Chapter Ninety-Nine: The Secret of Little Cabbage

孙立成 studied the bewildered face of Little Cabbage for a long while, and at last confirmed that the expression was no pretense.

Seeing that she truly knew nothing, he softened his tone and asked, "Little Cabbage, can you tell me about the Goblin Kingdom?"

At that, Little Cabbage’s face tightened, and panic flooded her features. Stammering a little, she asked, "Boss, how do you know about the Goblin Kingdom?"

"I just know," Sun Licheng said, a trace of smugness curling at the corner of his mouth.

In truth, he had learned all this thanks to the Effortless Hands Gentleman.

Before sleeping, those goblins would often speak of affairs in their homeland. Though they kept their voices low, they could not escape the Gentleman’s surveillance. And with a few goblins muttering in their sleep as well, the information, after being sorted and reasoned through by the Gentleman, led Sun Licheng to discover that beyond Full Moon Gorge lay a vast Goblin Kingdom.

When he first heard this, he had been greatly astonished. The gnomes had always claimed goblins were a barbaric race, when in fact the gnomes were the true savages. It left Sun Licheng’s worldview in considerable disarray for a time.

Only after defeating Commander Reitz and finding that goblin hero within his memories did Sun Licheng connect the Goblin Kingdom to that renegade goblin hero. According to Reitz’s memories, a pure goblin bloodline possessed an innate tendency to aid its own kind. In other words, when Sun Licheng had inexplicably rescued Little Cabbage in the Silver Moon Tribe, it was likely this very bloodline at work. Thus, Sun Licheng suspected that Little Cabbage was a descendant of that goblin hero.

How could Little Cabbage possibly know all this? Yet soon she seemed to recall something else, and said in a small, reluctant voice, "Boss, no matter how you learned of the Goblin Kingdom, please do not force us poor souls to speak. Before coming to the North, we all swore by the God of Oaths that we would die before revealing anything about the Goblin Kingdom. Please spare us."

Watching tears stream from Little Cabbage’s eyes in torrents, Sun Licheng was moved despite her ugliness. Oaths in this world were terrifyingly binding, especially those sworn in the name of the God of Oaths, which were tightly constrained by the Wheel of Order. They were absolutely not to be broken.

"Fine... all right," Sun Licheng sighed. When Little Cabbage had calmed a little, he suddenly asked, "What does the royal family of the Goblin Kingdom have to do with you?"

Little Cabbage froze at the question. Her face turned deathly pale in an instant. She bit hard into her lip, and the tears came even more fiercely.

"All right, all right, go on. I won’t force you anymore."

Little Cabbage’s reaction confirmed Sun Licheng’s suspicion, and he waved her away.

Watching her flee the room as if on wings, Sun Licheng pinched the bridge of his nose and gave a wry smile. "I never expected to get tangled up in goblin royal affairs. What a pain."

Since Little Cabbage was unfamiliar with that goblin hero’s name, Sun Licheng boldly guessed that the hero must have changed his name. After all, the fellow had even abandoned his goblin identity and taken up with goblins, that rebel race. Using a few small tricks, Sun Licheng indeed confirmed that Little Cabbage came from goblin royalty, which explained her possessing the pure bloodline of the Goblin Empire.

He had no interest in the sort of braided-queens court intrigues that resembled a stage melodrama, but no matter what, he would have to remain cautious of whatever danger the Goblin Kingdom might bring.

Once his subordinates had changed into the equipment he brought back, Sun Licheng announced that the Flower-Growing Tribe would begin intensive drills.

After the second dream battle, Sun Licheng finally had experience commanding large formations, and his expectations of the soldiers under him rose accordingly. After all, in war, personal valor was of limited use; gods were the exception.

If it ever came to confronting a deity directly, Sun Licheng felt his only choices would be to cry, "Spare my life, hero!" and surrender on his knees, or detonate the Heart of Divinity and drag the enemy down with him.

Once the intensive training began, the Effortless Hands Gentleman brought Sun Licheng a tremendous surprise: under his command, the tribal warriors’ fighting strength had clearly increased.

Ordinarily, a goblin’s combat power was around five. Equipped with a full set of Gnomish Empire infantry gear, it could reach eight. But under Sun Licheng’s command, it shot straight up to thirteen. Little Medusa Vena also leapt from thirty all the way to forty!

"Why is this happening?"

Sun Licheng was puzzled.

After thinking for quite a while, he suddenly remembered that he possessed the power of a hero. "Could it be that hero power also provides a troop bonus?"

With that thought, he had the Effortless Hands Gentleman create a defensive model based on the biological data they had obtained. Once it was finished, he led the troops through another experiment, and indeed, their defensive capability also rose markedly under Sun Licheng’s leadership.

Only then did Sun Licheng understand why heroes were so important to a tribe. This special profession not only wielded group magic, but directly affected the combat strength of the troops they commanded, and even granted certain individual hero skills. Truly formidable.

With a deeper understanding of his own hero attributes, Sun Licheng grew even more confident in the future. He redesigned the training plan and increased the workload.

The booming reports of muskets began to sound continuously across the training ground. The soldiers took turns pulling their triggers, and the wooden boards a hundred meters away were instantly shattered into flying splinters.

After a day of test firing, the new ammunition formula Sun Licheng had researched was finalized.

In the underground fortress of the Gnomish Empire, Sun Licheng had discovered, from information on gnomish construction materials, a special adhesive for stone slabs. After research with the Effortless Hands Gentleman, they found that adding a small amount of this fish glue-like material to traditional gunpowder not only greatly increased its power, but also significantly suppressed the smoke after firing, making it almost smokeless powder.

Even more pleasing to Sun Licheng was the fact that there was a large stock of this slab adhesive in the underground fortress. Although most of it could no longer be used as construction material, it worked even better in gunpowder.

The discovery of this new powder not only greatly reduced the amount of propellant needed per bullet, but also effectively increased the range of the musket. Because the cartridge casing could be made thicker, the firearm’s safety factor also improved.

To satisfy ammunition consumption, Sun Licheng brought back from the underground fortress a small metal-cutting machine tool, which after modification could be powered directly by magic crystals. After training Little Cabbage and several soldiers with quick minds, the speed of bullet production had greatly increased, and cartridge reloading could now be handled entirely by his subordinates, saving Sun Licheng a great deal of time.

Through all these efforts, the Flower Tribe’s forces had been completely transformed.

The goblins now wore standard Gnomish Empire combat uniforms beneath specially crafted rattan armor, with woven rattan helmets shaped like conical hats upon their heads, Flower Tribe Type One rifles in their hands, Gnomish Empire standard short swords at their waists, and Gnomish Empire combat boots on their feet. It truly had the strange elegance of eating local street snacks on the Champs-Élysées in Paris!

"Advance!"

As commander, Little Medusa Vena swung the straight blade in her hand. Two ranks of Flower Tribe warriors marched forward in step with the beat of waist drums, pressing toward the target in a broad front. There stood a small wooden fort.