This outcome left Su Min thoroughly exasperated, a feeling she was not at all accustomed to. She tapped her fingers impatiently on the warm shell of the Kirin egg.
Divine beasts did not mature through the mere passage of time alone; they needed a massive, sustained accumulation of energy and rare resources. The Little Golden Crow and the Dragon Princess had grown so rapidly precisely because they had such powerful backing, with entire clans dedicated to their nourishment. The Kirins undoubtedly possessed similar, if not greater, resources within their secret ancestral realm, but that was completely inaccessible to her now. The entire burden of raising this princeling had fallen squarely, and inconveniently, onto Su Min's shoulders.
"Who knows how long that bastard needs to fully awaken. He is probably devouring his remaining followers right now to speed up the process." Suppressing her frustration, Su Min looked up again at the planetary barrier hovering ominously about ten kilometers above the surface. It was an impenetrable cage, a dome of blood red energy. Even the spatial rift leading to the ancient battlefield was now inaccessible, sealed away behind the same formidable power.
Only waiting remained until the Fallen One finally awakened.
The others on the planet, however, faced far greater and more immediate headaches.
"The barrier has completely severed all satellite signals worldwide. Global communication and navigation have collapsed. Civilization has regressed decades overnight." Lin Yao grimaced at her barely functional computer screen, which flickered with static and error messages.
"Care for an outing? I have some time to kill." Su Min's ghostly, silent appearance right behind her elicited a sharp shriek.
"Ah!!!" The golden core cultivator quickly composed herself, her heart hammering. Being startled like this would normally signal grave danger, but with Su Min, it was just routine behavior.
"Master, you scared me half to death! And with global chaos now, is it really the best time for a stroll..."
"Precisely why I want to see the extent of it. That creature will not awaken for about a year. It is too short a time for any meaningful preparation on our part anyway." Su Min shrugged. For a Dao Comprehension cultivator like her, with a potential lifespan of five millennia, their seclusion sessions often spanned decades to centuries. A mere year was utterly insignificant, a blink of an eye. Without any concrete intelligence on her enemy's current state, even crafting specific counter artifacts proved impossible.
Yet Su Min remained fundamentally calm. Having sabotaged all his major contingencies and forced this premature awakening, the Fallen would be lucky to retain even one tenth of his former strength. He would be far, far weaker than the Mahayana skeleton she had faced on the ancient battlefield.
Especially after obtaining the Western Metal's Sharp Gold and completing her set of divine beast legacies, she secretly craved a worthy opponent to test her full, unrestrained power against. His emergence would serve that purpose nicely.
"Let us go." Without waiting for further protest, Su Min turned. Lin Yao abandoned her worries and followed. Explaining things to the panicked masses was not her responsibility. The moment they stepped outside the fortress gates, Su Min immediately noticed disturbances in the distance, seeing the glow of flames and sensing the chaotic, raging spiritual energy in one particular direction of the city.
"They are purging the Zhong family. No wonder master always avoided the alliance, traitors indeed. They were the ones who orchestrated my pursuit back then." Lin Yao's expression darkened with a cold killing intent. She had abstained from participating in the purge herself; rooting out such a deep rooted, powerful family required the strength of at least Nascent Soul cultivators. As an early golden core cultivator, she would be easy prey for any desperate, last ditch counterattacks. To the others, she was merely collateral, the lucky disciple of the expert who had disrupted their schemes.
"Thorough eradication is always troublesome." Su Min massaged her temples, recalling past experiences. Eliminating deep rooted factions was notoriously difficult and messy. Even annihilating the Blood Puppet Sect back in her homeland had required decades of effort and allied assistance, and it had still cost one golden core cultivator his life.
The Future Maitreya Mountain sect proved even worse; she had needed to outsource their destruction to a group of righteous monks. Unless she unleashed the Little Golden Crow and Dragon Princess with their emperor artifacts to simply raze entire regions from orbit, which would understandably make her the entire continent's public enemy, there were no clean solutions.
She consoled herself with the thought that most Fallen Ones consumed mere millions, not billions, of lives. It was a grim calculus, but Su Min would not cross that genocidal line herself.
"Any good eateries around here? I have not had a proper feast in ages." Stretching lazily as if the world was not ending around them, she changed the subject. The two of them vanished from the spot, reappearing a moment later in a nearly deserted barbecue joint. The recent cataclysmic battle's aftermath had left few people in a dining mood. Despite Su Min mitigating most of the collateral damage, the final impact of the Heaven rank treasure had still triggered devastating earthquakes across the continent.
