The Sky Tower. The Falling Star Sea.
The Falling Star Islands are no longer a beautiful place to go on holiday.
Three months ago there were energy fluctuations here that nobody could account for. The sea peoples sent patrols and found nothing at all, and just as everyone was concluding it was a natural phenomenon and settling back into the sand and the sunshine, a series of attacks began, and the Falling Star Sea acquired a reputation as a sea of blood.
Six thousand guards, mercenaries and Innate Alliance powers died there, sea people warriors among them.
Floating on the Falling Star Sea alongside them were tens of thousands of holidaymakers and a smaller number of older-generation warriors who had retired to the Falling Star Islands to live.
Every one of them wiped out.
Not a single survivor across several waves of attack.
A massacre that bloody and that cruel shook the whole Sky Tower.
The strong of the Demon Abyss and the Longteng Continent turned out in force to search, and the Heaven Devil Hall’s people lay in ambush here for a full month. The strange part is that they found nothing either.
Rumors in every variety ran through the Sky Tower’s clans. The most credible version was that some ancient evil warrior of overwhelming strength and extreme savagery had woken from a seal, and being in urgent need of restoring his power, had used a foul art of blood sacrifice and opened his slaughter on the residents and visitors around the Falling Star Sea… And as for why he then went silent after several waves of killing? Because the blood and energy he needed were sufficient, and this ancient evil warrior was preparing to refine and absorb them, and was hiding somewhere out of sight recovering his strength — which was why the searches turned up nothing. And if this monster out of the ancient age were allowed to recover completely, the whole Sky Tower would tremble under his claws.
At a moment like that, with everyone frightened and nobody knowing what to do, no one could step forward.
The Yue family’s Third Young Master — the man they trusted most and the strongest of them all — had left the Sky Tower for the Heavenly Realm to season himself, and nobody knew when he would be back.
And not only him. Tianzhu, the Dragon Emperor, the Underworld Emperor, and a great many of the demon kings in the Demon Abyss were none of them holding the Sky Tower either.
Every one of them had gone to the Heavenly Realm.
With the Innate Alliance running back and forth between them, the Sky Tower’s clans each raised their own guard.
Unfortunately, a body of dragons with no head. Nobody had stepped forward to take the whole thing in hand — no leader they believed in the way they believed in the Yue family’s Third Young Master — and the warriors of the clans had nothing solid under their feet. The truth was still not established and there was already something close to unrest among the clans; if a fallen warrior of the ancient age and overwhelming strength really did appear before the world, there was no telling where any of it would go.
That, of course, is what ordinary people saw and heard.
The truth was otherwise.
Three months ago, the day Gray Wolf came back through the spacetime rift on the Light Continent, the heads of the clans learned the truth.
The Heavenly Realm’s legions were about to mount an invasion… Gray Wolf cannot speak, but he is nobody’s fool. He simply took them all to the crystal pillars where the Sky Tower records its great events and pointed at the Nine Luminaries Clan Heavenly Empress’s invasion, and every one of them understood at once.
From that day the clans began preparing for war.
They kept it quiet among themselves, so as not to panic the ordinary population, but the elite of every clan had long since been deployed and positioned — coiled and waiting, you might say.
What the Sky Tower’s defenders had not expected was the speed of the Heavenly Realm’s invasion. It came almost directly on Gray Wolf’s heels. Nor did it appear where they had estimated it would, at the Divine Tomb on the Light Continent. It appeared at the Falling Star Sea… How is there a spacetime rift connecting to the Heavenly Realm at the bottom of the Falling Star Sea? Nobody knows, and nobody can explain it. A small enemy force out of the Heavenly Realm invaded the Falling Star Islands, and because the sea peoples’ elite had all been drawn off to the Light Continent to hold the Divine Tomb, the islands had no strength left to defend themselves and paid a terrible price.
Tens of thousands of bodies floating on the sea.
Not only visitors, but a great many older-generation warriors of the various clans who had retired there. Not one survived.
By the time the sea peoples’ elite and the Heaven Devil Hall’s people got the news and came back, that small Heavenly Realm force had long since been met by traitors and taken away, gone without a trace and without a sound.
