The Almighty Dominance (by Sunshine) novel Chapter 663

Chen Hao drove the shovel into the packed earth once more, the blade biting deep with a dull scrape. His shoulders burned.

Sweat stung his eyes and ran in dirty tracks down the dust on his face. For a few heartbeats the rhythm felt almost right again—the old, simple rhythm of a man and the land.

Then the Gaia voice came, sliding straight into his skull.

“Chen Hao. Your scheduled instruction period begins now. Report to the training platform.”

He froze mid-lift. The shovel stayed buried in the dirt.

“I hate training,” he muttered.

The words came out rough, almost childish. He was no scholar. Never had been. Before the rebellion he had been nothing but a dirt-poor farmer.

Now these machines wanted to turn him into something else.

The Wudang sect and whatever sorcery they had brought with them had given the governor power no man in Xia had ever held, and Chen Hao wanted no part of it.

He wanted his hands on a hoe. He wanted the honest ache of muscle and callus. He did not want to learn how to drive a truck that could tear up and level an entire field in the time it once took twenty men to do the same work by hand.

Around him, other former rebels were already moving. Some dropped their tools with the same reluctance he felt.

Others stared at the strange wheeled machines lined up along the edge of the new fields—compact tillers, mechanized plows, grading trucks with wide steel blades.

Machines that could do in an hour what entire villages once struggled to accomplish in a day.

A low murmur rippled through the men.

They wanted to protest, to cling to their old ways, but deep down they knew the truth.

The revolution had arrived. They could not remain in the past. Every farmer in the two provinces had already received the same training. They were learning to operate the new equipment—machinery that made the land yield a hundred times what it once had.

While other provinces burned each other’s fields and fought over scraps, Yan and Qing would feed their people and still have surplus to let them enjoy their lives.

That was the future being built here.

Chen Hao let the shovel fall.

It struck the earth with a soft thud and remained upright, like a grave marker.

Slowly, he wiped his hands on his trousers and turned toward the training platform, where the other men and the gleaming line of farming machines were already gathering.

He did not look back.

He walked forward—into the future.

Meanwhile, across the other provinces, war continued its grim dance.

The borderlands between Dong Zhuo’s territory and Yuan Shao’s coalition had transformed into a graveyard of shattered truces.

For the past month, the two armies had clashed almost daily along the old imperial highway.

Every battle consumed staggering amounts of food and silver merely to sustain the men on the front. Yet no amount was ever enough.

Like armored locusts, soldiers from both sides descended upon the villages. They stripped them of grain, livestock, and sons—dragging the boys away to feed the endless meat grinder of war.

Should a farmer refuse to surrender his final sack of rice, the soldiers would bar the door and burn the house down around his screaming family.

Commanders on both sides pressured their captains with the threat of execution if supplies ran short. The captains, in turn, enforced the same terror on the farmers. They dressed this cruelty in noble words: “securing supplies for the righteous cause.”

Those peasants fortunate enough to survive learned to bury their remaining stores deep in the earth and whisper desperate prayers that the armies would march past without noticing them.

Lives were cheap. The war had no time for them.

In a muddy village two days’ ride from the Yan Province border, a family of seven packed what they could carry in the dark. The mother wrapped her youngest in a ragged blanket.

The father carried the iron pot and two hoes. They had heard the stories on the wind.

Governor Bai Xiaochun of Yan and Qing was widely regarded as a fool—he loved women far more than he loved war. His soldiers did not pillage. They built dikes along the rivers and cleared new fields from the wilderness.

True, the governor was harsh toward those who would not work; he ordered them beaten. Yet for the weary refugees, this was a mercy.

Better to feel the sting of a rod for idleness than to be conscripted into the meat grinder of war and die meaninglessly.

Better to keep the fruits of your own labor than watch soldiers steal them at swordpoint.

Word had spread that he granted houses and fertile fields to any man or woman willing to toil. And the women of Yan and Qing—rumors whispered they were the fairest in all the realm of Xia.

A governor lost in silk and perfume was far preferable to one who would torch your home over a single sack of grain.

They joined the river of refugees flowing south and east toward the two provinces that still had peace.

At the border checkpoint into Yan Province, the scene was nothing like the chaos they had fled.

A line of tired, filthy families waited under the watchful eyes of white-robed Wudang disciples and local soldiers. When a family reached the front, a calm soldier asked simple questions.

“Name? Where from? Any skills?”

The father answered in a hoarse, worn voice. “We have nothing left. But we can farm. We can dig.”

The soldier gave a single nod. For a fleeting moment, his eyes shifted toward something invisible to everyone else — a glowing transparent screen projected by Gaia.

New irrigation channels carried water to fields that had never known reliable crops.

Harvests came in heavy and golden. Merchants who had once hidden their goods now expanded their warehouses.

Taxes were collected fairly and without the old brutality. No one starved. No one was dragged from their homes at night. The fear that had lived in every village for generations began to loosen its grip.

The records of Yan and Qing told a story no other province in Xia could match.

Over the past year, the two provinces had taken in nearly one million refugees.

Men, women, and children had arrived from every corner of the empire—starving peasants from the flooded north, broken soldiers from failed warlord campaigns, families who had fled the capital’s corruption and the Yellow Turban uprisings.

No one made speeches about it. The numbers simply appeared in the ledgers Zhuge Liang reviewed each month.

One million souls who had once been burdens on collapsing provinces were now producing grain, digging canals, and raising families in safety.

Then the news arrived that changed everything.

It came on a clear morning in early autumn, carried by three exhausted riders who had ridden without rest from the western roads.

They dismounted in the central square of Changyi, fell to their knees before the governor’s guards, and spoke the words that would soon echo across the entire empire.

Dong Zhuo was dead.

The tyrant who had held the capital and the boy emperor in his fist had been killed in his own palace — by his own adopted son, Lü Bu, some said, or by his own blood in a rage over a woman.

Diao Chan. The most beautiful woman in all of Xia. Father and son had wanted the same prize. Steel had settled the argument.

The capital erupted in turmoil. The young Emperor Liu Xie had lost his iron protector in a single stroke. Every warlord who had been prowling the shadows saw the same golden opportunity at once.

Whoever held the dragon throne would rule all of Xia.

In that moment, the dream of kingship ignited in every ambitious heart.

Yet unknown to the raging warlords, three days later a small group of women completed a long and dangerous journey, delivering a thin fourteen-year-old boy into the heart of Yan and Qing.

As they reached the Governor’s mansion, Zhuge Liang stepped forward, her voice steady with quiet reverence:

“We welcome Emperor Liu Xie to our lands.”

The boy appeared exhausted and half-starved, his once-imperial robes reduced to rags. He had endured harsh treatment and countless hiding places on the road to reach the safety of Chang Yi.

At the same time, Gaia transmitted a concise message to Alex, who remained absorbed in his cultivation:

“Report: The ‘Beautiful Woman Project’ — launched one year ago to infiltrate the Emperor’s side — has succeeded. We now hold Emperor Xia in our hands.”