Age of Ascension: Forging an Immortal Realm from Nothing

If Qin Keqing was some delicate fairy princess floating around, freezing huge chunks of the battlefield with a flick of her 【Wind Moon Precious Mirror】, then Lin Daiyu was a five-foot-nothing, self-propelled tactical nuke. The girl was a blur. One second she's here, the next she's over there, and the only thing connecting the two points is a series of earth-shattering BOOMS from her Eight Extremities fists.
Sure, it wasn't as flashy as a giant magical fireball, but when it came to sheer, unadulterated ass-kicking, the fireball couldn't even hold her purse.
One punch, and a whole section of the monster horde would just… cease to be.
These elite calamitous beasties were supposed to be tough mothers, all thick skin and bad attitude. They had to be, to have tanked all that tower fire. But when faced with Lin Daiyu's little fists? They took one look and promptly decided that living was overrated.
BOOM—!
WHUMP—!
KABLAM—!
She zipped around so fast she was just a goddamn afterimage. You couldn't even track her. The only evidence she was even there was the constant stream of elite monsters getting launched into low orbit.
On the other side of the battlefield, Qin Keqing was playing it smart. She hung out near her BFF, the 【Frost Curse Tower】, layering her own ice magic over its to make sure the monsters were extra-crispy frozen. And thanks to her new necromancy hobby, for every big batch of monsters that died, a few would pop right back up as her loyal zombie-slaves. Now that she was Level 4, her undead fan club stuck around for a whole twenty minutes. She’d already built a respectable posse of corpses that were now happily tearing their former buddies to shreds.

“PEPPA PIGS, IT'S TIME TO MAKE SOME BACON!” (TL note: excuse me? bacon who??)
Wu Chi stood gallantly upon the ramparts, a fan of crane feathers in one hand, his silk robes fluttering in the breeze as he commanded his forces with an elegant gest—
Oh, whoops. Sorry, wrong fanfic. (TL note again: This is a famous image of the brilliant strategist Zhuge Liang (Kongming) from the classic Chinese novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms. He's the archetypal genius commander who wins battles with his intellect, looking cool and composed the whole time!!)
The dude was in a T-shirt and sweatpants, screaming his lungs out from the top of the wooden wall. As he yelled, another two waves of that god-awful fart gas rolled out. The elite beasts that were charging in got this look on their faces like they’d just licked a toilet bowl, but they grit their teeth, zapped themselves with lightning, and kept on coming. That's when the Peppa Pigs hit them. A whole phalanx of giant, armored pigs slammed into the front line, sending a dozen elites tumbling ass over teakettle.
But… it didn’t really do much.
【Elite · Calamitous Beast】
Race: Demon/Void
Level: 11
Constitution: 32+30
Spirit: 17+5
These things weren't just big and ugly; they were rocking a Demon and Void heritage combo, which meant their special moves were bullshit-levels of nasty. The Peppa Pigs could turn the regular mooks into pork rinds all day long, but against these elites? It was kinda hopeless. One charge wasn't nearly enough to kill them, and the pigs would immediately get dogpiled and beaten senseless. Thank god for their 【Steel Armor】 talent, or he’d be looking at a lot of bacon-related funeral expenses. As it was, the poor pigs were only holding on by the skin of their snouts with a lot of help from the towers.
Wu Chi even tried to help, pulling out a sniper rifle and popping off a few rounds. The results were… laughably bad.
Which, to be fair, was how it was supposed to go.
Lords weren’t meant to be front-line fighters. Their power came from their territory! Heroes, troops, wacky buildings, cosmic artifacts—that was their toolkit. A Lord getting his own hands dirty was just bad form.
“So that’s what a stat gap of several dozen times looks like. No wonder the academy textbooks kept screaming that towers are the only thing that matters early on,” Wu Chi muttered. He was only doing this well because he was a cheater running a hacked game with two OP gold-tier heroes. From his perspective, the monsters seemed kinda whatever and the towers were just doing an okay job. But for any other schmuck starting out? Their hero would ⊛ Nоvеlιght ⊛ (Read the full story) be a glorified sidekick. The towers were the real main character! Even a boring old 【Arrow Tower】 could dish out some serious pain.
He remembered the standard-issue advice from his teachers: start with 10 militia, get some early kills, summon a hero, then immediately stop everything and dump all your cash into towers. Only when you were swimming in resources should you even think about building a real army.
“Yeah, well, that path can suck it,” Wu Chi thought, his eyes landing on his territory’s special trait.
Waifus are the one true meta! 
A 10x stat bonus crushes all other arguments. Once he hit level 5, he could build a second barracks. Level that sucker to 5, and bam! One hundred troops. For a newbie Lord, a hundred-man army was basically the apocalypse.
“Just please, god, let it be a normal barracks this time. No more weird shit!” he prayed. He went back to micromanaging his pigs, telling them to stop trying to fist-fight the elites and just act like giant, annoying bowling balls. They'd use their 【Savage Charge】 to break up the enemy lines, letting the towers pick them off. It was all about creating chaos. See? He wasn't just slacking off for all those years; he was learning tactics!
An hour and change later, every last monster was dead.
Wu Chi felt like his brain was going to leak out of his ears. He looked out over the wall and immediately wanted to cry. Another wave had shown up. A few thousand regular ones, and a few thousand more of the elite bastards. The ground outside was no longer dirt; it was just a red, chunky sludge of guts and body parts. He fumbled for a water bottle and shotgunned half of it just to stop himself from puking.
“This is… this is literally hell.”
The soft, melodic voice belonged to Qin Keqing, who’d appeared beside him. Her face was slick with sweat, her pretty mouth hanging open as she stared in abject horror at the scene. She’d fought before, but nothing… nothing had ever been like this. Endless monsters, endless killing, fire and death and explosions and lightning…