“‘Negotiate peace’? That’s just asking for humiliation!”
Reverend Tianshu roared and stood up. This man had a ruddy complexion, a shiny bald head, and a very crude demeanor, always speaking in a rumbling voice. It was hard to imagine him as a Soul Projection expert.
He pointed fingers at Bao Qingsong and cursed. In his view, they had paid a heavy price for this opportunity, so to use it to negotiate peace, offering up territory and compensation, was utterly shameful!
Bao Qingsong was a scholarly man. Seated within the hall of the human alliance, he sighed and said, “It’s not what I want either, but our race is weak. Even if we incite conflict between the fiends and demons and then attack, the best we could do is win a battle, not win the war. The only option is to use this chance to negotiate peace, after which we can try and get the Demon Gate to ally with us again. This is the only way to get us out of this crisis.”
“Then what about the territory we’ve already given up?” another person asked.
Bao Qingsong shook his head.
This meant that they probably wouldn’t be getting back what they had already lost.
“That’s two thirds of humanity’s territory. If we lose this, we lose two thirds of our resources, two thirds of our population, two thirds of our cultivators. We humans were already weak, and if we lose all this, won’t we still be facing the danger of being conquered in the end?” A majestic voice rang out, but there was no sign of the speaker within the hall.
Bao Qingsong turned to the rear of the hall and prostrated. “Master is correct. War is a swift death and peace is a slow death. But a slow death is still better than a swift one. Only by surviving will we still have an opportunity. If the heavens take pity on humanity and grant us another Immortal, Master will no longer have to fight alone, and we can take back everything that we lost.”
While such things couldn’t be said, everyone knew it.
“That’s right. Waiting like this for something to happen is just wishful thinking. I can’t agree to this. It’s too much,” someone said.
These people were all authorities of humanity, and they couldn’t accept this sort of humiliating fate.
“I can’t accept it either!”
“Humanity can only stand and survive, not kneel and die!”
“That’s right!”
The cultivators in the hall voiced their objections.
Reverend Tianshu said, “Bao Qingsong, were you bribed by the fiends and demons into being their spy?”
He had never learned how to talk with tact, immediately asking such an offensive question.
Bao Qingsong scowled, but he ultimately held back and simply said, “It’s all for the sake of the bigger picture!”
The hall was full of clamor, but everyone without exception expressed full-throated opposition to Bao Qingsong’s “defeatism”, more willing to bring everything down with them than to hand it over.
Even though Bao Qingsong was the leader of the human alliance, he couldn’t decide things on his own. In the end, the council unanimously rejected his proposal, instead choosing to use the internal discord between the fiends and demons to strike hard and drive them out of human territory before talking about peace. 𝘳ÃоʙĚš
Yes, they could have peace negotiations, but that was only after they had displayed their strength and taken back their territory.
Was their decision wrong?
Not necessarily!
Sometimes, one couldn’t know the result until it happened.
Once the fiends and demons were beaten back, they might roar back in fury, or they might realize that they had underestimated the humans and choose to accept peace while there still existed a third party looking for opportunities.
Life was so uncertain because everything was possible yet one could ultimately only see one of those many possibilities.
If the method one chose was a success, one would celebrate and think that the methods one didn’t choose were all wrong, but if the method failed, one would be full of remorse and believe that all the other choices were correct.
The reality was that the world had never been so absolute. One choice being wrong didn’t mean that another choice was correct.
Regardless, the elders of the human alliance had made their choice, and Bao Qingsong could only accept it and plan out the counterattack.
The counterattack began two months later.
The fiends and demons had by now taken more than two thirds of human territory and had built up a great deal of resentment as they vied for loot. Internal struggles were common, but the real trigger took place at the Cloud Dream Mountains.
The Cloud Dream Mountains were a mountain range in human territory.
They were the site of some ancient ruins, purportedly a cultivator battlefield where countless cultivators had died. For this reason, the mountains were rich in spiritual energy and resources while also being incredibly dangerous. It was an excellent place for a cultivator to explore and seek out treasures. It was said that Bao Qingsong had had a lucky encounter here that had served as the foundation for his future success.
By now, finding some undiscovered cave estate in the Cloud Dream Mountains wasn’t very possible, but the complicated terrain meant that it was home to some special resources.
Anyone who occupied these mountains would own all the resources here.
