The news of the total destruction of the Iron-Glacier Pass swept across the Central Plains of the Western Continent like a world-ending calamity.
In less than forty-eight hours, the border tracking arrays, the Grand Iron-Vault of Winter-Frost City, the three-thousand-year-old ancestral mountain of the Blood-Shadow Sect, and the impenetrable fortress gate of the Western Province had all been erased from the map.
It was no longer a story of a fugitive escaping a bounty. It was a single-man invasion.
A solitary figure in a frost-covered traveler's coat—holding a cracked, extinguished pink lotus lantern inside his breast pocket—was walking down the broad stone imperial highway toward the heart of the continent. He did not run. He did not fly using spatial law. He simply walked, taking one calm, unhurried step at a time.
Yet, with every single step his boots took, the ambient atmospheric temperature of the Central Plains dropped by another degree.
The lush, golden wheat fields stretching for hundreds of miles along the highway snap-froze into brittle, pale-blue crystal gardens. The vast, flowing rivers that fed the agricultural hubs turned into solid, miles-thick glaciers in a microsecond. The cold was not magical—it was the pure, terrifying physical reaction of a primordial marrow density so extreme that it absorbed all kinetic energy and thermal movement from the surrounding world!
The people called it The March of Absolute Zero.
At the center of the Central Province sat Gold-Sovereign City—the absolute apex of power in the Western Continent.
Encircling the city were thirty-foot-thick walls forged from refined Sun-Gold Alloy, built atop a natural subterranean magma vein that had provided the metropolis with eternal summer and unlimited geothermal energy for three thousand years. The city housed over five million residents, tens of thousands of elite cultivators, and the grand headquarters of the Imperial Coalition: the combined strength of the Iron-Mountain Palace, the remaining grand elders of the Golden-Eagle Sect, and the Western Imperial Court.
Inside the grand imperial hall of Gold-Sovereign City, the atmosphere was suffocatingly tense, heavy with the stench of pure, unadulterated terror.
Sitting upon three elevated golden thrones at the head of the hall were the supreme rulers of the Western Continent—three genuine Stage-6 High-Grade Sovereigns:
At the center was Overlord Jin-Sheng, the Ruler of the Western Imperial Court, dressed in heavy dragon armor carved from golden meteorite ore, holding a massive, sun-forged imperial broadsword.
To his left sat Palace Master Iron-Mountain, an eight-foot-tall juggernaut whose physical body was clad in ancient, dark-iron armor reinforced with Stage-6 defensive runes.
To his right sat the last surviving supreme ancestor of the Golden-Eagle Sect—Ancestor Golden-Sky, a withered monster whose glowing golden eyes burned with frantic, vengeful rage.
Below the thrones stood over two hundred Stage-5 High Sovereigns and military commanders, their faces pale, their hands trembling violently as they listened to the emergency reports arriving every ten minutes from the forward outposts.
"Report!" A scout captain staggered into the hall, falling flat onto his face, his armor covered in pale-blue frost. "The fourth, fifth, and sixth imperial defense lines along the highway... erased! General Long and his fifty Stage-5 guards... snap-froze and pulverized into dust!"
"Where is he now?!" Overlord Jin-Sheng roared, his voice thunderous, but a subtle, uncontrollable tremor echoed beneath his words. He slammed his golden broadsword onto the floor, sending a wave of golden flame through the hall. "Where is the Northern Sovereign?!"
"He... he has just passed the Sun-Dial Bridge, Your Majesty!" The scout whimpered, his teeth chattering uncontrollably from the residual cold lingering in his blood. "He is less than ten miles from the main gates! He... he is walking alone!"
"ALONE?!" Palace Master Iron-Mountain spat, his massive iron fist clenching until the metal knuckles groaned. "He dares to walk up to the gates of Gold-Sovereign City alone?! We have five million troops! We have twenty Stage-6 spatial arrays tied directly to the subterranean magma vein! Even a Stage-7 Sovereign would be incinerated if they attempted a direct assault on our grand formation!"
"He is not looking for an assault," a quiet, trembling voice echoed from the corner of the hall.
The crowd turned to look. Standing near the back pillar was a senior elder from the Imperial Alchemist Guild, holding an ancient, crystal surveillance mirror.
"The surveillance array captured his face when he destroyed the sixth line," the old alchemist whispered, his voice shaking with profound, bone-chilling dread. "He is not looking for resources. He is not looking for revenge. His eyes... his eyes are completely dead. He has turned his bone marrow into a cold tomb. He is coming to bury us all."
