Chương 373: 373：To Greywater Town! A Desperate Pilgrimage

This was the deeply ingrained, absolute prejudice held by the vast majority of the world. But today! When the official, apocalyptic victory report of the Holy Halycon Empire perfectly overlapped with Lucia's painstakingly detailed feature article—when both were violently slammed onto the tables of the entire world... Every single ounce of doubt, every single sneer of mockery, was fundamentally, utterly shattered! If everything out in Greywater Town was nothing but a fabricated fairy tale, then answer this!

Who could use two thousand men, without suffering a single fatality, to violently, head-on slaughter three thousand highly mobile Centaur elites? Who could use three hundred men, in the dead of a freezing blizzard, to completely terrify an army of ten thousand heavy-axe Minotaurs into an apocalyptic camp-collapse and a total rout?!

And who could stand entirely alone, effortlessly phasing through eight overlapping layers of Shamanic magical wards, to execute a flawless sniper shot that blew a hole straight through the heart of Warchief Blackstone?!

"It's all real! Every single logic-defying detail recorded by Scholar Lucia is the absolute, ironclad foundation that made this zero-casualty miracle possible!" Inside a raucous tavern located at the absolute crossroads of several nations, a grand scholar—a man who had previously scoffed at the reports with sheer contempt—violently shoved his mug of ale aside. His face was etched with pure, unadulterated shock.

With violently trembling hands, he hoisted the Daily Gazette high above his head for the entire tavern to see.

"Without medical treatment that completely disregards the cost, how could there possibly be zero fatalities?!"

"Without that composite Dark Silver Armor, how could they possibly tank a suffocating volley of Centaur arrows?!"

"But most importantly!" The old scholar tore his vocal cords raw, screaming at the top of his lungs: "Without the absolute, ironclad promise of a lifetime disability pension, and the unshakable belief in total equality personally sworn by Lord Soren... what army would dare to face monsters outnumbering them fifteen to one, and erupt with such apocalyptic, fearless combat power?!" The tavern violently erupted into a roar that practically blew the roof off!

Under the explosive catalyst of the enemy supreme commander's execution, this earth-shattering wave of public opinion reached an absolute, boiling crescendo! It violently, ruthlessly shattered the suffocating, pessimistic, and rigidly class-oppressed atmosphere that had choked the human world for four hundred and fifty years!

Faced with an unprecedented, epoch-defining battle record forged from blood and miracles, a massive, unstoppable chain reaction began to detonate across every single class and faction within the human alliance! The Northern Border of the Silvermoon Kingdom. This was a miserable, squalid refugee camp that had been ruthlessly trampled by the fires of war. Freezing winds violently poured through the gaping holes of shredded canvas tents.

Everywhere you looked, starving, shivering refugees huddled together alongside bankrupt serfs who had lost their land and were teetering on the absolute brink of starvation. In a pile of rotting mud, an emaciated, white-haired old serf tightly clutched his infant son. The child was burning with a severe fever, hovering at death's door. He hadn't eaten a single grain of wheat in three days.

Just a few days prior, the border tax collectors of the Silvermoon Kingdom had whipped him bloody just to violently confiscate his last half-sack of wheat chaff. Just as he surrendered to his fate, fully believing that today, he and his son would become nothing more than nameless, frozen bones in this ditch...

"Did you hear?! Something apocalyptic just happened!" A toothless, crippled veteran—a former mercenary who had lost a leg and ended up stranded in this hellhole—stumbled frantically into the camp. Leaning heavily on a wooden crutch, he held a half-mud-soaked copy of the Daily Gazette in his trembling hands. To read the text, the veteran practically mashed his eyes against the paper, his voice shaking violently:"In the Misty Swamp! That Lord Soren who saved countless people meant to be eaten as Orc livestock!

He led his brothers in Greywater Town and killed Warchief Blackstone!"

"Killed the Warchief?!" Dozens of starving refugees paralyzed in the mud violently jolted awake.

"Not just killed! They routed thirty thousand Orcs, and they didn't lose a single damn man!" The veteran was so hyper-excited he violently tossed his crutch aside, dropping to his single knee in the mud. Waving the Gazette, he cried out:"The paper says it! In Greywater Town, as long as you are willing to bleed and sweat for the territory, the Lord does not give a damn about your birth!"

"He abolished class oppression! Even a lowly serf, once in the army, can get an equal share of Royal-grade Snowflake Beef!"

"Even if you lose an arm or a leg in battle, the Lord swore a blood oath to bring you back to the territory and feed you for the rest of your natural life!" Those words violently awakened the primal, desperate thirst for survival buried deep within the hearts of these people pushed to the absolute brink. The old serf clutching his dying son suddenly radiated a blazing, intense light in his eyes! He violently shot up from the mud, completely ignoring the severe weakness ravaging his body.

"Is it true...? Over there, regardless of your birth... will they truly treat the sick? Will they truly give us full bellies?" The old serf stared dead at the veteran.

"These are the ironclad laws laid down by a hero who slaughtered two Orc commanders! Only a God of War who actually treats people like human beings could forge a miracle like this!" The veteran pointed fiercely toward the northern sky. The old serf violently ripped off the ragged sleeves of his linen shirt, using the strips to strap his highly feverish son tightly to his back. The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

"Brothers! Sisters! Countrymen!" The old serf spun around, his voice hoarse but echoing like thunder across the camp.

