Luzhou was originally Empress Su Mingyue's territory, but after it was carved up by that group of Blood Refining Realm Martial Artists who escaped from the blood pool prison.

Empress Su Mingyue summoned Ren Yunjie, who was stationed in Luzhou, back to Youzhou.

Ren Yunjie had been pent up in the Hidden Cloud Valley for over half a year, and he had nowhere to vent the pent-up frustration in his heart.

Hearing that Empress Su Mingyue intended to mobilize troops against Luzhou, he immediately volunteered, requesting to lead the troops to reclaim Luzhou.

Empress Su Mingyue did not refuse him and assigned five thousand Sorcery troops to accompany him on the expedition.

Ren Yunjie led an army of one hundred thousand to the border of Luzhou.

The warlords in Luzhou had evidently received news in advance; they scraped together an army of one hundred thousand and defended the city, hoping to block Ren Yunjie at the border.

The forces on both sides were equal, with one side attacking and the other defending.

Logically speaking, the defending side, relying on the city walls and fortifications, should have had every advantage.

To hold a border city with one hundred thousand men, the attacking side would need at least two or three hundred thousand troops; it would be unthinkable to take it otherwise.

This is an unbreakable military truism that has held for thousands of years.

However, the scene that unfolded next left everyone who witnessed this battle dumbfounded.

With an order from Ren Yunjie, the siege began.

He hadn't even had time to get the Military Supervisory Squad in position.

According to standard practice, the first wave of a siege must be backed by the Military Supervisory Squad to prevent soldiers from retreating in the face of battle.

But before his Military Supervisory Squad could even form up, the soldiers on the front line charged toward the city walls like madmen.

Before the ladders were even steady, men were already climbing up them.

The logs for ramming the city gates hadn't even been positioned, but a dozen soldiers used their own shoulders to ram the gates, causing the iron-plated doors to boom as they struck, refusing to stop even when their shoulders were battered into a bloody mess.

The garrison on the city wall poured boiling oil down, dousing the first soldier to scale the wall.

The soldier fell from the ladder, smoke rising from his body.

The second soldier didn't even glance at him, stepping over the boiling oil still dripping down the ladder to continue climbing.

Ren Yunjie stood on the high ground in the rear, watching this charge, which was so frantic it bordered on insanity, and he was completely stunned.

He had been leading troops for nearly twenty years, spending half his life struggling on the battlefield, and had fought countless sieges, but never like this.

The Military Supervisory Squad, which should have been the busiest on the battlefield, had now become completely redundant.

The soldiers didn't need any supervision; seeing the enemies on the city walls, they felt no fear at all.

Instead, their eyes shone with abnormal excitement, like wolves that had been hungry for days catching the scent of blood.

Conversely, the defending troops were scared half to death upon seeing this group of howling, wide-eyed enemy soldiers beneath the wall.

What the hell kind of battle was this?

They were all soldiers, and all cultivated the Dushi Sutra, so why were the enemy troops like a pack of wolves seeing little lambs, scrambling to charge forward for fear of being even half a step behind?

The timid ones among the defenders threw down their swords and jumped off the city walls.

The brave ones gritted their teeth and swung their blades, only to find that for every one they cut down, two more immediately took their place; for every two they cut down, four more replaced them.

These attacking soldiers were like endless leeks, surging onto the city walls in wave after wave.

Three hours.

In just three hours, Ren Yunjie had captured this border city, which theoretically should have been impossible to take without three times the number of troops.

After the battle, when the results were tallied, over forty thousand of the enemy had been captured.

This was only because Ren Yunjie had given the order quickly enough.

Seeing his soldiers blinded by the bloodlust, he realized that if he didn't stop them, even the prisoners would be hacked down to be turned in as military merit.

That was the only reason those forty thousand lives were barely saved.

The other sixty thousand didn't even have a chance to flee or surrender; they had all become military merit for the soldiers.

Corpses were strewn everywhere around the city walls, and the water in the moat had been dyed a dark red by blood.

The news of Ren Yunjie's great victory reached Yongning City, and the entire court and public were shaken.

