Fiona Li arranged a large compound for Ian Song and his group, with plenty of rooms—enough for over a hundred people and still some to spare.
After winning over these soldiers, Ian didn’t plan to rush out of the city. As the saying goes, sharpening your blade won’t delay chopping wood—he knew these troops needed real training before they could work together seamlessly on the battlefield.
Meanwhile, in another compound—
Lance Xuanyuan, who’d spent two years commanding on the front lines, easily took charge of the ninety-five soldiers Fiona Li had sent him.
Knowing Ian was a rookie with zero military experience, Lance decided to drop by and see him make a fool of himself.
He happened to catch Ian giving a speech, and then watched as Ian used two clever moves in a row to win the soldiers over. Surprised, Lance was also a little disappointed.
So he simply didn’t show his face and quietly slipped away.
Next, Ian did a thorough assessment of the nine Grandmaster-level warriors—including Liam Liang—and reorganized the whole team.
Leading troops in battle isn’t the same as street brawling—a good commander can multiply his soldiers’ power, making it possible to win with fewer against more.
The ninety-plus soldiers Fiona Li sent were all handpicked from the regular patrol teams.
They weren’t the absolute cream of the crop, but they were far from weak.
Every patrol squad knew at least one basic battle formation.
At Ian’s signal, the nine warriors showed off the formation they were used to.
After watching, Ian was faintly disappointed—the formation those nine warriors put together was honestly pretty crude.
Back in the Great Qin World, Ian had studied military strategy and formations; after returning to reality, he’d collected books on the subject too. And once he arrived in this world, he made a point of reading tons of formation manuals in the Pristine Way Sect’s Library Pavilion and Sanctum’s collections.
In this world, people worship personal martial strength and barely pay attention to battle formations.
That made Ian want to create his own set of formations.
With the idea in mind, he had the soldiers train on their own while he went back to his room to work out the details.
His spiritual force was powerful, plus he had the Mastery Insight skill.
So it only took him half an hour to fuse all his knowledge of military strategy and formations into a single framework, then another hour to run deductions and simulations.
In the end, he invented three new battle formations.
One was called the Threefold Blade Formation, which only needed three soldiers.
Another was the Unity Battle Array, requiring nine soldiers.
And the last was the Big Dipper Battle Array, which needed eighty-one people.
That very afternoon, Lance Xuanyuan led Special Patrol Team One out on a mission.
Meanwhile, Ian started personally teaching his troops the three formations he’d created.
Since the Threefold Blade and Unity formations didn’t need many people—and everyone had some prior experience—they mastered them in just three days.
But the Big Dipper formation was much more complicated. It took a whole week before the team could barely pull it off.
Ian and Lance’s contest was set for three months, but ten days had already passed—and Ian still hadn’t led his troops out, just kept drilling them. When Lance heard, his reaction was pretty weird.
In those ten days, Lance had already led his team to kill hundreds of Devil soldiers who’d snuck across the border—including dozens of squad leaders and five company captains.
He’d already racked up over a thousand merit points.
Finally, on the eleventh day of the contest, Ian led his troops out.
He bumped into Lance Xuanyuan at the city gate, just as Lance was returning with his squad.
“Junior Huang, you’d better step it up! If I win too easily, it’s no fun for me!”
Lance Xuanyuan grinned.
“Don’t worry, I won’t let you down!”
Ian just smiled indifferently and led his squad onward.
Seeing that, Lance Xuanyuan frowned. Was the kid up to something sneaky?
An hour later, Ian led his team to the Blood River.
The river was called Blood River for a reason—its waters really did look like fresh blood.
Staring at the churning river, Ian picked up a stick and tossed it in.
The splash barely faded before the stick sank straight to the bottom.
Next, Ian yanked up a handful of weeds and tossed those in too—they sank just as fast.
“Why don’t the Mighty Bull Devils sink when they go in?” Ian asked.
A squad leader replied, “I have no idea, sir.”
“Haven’t you caught any alive to interrogate?” Ian pressed.
The squad leader answered gravely, “We have, but they didn’t know either! And among the ten great Devil tribes, only the Mighty Bull Devils don’t sink in the Blood River. The other nine all do. What’s even weirder: if a Bull Devil dies and gets tossed in, it sinks too.”
“Could it be something to do with their souls?”
Ian started pondering, then activated his Clairvoyant Vision to probe the Blood River.
The squad leader added, “And here’s the strangest part—if you scoop out some water from the Blood River, it turns into normal water almost immediately.”
"Really?"
As he replied, Ian’s gaze was already probing the riverbed.
After analyzing with Clairvoyant Vision, he found nothing wrong with the river water itself. So maybe the Blood River’s secret was hidden at the bottom.
"What’s that?"
Soon, Ian’s vision pierced through the water and hundreds of meters of silt, all the way to the river bottom.
The bottom was lined with smooth, crystalline blood-jade, faintly shimmering with mysterious runes.
Those runes were constantly emitting a strange law-force, giving the whole Blood River its mystical powers.
What shocked Ian even more was that the entire visible riverbed was covered in this blood-jade.
How long was the Blood River, anyway?
No one knew for sure, but the stretches they’d already discovered were thousands of kilometers long. If the whole riverbed was paved with blood-jade for that distance... what kind of project was that?
Even a Martial God couldn’t build something as massive as the Blood River!
"Could it be the Creator God who made the Blood River?"
Ian wondered to himself.
Suddenly, Ian’s eyebrows shot up—he’d spotted more than three hundred bull-headed figures in the wide river.
Looking closer, there were about three hundred regular Mighty Bull Devil soldiers, thirty squad leaders, and three company captains.
Ian couldn’t help but laugh, “Ha! When luck comes, you can’t stop it—first day on the battlefield and the Mighty Bull Devils are here to deliver me my points!”
“Captain, we might not be able to take them!”
Liang Yunkun glanced at the three hundred-plus bull heads floating in the water, his worry showing.
Normally, just three Mighty Bull Devil squad leaders could fight a human Grandmaster to a standstill. This time, there were thirty of them—Liang figured those thirty alone could tie up all ten of their Grandmasters.
And the three hundred regular Devil soldiers could easily overwhelm the rest of their squad with sheer numbers.
Ian grinned, “Battles aren’t just about numbers. Watch closely—I’m taking down every last one of those Mighty Bull Devils!”
Liang Yunkun and the others couldn’t help but smile wryly. Their new captain was way too confident, but orders were orders—if Ian wanted to go head-to-head with the Devil tribe, they had no choice but to follow.