Chapter 128

"Bang!"

"Damn it! Wang Zhan? Where did he run off to?"

In Luoyang City, when Wang Shichong learned that his ten thousand elite soldiers had been routed and that less than thirty percent had escaped back to Luoyang City, he instantly flew into a rage.

Ten thousand elite soldiers, just like that, gone; his heart ached until he felt faint.

"Gr... Great General, General Wang has already died in battle."

An officer who had escaped back stammered, his face still filled with fear.

"Bang! Dead?"

"He's dead, why were you able to come back?"

Upon hearing this, Wang Shichong was a bit dazed, and then the next second he suddenly slapped the man's forehead, killing him before the other party could react.

"A grandmaster is so powerful that he can charge through an army of ten thousand?"

Wang Shichong muttered to himself, his face filled with indescribable meaning—there was shock, wariness, and even a trace of fear.

"How is this possible?"

Wang Shichong thought that his army's collapse was due to Su Fan taking action. If he knew that Su Fan, the grandmaster, hadn't moved, and that it was just Yuwen Chengdu and thirty others who had dismissed his ten thousand-man army, he probably wouldn't be able to sleep peacefully from now on.

To outsiders, this was absolutely exaggerated: dozens of people breaking through an army of ten thousand and slaughtering them until they collapsed.

This kind of battle where the few defeated the many had never existed since ancient times.

However, in reality, such situations did exist.

In a high-martial world, the power level was pulled to an extremely high level.

First of all, Wang Shichong's ten thousand elite soldiers were considered quite good in the world, but compared to Su Fan's side, there was one grandmaster, four super first-rate experts, and over a dozen first-rate ones.

The weakest among them, at the peak of second-rate, could serve as a colonel in Wang Shichong's ten thousand-man army.

In his ten thousand-man army, there were fewer than five people with such strength.

A second-rate fierce general could definitely achieve one against a hundred if dealing with ordinary soldiers.

As for Yuwen Chengdu and Pei Yuanqing, they were even more terrifying—their physical strength was extremely strong, their defense was iron armor outside and tendons and bones inside, a double layer of protection; they didn't even have any thoughts of defense when charging.

Even if swords and blades were upon them, they couldn't break their defense; on the battlefield, they were machines of slaughter, unless they exhausted their strength.

To deal with such fierce generals, you needed equally fierce generals, plus elite soldiers.

Or, like the private soldiers under Su Fan, perhaps they could only block them by sacrificing themselves.

But many people didn't know this.

Wang Shichong might be the first to feel the power of a super fierce general charging alone.

From then on, Wang Shichong's pursuit of fierce generals reached a pathological degree, because whenever he thought of Su Fan and his group of dozens charging into an army of ten thousand, his scalp would go numb.

He had the heart to contend for hegemony, so he would naturally view the Yuwen Clan as an opponent.

He also knew that the future Yuwen Clan and he would eventually have a battle. Once the two sides fought, if he couldn't block the other party's charge and let them rush into his army to behead generals and seize flags, his army would probably collapse too.

After learning the details of the defeat, Wang Shichong also began to change his attitude.

For several days in a row, he slowly opened up his attitude toward some of the original generals in the court, no longer suppressing them as tightly as before.

At the same time, he began to constantly win people over and promote talented young generals in the army.

Of course, the news that Wang Shichong had sent people to intercept and kill Su Fan's party halfway, only to be killed and routed, also slowly leaked out.

The entire jianghu knew about it.

Most people mocked Wang Shichong for overestimating his own strength.

Only the various forces that knew the details of the battle raised their vigilance against the Yuwen Clan once again.

They also seemed to have a new understanding of those fierce generals on the battlefield.

Even jianghu experts had a new attitude toward military generals; in the past, they didn't care about soldiers in the army at all, and they didn't even take the fierce generals of the Sui Dynasty seriously.

But after the battle at the Jingnian Zen Temple, the terrifying combat record set by Pei Yuanqing made the jianghu veterans who had seen it with their own eyes fall silent one by one.

No one dared to say that the path of a fierce general on the battlefield was a discarded path anymore.

Because the combat power erupted by these fierce generals was no worse than that of top jianghu experts, and in this chaotic world, these fierce generals were clearly more favored by various warlords and princes.

When jianghu experts charged into an army, although they could achieve certain effects, they looked much worse compared to fierce generals in the army.

The world was changing; Su Fan's arrival had already influenced this world, at least now the attitude of the temple and the jianghu toward fierce generals had changed a lot.

Some talented but unrecognized generals began to show their heads ahead of time.

Li Jing, Qin Qiong, and other generals who would have originally stood out only after a few years were now developing on their own and were highly valued by their monarchs.

"I didn't expect the changes to come so quickly."

Su Fan, who received the news in Wu Commandery, smiled faintly; how could this not be a change he brought about?

Military generals began to step onto the stage, making more and more forces pay attention to them; of course, this might bring him some trouble.

At the very least, it became more difficult to win over some talents, as competition was needed.

The Yuwen Clan was not bad; their momentum over the past two years had developed extremely rapidly, ranking in the first tier among the many warlords in the south, and even showing signs of surpassing the Song Clan.

The Song Clan had the Heavenly Blade, a saber expert comparable to a grandmaster, but the Yuwen Clan was not bad either, and more importantly, the Yuwen Clan's grandmaster experts were incomparable to the Song Clan's.

Besides the generation of the Heavenly Blade Song Que, the Song Clan had a few good experts, but the next generation had no famous ones.

There were no successors.

But the Yuwen Clan was different; they had three generations—old, middle, and young. The old Yuwen Shang was a grandmaster, and the middle generation had four great experts, with innate first-rate, super first-rate, and even grandmaster levels.

The young ones were even top-tier grandmasters in the world.

It could be said that the Yuwen Clan could flourish for at least a hundred years.

Even if the Yuwen Clan failed in the process of contending for the dragon, as long as Su Fan didn't die, no one would dare to touch the Yuwen Clan.

Just like the Song Clan back then; even Emperor Wen Yang Jian, who was at the height of his power, couldn't do anything about the Song Clan.

Was he willing to watch the Song Clan establish a state within a state in Lingnan?

Because of Song Que's strength, Song Que back then was already a peak grandmaster, and his combat power made the Sui Dynasty wary.

Su Fan's strength was even greater.

This was also something that gave many warlords a headache; it could be said that the Yuwen Clan had no shortage of retreats, and even if they failed, they could still live well.

Therefore, warlords from all sides also began to frantically win over the three major forces of Buddhism, Taoism, and the Demonic Sect, because only these three forces possessed power comparable to a grandmaster.

To resist the Yuwen Clan and defeat the Yuwen Clan, one must have a grandmaster.

This was the common thought of all local forces after the battle at the Jingnian Zen Temple.