"Instead of staying here to have our last drop of blood squeezed dry by aristocratic tax collectors, just to freeze and starve to death without even a grave!"

"Let's go to that land! A land where, as long as you put in the work, they treat you as a brother!"

"We are going to defect to Lord Soren! Even if we have to crawl on our hands and knees! Even if we drown in the muck of the swamp! I would rather die on the path marching toward hope!"

"MOVE OUT! TO GREYWATER TOWN!" The primal instinct to survive and a desperate, burning thirst for fair treatment violently ignited the hearts of these refugees and serfs! And it wasn't just the bottom-tier refugees. Across the nations, the grassroots soldiers and low-ranking officers who had always been viewed as cheap, disposable biological material by their aristocratic commanders had their entire realities violently shattered by this battle report and the policies it revealed!

Within the defensive lines of a certain Duchy, in a trench choked with waist-deep, freezing mud. A low-ranking squad leader, covered head to toe in agonizing frostbite, stared at the shivering, freezing brothers around him. They hadn't been issued winter coats, and their military pay had been ruthlessly embezzled by the nobles. He looked down at the Daily Gazette that had just been passed down the line.

His eyes locked onto a single, glaring sentence: [The entire army of Greywater Town, from the elite mainline vanguard to the women and children of the logistics corps, are fully outfitted in self-produced, thick Padded Cotton Armor...] He had thrown his life into the meat grinder for the nobles of this nation for eight years! He bore five brutal scars on his body! And what the hell did he get for it?! He got the mocking laughter of aristocrats hugging their mistresses in warm castles!

He got to watch his lieutenant, who lost both legs on the front lines, get thrown out of the barracks like absolute trash to starve to death on the streets!

"Why the fuck should we take this?!" The squad leader violently kicked over the wooden bucket in front of him, spilling the rancid slop filled with grit that passed for their rations. The venomous, burning fury in his chest violently erupted. He spun around, sweeping his gaze over the hundred-plus brothers in the trench who shared his absolute rage.

"Look at Lord Soren! He places the lives of his soldiers above all else! He equips every single brother with heavy armor forged from mithril and black steel! He swore an ironclad oath: death guarantees a burial, and disability guarantees a lifetime pension!" The squad leader aggressively ripped the Duchy insignia off his shoulder pad and ruthlessly stomped it deep into the rotting mud. He roared in a low, furious growl:"Brothers! I have had enough of being cheap cannon fodder for these aristocratic parasites!"

"The second this blizzard stops, we are done! Grab your weapons! Even if we have to become wandering mercenaries, we are marching straight to Greywater Town!"

"We are going to sell our lives to a true, peerless commander! A man actually worthy of our loyalty, who can lead us to execute massive enemy Warchiefs with zero casualties!" This intense, burning yearning allowed these numb, exhausted veterans to violently reclaim their absolute dignity as warriors. Meanwhile, the staggering prestige and absolute security of Greywater Town began to exert a massive, apocalyptic siphon effect on far more diverse, apex-tier classes across the continent.

Deep within the Holy Halycon Empire, inside a dilapidated tavern packed with refugees fleeing the war. A destitute magic apprentice, wearing a heavily patched, threadbare robe, stared at the Daily Gazette in his hands. His breathing completely stopped. In an era of high towers where magical knowledge was strictly, ruthlessly monopolized by the aristocracy and official academies...

because he was born a commoner and lacked a prestigious family surname, even though he possessed an absolute, heaven-defying talent for elemental affinity, he had been callously expelled by the Royal Academy. He was violently stripped of the right to even glance at a basic magical theory textbook. But now, what did he see in the margins of this battle report?

[Greywater Town establishes basic academies and military schools, actively popularizing mathematics and magical theory to commoners and standard infantrymen, aiming to mass-produce domestic magical research scholars...]"Popularizing... teaching magical knowledge to commoners?!" The magic apprentice violently grabbed his own hair, completely losing his mind in pure hype.

"There are absolutely no aristocratic barriers to knowledge over there!" He violently snatched up the single, ratty spellcasting notebook left on his table and shoved it into his robes. And in the corner of that very same tavern, a disgraced Knight—a man who had offended a massive noble, been stripped of his fiefdom, and exiled into the life of a wandering mercenary—firmly gripped his heirloom broadsword.

"A supreme commander who can stand completely alone, firing a single arrow into an army of a hundred thousand to take the enemy general's head..." The disgraced Knight's eyes burned with a desperate, absolute yearning for true martial honor.

"Only a God of War like that... is truly worthy of my blade!" Scholars. Destitute mages. Nameless mercenaries possessing apex martial combat arts. In their respective homelands, they had suffered endless, suffocating class suppression and tasted the absolute, bitter ash of losing their homes to the fires of war. But right here, right now, in their hearts... Greywater Town had officially transmuted into an absolute, impregnable sanctuary!

It was an apocalyptic utopia where they could freely unleash their talents, where birth and class meant absolutely nothing, and where they would find absolute, unyielding protection!