Orion surveyed the aftermath of the battle, his soldiers, once wounded, now remarkably restored. Thanks to the nearly unlimited supply of elixirs he'd provided, not a single soldier had died, not even those who'd suffered the most grievous injuries. Missing limbs were instantly regrown, and their bodies were restored to perfect condition.
It wasn't just physical healing. Orion had also distributed powerful cultivation elixirs, a perfect complement to the intense battle his men had just survived. Their strength, which had reached a bottleneck, now surged forward. Many broke through to higher levels of cultivation, their loyalty to Orion skyrocketing. Before, they might have hesitated to follow his orders, but now, they were willing to do anything for him.
With his soldiers healing and their strength growing, Orion turned his attention to cleaning up Chang'an City. But there was little to clean. The fierce battle had reduced the entire imperial capital to a pile of rubble. The city was a wasteland, and no one had survived. The real work wasn't cleaning, but salvaging. As the imperial capital of a great nation, there were still many resources to be found.
After an extensive search, his men finally unearthed the legendary royal treasury of the Great Zhou Dynasty. Orion, having been summoned, arrived to find himself underwhelmed. Having seen the powerful artifacts of the upper-realm beings, he found the contents of the treasury to be lacking. While the items were powerful by this world's standards, they paled in comparison to what he'd seen before.
"I expected more," he muttered, "and all I got were these scraps."
Still, he was not one to waste resources. He began collecting everything, adhering to his belief that "a mosquito, no matter how small, is still meat."
As he worked, a frantic Yu Xiang, one of his lieutenants, rushed to his side. "My lord, it's not good! The body of Empress Zhou Linglong is missing!"
Orion was stunned. "What? That's impossible! I killed her myself. Are you sure you looked everywhere?"
"Yes, my lord!" Yu Xiang said, his face pale. "The emperors under your command searched the entire area. We nearly turned over every stone, but there's no trace of her."
Orion's brows furrowed in thought. "Could the aftermath of the battle have turned her body to dust?" He considered this for a moment before waving a dismissive hand. "Forget it. A corpse is just a corpse. There's no need to search for it anymore. Just focus on gathering what's useful. She's dead, and I've received the luck points. What does it matter if her body is missing?"
Within a short time, Chang'an was completely looted, and the shattered void above the city had been repaired. The once-bustling capital was now a desolate ruin, a silent graveyard for the tens of billions of souls who had been caught in the crossfire of the battle. Orion was saddened to discover that the massive loss of life only yielded a handful of luck points, since the system judged the power gap between the great emperors and the ordinary citizens to be too vast. His heart ached at the missed opportunity, but the massive 100 million points he already possessed soon eased his pain.
"My lord, what's our next move?" asked Xu Chu, one of his top generals. Their primary objective, to destroy Chang'an and kill the empress, had been accomplished, leaving them without a clear target.
Orion wasn't concerned. The system had already given him his next directive: conquer the entire Great Zhou Dynasty. He'd already dispatched Gao Shun to begin the first stage of the conquest.
"We rest," Orion declared. "You've all been through a difficult campaign. We will spend two days here to rest and regroup. Then, we will march south to Jiangnan and conquer the rich lands there!"
"But, my lord," Yuan Zuozong objected, "we can keep fighting!"
"I know your spirit is strong, Yuan Zuozong," Orion said, cutting him off, "and you are not afraid of hardship. But you must think of the men under your command."
Yuan Zuozong fell silent. Orion's words had struck his one weakness—his devotion to his soldiers. He reluctantly agreed, and everyone settled in for a much-needed two-day rest before their next conquest.
Unbeknownst to Orion, the news of Chang'an's fall and the complete annihilation of the Great Zhou royal family had already spread across the entire continent of Dongzhou. Many major factions had sent their top warriors to aid the empress, and now, their fate cards had all shattered. Enraged and confused, they had rushed to Chang'an, only to find that the city was gone, vanished as if it had never existed. They cared little for the fate of the Great Zhou; they only wanted to know what happened to their ancestors.