“The Sky Tower’s foundations are too thin now.” Standing on the shore of the Falling Star Sea and facing a situation like this, Elder Nangong could not help sighing.
“There’s something crooked in this.” The Old Fox, standing beside him, drew his brows together. “What the enemy has done here isn’t only launching an attack while the Yue boy and the others are away. They’ve worked a trick on us as well. The invasion is plainly at the Divine Tomb on the Light Continent, and they have deliberately staged a massacre out here at the Falling Star Sea to pull our attention across. And more important than that — they have certainly planted men among us. They have an inside contact, and a deeply buried one. I’ll say it plainly: without traitors, without a ghost in our own house making mischief, there is no possibility of their sliding past our defensive windows and carrying out three consecutive killings.”
“Perhaps somebody among them has a special ability of some kind.” Elder Muhua of the Green Leaf, a remnant-clan elder brought back from the Heavenly Realm not long ago, did not quite agree with the Old Fox. As he saw it, the Heavenly Realm has strange and gifted people past counting, and abilities that foresee events or achieve the effect of that kind of sensing are too numerous to list.
“Everyone is frightened. What are we to do?” Jiwei and Yan, the sea peoples’ two countesses, had arrived.
The sea peoples’ losses were terrible.
They felt they had failed the trust Hailan placed in them, and of all times the Sea Empress had gone to the Heavenly Realm with Yue Yang, with no telling when she would return. They were at their wits’ end. They lacked the strength, and their standing was not quite enough either. How were they to press down a situation like the one the sea peoples were in?
Elder Nangong found it difficult himself.
He did not know what would comfort them.
Yue Yang gone, Tianzhu and the Dragon Emperor gone, and even the outstanding men of the younger generation — Ye Kong, Sea Fatty, Xue Tanglang — every one of them gone. At the moment everyone believed to be safest, the Heavenly Realm’s legions had put a knife into their back, and the force of it was worse than the Nine Luminaries Clan Heavenly Empress’s full invasion in its day. Handled badly, and the Sky Tower could genuinely be destroyed.
The one hope now was that Yue Yang and the others would get back in time.
Though the Sky Tower is not yet at the point of despair, because the Night Empress and the Supreme are still here. They are both training in secret inside the Sky Stairway — but if they get word and come back, that will be very much faster than waiting on Yue Yang, who has gone into the Trial Grounds to run its gates, to finish and return…
“Report!” A small squad of dragon riders came in at speed, the squad leader at their head covered in blood. “Inside the Divine Tomb on the Light Continent, a Heavenly Realm legion of over ten thousand has been sighted. The Heaven Devil Hall, the Dragon Rider Legion and the Dragon Blood Guard are engaged. We are holding the Divine Tomb’s exits, but more than ten Heavenly Realm warriors disguised themselves as rank and file, broke the defensive line and escaped, and the demon marshals of the Demon Abyss could not overtake them. Grand Commander Fengkuang has ordered us to request reinforcement.”
“A handful of Heavenly Realm rank and file, and you have gotten yourselves into this state?” The Old Fox went into a rage at the report.
“Tell Grand Commander Fengkuang we will hold the teleport passages below the Sky Tower’s ninth floor.” Elder Nangong, though, was gentle with them.
He understood.
The Dragon Riders and the Dragon Blood Guard were newly formed and had not been through much blood and fire on a battlefield, and were certainly still a pack of young gentlemen playing soldier. Turning them into true elites would take a good stretch of grinding and growing yet.
To make them come through the way Ye Kong and Sea Fatty had.
Even for the most gifted prodigy.
Would probably not be possible until after this Heavenly Realm invasion.
How hard had Ye Kong’s and Sea Fatty’s growth been? Besides having Yue Yang out in front the whole way to lead them, they had been ground and turned over between life and death times without number. Today’s Dragon Riders and Dragon Blood Guard have not truly been through a life-and-death battle, have not been through a field of blood and fire that changes a man’s whole life, have not woken to themselves a hundred times over between living and dying. Wanting to shed the skin and change the bone all at once — how easy is that?
That they can manage what they are managing now.
Meeting an enemy without breaking.
Fighting to the end without any fear of dying — that alone is a rare thing.
