Immortality: Starting with a grave, I'm invincible when burying corpses.

The Cloud Legion's first battle was aimed directly at Yinshan, where they wiped out hundreds of demonic sect strongholds hidden deep in the mountains.

On the way back, they also wiped out three minor vassal lords who had rebelled and were stripped of their titles.

For a time, they were the most popular.

Despite its various shortcomings, the existence of the Cloud Legion has caused the feudal lords and various rebellious forces to restrain their arrogance.

For a time, the Great Qi Dynasty became much more stable.

In the eyes of the various lords who lacked terrestrial deities to oversee them, the appearance of the Cloud Legion reversed the decline of the Great Qi Dynasty.

The entire Cloud Sky Legion has a full strength of 50,000 men, with more than 28,000 currently. Although it is not at full strength, its current size, coupled with a large number of mechanical soldiers, is enough to conquer all directions.

In the past, the Apocalypse warships needed to protect the capital and would not easily leave Kai'an City. But now the Cloud Legion is different; it can go wherever it wants.

Even if the main ship doesn't move, the thirty-six Heavenly Guardian Ships are enough to suppress any force that doesn't have a terrestrial deity in charge.

In the eyes of the various powerful lords, the appearance of the Cloud Sky Legion meant that the Great Qi royal family and the Wenchang Palace had reached some kind of agreement, and their relationship had returned to its former close state.

Without the Wenchang Hall holding it back, the current Daqi is showing signs of returning to its peak.

That being said, the various warlords did not really take these matters seriously. The warlords who were wiped out were genuine rebels, and it was only natural that they were eliminated as the first to be targeted.

If the country continues its aggressive military campaigns, the treasury of the Great Qi Dynasty is likely completely depleted. It will take at least 30 to 50 years to recover.

Given the level of corruption among the officials of Daqi, it goes without saying that large-scale peasant uprisings will break out in various parts of Daqi in the coming decades.

The peasant uprisings sweeping across the country were enough to tie up all the energy of the Great Qi Dynasty.

More importantly, the current leader of the feudal lords is Qishan Dao. Although the imperial court is strong, the leader is not at all inferior.

With their elder brother leading the way, as long as they don't openly rebel, they don't need to worry about the court breaking ties with them.

Moreover, the other major vassal states were also quite powerful.

The forces including Zhenbei Gong Shen Yunwei, Zhennan Hou Bai Qingming, Haining Hou Nangong Yun, and Donghai Dongtian have not stopped developing over the years.

All factions are accelerating the enhancement of their own strength and developing various weapons that can be used in war.

Although they were not as militaristic as the Great Qi, they each formed their own new-style legions.

On the contrary, Qishan Dao, as the leading force, has never spent too much on military expenditures. Even though all sides are engaged in an arms race, Mu Ling'er has no intention of increasing military spending.

Qishan Road continues to focus its main efforts on improving people's livelihoods, and has set an ambitious goal of extending the medical system to every village within ten years.

This behavior relieved everyone in the Great Qi court.

In a sense, the seemingly calm Daqi is actually a huge powder keg.

If either party can't resist crossing each other's bottom line, this huge powder keg will immediately explode and become uncontrollable.

The current balance can only be maintained because all parties have quietly reached a consensus that the current situation is the most stable.

Everyone agreed that continuing to drag things out would be more advantageous to their side.

……

The seventeenth year of Ningtai.

This year marks the hundredth anniversary of Mu An's arrival in the Nine Realms.

In Mu An's memory, he had never cared about his birthday, for no other reason than that.

Simply because, for a very long time, Mu An herself didn't know.

According to Mu Ping, Mu An was only one or two months old when he found her.

According to Xiao Lü, when she first met Mu An, Mu An was a two-month-old baby who was babbling and quite active.

According to Mu An's own current deductions, his exact birth time should be the first day of the Lunar New Year a hundred years ago.

Strangely, the first time he left a trace in the Nine Domains was when Mu Ping found him.

Where was Mu Anren two months before she was found? No matter how I calculated it, it was all a blank.

Even Mu An himself doesn't know the specific secrets behind it; he only has some vague guesses.

Mu Ping was not a romantic person, nor was he very good at taking care of children. He had never specially celebrated Mu An's birthday.

Xiao Lü was much more thoughtful. In the first few years, she never celebrated Mu An's birthday, but when Mu An turned six, she began to regard the day they first met as Mu An's birthday.

Without Mu An's consent, Xiao Lü prepares small gifts for Mu An every year.

When Mu Ping was alive, Xiao Lü's status was far lower than it would be later, and she didn't have much money on her, so she only prepared small items.

For Mu An at the time, these small gifts didn't mean much, and she didn't pay much attention to them. She just considered them a token of her appreciation, and receiving gifts always made her happy.

Later, as they spent more time together, Mu An gradually came to accept Xiao Lü as family and began to value the gifts she had carefully prepared.

Later, Xiao Lü took on an increasingly larger role in Mu An's life, becoming a true member of his family.

Every year when Mu'an receives a gift from Xiao Lü, she keeps it safe.

At first, they were kept in a cabinet, but as the gifts accumulated, Mu An simply prepared a treasure chest to store all the gifts she received each year.

Now, the treasure chest that has been with Mu An since childhood has been transformed into a spatial artifact and hidden in a room in the Four Symbols Cave, together with the sketchbook that Xiao Lü left for Mu An.

Every year on the third day of the third lunar month, Mu An would come to see the one hundred birthday gifts she had left for herself.

Whenever Mu An sees these objects filled with memories, he always feels that Xiao Lü has not actually left him, but has always been by his side, watching over him from somewhere.

Mu An had also thought that perhaps in the future she could revive Xiao Lü, since the book was full of stories about rescuing people from the river of time.

There are also stories of extraordinary beings capturing a fragment of time from the long river of history.

But these are just people's imaginations. Mu An doesn't know if the river of time exists in the world, or if there really is such a concept as eternal proof.

In Mu An's mind, if such a concept really existed, then there was no reason why Xiao Lü would leave him.

If there really is a future version of myself, then he should know best how much his past self wished that Xiao Lü could stay with him for a longer period of time.

There's no reason for my future self not to try to stop Xiao Lü's passing, unless by then he's completely devoid of emotion and has forgotten his initial memories.

The paradox of time is the most difficult to understand. Even though Mu An had read many treatises on time and the concept of the Great Luo, he still could not understand how time actually exists.

At least for now, in Mu An's view, only the present moment is real.

Because the day Mu An and Xiao Lü met was not actually Mu An's real birthday, this birthday was celebrated only by the two of them for a hundred years.

Even Mu Ling'er and Xiao He only knew Mu An's age, and the time they chose to celebrate each year was not fixed.

In Mu An's heart, he also accepted that his birthday was the third day of the third lunar month, not the first day of the first lunar month when this body was born.

At the beginning of this year, when Mu Ling'er asked Mu An when he planned to celebrate his 100th birthday, Mu An unhesitatingly set the date for the fifth day of the third lunar month.

The day of the third day of the third lunar month was a secret he left for Xiao Lü; it was a secret between the two of them and had nothing to do with anyone else.

One day chatting with Xiao Lü, one day daydreaming in the house, and one day celebrating with everyone—this was the perfect day in Mu An's eyes.