Chapter 70: Which Way Western Man?

The Spirit Boat had barely settled before someone came rushing toward them.

He was an old man wearing the robes of an Evergreen Sect Deacon, though the word old in Shengyuan had always been somewhat deceptive. His face looked to be somewhere in his sixties, his hair was mostly grey and his back had begun to bend, yet Damian could clearly sense the Refined Qi within his body.

This fellow was indeed at Qi Condensation, but barely.

Damian’s newly awakened perception made the difference rather obvious.

The old Deacon had successfully crossed the threshold and opened his Qi Sea, but his foundation felt thin and somewhat stagnant. His aura carried none of the vitality Damian sensed from cultivators like Mu Qingyao, much less Lan Ruyue or Shen Xueyi.

If Damian had to guess, the man had not reached Qi Condensation through extraordinary talent.

He probably gorged on pills and accumulated resources, likely needing decades of grinding against the bottleneck until it finally gave way.

Whatever the method, this was probably where his cultivation journey ended.

And apparently, the Evergreen Sect knew it.

That explained why a Qi Condensation Deacon had been placed in command of a battlefield filled almost entirely with disposable Body Tempering disciples.

To put it impolitely, the sect had sent its trash to hold back the enemy’s trash.

The good news was that the Nightmare Corpse Sect appeared to follow exactly the same philosophy.

Neither side wanted to waste promising disciples or valuable Elders over Willowbank Front, so both continuously fed their weaker members into the grinder while concentrating real strength elsewhere.

That grim balance was probably the only reason the position still existed.

The aged Deacon reached Damian and bowed so deeply that Damian wondered whether the man’s back would survive returning upright.

"Guest Elder Damian! This lowly Deacon had no idea you intended to honor Willowbank Front with your presence. Had I known, I would have prepared a proper reception!"

Damian’s mouth twitched. "There was no need."

"Of course, of course! Guest Elder Damian is magnanimous and does not care for meaningless ceremony!"

That was not what Damian meant.

The fellow turned toward the four youngsters and then back toward Damian with the eager expression of someone who had suddenly discovered an immortal ancestor standing outside his tent.

"That flame just now was truly divine! The Corpse Qi plaguing our camp for so long disappeared beneath a single wave of Guest Elder Damian’s hand. This Deacon has cultivated for many decades and has never witnessed—"

"Alright."

Damian cut him off before the praise developed its own cultivation realm.

The Deacon immediately stopped.

Damian was not offended though.

If anything, he understood the behavior.

This man possessed little future prospects, had been shoved onto a miserable battlefield and had probably spent months expecting his luck to eventually run out.

Then Damian arrived wearing a Guest Elder token, riding one of the Evergreen Sect’s better Spirit Boats and casually burned away the Corpse Qi tormenting the camp.

Of course the old fellow wanted to attach himself somehow.

That did not make the fawning less uncomfortable.

"Show me the camp and explain the current situation," Damian instructed.

"Immediately, Guest Elder Damian!"

......

The tour did not improve Damian’s mood.

Rather, it made things worse.

The Willowbank Front possessed a nominal fighting force of around three hundred Body Tempering disciples, though that number was somewhat deceptive because personnel were continually rotated between the battlefield and Evergreen Sect territory.

The regular large-scale skirmish happened approximately once every month.

During those engagements, the camp typically lost around five percent of its total force to direct deaths, about fifteen to twenty people.

Another forty percent could expect to leave the battlefield injured badly enough to require replacement, which was a whole one hundred and twenty bodies.

Damian stopped walking. "Forty percent?"

The aged Deacon smiled bitterly.

"On a good month, Guest Elder Damian."

Damian stared at him speechlessly.

The smaller weekly clashes were less catastrophic, with approximately one percent direct casualties, so around a couple disciples out of one hundred.

Another ten percent suffered injuries severe enough to affect combat performance, usually around ten or so.

The reason those numbers were lower was not because the fights were somehow gentle, but because both sides had become very good at running away.

The Body Tempering disciples knew exactly how quickly an ordinary engagement could become fatal once formations broke or enemy reinforcements appeared, so smaller skirmishes often ended the moment one side sensed that the balance was shifting.

Then came patrols, which were apparently hell.

"Patrol casualties vary greatly. Sometimes nothing occurs for several days. Other times a patrol encounters an ambush or disappears completely." The Deacon explained while leading them past another row of wounded disciples.

"What percentage comes back when something actually happens?" Damian asked.

The old man hesitated. "If the enemy successfully ambushes them... almost none return unharmed."

Damian narrowed his eyes. "Define that."

"Either most are killed, or the surviving group returns entirely wounded." The Deacon bit the bullet and revealed.

There was practically no middle ground.

An uneventful patrol came home perfectly fine, while a compromised patrol became a massacre.

The four youngsters behind Damian gradually stopped looking around.

Jian Rui’s expression became particularly grim, Bo Wen swallowed several times, and Lin Meiyu and Shen Lian remained quiet.

They had known the war was dangerous.

