High Martial Arts: Slay enemies to become stronger, forge invincibility from billions of corpses.

As the outline of Tianhai City emerged in the dawn light, Song Chen stepped out from his last void traverse.

He hovered above the clouds for a moment, his Eye of Truth habitually spreading out, and then discovered that the land surrounding Tianhai City had changed.

Not long ago, he pushed the beast tide back into the sea from the mouth of the Yangtze River. At that time, the area outside the city walls was full of bomb craters, floating corpses, and shattered fortifications.

The crater is still there, but new grass has sprouted around it.

Further away, the wasteland that was once occupied by strange beasts was filled with surveying flags and construction signs. Bulldozers were leveling the land, and the tents of the construction team stretched far along the newly built temporary road.

A new recruit team was doing drills on the training ground outside the city wall. Their slogans were deafening, and the instructors' shouts could be heard from a great distance.

The team had many young faces, as well as many ordinary people from all walks of life.

Song Chen did not linger on the clouds for long. He concealed his aura, dimmed the luster of his Northern Darkness Armor, and discreetly entered the city through the western freight route.

The guards at the city gate were busy checking the passes of the construction material convoy entering and leaving the city, and no one noticed a young man in a dark coat walking in through the side gate.

The outer fortifications of Tianhai University were mostly destroyed in the beast tide, but the campus itself was largely unaffected because it is located in the city.

Song Chen did not enter through the main gate. There was a long queue at the main gate, consisting of martial arts students from all over the country who had come to apply for the exam, along with their parents.

He went around to the back door of the principal's office building and walked up the stairs he had walked countless times.

The door was unlocked, and Zhou Wangyue sat behind his desk with a pile of documents half a meter high in front of him.

Outside the window is the skyline of Tianhai City, which is under reconstruction, and the crane boom slowly turns in the morning light.

"teacher."

Zhou Wangyue raised his head, looked at the person at the door, and put down the pen in his hand.

The pen landed on the document and rolled a few times.

He stood up, walked over, stopped in front of Song Chen, and looked him up and down. The spiritual energy fluctuations were so restrained that they were almost imperceptible. This level of restraint could only mean one thing: his strength had far surpassed the stage of spiritual energy manifestation.

"From Anning?"

"Um."

Did your mom make you braised pork?

"I did it."

"You ate it for three days?"

"Yes, three days."

Zhou Wangyue nodded and didn't ask any more questions.

He turned around and waved to the other people in the office.

Several staff officers and civilian personnel immediately packed up their documents and left. Before leaving, each of them secretly glanced at Song Chen. The young man standing at the door was the same person who had stood on top of the Ice Demon Ape King in the global live broadcast.

The door closed behind them, leaving only the master and apprentice in the office.

Zhou Wangyue sat back in his chair and said, "The council just unanimously passed a resolution to formally nominate you as a candidate for the next speaker next month. Li Qingcang personally nominated you, and Qi Shanhe was the first to second it."

Song Chen sat down opposite him. He looked at the half-meter-high stack of documents on the table. The top one was the "Reconstruction Plan for the Outer Recapture Area of ​​Tianhai City", next to it was the "New Recruit Training Outline", and next to that was the "Draft Delineation of the Post-War Alien Beast Reservation Area".

Every document required a signature. Zhou Wangyue's pen sat among the pile of documents, the ink on the nib already dried.

"How many documents does the speaker have to sign each day?"

Zhou Wangyue followed his gaze and glanced at the pile of documents on the table: "Sometimes there are fifty or sixty documents, sometimes there are more than a hundred."

"Never mind then."

Zhou Wangyue put down the herbal tea, his face showing no surprise.

"I guessed it."

"If you don't become speaker, what will you do next?"

Song Chen turned her head and looked through the window at the sky.

The morning light was already bright, and the sky above Tianhai was a clean, pale blue, with only a few wisps of clouds high in the sky.

But what he was looking at wasn't the clouds; his penetrating eye pierced through the atmosphere, through the ionosphere, and extended all the way to near-Earth orbit.

There were several faint psionic signals moving around, belonging to human reconnaissance satellites, and the remains of several abandoned space stations.

Zhou Wangyue followed his gaze and looked out the window at the sky: "Space?"

