On an early summer night, the wind carried the rank scent of vegetation growing wild.
Ye Lingxi shoved her peachwood sword deeper into her backpack, wiped the sweat from her forehead, and sped her electric scooter toward the suburban graveyard, sparks flying all the way.
Her master had said that thing would appear at midnight, and she had to set up the formation before then.
She was of the Taixu Dao Guizhen Lineage of the Mystic Sect, the seventy-second generation inheritor.
Twenty-one years old, freshly graduated.
Today was her first job, with a fee of fifty thousand yuan.
Fifty thousand yuan—enough to repair the temple roof, buy her master a few bottles of good wine, and get herself some proper gear…
The suburban graveyard was desolate beyond belief, said to have once been a mass burial pit.
Ye Lingxi held a compass in her hand, its needle spinning wildly, making her eyelids twitch.
“Something’s wrong…” she muttered, pricking her fingertip and letting a drop of blood fall onto the compass.
The needle stopped.
It stopped pointing straight up at the sky.
Before Ye Lingxi could react, the ground beneath her feet gave way!
“Holy shit!”
The sensation of falling seized her heart, wind roaring past her ears, darkness spinning around her.
Ye Lingxi instinctively reached for the talisman paper in her backpack, but before her hand could get inside, her back slammed solidly into something hard.
“Cough…”
She nearly coughed up her lungs, lying crumpled in a pit, her back aching fiercely.
Dust filled her eyes, making tears stream down her face.
What the hell was going on?
The graveyard collapsed? She fell into a grave pit?
Ye Lingxi lay there for a long while before recovering, pushing herself up slowly, and instinctively looking up to see where she’d fallen from.
Then she froze.
Above her head was not the night sky she’d come from.
No moon, no stars—it wasn’t even night at all.
A star that could loosely be called a sun hung at a slant in the sky, and the direction she’d fallen from…
Was nothing at all. She was lying on her back in a stretch of barren, vast grassland.
The spot she was in happened to be a pit just big enough for one person—whether she’d carved it out with her fall or it had been there before, she couldn’t tell.
This wasn’t the graveyard she’d been standing in at all!
“…”
Ye Lingxi swallowed hard.
No, this was very wrong.
She pinched her thigh. It hurt. Not a dream.
A ghost’s trick?
Her master had set her up!
A ghost with that level of cultivation—how could a fresh graduate like her possibly handle it?
She pulled out her compass again and checked it. The needle was completely still, as if dead.
“Master?” she called out tentatively, her voice bouncing around the pit. No one answered.
She was starting to panic.
But panicking wouldn’t help. She needed to get out first.
Ye Lingxi tightened her backpack, found a foothold, and prepared to climb up.
But at that moment, a massive shadow slowly passed overhead.
Ye Lingxi’s movements froze.
What was that?
She maintained her climbing posture, her neck twisted at an unnatural angle, eyes locked on the sky.
A UFO?
A battle-damaged one?
The key issue was—that thing was descending right toward her.
Ye Lingxi’s mind went blank. Almost instinctively, she grabbed at the dead grass around her, shrank back into the pit, and hid herself.
The UFO landed, less than a hundred meters from where she was.
There was no earth-shattering boom as she’d imagined—only a dull vibration that traveled up from the ground, shaking loose dirt from the pit walls.
Ye Lingxi huddled at the bottom of the pit, making herself as small as possible.
…
A hundred meters away, a crack split open along the side of the massive vessel, spilling dim light from within. A ramp extended, and figures stepped out onto it.
One, two, three…
Twelve powerfully built Sentinels walked down the ramp and set foot on this barren, remote planet.
Leading them was the man once hailed as the Federation’s God of War, Commander of the Seventh Army’s Special Operations Unit—Mingzhou, an SS-class Sentinel with a Pollution Level of 95 points.
Behind him were the soldiers of the Seventh Army’s Special Operations Unit, the lowest among them exceeding 85 points of Pollution Level.
The Seventh Army had once been the Federation’s most elite force, and the Special Operations Unit was the elite of the elite.
Twelve campaigns. Eleven total victories.
Their names had been written into the military’s commendation orders, and carved onto the martyrs’ monument—living martyrs.
That was a month ago.
A month ago, on their final mission, they’d penetrated deep into the rebel core and destroyed the rebel base.
The mission succeeded. The rebels retreated. But on the way back, everyone knew it was over.
Every member of the Special Operations Unit had their Pollution Level break through the critical threshold.
Sentinels were the product of evolution in the interstellar age. Their bodies were powerful, their five senses razor-sharp—a species built for combat.
But by the same token, their mental state was their weakness.
With each battle, their Mental Landscape would be invaded, occupied, and eroded by filthy, violent energy.
They needed Guides to regularly sort through their Mental Landscapes for them to survive long-term.
But in today’s interstellar age, Guides were far too scarce.
Many Sentinels went from birth to death without ever having seen a Guide.
Faced with the accumulation of foul energy in their Mental Landscapes, all they could rely on was Suppressants to slow the process of erosion.
It was like quenching thirst with poison; one day, the Mental Landscape would inevitably collapse and shatter under the erosion of the killing aura.
And on the day the Mental Landscape shattered, they would completely lose control, becoming monsters driven solely by slaughter.
The Federation’s approach was quite gentle—no executions, no imprisonment. They were simply sent to remote star systems to fend for themselves.
These remote star systems shared a common name—the Sentinel’s Slumbering Lands.
…
In a pit a hundred meters away, Ye Lingxi quietly poked her head out.
Through the gaps in the grass, she secretly observed them.
She believed she had made no sound at all, and with such a distance between them, shielded by the foliage, those humanoid creatures that had stepped out of the UFO shouldn’t have been able to spot her.
What she didn’t know was that a Sentinel’s five senses were over seventy times sharper than an ordinary human’s.
A gaze from the shadows would usually be detected by them in an instant.
Ye Lingxi continued to observe them.
One, two, three, four, five… she counted. There were twelve humanoid creatures on the other side.
The one at the lead was very tall, with broad shoulders and a wide back.
From this distance, Ye Lingxi couldn’t make out his face, but she could see the markings on it.
Black, winding upward from his neck, spreading across half his face—like some kind of eerie totem, or the brand of a demon.
The others had markings too, each in different colors, but all equally bizarre.
Those markings reminded her of the talismans used by corpse herders in western Hunan, and of the villagers in remote southwestern mountains who worshipped evil gods.
She had seen similar markings before, in her master’s dust-covered ancient texts, where every page bore the words “Great Omen of Misfortune.”
And there was something wrong with the aura of these people.
Terribly wrong.
A wild, violent, and utterly chaotic aura enveloped them.
Before she could figure out what kind of great evil these twelve humanoid creatures were, she suddenly realized that all twelve who had stepped off the UFO seemed to be looking in her direction.