Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king - Chapter 32: Looking for employment(1)

Akira Tsukihara was a romance author who despised love. Though she wrote best-selling novels filled with idealistic romance, she harbored nothing but contempt for the genre and the readers who adored it. Love, in her eyes, was a lie—an illusion that blinded people from the true forces of the world: power, betrayal, and ambition. One night, in a fit of frustration, she cursed love itself... and woke up trapped inside one of her own stories.Reborn as Aira, a nameless peasant girl in the Kingdom of Seraphis—a world she had meticulously crafted—Akira quickly realizes that reincarnation isn’t the fantasy dream she had written about. She isn’t a noble, a princess, or a heroine blessed with beauty and power. She is a nobody. A commoner, struggling to survive in the harsh realities of the medieval world she had once designed as a mere backdrop for her grand romances.As Aira, she faces starvation, endless labor, and the crushing weight of insignificance. But Akira was never one to accept fate. If she couldn’t escape this world, she would rewrite the story on her own terms. She would carve her name into history—not as the lovestruck heroine of a cliché romance, but as the mastermind who would bend the world to her will.In a land ruled by noble bloodlines and political schemes, where the romance tropes she once loathed play out before her eyes, Aira sets her sights on one goal: destroying the very ideals of love that had imprisoned her in this wretched world.Even if it means becoming the villain of her own story.

A hundred thousand years ago, there was a great war between cultivators. Immortals fell by the tens of thousands, the path of cultivation itself was severed, and after the dust settled, tombs forested the world.

A hundred thousand years after the last legend faded, Lu Yun, commandant of tomb raiders, descends upon the world. Armed with the Book of Life and Death, he has some burning questions to answer.

……

“This isn’t how you raid a tomb!” Lu Yun smirked at the cultivators frantically scurrying about the ancient tomb. “Do you want me to teach you?”

……

But ah, can someone teach him how to cure his new body’s erectile dysfunction?

The past life Ji Anran: “Geng Yan, let’s get back together.”

Geng Yan, who was dumped: “I refuse. You have powers anyway, and you can live well without me.”

After rebirth, the weak chicken Ji Anran: “Geng Yan, let’s get back together.”

The dumped Geng Yan: “I refuse.”

Ji Anran, lying dead: “I have no power, you don’t care about me, just let me get cold1.”

Geng Yan: “… …” The unsuccessful Geng Yan can only take away the weak chicken, one cannot put sand on the wall2 Ji Anran.

Later… what about the ordinary person without the strength to truss a chicken?! Who’s the guy in the day?

- Description from Novelupdates

Chen Sansi traveled back to the chaotic end of a dynasty, thankfully with the hardworking system by his side. He originally wanted to hunt to earn money and someday go to the Martial Arts Hall to learn some basic fist and foot techniques, aspiring just to be an ordinary rich man. Yet, fate had other plans. With officials imposing heavy taxes and the Martial Arts Hall bullying the citizens, he had no choice but to enlist in the army to survive, becoming an archer. From “archery (entry-level),” he worked tirelessly up to “operating a ten thousand weight bow, where arrows cannot be dodged,” taking the heads of enemy generals from a hundred miles away! From “basic soldier’s spear technique,” he worked tirelessly up to “National Guardian Dragon Spear, growing more valiant with each battle,” standing firm with a spear on horseback, alone turning back the Enemy Army of a million! Years later, Chen Sansi, having campaigned in the south and battled in the north, was truly invincible under the heavens, commanding two hundred thousand of the Iron Cavalry. Watching his subordinates forcibly ascend him to the throne and become emperor, he felt quite helpless: ’You... you have really caused me trouble!’