Chapter 151: Deadlock Resistance

Yan Luo had no idea that his battle against the Spaniards was spreading across YouTube and Bilibili in this inner world. That night, he had quietly slipped into the tribe, pulling off a literal Assassin's Creed.

Patrolling soldiers were silently put down one by one during the surprise attacks.

Because of the need to build a city, the tribe occupied a vast area, and the patrols were scattered everywhere. Queen Isabella probably never expected that the player who fought so openly during the day would shamelessly resort to assassination by night.

Once all the patrolling NPCs were wiped out, no one would discover his infiltration.

The game had a distinct cycle of day and night, and NPCs would also rest and sleep when night fell.

Yan Luo sneaked into a tent where more than a dozen people were sleeping. He slit the throats of these slumbering soldiers one by one. Low-level artificial intelligence was still rather rigid; sleeping was equivalent to being on pause and idling, and they died before they could even react to the assassination.

After butchering twenty-three tents in a row and taking out nearly four hundred people, Yan Luo entered the twenty-fourth tent, only to suddenly realize that the occupants here were not sleeping soldiers.

Instead...

It was a group of players.

The time ratio between this inner world and the game was one to ten—ten days in the game equaled one day in reality. When night fell, many Spanish players did not log off. The darkness of the Stone Age was quite dangerous, so rather than wandering aimlessly outside, they simply chose to sleep inside the tribal tents.

What Yan Luo stumbled upon was precisely a group of slumbering players.

However, players could not be compared to low-level AI NPCs, not to mention that newcomers possessed near-death protection. The moment Yan Luo used his blade to slice open the first person's throat, the fellow jerked wide awake, and the others snapped out of their sleep as well.

"What is happening?"

"There's an assassin!"

"Watch out!"

Chaos erupted inside the tent. With another swift slash, Yan Luo finished off the player with the slit throat, turning him from near-death to entirely dead.

"My infiltration has been discovered?"

"It seems I can no longer play the role of an assassin."

Yan Luo quickly switched his Mandarin Duck Sabers for the Coiled Dragon Staff, gripping it tightly. "In that case, I have no choice but to be a berserker!"

During his daytime clash with the golden spear, the refined steel staff had been heated red and then cooled, causing the weapon to sustain a certain amount of damage, though its weight remained unchanged. With a single smash of the staff, the targeted Spanish player let out a pig-like shriek.

With another strike, Yan Luo sent this player off to respawn.

This time, because he intended to completely crush the Spanish civilization, Yan Luo held nothing back. Even players in the near-death state received a finishing blow to ensure every single player in this tent was beaten to death. Upon leaving, he discovered that plenty of people were rushing out of the other tents as well.

Yan Luo simply unleashed the "Ten Directions Staff Technique," striking anyone he saw. A soldier would be killed in one blow, while a player would take two. Instantly, the Spanish civilization's camp resounded with wails of ghosts and howls of wolves.

"Despicable outsider!"

When Queen Isabella, Pizarro, Cortés, and the Duke of Medina Sidonia—the truly powerful high-level NPCs of the Spanish civilization—finally emerged, the scene that greeted them was Yan Luo wielding a massive staff and beating... no, rather, slaughtering the players and soldiers.

"Things are getting hot, time to bail!"

Seeing these powerhouses step out, Yan Luo immediately put away the Coiled Dragon Staff, turned on his heels, and bolted. Raising a trail of dust, his figure vanished into the distant darkness...

The next day, after the sun rose and Queen Isabella tallied the numbers, she was utterly enraged. They had actually lost over four hundred soldiers last night alone! Coupled with the hundred-plus imperial guards killed earlier...

Each civilization started with only five thousand troops, and one-tenth of their military force had just vanished like that.

On a hillside, Yan Luo was crunching on an apple. Wild animal and plant resources in this game were exceptionally abundant.

Since he intended to fight the Spanish civilization to the bitter end, he couldn't let them catch their breath during the day either.

When he first arrived here, he had been chased a few times by barbarians. The Pyrenees mountains happened to harbor barbarian encampments.

About four hours into the in-game time, nearly a thousand barbarians, wielding stone axes in their hands like a gang of axe-wielding thugs, came charging in pursuit behind a single horse. Among them was even a barbarian king draped in animal skins and wearing a string of human bone necklaces around his neck.

Every single barbarian wore a look of furious rage.

