The fifteen minutes of rest felt less like a reprieve and more like the deep breath before a plunge into deep water. The air in the central amphitheater was stale, recycled through millennia of beast lungs but the cultivators rose nonetheless with renewed vigor.

  Sect Master Zhou of the Iron Blood Sect stood at the front of the main formation. He was checking the straps of his crimson armor. He looked at the tunnel ahead. It was vast and the ceiling was lost in the shadows. The walls were marked by claw gouges that looked like they had been carved by titans.

  "Form up!" Zhou’s voice echoed, authoritative and calm. "Shield bearers, stay in the Commander's wake. Do not stray into the shadows. We are the cleanup crew, not the vanguard. Remember your role. We don’t need heroes here, we want survivors."

  The army of two thousand moved out.

  The darkness here was physical. It pressed against their spiritual senses, muffling detection ranges like a heavy blanket. But they didn't need to see far. They just had to watch the back of the man in the simple robes.

  "Here they come!" Matriarch Su spoke from the flank. Her eyes narrowed as she sensed the shift in the air. It wasn't a skirmish line. It was a tide.

  From the gloom, thousands of eyes ignited—a carpet of bioluminescence stretching endlessly. Armored Pangolins formed a living wall of scales. Behind them, Venom-Spitting Cobras raised their hoods. Above, clinging to the stalactites or flying were hundreds of Shadow-Stalkers.

  This was an army that numbered in the thousands.

  Li Yu, walking ahead of the vanguard, didn't pause his steps for even a second. He knew they would be here and sure enough, they were. He spun Star-Crusher, the rod made from Khaos’s shell hummed with power and accelerated.

  "Here we go." Li Yu said softly.

  He hit the enemy line like a divine catastrophe. His staff slammed down—First Form: The Mountain Collapse.

  The impact didn't just break the formation; it liquefied it. The front ranks of the Pangolins, beasts with hides tough enough to deflect flying swords, were instantly turned into a spray of mist and shrapnel. The shockwave tore a highway through the center of the horde.

  "Forward!" Commander Lei bellowed. "Pick off the stragglers! Stay with the group!"

  The army advanced but they weren't charging into a wall of death. They were walking into a slaughterhouse where the butcher had already done the work. Their work now was to take care of the trimmings.

  A disciple from the Thunderclap Mercenaries stepped over the ruin of a Pangolin. A Razor-Scale Wolf, half its body crushed by the aftershock of Li Yu’s blow, snapped feebly at his ankle. The mercenary brought his axe down, ending the beast with a single efficient chop.

  "It's just as he said," the mercenary muttered as he was looking ahead. "He’s the spear. We’re just the broom."

  The battle fell into a rhythm. It wasn't a desperate struggle for survival; it was a test of endurance. Li Yu was a whirlwind of violence at the front. He wasn't letting anything dangerous through.

  Any beast that was mid-Core Formation or higher was targeted and obliterated instantly by his staff, void javelins or some other technique. The javelins orbited him like loyal guard dogs and made it seem like he was an army all on his own.

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  Only the stunned, the maimed or the terrified weaker ones slipped past him to the army.

  Sect Master Zhou deflected a lazy strike from a dazed Shadow-Stalker and ran it through. He looked at his disciples. They weren't panicking. They were sweating, their arms tired from the repetitive motion of killing but they were safe. He had not fought in such a way since becoming a leader. This brought him back to his own training days when he was a young cultivator..

  "Keep the pace!" Zhou ordered. "Don't let the corpses pile up! Clear the path!"

  They fought for twenty minutes, pushing deeper into the mountain. The sheer volume of enemies was staggering but Li Yu was an unstoppable force of nature. He was carving the tunnel out and widening it with every swing.

  Then, the rhythm broke.

  The sounds of battle—the wet thuds of weapons, the screams of dying beasts—were suddenly muffled. A blanket of silence descended over the cavern, heavy and oppressive.

  A wind began to blow from the deepest part of the tunnel. It wasn't a natural breeze. It was silent, cold and smelled of ancient decay.

  Matriarch Su froze and then she raised her fan halfway up. "Stop!" she roared, her face draining of blood. "Something is coming."

  A pressure descended. It was heavier than the mountain above them. It was a soul-crushing weight that forced the very air out of their lungs.

  Thump.

  Disciples in the Foundation Establishment realm dropped to their knees and were clutching their chests. They were gasping for air that wouldn't come. Even Commander Lei, a man as sturdy as a boulder, staggered, using his hammer to prop himself up.

  "Soul Formation..." Zhou wheezed, his spiritual sense screaming in terror. "One late stage... multiple sources of other Soul Formation..."

  From the darkness, It emerged.

  A massive creature floated into the cavern light. It was a nightmare of shifting grey wind and old bones. It was shaped vaguely like a lion but fluid and formless. Its eyes were two spinning vortices of apathy.

  Flanking it were four other monstrosities. Two towering Magma-Drakes, their skin dripping with liquid fire and two Storm-Tigers wrapped in crackling lightning.

  Five distinct auras of the Soul Formation realm washed over the army.

  The despair was instant. The cultivators froze and their wills shattered by the unstoppable new force that just appeared. They had been fighting broken cripples for the last twenty minutes and were feeling invincible. Now, facing five Soul Formation disasters, reality crashed back down. They were ants standing before a boot.

  The Grey-Wind creature opened its maw. A blade of wind that was silent and invisible to the naked eye but blindingly bright to spiritual sense began to form. It was aimed not at Li Yu but at the army behind him. They wanted to take out the majority and then focus on the leader afterwards.

  Li Yu stopped his assault on the horde instantly.

  He turned back to face them. His expression was hard and his eyes sharp with a terrifying intensity. He recognized the threat immediately—if that wind blade launched, two thousand people would die in a heartbeat. The damage sharing formations would be useless when everyone died at once.

  He slammed his staff onto the ground.

  FLASH.

  It wasn't a sound but a distortion of reality. Space twisted violently around Li Yu.

  "Protect them," Li Yu’s voice cut through the pressure. It sounded icy and absolute.

  In a fraction of a second the Sentry avatar came back into being. The Sentry’s eyes blazed with blue light as it turned to face the army and its hands were already moving.

  Simultaneously, the main body of Li Yu blurred. He didn't run at the five beasts; he simply appeared among them.

  Li Yu’s main body grabbed empty air but the space around the Grey-Wind creature and its four lieutenants warped violently. A black tear in reality opened. It was ragged and hungry. It looked like it could devour the entire world.

  Li Yu, the massive Grey-Wind beast and the four lieutenants were sucked into the tear. It wasn't a request; it was a forceful abduction.

  Pop.

  The fissure snapped shut. The crushing pressure that had appeared instantly also vanished just as suddenly. Sect Master Zhou gasped, sucking in a lungful of air as the weight disappeared. He looked up and was bewildered. The five nightmares were gone. Li Yu was gone.