The civil war within the Jade Cauldron Domain had dragged on for twenty years. Endless battles had erupted across the region, rising and falling like waves. Skirmishes had turned to sieges, ambushes to full-on assaults. After all that, the tide of war had finally converged upon the battlefield known as the Thundernet Nine Mountains.0

Luo Chen knew a great deal about this civil war. He had even dispatched the Luo Tian Society's intelligence division to collect every scrap of information they could. Whether it was a hard fact or a baseless rumor, he wanted to know it all. He had reviewed the full picture many times, traced the lines of conflict, and tried to deduce when this war might finally come to an end.0

In terms of insight, Luo Chen believed that aside from the Golden Core elders of the major sects and the two elusive Nascent Soul Sages, no one understood this war better than he did. His grasp of the situation far exceeded that of those sect disciples, vassals, or even elite rogue cultivators.1

Yet the deeper his understanding grew, the more something felt wrong. Because this was not how a war should be fought! In his understanding, if one side was strong and the other weak, the proper strategy was to attack, to deliver swift and crushing strikes. If a single thunderous blow could end the battle, like when the Luo Tian Society had moved against the Fu and Duan families, then that was the right way to do it. It was clean, efficient, and devastating.0

Dragging out a campaign for two decades was sheer madness. If both sides were evenly matched, there...0