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.

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