Hurt my loved ones? I'm not guarding this country's borders anymore!

The capital city. The frost in the capital was so thick you could stick snot up your nose.

Inside the Prime Minister's residence, not far from Dongjiaomin Lane, the stove fire burned hotter than the sun outside. The rosewood floors gleamed.

A two-meter-long nanmu wood table was placed in the middle of the room.

"Bang!"

Zhuge Tianming slammed a pair of blackened, patina-covered iron walnuts he had been handling onto the floor tiles. Sparks flew high, and they left a dent.

That old bastard is a trained fighter; back in his youth, he was a skilled martial artist in the Northern Frontier, making his way in the Green Gang with his exceptional martial arts prowess. Even though he's retired and has fattened up in Beijing, that ruthless edge is still there.

He was wearing a black mink coat. The collar was buttoned up tightly, and his facial muscles were twitching like those of an old bastard having a stroke.

On the table was a red lacquered wooden box that had been pickled in coarse salt and lime. It wasn't locked. The lid was open.

There's a head inside.

That was Zhao Kuo, who yesterday had threatened to eat people with alcohol. Now, his face was ashen and bluish-black, his eyes bulging as if he wanted to blind Zhuge Tianming. He exuded a foul, pungent stench.

"Damn it! Damn those bastards' ancestors for eighteen generations!" Zhuge Tianming roared, his hoarse voice echoing throughout the room. "Useless idiots, pigs, not even as good as a bred wild boar! One hundred thousand men, eating my military pay to buy old foreign rifles and fancy machines. And we have dozens of cannons already!"

"One night?" He strode over and grabbed the trembling major's adjutant by the collar. "That bastard surnamed Shen emptied his pockets in one night?"

The major adjutant was drenched in cold sweat, his tongue stammering. "Premier...Premier. Those weren't soldiers...the Shen family's men are a bunch of living devils! Without a sound, without a whisper, they just charged their horses into the gun emplacements. The entire northern force is reckless. A complete rout, a total rout."

"How far is it from the hometown of the Nine Gates Admiral?" Zhuge Laogou asked, panting heavily.

"Three hundred li. If they marched at full speed for half a day, their heels would be touching the moat."

Three hundred li. That's a distance where you could easily grab a boning knife at your neck.

"All the old bastards are dead." Zhuge Tianming sneered. He threw off his black overcoat, turned around, and walked to the table. "Those 50,000 newly formed troops in the outskirts of Beijing are cowards."

He looked up, his sallow, lifeless eyes swirling in their sockets. "I can't catch a hard hand. I'll just have to catch a soft one."

Before the adjutant could respond, the old dog gave the order: "Open all the inner city gates. Slam the gates shut. Don't bother with a single sentry. Those few brick walls couldn't withstand a Grandmaster's flying kick anyway."

Undefended. That's a really cunning move. It's like putting on a show of an empty city.

The adjutant was still dazed when those dead fish eyes swept over again.

"Where's Fatty Zhang from the Garrison Command?" Old Dog pulled out a cigar and lit it. "Didn't he detain a lot of the groceries on the list? Call him right now! Put up barbed wire around all those people living in and around Beijing who have connections to the names of those Northern soldiers... their goddaughters, their little girls."

The major broke out in a cold sweat and began to stammer. This tactic was a scheme to round up and kill the entire families of 300,000 soldiers in the North—utterly heinous. "Prime Minister, this… according to the roster in the North, there are at least 20,000 related households. Are we going to take all their families? What about the President…?"

Zhuge Tianming took a deep drag, smoke billowing from his nostrils. "To hell with the president. That bastard's just sitting in his villa with an actress, trying to be clever! If he doesn't take this seal, I'll send him to eat a hot bullet first."

As he spoke, he lifted a corner of his mink coat, revealing a brand-new, bright orange Mauser pistol hanging in the inner pocket. "Don't abandon the old, weak, sick, or disabled. This time, we'll keep them all at the old textile factory site in the south of the city! Tell them that as soon as Shen Jinglong sets foot on the north gate tower, I'll set up a thousand machine guns. We'll all perish together, boiled in the same pot."

He spoke through gritted teeth, without the slightest ambiguity. The toxicity, like that of a moldy, hairy rat from the sewers, permeated the hall.

Few people thought he was lying. This kind of scoundrel doesn't follow these stupid rules. He'd trade ten thousand men for Shen Jinglong to stop. A perfectly reasonable deal.

