Steel and Sorrow: Rise of the Mercenary king - Chapter 71: Reaching the city(1)

Zhuang Xian was abducted when she was three years old and lived in an orphanage until she was sixteen when the Zhuang family adopted her. From then on, she jumped from being an orphan with nothing to a little princess. But she wasn’t satisfied. She wanted to find her birth parents and get their love, but she didn’t expect to instead find a family of jackals and snakes. They took advantage of her trust to annex her adoptive parents’ company and forced them to their deaths.

Her three brothers fled abroad, while Zhuang Xian was beaten and scolded by everyone. Locked in a warehouse, she was forced to endure torture for the whole month with a clear mind thanks to drugs. In the end, she died miserably due to her fiance and her sister’s plotting against her. That cheating scumbag and prostitute! Zhuang Xian swore before her death that if there was a next life, she would be willing to do anything for the Zhuang family, and she wouldn’t let these people deceive her like this again! She would make sure that those who treated her well would have a good life! Zhuang Xian didn’t get the next life, but she did return to the first three years of her adoption. For three years, she stayed under the radar and created multiple identities for herself.

When three years were up, she returned to the Zhuang family and beat up those scumbags, while her three brothers doted on her as though she was a treasure! Outsiders say that the Zhuang family’s adopted daughter didn’t learn well when she was younger, that she was completely illiterate, and that she was stubborn. The reason she was rejected by her previous adoptive family was that she was prone to stealing.

However… She was the Chess Saint, the Gold Medalist Designer, and also the world’s best doctor! All of them were her! There was also the crazy slave-like man who loved to spoil her and loved to show off his wife, “Zhuang Xian is beautiful, right? She’s my wife!”

Anton is a great-grandfather. He is living quite a happy life, despite his advanced age and declining health… until a group of cultivator bandits moves into the area. The nearby guardians of the area, the Order of Ninety-Nine Stars, are unable to track them down as they continue to ravage nearby towns. During one desperate winter Anton is out on a hunt when his family- his entire village- is killed or taken as slaves by the bandits. He lacks the strength to fight them, and he wasn’t even present for their arrival to die with his loved ones. At the pit of his despair, he wonders if he ever had any chance to change things. What could he even do? He cannot even pull his best bow, and his eyesight is failing. If he had been a cultivator… perhaps there might have been a chance, but he was decades- perhaps even most of his life- too late.Participant in the Royal Road Writathon challenge (2022)Notes on cultivation levels:There are five general stages of cultivation, though the fifth is extremely rare. Each cultivation style might have their own name for the stages.1. Body Tempering2. Spirit Building/ occasionally System Creation (Ninety-Nine Stars)3. Constellation Formation (Ninety-Nine Stars)4. Life Transformation/Galaxy Construction (Ninety-Nine Stars)5. Ascension

After the continent of the nine clouds, the continent of the gods, Lin Feng, a proud cultivator, journeys to exciting new worlds. There is more trouble on the horizon, will he be strong enough? See his journey…

- Description from Novelupdates

Elijah is dying.Afflicted with terminal cancer, his days are limited. So, after deciding to spend his remaining time with family, he boards a plane and sets off for the Pacific Northwest to be with his sister. However, along the way, Earth is transformed by the touch of the World Tree, injecting it with magical Ethera and connecting it to a much larger universe via the System. More importantly for Elijah, though, it also causes his plane to crash, stranding him on a deserted island. But all is not lost, and through the System, he gains the Druid archetype that may be enough to allow him to survive a hostile environment filled with powerful monsters as well as more mundane threats like starvation and the elements. Meanwhile, his sister, Alyssa, must survive the collapse of civilization as she knows it while trying to keep her family safe. Follow them as they try to navigate an apocalyptic world full of game-like stats, classes, and threats aplenty.