Chapter 130 - The Many Faces of the Preservers

He Tangtang was itching to go. Dropping into an army crawl, he inched his way toward the cave entrance for a peek, and turned back to Wen Jifei.

Wen Jifei was scrunched in the deepest corner, arms crossed, shaking his head firmly. “Don’t even think about it. My goal coming in here isn’t to be deadweight or cause trouble. My mind has never been clearer.”

It was rare to see Plague Chicken sit still and behave.

He Tangtang laughed. “I wasn’t trying to drag you along. I was just thinking, if you weren’t here, would they have taken me?”

“No.” Wen Jifei glanced up at him. “Face it, Tangtang. If I weren’t here, Little Qing would say, ‘He Tangtang, you stay put and keep quiet.’ He’d probably even leave someone behind to babysit you.”

A strange logic of compulsory protection for the weakest.

That didn’t sit well with He Tangtang. He stiffened his neck. “Am I really weaker than those Invincible Firewind Wheels in an actual fight?”

“Not necessarily,” Wen Jifei conceded. “If you made Little Qing choose, though, he’d still take her... because she speaks foreign languages.”

“She only speaks foreign languages because she’s a foreigner!”

“She speaks Chinese, too.”

“Don’t I speak Chinese?”

“Huh. That’s true. The logic got a bit tangled there.” Wen Jifei shook his head. “Anyway, never mind that. I need a favor. When you hear them coming back, start a fight with me on purpose. Challenge me to a fight.”

“Why?” He Tangtang asked, confused.

“Because if you don’t, Little Caixin is going to challenge me the moment she gets back. Little Qing will just stand there gloating, and I’m afraid I’ll accidentally chop her in half.”

“Oh. How did you piss her off?”

“It’s a long story.” Wen Jifei’s tone turned aggrieved. “The short version is that I just gave Little Qing his first experience of ever being liked by a woman. The most direct, rawest kind of confession, too. Of course, that was the only way he’d ever even notice it.”

He Tangtang didn’t follow.

Wen Jifei didn’t explain. Sighing to himself, he added, “It’s too bad. From how it played out, he still managed to miss the point. He didn’t appreciate the good intentions either.”

***

While the two of them whispered inside the cave, the reconnaissance on the far slope continued.

The battle between twenty-odd Arab fighters and a lone black-clad figure with East Asiaran features was ongoing down in the mountain pass.

According to Yin Caixin, the one being conspicuously protected in the group was likely a prince from some Arab emir’s family. That explained how he assembled a team of more than twenty people after entering.

As Han Qingyu watched the fight and listened to the two people on either side of him chat, he realized his understanding of the source energy world was still very limited.

The Preservers were simultaneously the most fantastical yet realistic players in this hidden world. That also made them the most interesting.

It was a faction with a common label but an extremely multifaceted internal system, made up of countless branches, families, and individuals.

Few were on the same page. In fact, they largely looked out for themselves, held their own positions, and followed their own playbooks.

In Arabia, for example, and in some of the wealthy oil states nearby, many of the ultra-rich were Preservers.

They spent money buying tickets to arks that didn’t yet exist, deep-sea mansions that hadn’t yet been built, and land on new habitats that had yet to be found. It was like buying insurance from every provider at once.

Despite making enormous annual donations and tributes to the Azure Coalition, they never got too close, let alone joined. On top of that, they bought up energy cores in the City of Sin, which only drove up prices.

They also routinely tried to corrupt Coalition fighters with material temptations, persuading them to desert and become personal bodyguards and tutors for their children. They even held private source energy fighting tournaments among their own aristocratic kin.

There were also the more traditional, ancient cultures of the Oriental Republic. Richer mythological traditions, deeper roots of reclusive philosophy, and a stronger heritage of subsistence farming and self-sufficiency created a very different landscape.

Some Preservers in the Oriental Republic had sealed themselves off as early as the 1910s and ’20s, when the Oriental Republic Army Group was first being established. It was a developing period when the army was at its weakest and had the most contact with civilian society.

These early Preservers, operating as clans or sects, had planned their own survival paths for the end of the world. Among them were warlords, landed gentry, old-world martial artists, and important figures from various governments of the era.

They had either participated in the early Azure Coalition or provided assistance. Through that, they had learned of the Sharpies, gained access to early Coalition technology and knowledge, and accumulated some personnel, devices, source energy, and channels for obtaining more resources if necessary.

