ACSP: Chapter 187: You worship even animals? You people truly deserve to die!
"The Hero Monument at Nanga Shrine?"
Jiang Chen repeated the words slowly, his voice dropping into a register so cold it seemed to drop the local temperature by ten degrees. "I didn't expect you people to place so much importance on a grotesque structure built from the blood of the innocent. It seems that the people of your nation really all deserve to die..."
Hato Yui hadn't bothered to lower her voice when speaking to her sister; in fact, she had deliberately projected it so Jiang Chen would hear every word. In her mind, backed by an absolute numerical advantage of hundreds of elite fighters, victory over the Great Xia prodigy was already an immutable fact.
But her words ignited a white-hot, deep-seated fury within Jiang Chen's soul.
To the fanatical Contractors of the East Island, the Nanga Shrine was a symbol of ultimate status and immortal glory. But to the citizens of Great Xia, it was nothing more than an abhorrent cesspool designed to glorify and worship horrific war criminals. Every single entity enshrined within its walls was an animal who had committed unpardonable, stomach-churning atrocities on Great Xia soil in the dark chapters of history. To treat such monsters as deities, to bow before them and offer up prayers, was a spitting insult to every living descendant of Great Xia.
"Insolent dog! How dare you show such blatant disrespect to the sacred heroes of the Nanga Shrine?!"
Seeing the sheer, unadulterated contempt in Jiang Chen's eyes for the figures she worshiped, Hato Yui's face twisted in righteous fury. She stepped forward, pointing a crimson-tipped finger down at him. "Jiang Chen, I know exactly what your file says. I know you possess terrifying strength. But look around you! There are hundreds of us here. With your pathetic, singular strength, how many of us can you actually hope to kill before you are drained dry?!"
The moment her voice fell, the massive horde of East Island Contractors—who had been focusing their efforts on breaking down He Gen's wooden barrier—turned in unison.
Hundreds of pairs of eyes, dripping with cold malice and bloodthirsty killing intent, locked directly onto Jiang Chen's small vanguard. The collective pressure was so immense it made Li Yanran and the others feel their scalps go numb.
Contractors who broke past the Level 50 threshold gained the terrifying ability to fully fuse their physical bodies with the spirits of their contracted fictional characters, unlocking an explosive, permanent amplification of their baseline strength. At this exact microsecond, every single invading Contractor in the clearing activated their fusion state. The forest air warped as a suffocating wave of synchronized, high-tier chakra and malevolent energy erupted from their bodies. These were not generic foot soldiers; they were a legion of lethal specialists.
"How many can I kill?"
Jiang Chen looked back at Hato Yui, his face entirely expressionless, though the killing intent swirling deep within his pupils was now raging like a localized hurricane.
"Naturally... I am going to kill every single one of you standing in this forest," he said, his calm, unyielding voice cutting through the heavy aura of the army.
"And I won't stop there. Once I am finished purging this clearing, I will personally cross the ocean to your East Island. I will burn down your proud Nanga Shrine until nothing remains but ash. I will trample your precious imperial family into the dirt, slaughter your entire line, and utterly annihilate your nation from the face of the earth."
Although these words sounded chuunibyou, they fell into the ears of Li Yanran and the others, instantly dispelling the fear in their hearts.
It even made their blood start to boil.
— Raise the banner of Han beneath Mount Fuji, get drunk with Hu girls under the cherry blossom trees.
— When the red flag covers the land, ride horses across East Island to admire the cherry blossoms.
— Once the city is broken and the cherry wood dies, look back at the old friends, ten million strong.
— Even if I am a lone soldier, I will surely leave the enemy's head before the tomb.
— The enemy's heads are spread before the tomb, today's courage is no less than the ancients.
Isn't this what they most desire and look forward to?
No.
It's not just them.
There are also those ancestors who once sacrificed themselves to protect Great Xia; they must also want to see this scene, right?
These descendants of East Island dream of completing the grand ambition their ancestors failed to achieve back then.
Shouldn't they, the descendants of Great Xia, also want to realize this wish in their lifetime?
"You are courting death..."
Seeing that Jiang Chen was still insulting her ancestors and even threatened to trample East Island, Hato Yui could finally no longer sit still.
"Kill them for me, leave none alive."
Following Hato Yui's order, those hundreds of East Island Contractors surrounding them immediately charged toward Jiang Chen and Li Yanran.
"Everyone, be careful. These people are high-level Contractors who have entered the fusion state. We will try our best to defend and use explosive tags to force them back. As long as we don't drag Jiang Chen down, that will be enough."
Li Yanran hurriedly instructed the others.
After experiencing the incident in Jinghai City, Li Yanran's mentality had gradually changed.
Facing an enemy force dozens of times more numerous than her own squad, Li Yanran didn't display even a trace of timidity. Instead, she stood her ground, calmly barking out tactical adjustments to lock down their defensive formation.
She was already demonstrating the true, commanding demeanor of a tactical captain.
Jiang Chen felt a wave of profound gratification watching her significant growth. Up until now, his strategic focus had gradually begun shifting toward Kang City, where the sheer volume of advanced high-tier resources and dungeons was vastly superior. However, Jinghai City was the homeland where he had grown up and lived for over a decade. He would absolutely never abandon its territory.
