My cultivation disguise has been exposed by Xiao Sizi.

Holding the sweet potato in his scabbard, his dark face flushed red, he stammered, unable to utter a complete sentence.

On the shaft of the cart.

Cui Wanqing stared blankly at the unbelievable scene before her.

A hot egg was handed to her by a woman.

Cui Wanqing instinctively reached out her hands to catch it.

The warmth of the egg penetrated her expensive silk gloves, hot and heavy, carrying a power that struck straight to her soul.

"Young Miss, this..."

Cui Ming, who was in the carriage, also crawled out. Looking at the ordinary people around him, their faces full of fervor and bowing to them, he felt as if he had been struck by lightning.

In the past, when others looked at him, their eyes were filled with evasion and curses.

Today, in these thousands of eyes, he saw pure reverence, sincere gratitude, and the fervor of someone willing to fight to the death for their benefactor!

"call……"

Cui Ming gasped for breath, feeling a surge of heat rush to the top of his head.

His usually stern and calculating old face was now trembling violently with extreme excitement.

"Wanqing... Uncle has lived to be fifty years old, and only today has he truly come to understand life."

Cui Ming looked at the two coarse flatbreads that the people had forced into his hands, his voice hoarse.

"In the past, we schemed and plotted to seize land, thinking it was a display of our family's power. But that power is utterly worthless in the face of the overwhelming support of the people!"

"This feeling of being revered by thousands..." Cui Ming closed his eyes, took a deep breath of the smoke and dust mixed with the wind and snow, and his expression was blissful. "It's so intoxicating. It's even more intoxicating than drinking the imperial wine in the palace!"

Cui Wanqing gripped the scalding hot egg tightly in her hand.

She looked up at the swirling snowflakes, and the image of Li Chen lounging in the wicker chair, exuding a lazy yet all-encompassing air of control, came to mind.

Cui Wanqing muttered to herself, "While other noble families are fighting tooth and nail for the profits of a few thousand catties of charcoal, His Highness Prince Qin has easily won over the hearts of all the people in the world."

"With such overwhelming popular support, what can the Lu clan of Fanyang and the Cui clan of Boling do to fight us?"

At this moment, the members of the Cui clan of Qinghe underwent a complete spiritual baptism and transformation.

They finally realized that clinging tightly to the Qin King's mansion was no longer just about surviving, but about embarking on an unprecedented path to heaven!

……

Night falls.

The daytime frenzy and clamor gradually subsided as the heavy snow fell.

In the south of Chang'an, there is an old weapons workshop that has been abandoned for many years.

The location is remote, surrounded by vast stretches of wasteland. Today, this old workshop has been bought by the Cui family of Qinghe and transformed into their headquarters for producing honeycomb briquettes and sheet metal stoves day and night.

To avoid attracting attention, not a single lantern was lit around the workshop; only the howling wind and snow echoed across the wilderness.

At the third quarter of the hour of Chou (1-3 AM), the night is at its darkest.

Several ghostly black shadows suddenly appeared on the high rammed earth wall surrounding the workshop.

They were dressed in black, their faces covered with black cloth, and they moved as nimbly as night owls.

Without a sound, the dozen or so black-clad assassins scaled the courtyard wall and silently landed in the thick snow in the workshop's front yard.

The leader of the assassins had eyes as cold as a venomous snake.

He made a very discreet hand gesture, and his companion behind him immediately took a leather bag full of kerosene from his waist and drew a short knife coated with deadly poison.

"Hurry up. If you find the formula, leave immediately. If you can't find it, burn down the warehouse and all the production molds."

The leader of the assassins lowered his voice and gave the death order to the head of the Lu family in Fanyang.

A dozen or so assassins spread out, clinging to the base of the wall like black geckos, and crept toward the rows of huge warehouses in the center of the workshop.

It's too quiet.

It was so quiet it was almost eerie.

The leader of the assassins, who had spent years teetering on the edge of life and death, felt an instinctive unease about this eerie silence. How could the Cui family of Qinghe, whose workshop was raking in money daily, possibly not even have a single night patrol guard?

He slowed his pace, taking each step with extreme care, his eyes scanning the surrounding snow and eaves like a hawk.

Ahead is the warehouse gate.

Once you push open that door, inside lies the honeycomb briquette mold that the Lu family of Fanyang dreamed of destroying.

The leader of the assassins took a deep breath, took the last step, and headed towards the warehouse door.

"Clatter".

A very faint, crisp sound came from the snow beneath his feet.

The sound was faint, but to the leader of the assassins, it was no different from a death knell from the deepest hell!

He felt as if a tough thread, so thin it was almost invisible to the naked eye, had snapped at his ankle!

"Damn it! An ambush! Retreat!"

The leader of the assassins' hair stood on end instantly. He let out a fierce roar and retreated backward like an arrow released from a bow!

However, it was too late.

"Crunch...click-click-click!"

Accompanied by a tooth-grinding sound of mechanical gears meshing, the snow on the seemingly flat ground in front of the workshop warehouse suddenly exploded!

Immediately afterwards, rows of strange iron pillars shimmering with a ghostly blue light shot out from the ground like bamboo shoots after a rain, instantly surrounding the dozen or so assassins in an iron barrel formation with a radius of several dozen feet!

The moment the iron pillar popped out.

The leader of the assassins smelled an extremely pungent, strange odor, similar to sulfur but a hundred times stronger.

The smell was coming from the bottom of the iron pillar!

Before these experienced elite assassins could even react to what kind of trap it was...

A spark suddenly appeared on the roof of the warehouse.

"Pfft!"

The spark, following a pre-laid fuse, shot at an incredible speed to the center of the iron pillar array.

next second.

"BOOM—!!!"

A massive fireball, hot enough to melt steel, exploded in the workshop’s front yard with a deafening sonic boom!

The deafening roar echoed for a long time over the desolate wilderness south of Chang'an.

That incredibly hot fireball instantly melted all the snow within a radius of several dozen feet.

The violent shockwave, mixed with shards of iron, was like a metal storm that had no blind spots, mercilessly tearing apart the bodies of the dozen or so elite assassins of the Lu family of Fanyang.

"Clatter."

A charred, severed arm fell from mid-air and crashed into the remaining snow in the distance, emitting wisps of white smoke.

The warehouse door, which had been silent just moments before, slowly opened from the inside in the workshop's front yard.

Several guards from the royal palace, holding large riot shields, cautiously peeked out.

Behind them stood Li Tai, the Prince of Wei of the Tang Dynasty, wearing a somewhat comical heavy leather armor and a metal helmet that only revealed his eyes.

Holding a blackened booklet and a charcoal pencil, he strode to the edge of the crater at the center of the explosion.

The wreckage and the strong smell of blood on the ground did not make the chief scientist of the Tang Dynasty feel uncomfortable in the slightest.

"Tsk, its power is still a bit lacking."

Li Tai squatted down, poked a piece of scrap metal on the ground with a charcoal pencil, and recorded data in his notebook with a furrowed brow.

"The sulfur's purity is still insufficient, causing the detonation velocity to be half a beat slower. The thickness of the iron pipe also needs to be increased by two points, otherwise the trajectory of the fragments is too scattered, and the kill radius is three feet smaller than I estimated."

Li Tai shook his head while muttering to himself.

The guards of the Cui clan from Qinghe standing behind him watched as the fat prince discussed the "kill radius" amidst the scattered pieces of flesh, and each of them felt a chill run down their spines.