Everyone in the Evergreen Sect knew that.

But there was a difference between hearing ’the frontline is dangerous’ and seeing the actual numbers.

Five percent dead in every major engagement, forty percent wounded, weekly losses layered on top, and patrols that sometimes vanished entirely.

In fact, the revelation was almost absurd.

Being drafted onto a warfront like Willowbank was safer than being assigned to patrol duty.

At least here there were formations, numbers, healers and retreat routes.

Outside?

A dozen Body Tempering disciples could disappear into a forest and simply never be seen alive again.

The four youngsters suddenly felt incredibly grateful toward Damian.

While they had never been bottom-tier disciples, as all four possessed enough talent and cultivation to maintain respectable positions among their generation, that was also precisely why the sect could eventually have sent them into the war.

Before being assigned to Damian, they had avoided that outcome primarily by constantly accepting internal sect tasks and accumulating enough merit to offset their contribution requirements.

Working harder had bought safety.

Then Damian appeared, and being attached to a mysterious Guest Elder who primarily conducted commerce seemed like winning heaven’s lottery.

Until the Guest Elder personally brought them to the battlefield, of course.

Still...

Seeing the camp around them, none regretted following him.

Not anymore.

......

By the time the tour ended inside the command tent, Damian had developed a headache.

He sat in the main chair and slowly rubbed his brow.

This... was not what he planned.

The original idea had been beautifully simple.

First, come to Willowbank Front, understand the battlefield and identify Nightmare Corpse Sect targets.

Second, kill as many as reasonably possible, farm Skill Points and test the Potion of Berserk.

Then maybe experiment with <Battle God> and <Demonic Plundering Dao Body> while he was at it.

It was clean, efficient, and fun, depending upon one’s definition of fun.

Instead, Damian had arrived and discovered three hundred people being fed into a meat grinder because the battlefield was too unimportant to deserve better resources.

He could hear coughing outside, occasional groans, a healer yelling for assistance, and a young man somewhere begging someone not to cut something off.

Damian pressed two fingers against the bridge of his nose.

"...Fuck."

He had seen wars on television.

Almost everybody had on Earth, as distant suffering was made available in high definition.

He had seen bombed cities, refugees, wounded civilians, and soldiers being carried away from shattered buildings.

And like many ordinary people watching from a comfortable room, Damian had occasionally thought about what he would do if he possessed enough power to change those situations.

Stop the fighting, save the innocent people, and well... do something!

Those thoughts were easy when the suffering existed behind a screen, but this was different.

The smell, the blood, and the people outside were real.

Humans were empathetic creatures by nature.

Unless something had gone seriously wrong inside a person’s head, watching other human beings suffer on a large scale produced some degree of psychological distress.

For Damian, this was his first genuine exposure to a battlefield in either of his lives.

And it was... intense.

The young man was obviously not going to break down crying and suddenly decide to sacrifice himself for strangers.

The war happening inside Damian was quieter than that.

Morality argued with ambition, logic argued with emotion, and self-interest argued with responsibility, while somewhere beneath all of them sat the question Damian had already asked himself in Shengyuan days ago.

What kind of person was he going to become with the Dual Realm Exchange System?

The Wicked? Take advantage of everything, exploit every weakness, and treat both worlds as markets filled with resources and people as variables inside profit calculations.

The Saint? Save everyone by spending his wealth and advantages fixing every tragedy he encountered until the universe itself finally ran out of suffering.

The Neutral? Pretend none of it mattered unless the consequences reached his doorstep.

Or... The Hero?

A man who was not some perfectly righteous champion glowing with moral superiority, but who was capable of ruthlessness when necessary and generosity when he chose.

Someone who could ignore distant injustice he lacked the power or desire to solve, yet found it considerably harder to walk past suffering occurring directly in front of him.

Damian continued rubbing his brow as the aged Deacon watched him carefully.

Then the man’s expression shifted, seeing a great opportunity.

"Guest Elder Damian, if the sect could perhaps receive a portion of the medicines that you—"

Jian Rui looked at him, and that was all.

The old Deacon stopped speaking, his jaw snapping shut.

A Body Tempering Level 8 cultivator had just stared down a Qi Condensation Deacon, and somehow, nobody inside the tent found it strange.

Jian Rui’s eyes were cold as he understood Lord Damian better than the Deacon did.

From the moment Damian had intervened to save mortals inside Evergreen Immortal City, Jian Rui understood what sort of person he had chosen to follow.

There was a strange irony to human nature.

The wicked often preferred good people around them.

Good people were predictable, kept promises, could be trusted not to stab you over every small benefit, and were perhaps easier to manipulate, but they were also considerably safer companions when everyone else in the world was competing over the same pile of meat.

Jian Rui did not consider himself wicked, nor did he consider himself some saint.

But if forced to choose, he would rather follow this Damian Baines, the man visibly agonizing over whether he should help a few hundred low-ranking disciples on an insignificant battlefield, than a Damian Baines who could hear about everything going on here and feel absolutely nothing.