As for why they were so angry?

In the Stone Age, the most important thing for indigenous people was their spiritual faith, and Yan Luo had just chopped down the totem inside this barbarian camp...

Leading this horde of barbarians close to the coastline, he ordered his horse to pick up speed and shook them off. Having lost their target, the barbarians roared furiously on the hillside—and then, they spotted the city under construction along the coastline.

Upon seeing those hard-working civilians building the city, a light full of aggressive greed instantly burst into the barbarians' eyes!

Thus, the Spanish tribe suffered a barbarian raid.

Leaving the horse to keep watch nearby, Yan Luo retreated to a cave to catch up on some sleep. When night fell, fully rejuvenated, he went into action once more. This time, because they were on guard, he only used his staff to beat a dozen or so players and dozens of soldiers to death before Queen Isabella and a group of generals showed up, prompting him to flee quickly.

When the second day arrived, he went back to that barbarian camp—as long as the camp wasn't destroyed, barbarians would continuously respawn at a frequency of once a day until the Enlightenment era, when all barbarians on the map would be completely exterminated.

The Spanish civilization suffered yet another barbarian assault.

Instead of returning to Wu Zetian's city, Yan Luo simply found another place to sleep and wait for nightfall. Overflowing with energy, he would once again play the assassin or the berserker.

就这样, for ten consecutive days, the soldiers of the Spanish tribe were almost wiped out entirely.

With the relentless barbarian raids combined with Yan Luo's nightly ambushes, out of the five thousand civilians, over two thousand had perished. Most crucially, to this day, due to the constant harassment, the Spanish civilization's city still hadn't been successfully built, leaving them unable to replenish their population. To have no established city after so many days—this was probably the only such case.

The seventy or eighty Spanish players simply couldn't take it anymore.

They were here to play a game, not to be chopped down as cannon fodder for other people's amusement. Players in other civilization factions were happily completing quests, hunting when they should hunt, gathering when they should gather, and some even had leisure time to explore, discovering treasure caches and reaping massive rewards.

And what about them, having joined the Spanish civilization? By day they got chopped up by barbarians, and by night there was a stubborn, die-hard Chinese player hunting them down...

Naturally, they lodged complaints.

However, *Civilization: Rise of Great Powers* looked like an online game, and indeed it was one, but its core was the Cosmos Bead. After the rules and details of the internal world were designed, it ran automatically. The AI referred to as the "supercomputer" was actually the artifact spirit of the bead.

Tencent's customer service had no way to pull up the internal player data at all.

Meanwhile, ten days in the game corresponded to one day in the outside world. In just a single day, the video of Yan Luo versus Pizarro and Cortés racked up tens of millions of views on YouTube, with many people re-watching it multiple times—the battle was simply too magnificent!

Views on Bilibili also broke the million mark.

Countless people were inquiring about the identity of this devastatingly handsome fellow.

Yan Luo was practically trending toward becoming an internet celebrity in this inner world.

After studying the video, Tencent's customer service informed the Spanish players that the Chinese individual was likely a kung fu master in reality.

In short, the official response was perfunctory. In anger, the Spanish players threatened to delete their accounts in protest. However, numbering fewer than a hundred people, it was all sound and fury signifying nothing. Amidst the fanatical popularity of *Civilization: Rise of Great Powers*, it failed to stir even the slightest ripple.

Inside the game, the Spanish civilization, abandoned by its players, had almost all its soldiers wiped out. Although traps had been set a few times over the past ten days, Yan Luo had managed to escape every time—someone with such prowess was virtually impossible to intercept once they set their mind on running.

Queen Isabella's state of mind could be described with only a single sentence:

She was infuriated beyond words!

She maintained no smile; her face was filled with a murderous aura, and her pretty features were even slightly distorted.

"Tonight, no matter what, we must kill that fellow, even at any cost!"

The two generals standing before the queen, Pizarro and Cortés, also radiated a tragic, resolute aura of casting everything aside to achieve their objective!

At that moment, Yan Luo was resting on a hillside in the Pyrenees mountains.

Over these past few days, the accumulated Tier 1 mask fragments had finally reached 100%.

"Fragment combination!"

Countless fragments in his consciousness converged together. Amidst a burst of light, a Heroic Soul mask appeared—though covered in cracks, it miraculously bore the distinct, anime-esque aesthetic of a Takeuchi-style face.