"The meteorite came from space, the Cangxing civilization came from space, the psionic vortex is under the Pacific Ocean, but the answer may not be in the sea."

"But before that, I need to kill all the fish in the sea first."

"Do you have a solution for cleaning up the ocean?"

Song Chen did not answer immediately.

He had thought about the ocean issue repeatedly during his three days in Anning City.

More than two hundred Tier 6 Beast Kings are distributed in the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian Oceans, at depths ranging from hundreds to tens of thousands of meters.

They are scattered, able to run and hide, and are under the unified command of the Giant Whale King and the Sea Dragon King.

He's not afraid of either side in a head-on fight.

But the ocean is too vast. Playing hide-and-seek with the Beast King in the sea and slowly killing it over several years is too inefficient.

Unless we can force all the Beast Kings to one place.

"It's possible to clear them out, but it's very difficult. If the beast kings in the sea scatter and run away, the time it takes me to chase one is enough for the other ten to find a new place to hide. We need to find a way to gather them together."

"But it's also troublesome to concentrate them. If more than two hundred Tier 6 beasts attack at once, I can withstand it, but I can't kill them all."

"If they realize they can't win, they'll still run away."

Zhou Wangyue pondered for a moment: "If the Giant Whale King and the Sea Dragon King do not take the initiative to fight, this battle will be dragged into a war of attrition."

"right."

"Is there some kind of formation or supernatural ability that could seal off the entire sea area?"

"Not at present. The area of ​​the Pacific Ocean is 160 million square kilometers."

The office was quiet for a while.

Zhou Wangyue knew that humanity currently had no means to seal off the entire Pacific Ocean. Using a psionic barrier would require tens of thousands of generators to operate simultaneously, nuclear bombs would only reach the shallow layers, and a fleet blockade would be a target for a sixth-tier beast king.

Song Chen gritted his teeth and said, "If there's really no other way, we'll kill them slowly. If we can't finish in a year, we'll kill them for two years; if we can't finish in two years, we'll kill them for three years. I have time."

The weight behind those words left Zhou Wangyue speechless for several seconds. A young man was willing to spend several years hunting down the Beast King alone in the sea.

No one asked him to do that, and no one could ask him to do that.

Zhou Wangyue stood up: "Then it's not a tactical issue, it's a matter of endurance. Since it's an endurance issue, there's no need to rush it over tonight."

He walked to the door and glanced back at Song Chen.

"Let's go eat first. There's a new restaurant that opened in the alley behind the school. The owner is a veteran from the North. His braised beef is pretty good."

Zhou Wangyue's tone left no room for refusal.

Song Chen smiled, said nothing, got up and followed him out.

In the evening, the setting sun painted the East China Sea in a golden-red hue.

There were no more backs of the strange beasts on the sea surface. After the Battle of Tianhai, the strange beasts in the near sea were either killed or escaped into the deep sea.

Several fishing boats are operating in the nearshore waters, marking the first civilian vessels to return to fishing at sea in fifty years.

The fishermen on the boat saw a piece of broken shell of a strange beast occasionally floating on the sea, but they walked around it without changing their expressions and continued casting their nets.

The restaurant Zhou Wangyue mentioned was hidden in an alley in the old street. It had a small storefront with a handwritten wooden sign hanging at the entrance, and cooking fumes were billowing out from the kitchen exhaust fan.

The boss was a middle-aged man missing his left arm. When he saw Zhou Wangyue come in, he called out, "Principal Zhou, please take a seat," and then his gaze fell on the young man behind Zhou Wangyue.

He froze for a few seconds, the spatula in his hand hanging in mid-air.

"Councilor Song?"

Song Chen nodded. The boss put down the spatula, wiped his hands on his apron, and gave a solemn military salute.

"Eighth Defense District of the Northern Territory, Second-Tier Warrior, Retired Sergeant, Councilor Song, this meal is on me."

"Need not."

"Let me treat you," the boss's voice suddenly went hoarse.

"I fought in the North for eight years. My brother died at the hands of the Sirius Clan. You avenged him. This meal is on my behalf."

Song Chen looked at his empty sleeve, paused for a moment, and then nodded: "Okay."