Eventually, Damian lowered his hand and sighed.

There were some parts of personality a man could train away.

Some weaknesses could be corrected and some habits could be broken.

This... apparently was not one of them.

Damian looked toward the Deacon. "Henceforth, I’m taking command of Willowbank Front."

The old man’s face changed. "Guest Elder Damian, while your status certainly—"

Damian waved him down. "You misunderstand."

The Deacon hesitated, while Damian leaned back and steepled his fingers.

"I’m not asking you to stay and assist me. Go back to the Evergreen Sect."

Silence, as the old man blinked in disbelief. "...Guest Elder Damian?"

"Return to the sect. Report that I have temporarily assumed command here. Unless someone above me objects directly, don’t come back."

For perhaps three full seconds, the Deacon simply stared.

Then joy erupted across his face with such force that Damian nearly laughed.

"Y-You mean... this D-Deacon may return?" He asked while trembling like a leaf.

"Yes."

"Immediately...?"

"Preferably."

The old man stood so quickly that his chair scraped backward.

"This Deacon will certainly ensure the sect receives a complete report! Guest Elder Damian may rest assured that every relevant detail will be communicated properly!"

"Good."

The man bowed, then bowed again, and apparently decided a third bow could not hurt.

Within minutes, he was gone.

Damian heard excited voices outside, followed shortly afterward by the cry of a flying beast.

He stepped from the tent just in time to see the old Deacon rising into the sky on the back of a large avian Spirit Beast.

The fellow did not look back once.

Bo Wen stared upward speechlessly. "He seems... happy."

"Wouldn’t you be?" Damian asked, giving Bo Wen a side eye.

Fair point.

The four youngsters turned toward him, their expressions mixing worry with something Damian recognized as pride.

Jian Rui stepped forward. "Lord Damian... are you certain?"

Damian considered lying, then shrugged.

"Not really." He admitted sincerely.

The four stared, unable to say a single word.

"But I’ve already made the decision, so now we make the most of it." Damian added with folded arms and a calm expression.

Yes, that sounded more like their Lord Damian.

Damian looked around the miserable camp.

First things first.

Before killing anyone, he needed Willowbank Front to stop resembling the waiting room outside hell.

......

The camp possessed internal runners used to distribute commands.

Damian commandeered them immediately.

"Tell every disciple capable of moving without risking death to assemble at the central rally ground. Anyone who cannot move stays where they are. I want a rough count within half an hour."

The messengers scattered while Damian walked toward the rally area with Jian Rui, Bo Wen, Lin Meiyu and Shen Lian behind him.

Disciples began appearing gradually.

Some walked normally, others limped, several leaned on spears like walking sticks, and many came supported by less injured companions.

Damian’s face became increasingly dark.

Three hundred nominal personnel, huh?

Motherfucker, barely more than one hundred managed to reach the rally area!

Not even half, dammit!

And even among those hundred, a disturbing portion could not stand without assistance!

One young woman had an arm bound against her chest, another disciple’s face was grey from Corpse Qi infection, and a boy who could not have been much older than eighteen leaned against his friend while one trouser leg hung empty beneath the knee.

Damian stared.

Lord in heaven.

What the fuck was this?

He stepped onto the raised wooden platform that served as the camp’s command point.

The murmuring gradually stopped.

"My name is Damian Baines. I’m an independent Guest Elder of the Evergreen Sect, and as of today, I’ve temporarily assumed command of Willowbank Front."

More whispers.

Several had already heard about the stranger who burned away the Corpse Qi miasma, while others simply stared.

Damian continued. "I have a method that can treat the Corpse Qi affecting many of you."

Silence descended instantly.

That got their attention.

"The camp is a mess, so we’re fixing that before anything else. Those with minor injuries will assist those who cannot move properly. I want patients separated by severity into different tents: critical, severe, moderate and light. Anyone whose condition is deteriorating rapidly gets moved first."

The disciples looked at one another as hope began appearing cautiously.

Damian pointed toward Jian Rui. "He speaks with my authority while I’m occupied. Follow his instructions."

Jian Rui straightened instinctively.

Damian stepped down and spoke to him more quietly.

"Get the entire camp sorted. Use Bo Wen, Lin Meiyu and Shen Lian. Take a day if necessary, two at the absolute most. I want a proper count of healthy fighters, wounded, infections, missing equipment and anything else that looks like it’s about to collapse."

Jian Rui nodded firmly. "Understood, Lord Damian."

Damian looked across the camp one final time.

His original battlefield farming trip had somehow turned into emergency management.

Wonderful.

Absolutely wonderful!

He returned to the command tent alone, and once the flap closed behind him, Damian released a long breath.

"Alright."

He needed supplies, a lot of them.

Far more than the handful currently sitting inside his System Storage.

Damian raised his hand and space distorted.

The permanent passage between realms opened before him, revealing the familiar magical world on the other side.

Without hesitation, Damian stepped through.

For the first time since arriving at Willowbank Front, the command tent became empty as Damian Baines returned to Valoria.