"Welcome, beauties! What can I get for you?" The server's eyes lit up at Su Min's striking appearance. Her flawless jade like skin and pristine, elegant features needed no adornment. Lin Yao, though slightly less dazzling, still turned heads with her own clean cut beauty.
"Three whole roasted lambs to start." Lin Yao's cheek twitched at her master's prodigious appetite. The stunned server quickly deduced their cultivator status from the request and the aura they casually exuded, and he retreated to the kitchen with a respectful bow.
"Disasters everywhere. I heard an entire coastal city was destroyed by the quakes. Do Dao Comprehension experts always wreak such havoc when they fight?" Lin Yao referenced the Fallen followers' parting attack, the one that had actually managed to wound Su Min.
"Count your blessings. A true, full powered Mahayana practitioner could have split your planet in half with that last strike. This world's spatial stability is just particularly fragile." Su Min rolled her eyes, thinking of her own homeland, which was far more robust and could withstand Dao Comprehension battles with less catastrophic environmental damage.
"Master, when he finally awakens... your fight will not destroy the..." Lin Yao could not finish the terrifying thought.
"Relax. We will take it to the void." Su Min smirked. Unlike her own world's powerful spatial restrictions, here she could physically fly into space, and so could her enemy. Neither of them would risk damaging this "livestock pen," as the Fallen likely saw it, as it was the source of the sustenance he desperately needed.
Thud. The restaurant's door burst open as a disheveled, middle aged man staggered in, reeking of cheap alcohol.
"Ten beers! Now!" he slurred, slumping into a booth.
"Lao Yu... you have to eat something, life goes on..." The server approached and explained softly to the two women, "His entire family was in that city that was destroyed..."
Su Min simply nodded, her face impassive. She had seen such grief ten thousand times before.
"Master..." Lin Yao looked at her with a concerned, slightly pleading look.
Su Min waved a hand, erecting a subtle soundproof barrier around their table. "Do not look at me like that. I am just a passing hero, not a guardian deity. These tragedies were not my making, and I believe I have done more than enough already." Decades, centuries even, of witnessing suffering had inured her to its immediate sting. Her primary moral code was to ensure such large scale events were not her direct fault.
"One year of hardship remains. And remember, the ancient battlefield's rift cannot be sealed permanently either." Without her intervention, the Fallen would have awakened at his full strength, potentially even reaching the Unity stage within a few years, which would have been a true, inescapable apocalypse for this entire world.
"Your roasted lambs, beauties!" The server returned, carrying platters of aromatic, sizzling meat that diverted their gloomy thoughts. For now, relaxation and a good meal took priority.
Meanwhile, deep within the sealed barrier, at the heart of the hidden altar...
A solitary, gaunt figure sat cross legged amidst a blood red mist so thick it seemed almost solid.
"They replaced all my Kirin eggs with common ostrich eggs, those imbeciles! And then they had the gall to awaken me prematurely. Death was far too merciful for them." A bloody light flashed in his eyes, a glow of such pure malice that it made the space around him tremble.
This was the Bloodfiend Patriarch, who had once been an early Mahayana expert.
Struck by the Heavenly Decay the moment he solidified his Mahayana cultivation base, he had been forced to seal himself away at the cost of severing most of his cultivation, regressing all the way back to a half step Dao Comprehension. His current plan, his very hope for survival, stemmed from a past service he had performed for the Kirin kind. Though bound by powerful soul oaths not to harm them, a lucky raid on an ancient tomb had netted him a rare Death Substitute Doll, an artifact capable of negating one fatal backlash.
Thus, when the Elder Kirin sacrificed itself to strengthen their ancestral defensive formations, he saw his chance. He had used the doll to circumvent his oaths and stolen nearly the entire next generation of Kirin eggs before fleeing across the void to this remote, life bearing planet. His meticulous preparations over centuries included grooming human followers, knowing that humanity, the universe's favored children, appeared on all such worlds and were easily manipulated.
Yet at the final moment, everything had collapsed. His followers had not only awakened him prematurely but had also lost every single one of his sacrificial offerings.
In his rage, he had devoured all his remaining followers, barely managing to restore his strength to the early Dao Comprehension stage. But a severed Mahayana's lifespan burned rapidly without a continuous consumption of potent flesh, a fundamental flaw that true Unity stage practitioners had long since overcome.
"That woman must be from the Heavenly Continent, answering the Kirins' distress call. DAMN IT!!!" His roar of frustration echoed through the bloody chamber, a promise of vengeance that soured the very air.