Especially the passage Ren Yunjie wrote in his military report, which made all the officials in the hall gasp:

"Your humble servant only gave the order to attack the city; I did not deploy a Military Supervisory Squad, nor did I perform any pre-battle mobilization."

"The soldiers charged as soon as the order was given, fearless of death, scrambling to be first, like wolves and tigers."

"The siege lasted only three hours before the city was taken."

"Your humble servant has served in the military for twenty years and has never seen such Battle Intent."

Empress Su Mingyue immediately issued an imperial decree, conferring titles upon a group of soldiers with significant military achievements.

These soldiers were basically from humble backgrounds; going back three generations, their families were all farmers, and not even a single scholar had ever been produced.

This was the first time in their Family history that someone had become an official, owned land, and held a title.

The eyes of the noble Families were glued to the scene.

They truly saw the benefits of military merit titles.

Although they had been stripped of their hereditary privileges by the new laws, the new laws did not say they were forbidden from going to the battlefield.

They had the best equipment, a foundation of martial arts passed down through generations, and had been steeped in military strategy since childhood; going to the battlefield would be a dimensionality-reduction strike.

Consequently, they began sending their own descendants to join the army and accumulate military merit on the battlefield.

Not even half a year after the new laws were implemented, the noble Families of Youzhou had instead become the staunchest supporters of the new laws.

When Empress Su Mingyue's imperial decree reached the front-line camp, not to mention how the soldiers cheered with joy.

The ones who made the first scene were actually the Military Supervisory Squad.

This group of Military Supervisory Squad members, who usually were responsible for holding the rear and preventing deserters, tore off their armbands and clamored to petition Ren Yunjie.

They were the people in the entire army closest to the battlefield, watching helplessly as their comrades on the front lines gained military merit, earned titles, and acquired land, while they could only stand in the back and watch the show.

They were so anxious they felt like their hearts were being clawed at, wishing they could hold a knife to their own throats to make the general assign them to the vanguard battalion.

This completely stumped the old general, who had been in the military for over twenty years.

From ancient times to the present, he had never heard of soldiers who didn't want to be in the Military Supervisory Squad.

It was truly outrageous—it was the epitome of absurdity.

But the Military Supervisory Squad couldn't just be done away with.

If he really disbanded it, what if one day the soldiers' fearless drive faded and a rout occurred on the battlefield?

The stumped Ren Yunjie sent a message via eagle to Empress Su Mingyue overnight.

He wrote down the situation regarding the Military Supervisory Squad's disturbance in full detail.

At the end, he asked: Should the Military Supervisory Squad be disbanded? Please, Your Majesty, give your instructions.

Empress Su Mingyue's reply consisted of only four words: Act according to circumstances.

When the war broke out, the one who benefited the most was Zhou Ming, who was in the cave refining the sphere.

Within his Dantian, waves of heat surged like a bursting river.

After nearly a year of Cultivating, the magic power cultivated by the soldiers was incomparable to before, both in quality and quantity.

In the past, when a soldier in the Qi Refinement Stage died, the magic power that surged through the Causal Chain was nothing more than a faint glimmer as thin as a hair.

Now, when a soldier who had been Cultivating for over half a year and had a stable cultivation in the Qi Refinement Stage died in battle, the surging magic power was a warm current as thick as a thumb, more than ten times thicker than before.

After one battle, with thousands or tens of thousands of soldiers dying in combat, those warm currents gathered in Zhou Ming's Dantian into clusters of extremely pure magic power.

After he refined them all, he injected them one by one into the sphere.

Zhou Ming, who had originally been somewhat leisurely, instantly became busy.

He no longer had to wait half a day for a few wisps of heat like before.

He immersed his entire focus in the process of refining the sphere, continuously refining, injecting, refining again, and injecting again.

While desperately accelerating his Soul Transformation Stage refining speed, he smiled bitterly in his heart.

He had already anticipated this outcome when he explained the new laws to Empress Su Mingyue.

But he hadn't expected that he would still underestimate the desire of the common people for merit.

This situation had left him so busy he couldn't keep up, and he finally understood what it meant to be in pain and happy at the same time.