

And in that war, one of the main forces of the coalition was the army of the Sun God Church.

Jier pursed his lips; he didn't know what to say about this, but he also understood why other teams hadn't been targeted, while the Sun God Priests, who formed a separate team, were specifically targeted by the Parasitic Monsters.

The main combat force of the other teams was still Warriors; although they all had accompanying Priests, most Priests were only responsible for healing, and the monsters did not easily discover the Priests' tracks. The Sun God Priests' route was different; their characteristics were too obvious, and in order to show off their strength, the Sun God Priests had likely cast some kind of Divine Art on the Town Guards and Armed Civilians under their command, allowing the distant Parasitic Monsters to see something at a glance.

"I hope it doesn't implicate my side," Jier exhaled and called for everyone to prepare to set off.

The drivers of the carriages lined them up neatly in the central open space of Kangkaiqi Village, and Jier and the Priests were also on horseback. The messenger would rest in the village for a while longer and then follow them alone on horseback.

Heading north from Kangkaiqi Village, skirting the northeast side of the huge trench outside Yemei Town, Jier soon saw a simple Temporary Camp backed against the trench.

It was a mess over there; many people in the camp were sitting on the ground with their backs against each other, or simply lying on the ground to rest, a strange feeling of exhaustion where the posture of rest didn't matter.

And outside the camp—or rather, it was hard to distinguish the inside from the outside of the entire camp.

Outside, there were large numbers of Parasitic Monsters active; they were in groups of three or five, surrounding the entire camp in a loose encirclement.

Although the encirclement looked loose, Jier only had to count the total number of those monsters to become vigilant, because the number of monsters still alive already exceeded two hundred. This did not include the number of monsters killed by the Priests' route over the past few days.

Perhaps they had killed twice as many Parasitic Monsters in these few days.

And inside the camp, they relied only on a loose human wall to establish the inside and outside of the camp.

This human wall holding weapons was mostly composed of temporarily trained Armed Civilians; they held various simple weapons and long-handled farm tools, looking like a mess.

Only in many places on these weapons did they emit a faint white light, as if they had been blessed with something by the Priests.

And the Priests were gathered in the very center of the camp, sitting in a circle, praying to a white, half-human-height Statue of the God, looking as if they were recovering Divine Power. Some civilians gathered behind the Priests, kneeling and praying to the white Statue of the God in the center, past the Priests. There were quite a few of these civilians, at least nearly two hundred.

But Jier glanced at the number of people in the entire camp and found that there were at most fewer than five hundred. One had to know that when they set off, this team had seven or eight hundred people; in just these four days, they had lost two or three hundred people.

No wonder Bell said the losses here were severe.

After Jier's carriage team approached a bit closer, someone in the Sun God Church Priests' camp finally discovered Jier's team's movements and quickly communicated it to the Priests in the camp.

At the same moment, the monsters also discovered Jier's team's movements—don't ask how they, who had no eyes, saw Jier's team. These monsters, which had been holding back, saw that there were reinforcements for the humans and gathered one after another; one group surged toward the camp, and one group came straight for Jier's carriage team.

"Ignore the monsters coming over, bypass them, drivers follow me closely!"

Jier held his Long Sword Hunting high, letting the white light emitted by the Long Sword form a pillar, pointing straight to the sky. This was not only for the drivers in the team to see but also to show the Sun God Church Priests, letting them know that he, Jier, was not an outsider without the slightest connection to the Sun God Church.

This move was indeed effective; the Priests in the camp immediately realized that the leader coming toward them also used the power of the Sun God, which made their ugly expressions look much better, so they all acted nimbly and joined the defensive team resisting the monsters' latest attack.

"Follow me closely, don't go the wrong way!"

Jier shouted loudly, his left hand adjusting the Jiansheng of his warhorse, letting the Tianxuecao turn and gallop on the abandoned farmland outside the town.

Behind him, the carriage team also began to turn, avoiding the intercepting monsters that were charging straight at them in advance.

The monsters' walking speed was too slow; once they failed to intercept the carriage team at the right time, they could only watch the carriage team drive past them, rushing quickly toward the human camp to converge, while they could only eat the dust kicked up by the carriage team behind them.

"Open a gap to enter the camp in front, quickly! Open a gap for us!"

Jier, riding on horseback, shouted loudly toward the Temporary Camp in front.

