Golden-yellow shell casings sprayed out like a torrential downpour, clattering against the hard floor in a dense, crisp rain of metal.
In the blink of an eye, the ground beneath Su Zhen’s solid-steel dragon throne was covered in a thick layer of scorching brass casings.
The relentless hail of bullets swept across the grand hall like a raging storm.
Every single round was powerful enough to tear through steel.
The thick vermilion pillars in the Hall of Supreme Harmony, so massive that it took two people to encircle them, suffered a devastating barrage.
The hundred-year-old golden nanmu wood was utterly helpless against it.
“Boom! Boom! Boom!”
Dull impacts rang out without pause.
Wood chips flew everywhere. Huge chunks of timber were ripped apart and blown into clouds of dust in midair.
The exquisite coiled-dragon carvings on the pillars were blasted beyond recognition, stripped of the majestic imperial dignity they had once possessed.
The magnificent caisson ceiling overhead suffered an even worse fate.
Bullets pierced the heavy wooden boards and shattered the delicate glazed roof tiles.
Countless fragments of tile and broken beams came crashing down like hailstones.
The area above the Hall of Supreme Harmony looked as though it had been struck by a magnitude-ten earthquake, swaying precariously on the verge of collapse.
Facing this storm were the three hundred black-clad crossbowmen concealed among the rafters.
They were elite death warriors whom General Lin Zhenxiong had secretly trained at enormous cost, pouring in countless riches and years of painstaking effort.
Only a moment ago, they had resembled merciless gods of death, taking aim at the imperial family of three with poisoned arrows.
They had believed themselves to be hunters high above their prey, holding the power to decide the life and death of the highest rulers of the Great Abyss Kingdom.
But the instant the Gatling gun opened fire, they did not even have time to react.
Before their fingers could pull the triggers of their heavy crossbows, death had already arrived.
“Pfft! Pfft! Pfft!”
The bullets tore through human bodies without the slightest resistance.
The impacts were dull and dense, sending chills down the spine.
The black-clad men’s prized steel bows, which could supposedly pierce heavy armor, were nothing more than paper toys before bullets propelled by gunpowder.
The overwhelming kinetic force blasted them apart, sending countless razor-sharp metal fragments flying in every direction and burying themselves in flesh.
The specially crafted light armor they wore was worth a fortune and reputed to be impervious to blades and spears, yet it failed to offer even the slightest protection.
The bullets ripped through the armor with ease, shredding their internal organs and snapping their solid bones.
One crimson mist after another exploded in midair above the hall, like red lotuses blooming one after the other.
“Ah!”
“What the hell is that? Save me!”
The shrill screams sliced through the hall like swords, only to be mercilessly swallowed by the deafening roar of the machine gun.
Those struck by the bullets could not even retain complete corpses.
Their severed limbs were torn apart in midair, spraying blood like rain.
The three hundred elite killers tumbled from the rafters more than ten meters above the ground, dropping like dumplings being tossed into boiling water.
“Thud! Thud! Thud!”
The bodies crashed down in a torrential rain.
They hit the floor with sickening force, flesh splattering and bones cracking loudly enough to make one’s teeth ache.
Some of the death warriors had already gone still before they reached the ground.
Others landed hard and continued to twitch in agony, blood mixed with fragments of their organs pouring from their mouths.
Warm blood flowed along the grooves between the floor tiles, quickly gathering into a glaring pool of red at the center of the hall.
In barely a few dozen seconds, all three hundred deadly crossbowmen had been wiped out!
They had not managed to fire even a single poisoned arrow before being reduced to a floor covered in mangled flesh.
No level of martial cultivation, no scheme or stratagem, could withstand absolute firepower. Before such overwhelming force, everything became nothing but laughable trash.
Below the Hall of Supreme Harmony, the turncoat officials who had just been kneeling at Lin Zhenxiong’s feet and shouting “Long live!” were now driven insane by the sight of this hell on earth.
Because Su Yaoyao had deliberately adjusted the firing angle while Su Jin turned the crank, specifically targeting the assassins in the rafters, the bullets had not swept directly through the crowd below.
But that did nothing to lessen the crushing terror these civil officials experienced at such close range—a force capable of destroying heaven and earth.
“My heavens! This is divine punishment! Heavenly thunder has descended!”
The Minister of Revenue let out a shriek that sounded nothing like a human voice, his facial muscles twisted in terror.
Where had his earlier arrogance gone—the swagger with which he had supported a new ruler and cursed the tyrant?
He crawled and rolled beneath a shattered dining table, clutching his head with both hands and trembling with his rear sticking up in the air.
A strong stench of urine spread from his trousers, yellow liquid running down his legs and pooling on the floor.
This court official, who was normally lofty and full of talk about benevolence and morality, had been frightened into wetting himself.
The other officials were no better. They fled in panic, crashing about like headless flies.