Cultivators took land in a very simple way. They first drove away all the local cultivators and broke any existing formations, and then they laid down their own formation, after which the land was theirs.
Those that employed this method of taking land required three things: a strong organization, strong individuals, and strong formations. Only the three together could properly seize land.
The Cloud Dream Mountains became a major issue for the fiends and demons.
At the onset of the war, the Demon Gate and fiends had agreed to attack the humans from different directions, keeping whatever land they occupied in the process. It sounded simple, but in practice, there were many problems.
The Cloud Dream Mountains stretched across human territory, so they were a target for both races. Moreover, the treacherous terrain meant that one could easily end up dead, which provided the perfect conditions to secretly kill someone—after killing one’s opponent, one could simply throw them into a dangerous area and claim that they had died there, after which one could lay down a formation and claim the area. Others could also go about destroying one’s formation and push the blame onto treacherous terrain.
With the human cultivators further inciting conflict, the two races quickly began to fight over the resources of the Cloud Dream Mountains.
It was a fight to the death, all false kindness stripped away. The fiends had numbers and bizarre arts while the Demon Gate had powerful individuals with ruthless methods. When the two got fighting, blood drenched the mountains, conflicts cropping up all over the place.
As the Demon Gate consisted of strong individuals and the terrain of the mountains was complex, their cultivators often minded their own business and gathered up resources on their own, remembering to set aside a little for the sect. Thus, in the early stages of this conflict, the weaker Demon Gate actually had the upper hand.
The shift came on the twelfth day after the armies of the two races had entered the Cloud Dream Mountains.
A cultivator called Lang Qianmo found a spirit plant called the Yearning Red on Sorrow Peak. It wasn’t a particularly rare plant, but it rarely grew in such great numbers as it did here, and they would all be ripe in a few days. Lang Qianmo quickly claimed the area as his own.
But a group of fiends also discovered the place, and when they saw that Lang Qianmo was alone, they decided to take it, upon which the two sides fought.
Shockingly, Lang Qianmo, who was only at Heart Demon, managed to win, killing 35 fiends at once, including one Soul Transformation, three Heart Demon, and twelve Spirit Ring cultivators—a result on par with Tang Jie in his youth.
What Lang Qianmo didn’t know was that one of the cultivators he had killed was the son of a fiend Titan, Cang Lie.
Cang Lie was a Deification cultivator, in the upper echelons of the fiends. He was furious at the news of his son’s death and went to the Cloud Dream Mountains to personally take revenge.
The two races had an unspoken agreement for the conflicts to be restricted to those below the Violet Palace Realm so that there were no unnecessary losses among their upper ranks.
Cang Lie’s entry broke this agreement.
He had particularly cherished his son, and he needed to vent his anger, so he slaughtered all the Demon Gate cultivators he encountered.
In relieving his rage, he enraged the Demon Gate.
A Demon Gate Titan struck back, injuring Cang Lie in just three blows and forcing him to flee.
That Demon Gate Titan should have been satisfied with this. After all, the fiends were still stronger.
But demons had never been reasonable, which made sense given how arrogant and temperamental they were. That was what made them the Demon Gate. Thus, the Demon Gate Titan chased Cang Lie for three days and three nights, all the way into fiend territory, killing him in front of a large group of fiend cultivators before swaggering off.
The incident instantly exploded, and numerous experts from the fiend side mobilized, with the Demon Gate responding in turn. The bigshots from the Godslayer Sect, Ossuary Gate, Demon Flame Sect, and Inkheart Sect battled it out against the fiend Titans, the world wailing in grief and lamentation as they battled.
Their battle went on for three days and nights, until both sides were utterly exhausted and had lost people.
It was at this moment that Bao Qingsong arrived, leading the human cultivators in a surprise attack. Of course, to be safe, Guang Yuan didn’t take part. Even so, the fiends and demons suffered a major defeat, and Bao Qingsong led the humans in driving back the enemy.
Bao Qingsong wanted to use this opportunity to negotiate peace.
But the human cultivators, high off their victory, wanted to take back all their lost land, even strike into the territory of the other two races, before talking about peace.
Bao Qingsong could only sigh.
He didn’t dare say that negotiating peace early was correct, but he knew that not negotiating peace now was a mistake.
As he expected, the human alliance quickly discovered that they had lost the opportunity to negotiate.