Volume One: The Rise of the Western Regions

Chapter One: Besieged

　　"Boom..." The deafening sound of impact kept coming, making his eardrums ache faintly.

　　These damned bastards are attacking the city again. Don’t they ever need to rest? Henry Sutton cursed these barbaric Westerners fiercely.

　　"Captain, we’re out of arrows and stones, and the golden-haired dogs are coming up again." A rough, booming voice sounded in Henry Sutton’s ear.

　　Turning to look at his deputy, Henry Sutton said weakly, "Tell the brothers to knock them all down."

　　"Yes..." Edward Grant roared thunderously, excitedly licking his thick lips, then turned and ran toward the city wall. Judging by his look, it was as if he was going to meet his first love, not heading to a life-and-death battlefield.

　　"What a brute... I wonder how many brothers we’ll have left after this siege." Henry Sutton leaned against the corner of the wall, muttering, "I really don’t want this, oh heavens, how did it come to this? I don’t want to die yet."

　　Henry Sutton was a new recruit. Yes, he was just a rookie who had only been out of training camp for less than a year, but now he had become the commander of this barracks, with barely more than two hundred men left.

　　Ever since five years ago, when the expansion of the Western Caesar Empire reached the East, it inevitably encountered the ruthless counterattack of the Han Empire. The passionate clashes between the two empires played out countless epic stories worthy of history books. For years, these two giants fought over and over along the jagged border, but neither could achieve a decisive victory.

　　The continuation of war meant the depletion of troops, and the depletion of troops meant a constant need for new recruits. Henry Sutton was conscripted under such circumstances, hurriedly trained for three months, and then sent to the front lines like a duck being pushed onto a perch.

　　The small town he was in was actually just a pure military camp, a frontline barracks at the very edge of the war. Inside, there were only soldiers—no ordinary civilians. The five thousand men here formed the Han Empire’s first line of defense against the Caesarites. Twenty days ago, those damned Caesarites suddenly started a war, launching a frenzied siege.

　　On the first day of the siege, the main general was killed in battle, the deputy general died, and half the camp was lost. Everyone knew they couldn’t survive a second day of attack. In utter despair, Henry Sutton had no choice but to use the forbidden power within him.

　　Henry Sutton was the son of commoners, from an ordinary family, an ordinary person—no handsome looks, no outstanding skills, no illustrious background. But he did have one thing that set him apart. When he was seven, he went up the mountain to gather firewood and was bitten by a strange snake with a seven-colored crest. In a panic, Henry Sutton opened his mouth wide and bit the snake back, right at its vital spot, killing it and even sucking it dry of blood. Afterward, he suffered a high fever for seven days and nights before finally recovering.

　　After surviving that ordeal, nothing seemed different. But when Henry Sutton turned fourteen, he discovered a secret about himself: his blood had mutated. That time, he stole his father’s old yellow wine, and while drinking, accidentally cut his finger. His blood dripped into the wine. After bandaging his wound, he found that the family’s old yellow dog had drunk the leftover wine. An hour later, when the drunken old dog woke up, Henry Sutton noticed it had become much stronger, its former decrepit appearance completely gone.

　　After that, Henry Sutton secretly conducted a few more experiments and found that once his blood mixed with alcohol, it would cause a mutation. Any animal that drank it, after an hour’s sleep, would wake up much stronger. Even more strangely, this blood wine had miraculous effects on injuries. Of course, all his test subjects were small animals—he didn’t have the guts to let a person drink the blood wine.

　　But the battle in the barracks forced him to change his stance. In such a life-and-death moment, any means that could save lives was the most important.

　　Because he was a new recruit, and even more luckily, he was hit by an arrow on the first day of defending the city but survived and was carried down from the wall for treatment. That night, enduring the excruciating pain, he dragged out several jars of aged wine from the logistics department, mixed in his own blood, and gave a bowl to everyone in his squad.

　　Perhaps because both the main and deputy generals had died unexpectedly, everyone realized they were at the end of the road, so no one stopped him. As a result, those who drank it soon fell into a deep sleep, and an hour later, when they woke up, they were full of energy, lively as dragons and tigers. More importantly, all their wounds had healed—even deep, bone-revealing cuts closed up without medicine.

　　Overjoyed, Henry Sutton gritted his teeth and filled a bowl with blood, mixing it with five jars of wine. Each of the two hundred or so men got a small cup of blood wine.