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Chapter 1026 - 678 Betrayal and Original Sin

Chapter 1026: Chapter 678 Betrayal and Original Sin

The Thousand Cattle Guard’s tribune, Wu Jie.

After being pulled up by the armored warriors, he swiftly changed his steam engine and silently stood behind Li Changhe.

As the only Thousand Cattle Guard warrior present, he naturally stood behind his general. And honorably named it protection.

Guo Yi and others scoffed internally, thinking that this ’general’ was clearly several times stronger than the entire team. You’re protecting loneliness itself.

Li Changhe, however, didn’t mind. Since he’d already made contact with them under the persona of General Li Ba, he might as well calmly accept General Li Ba’s treatment.

If it were in the Great Tang, Li Changhe would have asked Hou Junji and Zhang Liang to come and explain themselves.

As a Tian Ce General, Li Changhe had that authority.

The space behind Li Changhe flickered and rippled, conjuring a Bronze Throne. He sat reclined in the throne with a leg casually crossed over the other.

While taking off his helmet, he also tore off the fragmented Auxiliary Army armor and said, "Well then, tell me. What happened thirty years ago?"

When they saw Li Changhe’s face, Guo Yi, Yang Ming, and others were shocked.

It was obvious that they recognized Li Changhe as the exotic person they had spoken of before. After all, he had previously attracted attention by being accompanied by three girls, and Qiu Wentian was a formidable force who could send the Berserker soldiers flying with a single punch.

"So... it really was him."

Yang Ming felt conflicted. He removed his helmet and, along with the armored warriors, knelt on one knee before the Bronze Throne.

The Auxiliary Army soldiers, on the other hand, did not kneel but stood on alert on both sides of the melting cave, all ears for the conversation between the armored warriors.

As Yang Ming’s deep voice began, the curtain of events slowly lifted.

More than thirty years ago, it was during the Great Tang’s second war against different races.

It was when the Great Tang’s Expeditionary Army campaigned across realms.

The great generals led their respective Expeditionary Armies through treacherous Teleportation Gates to various worlds, to subdue all non-human exotic races and alien monsters.

Among these Expeditionary Armies, a number of teams were assigned a very dangerous and dreadful task, to capture the Insect God!

Even when not at her peak, the Insect Queen was a divine creature, a Divinity with the strength of an Insect Race queen.

The Conference Devil within the disaster fog is one of the best examples of such an Insect Queen.

Given enough time, she could even breed swarms that threatened the entire world.

However, the Great Tang was clearly aware of this danger. Without giving the Insect God a chance to recover, the Expeditionary Army quickly besieged her time and again.

During one such campaign, the Emperor of the Great Tang personally took action, inflicting heavy damage on the Insect God, who was resisting the fleet of the Expeditionary Army. He captured a significant amount of her strength.

After that, the Insect God once more fled into another world.

Li Er then ordered the Expeditionary Army led by Hou Junji and Zhang Liang to pursue and kill the Insect God.

Since then, this Expedition Army had been constantly moving from world to world, chasing after the severely wounded Insect God.

If the other Great Tang Expeditionary Armies were pressing exotic peoples and eradicating aliens, spreading the nation’s prestige.

Then the force led by Hou Junji and Zhang Liang was not waging war, they were on the road to war.

With an extremely high risk factor and almost no reinforcements, they stood alone against the Insect God’s frenzied vengeance.

During that period, the morale of the Expeditionary Army greatly diminished.

At that time, Yang Ming, who was just a tribune of the Auxiliary Army, heard his comrades say more than once that ’they had been abandoned’ and that ’their team was sent to die’ among other things...

Li Changhe nodded silently and sent this information to his teammates through [Friends].

Actually, even from this point of view, one could already perceive certain clues.

Li Er’s arrangement was very... deliberate.

When opening up the Eternal Prosperous Tang Dynasty, Li Changhe and his group left behind a lot of information, especially various materials related to the Great Tang.

Ordinary people of Great Tang may not know, but Li Er, as the Emperor of the Great Tang, was someone who completely knew the original history of the Great Tang.

Among the twenty-four meritorious officials of the Lingyan Pavilion in the Great Tang, there were several unstable elements.

For example, Zhangsun Wuji, Hou Junji, Zhang Liang...

Well, these guys are all dangerous figures to the Great Tang. In actual history, Zhangsun Wuji held overwhelming power and caused the death of Li Er’s son, Li Ke.

Hou Junji was even wilder, directly leading a rebellion before being eliminated. As for Zhang Liang... the histories also mention his ambition, and he was taken out early.

And these dangerous fellows, Li Er undoubtedly already knew about them through the information left by Li Changhe.

One could say that as Khan, he was magnanimous enough not to have them executed.

But to actually give them armies and have them go through the Teleportation Gate to confront the insect god, that’s where things get interesting.

A waste of traitors being utilized?

Or could it be... he had already anticipated their betrayal? Intentionally provoking them to turn against him?

As Li Changhe pondered, Yang Ming continued speaking.

At that time, discord ran rampant within the Expeditionary Army, but the presence of the Thousand Cattle Guard battalion quelled any dangerous sentiments. As a royally commissioned battalion, they strongly suppressed any dissenting voices and maintained morale.

Their role was akin to that of political commissars within the army.

Later, when the Expeditionary Army discovered traces of the insect god, they once again set aside their grievances and activated the Teleportation Gate to embark on a new round of extermination.

However, something eerie happened at that moment, as Great Tang’s ships passed through the Teleportation Gate.

Almost all the soldiers witnessed bizarre images and chilling laughter.

Following that, although the Expeditionary Army arrived at Chenhai, many warriors went missing, lost in the spatial rifts of the Teleportation Gate.

This included a large number of Thousand Cattle Guard warriors, among them generals.

Moreover, a strange fire aboard one of the Expeditionary Army’s warships not only destroyed a considerable amount of equipment but also deprived the army of the ability to open the Teleportation Gate again, as well as their ability to communicate with the Great Tang.

Saying that this was a coincidence would be too far-fetched. Li Changhe chuckled at this thought.

So, without the Thousand Cattle Guard battalion, the emperor’s proverbial Blade hanging over the necks of people like Hou Junji,

Hou Junji and Zhang Liang, two generals in the second-highest Sequence of authority, resolutely became the true leaders of the Expeditionary Army.

Since the Expeditionary Army couldn’t open the Teleportation Gate or contact other Great Tang armies,

And as they couldn’t find any trace of the insect god, they suspected they lost track of it through spatial rifts.

After a brief period of chaos, Hou Junji and Zhang Liang persuaded several senior officers,

And decisively implemented their own plan.

They supported a king of a certain duchy, proclaiming him the last legitimate inheritor of the Chenhai Dynasty, and conquered vast territories on the east coast of the continent.

The Chenhai Empire was thus established.

Naturally, that emperor was merely a puppet, while Hou Junji became the Regent King and Zhang Liang became the General.

This act of treachery, of course, also provoked the fury of many armored warriors, but it was quickly suppressed.

Some of the dissenters were forcibly put into hibernation.

Like Wu Jie here behind Li Changhe, who had been locked in a coffin for the past thirty years, until he was awakened today.

Others were expelled, becoming wandering armies without a home on the continent.

They longed for the Great Tang to return and slay these traitors.

And so, thirty years passed. The Expeditionary Army in Chenhai flourished and grew.

With the blocking of information, the younger generation in Chenhai didn’t even know that their blood carried the legacy of the Great Tang.

Only those who became armored warriors could discover this truth from their armor.

But what could they do about it? As citizens of Chenhai.

They had already become the original sinners.

Fortunately, the first to find them was Li Changhe.