Ancestor Golden-Sky stood up from his golden throne, his dark-red feathers fluttering violently as his Stage-6 spatial domain erupted.
"Nonsense!" Ancestor Golden-Sky shrieked, his face twisted in psychotic arrogance. "His meridians were sealed by the void needle for weeks! Even if he purged it with Earth-Marrow Resin, his Stage-5 energy cannot sustain continuous physical expenditure against our Sun-Gold Imperial Array! Activate the subterranean magma vein! Turn the ten-mile radius outside the gate into a sea of thousand-degree molten fire! We will melt his primordial marrow into slag!"
Ten miles outside the massive, golden gates of Gold-Sovereign City, the vast imperial stone highway opened into a wide, barren parade ground constructed from white marble and gilded brass.
Standing in the center of the road, five miles away from the city walls, was an army of fifty thousand elite imperial shock-troopers, flanked by three hundred Stage-5 Sovereigns and fifty steam-powered, dragon-headed flame cannons.
The sky above the city was a terrifying shade of blinding golden-red. The ancient Sun-Gold Imperial Array had been fully activated, channeling millions of gallons of liquid subterranean magma from the earth's core into the array nodes, creating a massive, hundred-foot-thick dome of white-hot, liquid golden flame that covered the entire metropolis!
The air above the parade ground shimmered with heat, reaching temperatures capable of melting iron weapons into liquid streams in seconds.
Yet, stepping out from the frosted pine forest five miles away, the solitary figure in the dark coat continued his forward march.
Li-Wen's leather boots stepped onto the white marble highway.
His dark traveler's coat was unbuttoned at the top. His short hair, heavily streaked with pure, snow-white roots, fluttered gently in the wind. His broad, iron-like back was straight and immovable. In his right hand, he carried the Pitch-Black Heavy Blade—drawn three inches out of its scabbard, its unadorned iron surface radiating a faint, microscopic sheen of absolute-zero sapphire cold that completely negated the thousand-degree heat radiating from the sky!
Inside his inner coat pocket, his left hand gently rested over the cold glass of the cracked pink lotus lantern.
Every step he took forward sent a microscopic wave of physical kinetic cold through the white marble floor.
CRUNCH... CRUNCH... CRUNCH...
The thousand-degree heat shimmering over the parade ground did not touch him. The moment the white-hot air approached within ten feet of his broad shoulders, the thermal energy was instantly absorbed by his primordial marrow density, snap-freezing the heat waves into brittle, pale-blue ice crystals that fell to the marble floor like frozen rain!
"HE'S WALKING THROUGH THE VOLCANIC HEAT WAVE?!"
"MY GOD! THE LIQUID MAGMA AIR IS FREEZING AROUND HIM!"
The fifty thousand imperial shock-troopers stationed behind the brass barriers began to tremble. Their heavy iron lances rattled against their shields as pure, instinctive, bone-deep terror spread through the ranks like a poison!
"DO NOT RETREAT!" A Stage-5 Imperial General screamed from his armored mount, drawing his flaming longsword! "FIRE THE DRAGON FLAME CANNONS! INCINERATE HIM!"
BOOOM—! BOOOM—! BOOOM—!
Fifty dragon-headed flame cannons fired simultaneously!
Fifty colossal streams of white-hot, subterranean liquid magma—each thirty feet wide—shot across the marble parade ground like a wall of roaring, liquid gold fire, heading directly for Li-Wen's broad chest!
Li-Wen did not dodge. He did not raise his heavy blade. He did not even alter his steady, unhurried cadence by a single microsecond.
He simply took another step forward.
The fifty colossal streams of white-hot liquid magma struck the invisible ten-foot kinetic field surrounding his dark coat!
CRACKLE—! CRUNCH—! SHATTER—!
The microsecond the white-hot magma made contact with the absolute-zero kinetic field, it did not explode! The thousands-of-degrees volcanic heat vanished into absolute non-existence! The liquid golden fire instantly snap-froze into fifty gigantic, pale-blue glass dragon sculptures mid-air—before violently shattering into billions of microscopic, frozen crystal shards that swept across the marble floor!
"THE VOLCANIC MAGMA WAS SNAP-FROZEN?!"
"MONSTER! HE IS A DEMON FROM THE ABYSS!"
The fifty thousand imperial shock-troopers completely broke down! Screams of pure, hysterical madness erupted across the parade ground as thousands of guards threw down their armor, trampling one another in a frantic, pathetic rush to climb over the rear brass walls into the city!