A Sun God Church Priest reacted and immediately had the civilians open a defensive gap, but the attacking monsters clearly saw this defensive weakness and hurriedly had a batch of more than ten monsters surge toward it.

Jier frowned, threw the Long Sword Hunting in his hand forward, and took the opportunity to throw out the Yue Shui skull on the weapon rack behind him, letting these two spiritual weapons fly straight toward the baring-fanged and claw-waving Parasitic Monsters one after the other.

Then the terrified Armed Civilians in the camp saw these two weapons emitting white and blue light actually pierce through the monsters in mid-air, then change direction, and take the opportunity to strike at other monsters.

The white-glowing Long Sword changed from a thrust to a slash in mid-air, cutting four or five parasitic Monsters in half at the waist in succession, then landed and bounced once on the ground before plunging in one go into the chest of a leading flowering Monster, pinning this Monster firmly in place; no matter how the Monster with astonishing strength struggled, it could not remove its body from the Long Sword.

The axe emitting blue light was even more terrifying; as soon as it left the hand, it spun horizontally like a blue ring of light, a meat grinder of death, sweeping past the parasitic Monsters blocking the way and mincing the bodies of the Monsters it passed into fragments, and these fragments shriveled and dried up, completely ceasing all movement.

This blue spinning ring of light collided left and right among the Monster group, completely destroying ten parasitic Monsters along the way, and then, just as it was about to crash into the crowd, it stopped in mid-air, then rotated in reverse, flashing left and right through the remaining Monster group once more, and finally returned to Jier's hand.

The Town Guards and Armed Civilians who were desperately defending the Temporary Camp were stunned; the terrifying Monsters they had been struggling to hold back had been slaughtered—nearly twenty of them—by the young Knight who charged over on horseback in a single encounter, without even touching a person, and a terrifying flowering Monster had been trapped.

Is this even human?

Many Church Priests in the Yingdi also saw this scene, which made their expressions unpleasant; if the Knight was this powerful, wouldn't their plan as Priests to request leading a route alone appear very foolish?

Jier put away the head of the Water-Leaping Beast, opened his left hand to aim at the hunt, recalled his Sword from mid-air, and thrust his right hand with the Long Spear to stab the flowering Monster that was just about to crawl up from the ground.

In the instant he swept past, the Monster on the ground was hoisted into mid-air by Jier with the Long Spear, then Jier threw the Long Sword from his left hand, blowing up the flowering Monster's head in mid-air, while his right hand thrust the Long Spear back and forth to kill, instantly blasting the wood-like body of the flowering Monster into a pile of wood shards.

"Oh oh oh oh! Knight Jier is mighty! Knight Jier is ever-victorious!"

On the wagon train not far behind Jier, the Warriors under his command, led by Weier, cheered loudly.

This cheer also took advantage of the momentum to lift the morale of the civilians in the Yingdi, changing their previous sense of exhaustion.

Jier stopped his warhorse in front of everyone and waved his hand to have the wagon train that had followed him slow down and enter the Yingdi; he shouted loudly: "Get off the wagons once you've stopped, everyone immediately join the battle! Let's give those Monsters a good show today! Aoni, you come and command the Warriors in battle, deploy them to the most critical areas!"

After saying this, he kicked his horse's flanks hard, making Tianxuecao run, charging straight toward the place where the Monsters' attacks were most intense.

Most of the Sun God Church Priests were also concentrated in this area; although their numbers were small, they were the key to everyone being able to withstand the Monsters' offensive. The Sun God Church Priests holding the Statue of the God with the Glowing White Stone would immediately release a Divine Power Impact through the Statue of the God in their hands whenever three or five Monsters were gathered in front, scattering and repelling the clustered Monsters.

The Divine Power Impact of the Sun God Priests was different from the Divine Power Impact of the Agriculture God Priests; after their Divine Power Impact was fired, it carried intense white light and a certain amount of heat, and the ground was scorched dry and cracked by the Divine Power Impact, losing its moisture and hardening. As long as a flash of white light passed before everyone's eyes, the Monsters were repelled.

It looked very spectacular.

But what attracted Jier even more was a type of Sun God Divine Power widely imbued on the weapons in the hands of the surrounding Armed Civilians; once weapons imbued with this thing hit a parasitic Monster, it would cause the parasitic Monster to let out a cry of pain, and a mist of water would evaporate from the Monster's body, as if even part of the moisture inside the Monster had been roasted dry.

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