As Ah He was speaking, Xia Ye happened to turn around and glance at them.

Qi Longsheng instinctively shrank back. Then he remembered that he was the boss of this district. He couldn’t show fear in front of his underlings, so he immediately stiffened his neck and shot Xia Ye a vicious glare.

Xia Ye merely smiled, utterly unconcerned.

The iron bars stood cold and imposing behind him, forming a wall that separated him from the gang of hoodlums.

Ah He failed to notice the strange atmosphere and asked in confusion, “Boss, what’s wrong?”

Qi Longsheng shot him a sideways glance and gestured for him to lean in. “When you went to see Blackbeard just now, nobody saw you, right?”

Ah He looked baffled. “No. Everyone was waiting for their turn to fight. Who would’ve paid attention to me?”

Qi Longsheng nodded.

If anyone else had tried to explain the arena’s rules to him, he would’ve thought they were insane.

But Xia Ye was different. Xia Ye made him feel as though those rules really would apply to him.

Qi Longsheng didn’t have time to dwell on it. A tremendous boom sounded ahead, and the towering iron gates slowly swung open. Blue sky flooded in together with the sunlight, illuminating the dim fighters’ waiting room.

Wearing a crimson cape, the host leapt onto the centre stage with a microphone in hand and shouted with infectious excitement, “Ladies and gentlemen, you’re in for a real treat today!”

He pointed toward the waiting room, his face animated with theatrical mystery.

“Today, we welcome an incredibly daring newcomer! He’s about to challenge the Shadow Warrior! Everyone here knows that the Shadow Warrior is the undefeated legend of our fighting arena, the man who once achieved an incredible fifty-two consecutive victories! Let’s see who dares issue a fight-to-the-death challenge to our reigning champion!”

Before the host had even finished speaking, the audience had already erupted into cheers.

The roar of the crowd rose higher and higher. Several drunken gamblers clutching liquor bottles stood up from their seats and screamed at the top of their lungs, “Impossible! The Shadow Warrior is the strongest!”

The wind carried their voices straight to Xia Ye’s ears.

His fingers twitched slightly as he looked at Blackbeard beside him.

“Can I go out now?”

Blackbeard sized him up before replying, “Go ahead. Be careful.”

He didn’t know the newcomer, but he knew exactly how brutal the Shadow Warrior was.

Just as the audience had said, the Shadow Warrior was the strongest.

There had once been a hotheaded youngster from District Eight who claimed to be the strongest fighter in the Lower Four Districts. He had even brought his own mech to challenge the Shadow Warrior.

The result?

He was flipped onto the ground in the very first round and couldn’t even get back up.

But the Shadow Warrior’s strength didn’t lie in his techniques; it lay in his heart.

His heart was far too ruthless. After spending so many years in the underground fighting circuit, Blackbeard had never encountered anyone so cold-blooded.

After knocking his opponent to the ground, the Shadow Warrior mercilessly crushed the mech’s core beneath his foot.

Black smoke billowed from the machine, accompanied by agonised screams, sending waves of exhilaration through the audience.

Coins rained into the arena as people chanted the Shadow Warrior’s name. From that day onward, the Shadow Warrior became the crowd’s favourite.

Xia Ye didn’t look like someone who could fight.

At least, that’s what Blackbeard thought.

The young man’s shoulders were slender, his white shirt spotless and neatly pressed. His expression was detached and indifferent. He didn’t look like someone who belonged in the arena at all—he looked more like a pampered young master sitting among the spectators.

Blackbeard couldn’t help worrying for him.

Standing in the centre of the arena, the Shadow Warrior let out a series of ferocious roars. From time to time, he raised the massive blade in his hand and pointed it toward Xia Ye in blatant provocation.

Xia Ye’s expression didn’t change in the slightest; he simply nodded to Blackbeard before walking straight toward the arena.

With the sunlight behind him, his figure looked especially small.

Watching from afar, Qi Longsheng spat viciously onto the ground.

“Damn it! If he gets beaten to death, do you think he’ll come looking for us in the middle of the night?”

—

As Xia Ye stepped out of the waiting room, a chorus of jeers broke out from the audience.

This newcomer was nothing like what they had imagined.

In their minds, anyone bold enough to challenge the Shadow Warrior should at least have been a towering giant—a Sentinel with muscles bulging all over his body.

But Xia Ye looked so thin.

“That’s it?” murmurs spread through the crowd. “This guy thinks he can challenge the Shadow Warrior?”

“He’s asking to die. The Shadow Warrior could knock him over with one finger.”

“This brat’s really a sentinel? He looks like an ordinary person. He’s probably just here hoping someone’ll collect the death compensation.”