They then withdrew and sealed themselves off in preparation for the end of the world. Over the many years, their thinking grew muddled, and they constructed a bizarre theoretical framework of their own. It went something like this:

Ancient myths and legends are real. The cultivators in those stories were actually training with source energy. Later, as source energy became scarce and dried up, those cultivators gradually died out.

We cultivate with source energy; therefore, we are cultivators.

Ascension to immortality is possible. When someone cultivates to a high enough level, they can travel to a planet richer in source energy...

In short, they’d gone completely off the deep end.

Over the following decades, many of these clans and sects were forcibly uprooted as the Coalition’s reach expanded. The vast majority of the rest quietly died out, losing their foundations and lineages.

Only a very small number had persisted, and it was only in the past decade or so that they’d gradually emerged from isolation.

***

“Should we help?” Shen Yixiu suddenly asked from his right, interrupting Han Qingyu’s wandering thoughts.

“Help who?” Han Qingyu asked back in bewilderment.

Shen Yixiu blinked. “Good point.”

The situation was apparent. The turbaned group was definitely Preservers, and from what Yin Caixin said, they didn’t seem particularly worthy of hostility.

If the group was ganging up on someone from the Oriental Republic Army Group, Han Qingyu would have jumped in to help without question, but they weren’t.

The lone fighter had a perfectly average build and height. The black clothes and pants he wore looked like they’d been made at an old-fashioned tailor’s shop, and his hair was a close-cropped stubble, as if he’d shaved it himself with a blade and it had only just started growing back.

He didn’t even look like he belonged to the Coalition.

“Doesn’t seem like a Wiper either,” Yin Caixin added.

“No, probably not.” Han Qingyu nodded. He couldn’t help but feel some admiration. “This guy is seriously strong, and his fighting stamina is terrifyingly high.”

Shen Yixiu nodded in agreement. “Also, the device he’s wearing seems like an old third-gen model, and it’s surgically implanted. He’s been desperately conserving source energy throughout the fight.”

What’s this guy’s deal? Could he actually be from one of those legendary, reclusive clans?

The black-clad young man down in the pass fought with everything he had. He seemed to be protecting someone, holding the pass alone and refusing to let a single enemy through, even if it killed him.

From Han Qingyu’s count, the man already had at least six blade wounds. While none had hit a vital area and weren’t fatal on their own, taken together, they made for a body in critical condition.

His movements were clearly hampered, but he remained completely expressionless. A normal person would’ve been in agony—weak and desperate. Yet there was no blinking or grimacing. Nothing at all.

At least ten curved, custom-forged dead iron straight blades came down on him at once.

The black-clad young man dropped into a lunge and caught them on his spear, which he held sideways in one hand. With a roar, he shoved the black spear upward, but the curved blades wouldn’t budge.

This was the first time Han Qingyu had seen anyone fight with a spear in the source energy world. It was black, likely forged entirely from dead iron. The design of it was somewhat antiquated, with no ornamentation at all, like the kind of weapon a general would wield in a historical drama about the Three Kingdoms.

Then, blue light erupted from the young man’s chest. With another desperate roar, the black spear spun and vibrated furiously in his palm. The clanging of metal on metal echoed through the pass as he blasted apart more than ten curved blades all at once.

Stepping back, he pivoted and swept the over-two-meter-long black spear out from his waist in a horizontal arc. It howled like a dragon, temporarily driving back every enemy.

A cough sounded, and a mouthful of blood hit the ground.

The man swayed.

Despite this, he raised his head, straightened up, and stood with his spear held upright.

From Han Qingyu’s vantage point above, it really did feel like one man holding the pass.[1]

1. The phrase used here is 一夫当关 (yī fū dāng guān), literally meaning “one man guards/holds the pass.” The full expression is actually 一夫当关，万夫莫开 (yī fū dāng guān, wàn fū mò kāi), meaning “one man holds the pass, ten thousand cannot breach it.”

This comes from the famous poem Shu Dao Nan (蜀道难) by the Tang dynasty poet Li Bai, describing the dangerous and narrow terrain of the Sword Pass (剑阁). While it can be used to describe terrain with a strong defensive advantage, it’s sometimes also used to describe a person with exceptional courage, strength, or ability, capable of single-handedly defending or handling any incoming threat or challenge. (pulled from https://baike.baidu.com/en/item/One%20man%20can%20hold%20out%20against%20ten%20thousand/1425480 ) ☜