“Is Gray Wolf here?” What the two countesses cared about most was whether that shameless wolf was in the fight. With him there, however formidable a Heavenly Realm power was, he would swallow it in one bite, and so far no Heavenly Realm power had been found willing to face him head-on. That is presumably why the Heavenly Realm’s advance legions are all so cunning — the rank and file will trade blows, but the leaders almost all disguise themselves and slip away to wait for their moment. Which also shows that the Heavenly Realm’s intelligence on the Sky Tower is in fact extremely accurate. Even a combat asset like Gray Wolf has been factored in.
“He is. He’s like our guardian god.” At the mention of Gray Wolf every member of the dragon squad brightened. It was precisely because that lazy, shameless dog was there — devouring more than ten powerful enemies one after another — that a Heavenly Realm legion which had arrived full of menace lost its footing entirely, and its leaders took to disguising themselves as rank and file and running. Without Gray Wolf, the Heavenly Realm’s legions would not have regarded the Sky Tower’s defenders as worth a glance.
Even the rank and file sent ahead to scout the road looked down their noses at everyone.
The Falling Star Sea.
It was only a place to draw the enemy.
And since the enemy was not there, there was no need to go on holding it and lying in wait.
Elder Nangong and the Old Fox conferred briefly, then scattered in four directions to carry out their separate parts of the plan.
About half an hour later, at the bottom of the Falling Star Sea, several shadows shaped like rocks or strange fish came up fast from the seabed. Each of them produced out of a storage bracelet several dozen to nearly a hundred subordinates, crushed almost out of shape, and without giving the half-squashed creatures a moment to draw breath, started kicking them, swearing as they went. “You worthless slaves, get the relay rune formation laid out. It cost nearly ten thousand lives today, and only just managed to pull those maddening old ghosts’ attention off us. Our plan is to bring ten kingdom lords through to this cursed Sky Tower. If you fail to finish this task today, every last one of you dies. I’ll take you worthless slaves for blood sacrifice. Move. Get to work. Every one of you standing there like an idiot.”
The slaves being sworn at scrambled about in a mess of hands and feet and laid out, on one of the small islands of the Falling Star group, an enormous rune formation nearly a hundred meters across.
Those few leaders then cut down several dozen slaves in the center of the formation, coldly and without feeling.
Blood as the medium, the runes as the offering.
Light flashed and flashed again, and out of the center of the great rune formation a blood-red pillar of light shot out. The strange thing was that this pillar did not point at the sky. Instead it bent away toward the deep water of the Falling Star Sea, twisting and snaking, and yet holding together without dispersing, and going on unbroken where it entered the water — as though in some undersea whirlpool nobody could name there were a spacetime rift leading to the Heavenly Realm.
That blood-red pillar, twisted like a snake, went down into the seawater.
And before long.
There was a response.
The few leaders looked at each other and burst out laughing, and one of them, lion-headed and man-faced, sneered contemptuously. “Those fools in the Sky Tower who think themselves so clever — how would they ever imagine that deep in the Falling Star Sea there really is a spacetime rift leading to the Heavenly Realm? The master’s stroke here — the empty made solid and the solid made empty, unreadable to anyone — is brilliant past anything. If you ask me, using it to fool these country bumpkins is a waste. With pig-brains like theirs, I could fool them any time I liked without a scheme at all.”
He was in the middle of enjoying himself when a golden radiance shot up out of the seabed and rose into the sky.
One leader with a rhinoceros’s nose and protruding tusks asked, baffled, “That’s not right. The sensing shouldn’t be that fast. How is the teleport finished already? Even if it did sense the fix on the position, it cannot possibly complete in one go. Isn’t it three hours at the least?”
“Perhaps the kingdom lord is on the stronger side. Or perhaps they teleported early.” The lion-headed leader thought it strange as well.
Overhead, that radiance scattered away.
Nothing there.
Only a Wind-Breath Seabird came flying down at the end of its strength, feathers curled and disordered all over, in a thoroughly wretched state. It could not even make the shore before it dropped onto the surface of the sea with a slap, and the small pitiful body came within a hair of being swallowed by the swell…
How is it a small seabird that got teleported through? Where are the ten kingdom lords?
(End of Chapter 1218)