Clearly, before the match had even begun, everyone had already decided Xia Ye was going to lose.

Lin Kezhi sat among the spectators, nervously watching Xia Ye’s every move. Listening to the audience recount the Shadow Warrior’s exploits made the heart he had only just calmed down leap back into his throat.

Xia Ye stood in the preparation area. Behind him stood rows upon rows of mechs forged from refined steel.

In recent years, extraterrestrial contamination incidents beyond the Alliance had become increasingly frequent, causing the depreciation rate of military mechs to reach an almost unbelievable level.

Most mechs retired after fighting in contaminated zones eventually found their way onto the black market, where they began a second career in underground fighting arenas.

The quality of these machines was poor. Their paint was chipped and peeling, their joints heavily worn. The worst of them even had its c0ckpit completely exposed.

It wasn’t difficult to imagine what it had endured.

Most likely, an extraterrestrial creature’s claws had ripped open its armour, dragging both the pilot and the optical brain out together, leaving behind nothing but a shattered c0ckpit.

Even after imagining the story behind it, Xia Ye’s expression remained unchanged. He simply stood there calmly, examining one mech after another.

“New guy, what about this one?”

Blackbeard pointed to the mech on the far left.

“It just arrived. Brand new, just like you. Those little punks haven’t had a chance to ruin it yet.”

The mech Blackbeard was referring to was the latest model.

Its entire body was snow white, armed with a dagger, and engraved with sharp, elegant characters:

Snow Eagle.

It was obvious the arena had spent a fortune acquiring it.

If Qi Longsheng had been there, he would’ve picked this one without hesitation. It looked far more formidable than all the battered old machines.

But Xia Ye didn’t even need a closer look to know it wouldn’t do.

The Snow Eagle was a military academy training mech. Although it was fully equipped and looked almost identical to an active-duty combat model, its destructive capability was only fifty percent of a standard military mech. There was absolutely no way something like that could defeat the Shadow Warrior.

Xia Ye shook his head. “I’ll take this one. I’ll tune it myself.”

He pointed toward a dilapidated machine. Its entire body bore the unique sheen of polished refined steel. It had obviously been used for many years, with every trace of paint worn away.

“That’s an old relic.” Blackbeard looked sceptical. “You sure?”

“Yes.” Xia Ye nodded.

Of course he knew it was an old relic.

In fact, no one knew its history better than he did.

Iron Cavalry.

One of the Human Alliance’s very first mechs. It had once created a miracle during the extraterrestrial contamination crisis. Back then, Chi Zhou had piloted the prototype of the Iron Cavalry to repel an extraterrestrial invasion for the very first time.

That battle had earned its place in history. It was also because of the Iron Cavalry’s extraordinary performance against extraterrestrial contamination that humanity embarked upon the path of mech development, abandoning the practice of fighting extraterrestrial races with flesh and blood alone.

This plain, unremarkable machine…

…was the true weapon of war.

As Xia Ye approached it, a faint scent of blood slowly seeped from its frame, like the smell of rust.

“This one.” His voice was firm. “Prepare quadruple-purity black-gold engine oil.”

Blackbeard spread his fingers and swept a stack of paper bills from Xia Ye’s hand. Paper money wasn’t worth much in today’s world anymore, but it was still valuable on the black market and in underground fighting arenas. There was no reason for Blackbeard to refuse it.

He tossed Xia Ye a ring of keys.

“You’re a madman.”

Xia Ye didn’t feel offended in the slightest. On the contrary, he was in an exceptionally good mood.

He laid a hand on the Iron Cavalry. The instant his skin touched it, the mech forged from refined steel actually trembled ever so slightly. If anyone else had witnessed the scene, they would’ve cried out in shock.

But Xia Ye was long accustomed to it.

He merely patted the Iron Cavalry’s arm lightly before picking up his toolbox and beginning the inspection.

When his father was still alive, he had once told Xia Ye, “Mechs have souls.”

Very few people believed those words, but Xia Ye did.

Whenever he stood beside Scarlet Dawn Lotus, admiring its graceful, streamlined body, he could always feel something impossible to describe calling out from within it.

Xia Ye believed he could hear Scarlet Dawn Lotus’s heartbeat, but apart from his father, no one had ever believed him.

After his father passed away, Xia Ye found correspondence between him and one of his friends while sorting through his room.

Only then did he learn that ‘awakening’ did not simply mean becoming a sentinel or a guide.

True awakening meant being able to establish a connection with a mech through psychic power.

Becoming a Sentinel or a Guide merely earned someone an admission ticket.

The military academy’s entrance examination was never simply a test of combat ability, as most people believed. The Alliance’s real objective was to use those examinations to identify the individuals with the strongest psychic power and cultivate them into true mech warriors.

