Chapter 331 – Life 77, Age 74, Martial Sovereign 1

NiangBa led the charge as our army rushed toward Lang’ya City’s ruined walls. At his side were Meng LuYao, Cai XiaoYu, and a collection of our most powerful light, dark, and lightning cultivators. 

While the metal and earth cultivators among us might have been the deadliest, those who cultivated the secondary elements had better techniques for stunning and incapacitating their opponents. Light and dark cultivators could use short-term, powerful illusions to blind, disorient, and confuse people. Lightning cultivators, on the other hand, could just zap their targets and knock them out directly.

These groups led the charge because our goal was not total annihilation. Instead, after passing through the city’s outer wall, our cultivators were only focused on suppressing and subduing the local population. 

As we methodically made our way through Lang’ya City, using a circuitous route to head toward the Zhuge Clan’s main compound, I mostly stayed in the center of the group to watch out for any signs of portal activity. This prevented me from providing any direct support to our frontline fighters, but it put me in a position where I could carry out a far more important task.

Any time our vanguard incapacitated someone, one of our warriors would run over and check their identity jade. If the downed opponent bore the token of a member of the Zhuge Clan, I swept them into my inner world and sent them to the large void that currently existed between Chang’an’s walls and the edge of my soul space.

In the outer city, the number of people from the Zhuge Clan that we captured was minimal. However, the closer we got to the city’s center, the more we found. Of course, these were still not core members of the clan. Those were all safely tucked away within the clan’s compound. These were just the peripheral members that were one step away from being cut away from the clan entirely.

Still, I doubted Zhuge YeDu would be able to remain sanguine once he learned that we were capturing every member of his clan we came across.

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The walls of Lang’ya formed a box roughly 9 kilometers to a side. The inner city was surrounded by another wall of only 2 kilometers to a side. This put the distance from the outer wall to the inner wall at about 3 kilometers, depending upon the direction of approach.

During the first kilometer of our trek from the outer wall to the inner city, there wasn’t much of a resistance to speak of. As we had recently been relentlessly shelling this section of the city, the majority of its residents had already evacuated, and most of the buildings had been reduced to rubble. 

However, not long after we passed the 1-kilometer mark, Cai XiaoYu—who was marching along at NiangBa’s side—signaled our army to halt, and a series of defensive formations were rapidly deployed.

Not a moment later, thick bolts of inky darkness appeared out of nowhere and struck our hastily erected defenses.

In response, NiangBa opened fire with a series of Light Cannon Formations. 

Meter-thick laser beams of brilliant white light shot forward and impacted upon the empty air of the city street in front of us. After less than a minute of focused fire, the air blurred, the city’s ancient buildings vanished, and a thousand-man-strong army appeared.

Wisely, the moment his position was revealed, the enemy commander ordered his troops to retreat. However, this order was still a bit too late.

After quickly taking pills to boost the intensity of their attacks, the lightning cultivators among us unleashed devastating wide-area blasts that were enough to incapacitate nearly all of our opponents. 

Then, the moment after these blasts faded, I created a portal and jumped to the middle of the enemy’s formation. 

As these were all mostly Lords and Grandmasters, their mental strength was normally already rather weak. After sustaining damage from a vicious lightning blast, it was practically nonexistent. So, reaching out with my soul and intent, I was able to pull nearly everyone into my inner world with almost no effort.

A few of the enemy soldiers were still cognizant enough to resist this pull, but I didn’t want to be away from my army any longer than necessary, so I just ignored them. After grabbing all of the low-hanging fruit, I created another portal and reappeared back in the middle of my allies.

Our attack upon that 1000-man squad had been devastating, and it was clear that someone in the Zhuge Clan had taken notice. After we started advancing again, Cai XiaoYu called a halt twice more, but in both instances, we destroyed an illusion formation only to be met with an empty patch of open land.

During the second of these pauses, I took a moment to use a series of portals to investigate what was happening in the inner city. As Yan had predicted, Zhuge YeDu had ordered his clan to evacuate.

I informed NiangBa of this development, and he nodded in reply. Then, he raised his sword and turned to face his army. “Double time!”