The adjutant agreed and hurriedly scrambled towards the door. Old Dog Zhuge coldly glanced at Zhao Kuo's dead head. He spat a mouthful of yellow phlegm into the lime. His face was completely torn apart. Not a single piece remained.

On the other side, in a dense forest more than a hundred miles outside Beijing, Shen Jinglong set up an emergency camp. These battle-hardened soldiers showed no intention of stopping their horses; they were only there for a brief cleansing.

But the military intelligence seemed to have wings and flew back from Beijing. Zhuge Tianming, impersonating the Grand Commander, personally issued an arrest warrant and a house arrest order, which was then sent out throughout the entire Beizhili region via official telegram.

The entire command camp of Shen Jun was in an uproar.

Dozens of men wearing black wolf-skin hats smashed all the ceramic teacups on the table to pieces.

One of them was a brigade commander with a sharp face. His eyes were bloodshot as he ripped the blood-stained belt over his long gown to shreds: "Damn it! That old bastard Lin has gone to the very bottom! My mistress and my daughter who hasn't even opened her eyes yet are all over Xuanwu Gate. He's trying to use the crotches of all the men in the north to make his life rope!"

For a moment, there were seventy or eighty fierce and rough men. Who could hold back their anger? Their parents were all in the enemy's hands, like Maxim machine guns. Charge? Their entire family would be wiped out; don't charge? They would suffer this humiliation and shed tears they had never shed in their lives.

Several burly men with martial arts skills even drew their sabers and roared, "Dragon Lord! Cut! Let's send over a hundred brothers to raid the city walls and exchange men. We can't just sit here and do nothing!" The chaotic noise even caused the tin tent to buckle. This was a desperate, open strategy to strike at the weakest point.

"Shut up," Shen Jinglong's voice rang out. He didn't show a trace of anger. His expression was as calm as a still, deep well. But the extent of the simmering anger beneath that well was not written on his face.

No one in the room uttered a sound. Everyone could hear the chilling coldness in that voice, as if ice shards were melting into bones.

He stood up and took two steps to the table.

He wasn't angry. This was unusual, especially since he was already home. He used his hand to slice the broken sand table into a square with a single stroke, a sharp blade formed from his internal energy. The entire rough, solid wooden table was cleanly severed at the corner.

This was a chilling ruthlessness. "Can you have a baby in a hurry?" came the inverted question. His eyes were icy cold, like a knife cutting through flesh. "Count them all in your head. What kind of account is this?"

These few steps overwhelmed everyone with their aura. No one refuted them. Whose affairs were more important than the Dragon Lord's? Who bore the blood debt of having nineteen members of his family slaughtered? The Dragon Lord harbored that hatred more than anyone else.

"The old dog has released its cage and is biting. I'm not backing down. The old dog is trying to use the 'empty city stratagem' to delay my fate. I'm not stepping foot inside his house. I'll kill him from a hundred miles away." Shen Jinglong, with his back to everyone, looked at the distant, dusty landscape. "Isn't he going to send me some nasty messages?"

"The intelligence camp of the Great Black Dragon Palace."

"Find all the secret letters we seized from Zhao Kuo and his gang, including all those treasonous documents from those old Japanese bosses."

"No need to use the rat hole to gather information. Find two hundred cavalrymen to carry these scapegoats on their backs and place them on Saddlebridge. Also, add forty or fifty heads from their promiscuous list. Go!"

Shen Jinglong pointed to the outer circle to the north, which was the direction of the city wall of the south gate of the capital.

His true colors now shone with a blood-red light in the tent. This great demon who had waded through the Blood Mountains of the far north was about to unleash his man-eating blade. This wasn't a pledge of allegiance. He was going to use the entire court of corrupt scholars and rotten officials to wage the biggest gamble in the entire capital.

"Go shout from under the main gate of Beijing."

"Three days." Shen Jinglong paused. He wasn't joking anymore. "The deadline is three days. If I don't remove that old scoundrel's official hat from the court, I'll lead the way through the South Gate on the third day!"

"No need to wait. Let's all fight them to the death in this cesspool. If they want to play the game of collective punishment and fish dying, then let's tear the whole city apart together!" The last words were filled with arrogance and a domineering, utterly suicidal spirit.

"This bell is ready for all the rats in the city to receive."