DLERB -Chapter 41 One Glance, and I Became a Joke!

On the Stargazing Platform, the night wind howled.

Ying Ziye tilted his small face upward, looking at the peerless killing god standing before him, whose aura shook heaven and earth.

He reached out his small hand and tapped the cold armor of Han Xin.

“Uncle, get up.”

“I… will take you to kill people.”

Han Xin slowly stood up. His armor scraped with a heavy metallic sound.

There was no expression on his face—only a deeper, more respectful bow of the head.

“This general will obey my lord’s command.”

At that moment.

A black shadow silently appeared beneath the Stargazing Platform.

Qing Long raised his head to look up.

For the first time, his gaze did not fall on Ying Ziye, but locked onto the newly appeared figure above.

His hand—one that had held a blade for years—instinctively tightened.

He felt no hostility.

But he felt something far more terrifying: a pressure as heavy as a mountain.

It was the instinctive trembling of a wolf before a true dragon, of a jackal before a deity.

Ying Ziye walked down the steps with his small, short legs.

Han Xin followed half a step behind him like a silent shadow, never leaving his side.

“Uncle Qing Long.”

“Your Highness.”

Ying Ziye pointed at Han Xin behind him, a bright smile on his face.

“Go, invite the Chancellor and General Wang Jian over.”

“Tell them this prince has caught a very powerful tiger, and I’d like them to come and take a look.”

Qing Long’s eyes swept over Han Xin again. For the first time, his eternally icy expression showed a clear shift in emotion.

A tiger?

This was no tiger.

This was clearly a god of war who had crawled out of a sea of blood and hell!

“I obey your decree.”

Qing Long’s figure vanished into the night.

Half an hour later.

Wang Clan Residence

A violent knocking sound startled the sleeping old general Wang Jian awake.

“Old General! Emergency palace summons! The Regent Prince requests your immediate presence in the palace!”

Wang Jian rose and put on his clothes, his heart sinking sharply.

He instinctively looked out the window.

That faint blood-red sky from earlier still seemed to linger in his vision.

Had the remnants of the Six Kingdoms made a major move again?

Li Si practically rolled off his bed.

When the imperial guard said, “The Regent Prince summons you,” his legs began to tremble uncontrollably.

Another midnight summons!

Another sudden “surprise”!

Last time it was chili peppers. The time before that, potatoes.

What kind of life-threatening thing had this little ancestor pulled down from the heavens this time?

Wang Jian and Li Si met at the entrance. They exchanged a glance and saw solemnity and unease in each other’s eyes.

Wang Jian spoke first in a low voice:

“Chancellor, do you know why the Prince has summoned us in the middle of the night?”

Li Si wiped away nonexistent sweat, his face bitter.

“General, how would I dare guess the Prince’s thoughts?”

“I only hope… this ‘surprise’ isn’t food again. My old bones really can’t take it anymore.”

With completely different kinds of anxiety, the two walked into the study they both respected—and feared.

Candlelight filled the room.

Ying Ziye sat at the main seat, sipping lotus seed soup in small, unhurried mouthfuls.

Qing Long stood like a statue in the shadows of the corner.

Everything seemed normal.

Except for the man standing on the other side.

He wore the most ordinary Qin army armor and did not appear particularly muscular.

He simply stood there in silence.

Yet the moment Wang Jian and Li Si stepped into the room, both of them simultaneously felt a suffocating pressure crash down upon them!

Li Si’s legs went weak, and he almost collapsed on the spot.

He recognized this feeling.

It was the sensation of facing the unknown—of confronting an incomprehensible power—where one’s soul is reduced to insignificance and helplessness.

Wang Jian reacted even more intensely.

Those eyes of his, which had witnessed countless battlefields and life-and-death struggles, locked tightly onto Han Xin.

As a supreme general who had once commanded a million troops and personally sent hundreds of thousands of enemies to their deaths, he saw far more than Li Si did.

What he saw was not a man.

Under that ordinary Qin armor, he saw mountains of corpses and seas of blood—endless military camps stretching beyond the horizon, banners that blotted out the sky.

That was not killing intent.

It was something purer—and far more terrifying.

It was “military aura,” condensed from war, weapons, strategy, and slaughter.

Wang Jian felt as though he was not facing a single man.

He was standing alone against an invincible, unstoppable, sweeping force that had conquered the world—a million-strong army.

His breathing stopped in that instant.

Forcing himself to speak, Wang Jian said each word with great difficulty:

“Esteemed warrior, your face is unfamiliar.”

Ying Ziye set down the white jade bowl in his hand and smiled casually.

“A new arrival.”

Wang Jian’s gaze never left Han Xin. He decided to test him.

Using a military code only veterans could understand, he asked in a low voice:

“Twin dragons lock the mountain, lone wolf trapped in a cage—how do you break the fangs?”

This was an extremely difficult tactical problem: how to break a superior enemy’s pincer formation in mountain warfare with inferior forces.

The silent Han Xin, who had been standing like a stone statue, finally moved.

He did not speak.

He merely raised his eyelids slightly and looked at Wang Jian once.

Just that one glance.

BOOM!

It felt as though Wang Jian’s mind had been struck by billions of lightning bolts at the same time.

Before his eyes was no longer a study.

It was countless brutal, vast, and ever-changing battlefields.

He saw his own “Twin Dragons Lock Mountain” formation being dismantled in an unimaginable way—luring the enemy in, splitting them apart, and encircling them.

He saw his flanks severed by ghostlike elite units emerging from impossible mountain ravines.

He saw his central army, fooled by a frontal feint, being pierced straight through by a cavalry force striking like a spear to the heart.

Encirclement, infiltration, severing supply lines, flooding, fire attacks…

Every tactic he could think of—and even those he could never imagine—appeared in his mind in dozens, even hundreds of more efficient, colder, and more merciless variations.

The military strategies he had once been proud of, which he believed flawless, were now as fragile as sandcastles built by a child in the eyes of this man.

“Pfft!”

Wang Jian staggered back half a step, cracking the floor beneath his foot.

Cold sweat instantly soaked his entire back.

This veteran general, who had swept through the Six Kingdoms and never once suffered defeat in his life…

At this moment, was utterly defeated by a single glance.

He no longer cared about his disgraceful posture, nor the overwhelming shock flooding his mind.

Wang Jian turned abruptly toward Ying Ziye and bowed deeply—an unprecedented formal salute.

His voice was hoarse from shock, even tinged with fear.

“Your Highness…”

“Where… did such a divine being come from?!”

Ying Ziye licked the remaining sweet soup from his lips and let out a soft chuckle.

“He fell from the sky.”

“Specifically sent to help me catch rats.”

He no longer paid attention to the two stunned ministers.

His small body hopped down from the main seat and walked to the center of the room, where a massive sand table map was laid out.

It was the most detailed defense map of the regions around Xianyang, filled with flags representing garrisons, outposts, and fortresses.

Ying Ziye beckoned to the silent figure.

“Uncle, come here.”

He pointed casually across several elite Qin garrison positions on the map with his fair little finger.

“Take a look.”

“Is our Great Qin’s defense…”

“…basically a sieve?”