His original blueprint had been straightforward: leave City Lord Li Hongfei to manage and secure Jinghai City while he carved out an absolute foothold in Kang City, eventually pioneering a secure trade route between the two hubs for mutual access. This web would allow him to oversee both regions simultaneously, facilitating a perfect, symbiotic flow of regional resources. After all, even the minor secret realms scattered around Jinghai City contained excellent, specialized materials that would be a tragic waste to forfeit.
But plans never adapt as fast as reality.
The abrupt, devastating fall of City Lord Li Hongfei had violently derailed his original timeline. Yet, seeing Li Yanran prove her worth on the front lines, a new tactical layout crystallized in Jiang Chen's mind. Perhaps he could forcefully back Li Yanran, elevating her to inherit the mantle as the new City Lord of Jinghai City.
Though she was still young, she was Li Hongfei's only flesh and blood, and she had spent years accumulating administrative experience within the inner circles of the City Lord's estate. More importantly, Li Hongfei had spent his entire life fighting tirelessly for the welfare of Jinghai's citizens. Jiang Chen knew with absolute certainty that the shell-shocked survivors of the city would passionately rally behind his daughter.
Just as Jiang Chen finalized the strategic pieces in his mind, the vanguard of the East Island Contractors closed the distance, their boots tearing up the scorched earth as they rushed forward. The front-runners had already begun blurring their fingers through hand seals, preparing to unleash a devastating volley of close-range ninjutsu.
Seeing the incoming tide, Jiang Chen's eyes snapped cold. He ceased his calculations.
"Want to compare numbers?" a chilling smirk played on his lips. "Then I will grant your pathetic faction its final wish..."
Before the last syllable could even echo through the clearing, a cataclysmic surge of raw chakra detonated outward. Individual forms began fracturing into reality across the entire expanse of the forest, manifesting silently, instantly, and without end.
10... 100... 500... 1,000... 2,000... 3,000!
The sheer volume of the manifestation warped the local atmosphere. A colossal legion of identical [Shadow Clones] completely flooded the battlefield, instantly turning the coordinate into a sea of Jiang Chens.
Some of these clones stood tall and unyielding, forming an impenetrable, multi-layered phalanx around Li Yanran, the unconscious Zhang Xiaolin, and the rest of the vanguard. Others dropped into a lethal half-crouch directly on the forest floor, their crimson pupils locking onto the charging East Island Contractors like an apex predator evaluating a herd of doomed prey.
The visual was staggering. Beyond the floor of the clearing, identical figures materialized across every square inch of the environment—crouching on thick tree trunks, balancing lightly on slender branches, and standing tall atop the dense canopy of the leafy forest. The entire wilderness was suddenly swarming with Jiang Chen.
The charging Dongdao vanguard completely lost their momentum, skid-stopping in the dirt as absolute chaos erupted in their communication channels.
"What... what the hell is this?! Are these all high-density solid clones?!"
"An army of solid clones?! How is he maintaining this? Just how much monstrous Chakra is packed inside that one body?!"
"The division intel explicitly noted that this Jiang Chen was highly proficient with physical clones, but it never said he could deploy thousands simultaneously!"
"The data is completely trash! Or... did his raw power grid somehow experience another massive breakthrough in the last forty-eight hours?"
"That's impossible! The frontline reconnaissance we received was fresh from a few days ago. Even if his individual growth rate defies standard physics, nobody can scale up their capacity this drastically overnight, right?!"
The invading Contractors were completely paralyzed with shock. They tightly packed their ranks, staring at the suffocating wall of clones surrounding them from the earth to the sky. Every pair of eyes was suddenly flooded with primal fear.
Right as the frontline was on the verge of fracturing from sheer psychological pressure, Hato Yui stepped forward onto the rocky ridge.
Glancing down at her hesitant, wavering subordinates, she let out a piercing, authoritative roar. "What are you spineless cowards trembling for?! These are nothing but standard Shadow Clones—they are paper tigers that vanish into smoke at a single, solid touch! Furthermore, by fracturing his energy to manifest this many illusions at once, his actual main body must be completely drained dry of Chakra! This brat is putting on a desperate, empty bluff. There is absolutely nothing to fear!"
She drew her weapon, pointing it directly at the core of the phalanx. "The ones who should be crying for mercy right now... are them!"
As Hato Yui's cold, calculating logic echoed through the woods, the logic clicked back into the minds of the invaders. The deep-seated caution they felt toward the Great Xia prodigy vanished, replaced once more by fierce, psychotic expressions. They gripped their weapons with white-knuckled intensity, resetting their stances to launch a secondary, coordinated assault.
The military elite of the East Island were conditioned on absolute, fanatical compliance. In their hierarchy, the directive of a superior was a holy law that overrode self-preservation. At this exact microsecond, the last traces of hesitation died out in their eyes. All that remained was a numb, mechanical determination to execute the sequence.
But the moment the charging horde crossed the threshold into the kill zone—
Jiang Chen's three-thousand-strong legion of Shadow Clones moved in absolute, terrifying unison.
Their pupils instantly bled from standard black into a deep, predatory crimson.
Over 3,000 pairs of eerie, fully matured [Sharingan] snapped open simultaneously. In the dim, smoke-choked twilight of the dense forest, the synchronized ignition of thousands of swirling red eyes looked like a massive pack of bloodthirsty, demonic wolves locking onto their prey. The collective spiritual pressure radiating from those eyes was so immense it physically froze the air, sending a chilling shockwave straight to the bone of every single invader.