Some trampled one another and did not even stop to retrieve their fallen hats. Others desperately squeezed themselves into dark corners.
They all flattened themselves against the freezing floor tiles, pressing their faces tightly to the ground and wishing they could crawl into a crack in the earth.
They were terrified that the iron monsters belching tongues of flame might dip their barrels even slightly lower and turn them into piles of steaming minced flesh.
To Su Zhen atop the dais, the scene was more refreshing than a bowl of chilled sour-plum soup on the hottest day of summer.
Grand Chancellor and General Lin Zhenxiong, standing below the jade steps, had completely turned to stone.
His eyes were stretched wide, the corners so strained that tiny cracks had appeared. They nearly bulged from their sockets.
He watched helplessly as the trump card he had spent countless resources cultivating for ten years was reduced to nothing in the blink of an eye.
As he stared at the shattered pillars and the bodies raining down like water, Lin Zhenxiong’s world collapsed.
He could neither understand nor accept it.
“No… This isn’t real… It’s an illusion!”
Lin Zhenxiong’s lips trembled. He staggered backward, his legs as weak as noodles.
But he had, after all, weathered countless mountains of corpses and seas of blood. His instincts for danger were exceptionally sharp.
The moment he retreated, he sensed that the deafening rhythm of gunfire from the dais had changed.
The barrels of the Gatling gun Su Jin was cranking wildly were lowering with cold, merciless precision!
Six dark muzzles, each a bottomless pit spitting flames a meter long, were about to aim directly at Lin Zhenxiong’s head!
Run! He had to run!
That was the only thought left in Lin Zhenxiong’s mind.
What did imperial ambitions and supreme power matter? In the face of death, they were all nothing but worthless crap.
He turned around and scrambled away, abandoning even his sword and throwing it to the ground.
“Protect Your Highness! Come protect Your Highness!”
Lin Zhenxiong let out a shrill roar and grabbed several of his surviving trusted death warriors.
These men had originally been his final line of personal protection. Now, they became nothing more than expendable shields.
Without the slightest hesitation, he shoved the living men in front of him, using them as human shields against the storm of bullets.
“Pfft! Pfft! Pfft!”
The Gatling gun lowered its muzzles, and the dense hail of bullets lashed out like the whip of the Grim Reaper.
The death warriors serving as human shields were turned into bloody, perforated wrecks, shards of bone scattered across the floor.
The immense impact sent their bodies flying backward, slamming heavily into Lin Zhenxiong.
Using the force of the impact and the cover provided by the corpses, Lin Zhenxiong put every ounce of strength into bolting toward the rear of the hall.
At the back of the Hall of Supreme Harmony was a carved wooden window used for ventilation. Beneath it was a low opening normally used to let the palace hounds in and out.
At that moment, with his life on the line, the Grand General had no concern for face or dignity.
He slammed his head into the wooden window. The decrepit frame could not withstand the impact and shattered with a sharp crack, sending splinters flying.
Lin Zhenxiong scrambled and crawled out, squeezing through the low opening in a thoroughly disheveled state.
The once-arrogant powerful minister of Dayuan had now become nothing more than a stray dog with its tail between its legs, escaping through a dog hole!
Inside the great hall, the muscles in Su Jin’s arms spasmed faintly from the strain of firing the weapon.
Yet the madness in his eyes showed no sign of diminishing. It was not until the last golden cartridge belt had been emptied that it finally stopped.
Click.
The firing pin struck empty, and the deafening metallic roar came to an end.
The six rapidly spinning barrels also ceased turning amid a shrill scraping sound.
Silence returned to the hall. Only the occasional sound of broken bricks and shattered tiles tumbling down broke the stillness.
The air was thick with the suffocating stench of black powder and the nauseating reek of blood.
The barrels radiated astonishing heat, wisps of blue smoke drifting from their muzzles.
Standing beside the small golden throne, Su Yaoyao surveyed the wreckage covering the floor and the officials who had been scared witless.
She raised her tender white hand and gently blew on the scorching Gatling gun barrel.
The corners of her lips lifted slightly. She was just about to mock Lin Zhenxiong for his ridiculous escape through the dog hole when—
at that very moment,
from the deep darkness outside the hall, a low, thunderous roar suddenly erupted.
Boom—boom—boom!
It was the sound of war drums!
Like rolling thunder, it carried an overwhelming force that seemed capable of crushing everything in its path, sweeping across the palace from all directions.
The drumming shattered the heavens and caused the shattered floor of the Taiji Hall to tremble violently.
Immediately afterward, General Lin Zhenxiong, who had escaped the hall, let out a frenzied roar.
His voice, filled with boundless humiliation, madness, and bloodlust, rang across the imperial palace:
“No matter how powerful the firearms are, their ammunition will run out eventually! I have a hundred thousand armored troops—throw your lives away if you must! Trample the Taiji Hall flat!”
