Sword of Azure

Sword of Azure (also known as I Really Can't Carry This Team) is a game-world fantasy novel by the web author You Zhu, serialized on Qidian from May 13, 2019, completed on August 29, 2020, about 2.2 million Chinese characters in total. The story is set on a planet in a "twisted medieval" style: the technological civilization brought by human colonists repeatedly collapses due to periodic "magic tides," and can only be passed down barely through paper backups; coexisting with technology is a transcendent system that gathers spiritual substances, takes magic potions, and advances along the "path of bloodline." The opposition between divine right and imperial right, the Church and the Empire, the technological faction and the transcendent faction reaches a breaking point in the 241st year of the Sixth Era—Emperor Constantine leads his army in person and is annihilated, the heathen empire swallows the entire East and points its troops at the capital Constantinople, and the seventeen-year-old princess Theodora takes the throne in crisis, inheriting a thoroughly broken situation. The protagonist Asc is originally an esports player skilled in this game; after transmigrating, he becomes a history teacher at a noble school in Constantinople and loses his property after being hypnotized by a vampire. With professional-level combat awareness and foreknowledge of the world's plot, he builds a small mercenary company, the Sword of Azure, and gains a foothold step by step amid palace intrigue and city-state conflicts, getting drawn into a series of world-changing events: the defense of Constantinople, the eastern expedition on the Sires Peninsula, the rise of the Solomon Republic, and more. The work is characterized by a rigorous power system, a cast of vividly portrayed female characters who appear as a group, and background lines each with its own origins; battles are dense, and team adventure interweaves with political maneuvering. It is a representative long work of the game-world ("amber-style") genre.