With no more illusions blocking our path, we rapidly reached the inner wall. Without even needing to be commanded, a team of specialists brought out their siege formations.

Heavy rocks and thick shards of ice slammed into the stone wall in front of us. After only a few rounds of these attacks, a way forward was opened for us.

NiangBa raised his sword once more, seemingly prepared to give the order to charge, but before he could, a portal appeared, and an old man stepped out and stood in the direct center of the gap that we had just created.

“Damn you!” Zhuge YeDu’s qi-infused shout was loud enough to shake the surrounding buildings. “Not only have you raided my clan’s treasury, but you have also slaughtered my people. How dare you!? Emperors! You sent Emperors to attack Grandmasters! How dare you!? I will not stand for this. You. Will. Die!”

Following Yan’s plan, we had expected Zhuge YeDu to counterattack at this point, but we hadn’t known what form that counterattack would take. So, even before YeDu appeared, our people were already preparing to deploy defensive formations. Unfortunately, these defenses were in no way sufficient for what actually happened.

A sea of utter blackness roiled out from Zhuge YeDu’s body. At first, it only appeared as if YeDu was covered in a fire of absolute darkness, but seconds later, that fire expanded and engulfed the entire world in shadows. Staring at this scene, I couldn’t help but feel that YeDu had somehow contacted an ancient demonic entity from beyond the bounds of space and time.

A combination of Rank 6 defensive formations and a series of attacks from our Martial Emperors were able to keep this darkness at bay, but it was clear that we were fighting a losing battle.

At this point, I considered creating a portal to evacuate everyone before the darkness could consume us, but once I sounded the retreat, our defenses would collapse. How many of our people would be able to survive? 

I took a deep breath and tried to focus.

How had YeDu launched such a devastating attack? He was only a Sovereign, yet the power he displayed was enough to single-handedly crush a team of both Martial and Formation Emperors. This was not something that a mere Sovereign should be capable of. He had to be drawing power from an outside source.

An idea struck me, and I looked up at the flickering shadows amongst the engulfing darkness. It almost reminded me of… a fire.

As the army around me did their best to defend against the encroaching darkness, I reached into my soul, tore out the Expanding Realms Fire, shoved it into a jade box, and tossed it into my inner world.

Then, I quickly searched through my collections of fire seeds until I found an ornate jade box that I had barely touched in the centuries since I had first acquired it.

Hoping that I was doing the right thing, I opened the box, pulled out the fire seed, and shoved it into my soul. This was the seed that Emperor Li had given me so long ago, the Earth-Rank seed of the Three Thousand Flames Fire.

When this fire seed touched my soul, it sent out a blast of flames powerful enough to reduce everything to cinders. The messy garden that was my soul transformed into a raging fireball.

The power of this fire seed was too much. Neither my body nor my soul could handle it. The energy needed to be released.

Setting my sights on where I had last seen Zhuge YeDu, I created a portal that connected my soul to Lang’ya City’s inner wall.

At first, nothing seemed to happen, but a few seconds later, the darkness surrounding us shattered.

That didn’t mean we were safe, though. In mere moments, we went from being engulfed in darkness to being stuck in the center of a fiery hellscape.

Seeing this scene, my army, already on edge, backed up in horror. I, however, closed my eyes and focused my will and intent on slamming the portal to my soul closed.

This was not easy. The fire seed contained too much energy, and it needed to be released. I had no option but to wait for the seed to settle down. 

Thankfully, with no ‘will’ directing the flames toward our army, we were able to hold the fire at bay.

When the seed was finally drained enough that I could close the portal to my soul and take a moment to study the world around me, I was shocked. Lang’ya City’s inner wall had turned to molten slag, and only the charred husk of a corpse remained where Zhuge YeDu had once stood. Because he had been wearing Rank 7 armor, he was still clinging onto life, but with melted metal stuck to his bones, that life was fading quickly.

Before anything else could go wrong, I rushed to teleport to his side. Then, I pulled him through another portal and into the Su Clan’s palace compound. As soon as YeDu was positioned above an anti-Soul Lamp Formation, I shot out a lick of flames that burnt a hole through his skull.