His father had always said that Xia Ye had been able to resonate with mechs ever since he was a child.

One day, he would definitely awaken.

From that moment on, Xia Ye had found his life’s purpose. He would pilot a mech, tear every extraterrestrial creature apart, and protect the Human Alliance. Under Xia Ye’s adjustments, the Iron Cavalry quickly revealed the form it was meant to have.

Ten minutes later, Blackbeard returned.

“You really want quadruple purity?” He dragged over a hose, swinging it casually in one hand. “I’m warning you—we don’t have anyone here who uses four times the concentration. If you can’t control it, it’ll cost you your life.”

Although it was called engine oil, black-gold engine oil was actually extracted from the blood of extraterrestrial creatures.

To power these steel giants, the research institutes had poured in unimaginable effort. No energy source known to humanity had been capable of driving the mechs. Not until they began studying extraterrestrial life and extracted from its blood an energy source even more volatile than petroleum or electricity. No one knew what consequences using such power would ultimately bring.

Humanity, like desperate lambs, had no choice but to cling to this final straw.

Xia Ye connected the hose to the mech. “Thanks for the warning.”

Blackbeard had never met such an impossibly stubborn young man. He stood there glaring at him for quite a while. Seeing that Xia Ye had absolutely no intention of changing his mind and was wholeheartedly focused on filling the mech with engine oil, he could only shake his head and leave.

—

When the Iron Cavalry appeared in the arena, the audience immediately erupted into an uproar.

“What kind of junk is that? The paint’s completely gone! He’s seriously going to use that thing against the Shadow Warrior?”

A pot-bellied middle-aged man stood up and shouted toward the arena.

“You little brat! If you’re gonna scam people out of their money, at least put in some effort!”

Everyone knew that the Shadow Warrior piloted the strongest mech in the arena. It was equipped with the Alliance’s latest optical-drive intelligent computer. Its tremendous computational power enabled it to maximise the mech’s performance, allowing it to unleash three times the destructive force of an ordinary mech.

Compared to that, Xia Ye’s mech looked as though it had just been hauled out of a scrapyard. Two flexible conduits protruded from outside the c0ckpit, making it obvious that it was an obsolete antique. In an era where intelligent computers had become the standard core system for mechs, this entirely manual machine looked like nothing more than a joke.

Seeing the audience growing increasingly agitated, the host hurried back onto the stage and shouted, “Ladies and gentlemen, the death match is about to begin! Don’t hold back your enthusiasm—cast your vote for the victor you believe in!”

Normally, he would ramble on for quite a while during this segment, giving the bunny girls collecting wagers enough time to make their rounds.

Today, however, he said only a few brief sentences before stepping off the stage.

The reason was obvious.

No one believed Xia Ye stood a chance.

Without a second thought, the spectators tossed their betting chips into the box representing the Shadow Warrior.

Lin Kezhi looked around.

Not a single person had placed a bet on Xia Ye.

He hesitated.

Before entering the arena, Xia Ye had specifically instructed him to bet everything on him. But looking at the frenzied crowd, Lin Kezhi couldn’t help wondering whether this was really a good idea.

If he didn’t bet and Xia Ye lost, he would still have enough money to send him to the hospital.

If he did bet and Xia Ye lost…

…they wouldn’t even have enough money left to return to school.

“Hurry up. You’re the only one left,” the uncle beside him urged impatiently. “What’s there to hesitate about? Obviously you pick the Shadow Warrior. That… Iron Cavalry thing doesn’t look reliable at all.”

Stretching his neck for a better look, Lin Kezhi saw that the box representing Xia Ye was completely empty.

“I’ll bet on the Iron Cavalry.” He gritted his teeth. “All in.”

He couldn’t bear to see his friend go completely unsupported.

 

At the same time, in the VIP viewing room—

“Instructor Chi, who are you betting on?”

Shi Lu awkwardly accepted the betting hat from a bunny girl and carried it over to Chi Zhou.

He stumbled over his words four or five times before finally swallowing the word ‘Sir’ and replacing it with the more appropriate form of address.

Chi Zhou shot him a sidelong glance.

“Why are you so nervous?”

Leaning back comfortably against the soft sofa, Chi Zhou looked completely at ease. Every so often, he took a leisurely puff from the cigar in his hand, forming a stark contrast with Shi Lu, who looked as though he were about to face a mortal enemy.

He took the hat from Shi Lu, swept all the chips from the coffee table into it in one motion until it was overflowing, then stuffed it back into the bunny girl’s hands.

“Iron Cavalry. ALL IN.” Chi Zhou said.

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