Li-Wen walked through the sea of shattering pale-blue glass, his dark, void-like eyes staring straight up at the ninety-foot golden gate of Gold-Sovereign City.
He stopped ten paces in front of the massive gate.
High above the battlements, Overlord Jin-Sheng, Palace Master Iron-Mountain, and Ancestor Golden-Sky stood staring down at the solitary man. Their Stage-6 spatial domains were fully flared, yet standing before the broad-shouldered man below, they felt as small and fragile as dry autumn leaves before a descending mountain glacier!
"Northern Sovereign!" Overlord Jin-Sheng roared, his golden dragon armor crackling with immense spatial Qi, his hands gripping his imperial broadsword until his knuckles turned white! "You have slaughtered your way across three provinces! You have destroyed sects and erased border cities! What more do you want?!"
Li-Wen slowly raised his dark, abyssal eyes.
The white-rooted strands of his hair fluttered in the freezing draft. His face was flat, smooth, and completely devoid of human expression—a face carved from ancient, cold iron.
He pulled his left hand out from his inner coat pocket. He did not reveal the cracked lotus lantern. He simply opened his broad, scarred palm, facing the ninety-foot golden gate and the three Stage-6 Sovereigns above.
"The girl held a lotus lantern," Li-Wen said.
His deep, raspy voice was not loud. It did not echo with thunder or spatial magic. Yet, it carried an absolute, cosmic physical density that vibrated through the tectonic plates four miles beneath Gold-Sovereign City, causing the thirty-foot-thick Sun-Gold walls to groan under microscopic stress!
"She liked warm honey oat cakes," Li-Wen murmured, his pitch-black eyes reflecting no light from the golden sun above. "You took her lantern."
Ancestor Golden-Sky sneered down from the battlements, trying desperately to mask his trembling terror behind a wall of arrogant rage. "A brat's life means nothing in the grand realm of cultivation! She was merely a casualty of our sect's bounty! You think you can destroy Gold-Sovereign City for a mortal child?!"
Li-Wen looked at Ancestor Golden-Sky.
"A child to you," Li-Wen whispered softly, his raspy voice dropping into an absolute, unyielding coldness that cut through the sky.
"The world to me."
Li-Wen slowly raised his right arm, holding the Pitch-Black Heavy Blade.
For the first time since he had crossed the Eastern Seas, Li-Wen drew the heavy blade nine inches out of its scabbard.
SHRRRRRRR—!!!!!
A sound like a hundred cosmic stars collapsing into a dark void erupted across the Central Plains!
The ninety-foot-thick dome of white-hot, subterranean liquid magma protecting Gold-Sovereign City—the ancient Sun-Gold Imperial Array—did not flicker. The moment nine inches of the dark steel were exposed to the open air, the sheer, unimaginable kinetic density of the blade absorbed all heat within a fifty-mile radius in a single microsecond!
CRACKLE—! SHATTER—!
The hundred-foot-thick dome of volcanic magma snap-froze mid-air into a gigantic, pale-blue glass dome over the entire five-million-resident metropolis!
And then... it shattered.
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM—!!!!!
Millions of tons of frozen volcanic glass fell from the sky like an apocalyptic hail of pale-blue crystals, obliterating the battlements, the golden watchtowers, and the three hundred flame cannons in a single microsecond!
The three Stage-6 High Sovereigns—Overlord Jin-Sheng, Palace Master Iron-Mountain, and Ancestor Golden-Sky—were violently blown backward off the battlements by the sheer physical shockwave, crashing onto the stone floor of the central plaza inside the city!
Their Stage-6 spatial domains were torn to shreds. Their golden armors were cracked in a hundred places, blood pouring from their lips as they looked up at the shattered, windowless sky in pure, unspeakable horror!
The invincible Sun-Gold Imperial Array—the proudest defensive achievement of the Western Continent—was destroyed by nine inches of an unpolished blade.
Down on the cracked marble highway outside the gate, Li-Wen stepped through the dust of the shattered golden gate, his heavy leather boots making quiet, steady sounds against the stone.
He walked into Gold-Sovereign City.
He did not look at the fleeing citizens. He did not look at the burning palaces. He simply kept his right hand on the dark grip of his heavy blade, his left hand holding the cold, cracked pink lotus lantern in his coat pocket, stepping forward to finish the debt.
See you in next chapter....