As YeDu’s corpse thudded to the ground, an inky fire rose up to consume it, but before the fire could gain any strength, I slammed a jade box around it, capturing it. That encounter with YeDu had been a bit more dangerous than I would have liked, but I at least had a new Earth-Rank fire seed to show for it.

After breathing out a sigh of exhaustion, I teleported back to Lang’ya City and found NiangBa. “Sorry, but we’re not done yet.”

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Stepping through a portal, my army arrived at the outskirts of Blue Wind City, the home of the Li Clan.

Only a few moments later, another portal appeared, and Ning ZeKun stepped out and grinned at me.

“Fang, your timing is impeccable. You show up only seconds after the battle is already over.” He gave me a mock frown. “Sharing in the glory without sharing in the work. This must have been something that Old Man Li taught you to do.”

I raised an eyebrow. “It’s already over? You defeated the Li Clan?”

That wasn’t the plan. ZeKun’s army had been markedly weaker than my own. They were just supposed to be a delaying force.

ZeKun turned serious as he nodded. “Yes, defeated, not destroyed. After we arrived, the Li Clan broke out into a civil war. We barely had to do anything. Faced with enemies both internal and external, Li NeiTang, the current Sovereign, chose to abandon his position here. So, we’ve been able to secure the Li Clan’s base, but NeiTang has almost certainly gone to the Nine Rivers Sect to join up with the remnants of the Jiu Clan. This will make the next stage of our assault a bit more complicated.”

I put a hand on his shoulder. “Let’s just take things one step at a time, alright? More importantly, did you secure the Li Clan’s vault?”

ZeKun let out a light chuckle and tapped the air in front of him to create a portal. “Why not see for yourself?”

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After defeating both the Li and Zhuge Clans, we did not immediately rush to invade the Nine Rivers Sect. Having spent centuries in preparation for this assault, no one on our side was even seriously injured, but nearly everyone was exhausted. We needed time to recover before attempting to tackle the most powerful sect on the continent.

Back in my cultivation room, deep in the Su Clan’s Hall of Ancestral worship, I took a moment to examine what absorbing the seed of the Three Thousand Flames Fire had done to my soul.

In the past, I had viewed my soul as being separated into two parts. There was a walled-off inner garden that was overflowing with a riot of randomly placed plants, and there was an outer garden that primarily consisted of only the four plants that represented this world’s four philosophies of soul cultivation.

The Three Thousand Flames Fire had changed all of this.

The wall around my inner garden still stood strong, and the pedestal at its center showed no signs of damage. Nearly all of the plants, though, had been burned so thoroughly that only ash remained. The only one that had survived the fire seed’s inferno was the massive cypress tree that occupied nearly an entire quarter of my inner garden. Its outer bark was charred, but no real damage was done.

What did all of this mean? Was my soul damaged in some way?

I didn’t feel damaged. I felt… clean.

When it came to soul cultivation, trusting my ‘feelings’ was one of the worst things I could do—I knew this—but something about seeing my soul turned into a field of ash just made me feel… refreshed.

So, satisfied with the state of my soul, I instead turned my focus toward my inner world.

After I had rashly placed the Three Thousand Flames Fire upon my soul’s pedestal, the fire seed began channeling massive gouts of flame directly into the center of Chang’an. Thankfully, the skyscrapers that GuiMing had constructed were strong enough to survive this, and no one had been killed, but all signs of greenery had been eradicated.

The real trouble, though, was that these flames didn’t behave like normal, mortal fires. Even after burning through everything that would normally fuel a fire, these flames continued to feed off the qi in the air and the wu in the ground. Ribbons of flames danced freely through the sky, and while they looked pretty, if anyone under the Ruler Tier were to be touched by them, they would be incinerated.

This gave me ideas for the future, but at the moment, I couldn’t allow such uncontrolled destructive elements to exist. So, after moving the fire seed away from my inner world to prevent any more flames from being created, I extracted these ribbons of fire and snuffed them out one at a time.

Once everything was settled, I stood and left my cultivation room to meet with Yan and the others. We had one final attack to prepare for.