My Core is the Boss

The great city had fallen. Broken walls and shattered towers, everything lay in ruins. It was the silent aftermath of slaughter. Only a thousand or so demons still roamed its corpse-strewn streets.

White bones carpeted the ground with no graves to cradle them and no names to remember them by. Who knew whose sons these bones once belonged to.

A month later, a human army returned to reclaim the city. After a bloody battle, they took it back. The commander, a man with a blood-red scar across his face, drank with his officers in grim celebration.

Five days later, the demons struck again, and the city fell once more. Flames devoured it for two months before another human army arrived, only to meet the same fate. One by one, more armies came, and one by one, they perished.

Now, more than ten years later, Qi Yuan stood atop those same ancient walls. No army had set foot here in a decade.

He gazed out over the city of bones. "Any soldier who steps foot in this city will be courting death. Not a single soul lasted more than ten days."

Then, he murmured, "So, my mission this time is to defend this forsaken city?"

He stood alone in the desolate area, staring up at the towering battlements that bore countless blade marks. The air itself carried a weight of grief and ruin.

On the wall, four weathered characters were carved deep into the stone: City of No Return.

Qi Yuan glanced down at himself. "Level 45, huh?"

This time, when he entered the game, he wasn't starting from level 1. He figured level 45 corresponded to the late stage Foundation Establishment Realm. His in-game level matched the strength of his soul in the Canglan World.

"Level 45," he said with a grin. "Good enough to hunt some monsters."