"Everyone, we and the Chief are about to perform a forbidden spell. We hope everyone can buy us some time outside the hall," one of the elders by the Chief's side added smoothly, easing the rising tension in the room.
"Bring me Mo Lingtian," Yen Shui commanded the two elders as the rest of the assembly began to hastily exit the hall.
"Yes, Chief," the two elders answered as they immediately turned and exited the chamber.
"What do you think?" Yen Shui's voice echoed through the empty hall as he watched the destruction outside grow ever closer.
Almost immediately, an ominous, fiercely oppressive aura filled the entire place, saturating the room like a heavy, suffocating weight.
"Involving that person in your plot is too unpredictable," a deep, all-consuming voice suddenly answered from the shadows.
"It's the only choice we have now. How bad could gambling with fate go?" Yen Shui said, turning around as he sensed the elders approaching the hall with Mo Lingtian.
"What if you are wrong?" the deep voice asked.
"We will find out tonight," Yen Shui replied, turning away from the high windows just as the two elders stepped through the entrance with Mo Lingtian.
"Chief," the two elders said in unison, bowing slightly in salute.
Behind them, standing in the dim lighting of the hall, was Mo Lingtian. He was young, calm, and eerily composed, standing tall despite the fresh blood smeared all over his face.
"Child, come closer. I want you to see something," Yen Shui said, stretching his hand toward Mo Lingtian as the two elders gave way for them to meet.
Slowly, hesitantly, he stepped out of the dim shadows and toward Yen Shui. The light from the raging flames of destruction outside immediately highlighted his features. His clothes were tattered, his body reeked of ash, and his palms, arms, and back bore pristine, devastating cuts.
And his eyes, they bore intense, bottomless grief. Tears rolled profusely down his cheeks, standing in stark contrast to his stony, composed facial expression.
As he stepped closer, Yen Shui firmly rested a hand on his shoulder, gently guiding him to the gigantic doors paving the entrance of the hall.
There, framing the threshold, both of them stood and watched. They watched the screams, the flames, the absolute annihilation, the plunder, and the devastation that these unknown squads wrought upon their land, the only place in the three realms they could ever call home.
"Chief, I...."
"Child, wipe your tears," Yen Shui said without turning to look at him.
Mo Lingtian, his eyes still fixated on the slaughter outside, silently wiped his face with his tattered sleeves.
"You tried to save them?" Yen Shui asked.
"Yes," he replied.
"How did that go?" the Chief asked, this time turning his head slightly to face the boy.
"They all died," Mo Lingtian stated emphatically. A dead silence fell over the hall.
"Your mum?" Yen Shui asked.
"She was teleported," he replied, his eyes welling up with tears once more.
"Your sister?" Yen Shui pressed.
"She... she was raped to death," he replied, his voice trembling, threatening to break under the immense weight of his grief.
Upon hearing his answer, Yen Shui took a very sharp breath. He closed his eyes, turning back to face the burning horizon.
"Why was that?"
"I was weak. Too weak," Mo Lingtian whispered.
"Today, our entire race will perish. And you will bear our cause and effect. You will bear our karma," Yen Shui said, leaving Lingtian struggling to process the monumental weight of what he had just heard.
"Elders! Let's form the formation together!" Yen Shui yelled as he slowly levitated off the ground.
Almost immediately, the two elders simultaneously drew sharp daggers from their sleeves and swiftly sprang into action. Without a second of hesitation, they drove the blades into their own chests, tearing themselves open to violently pull out their own hearts, displaying a horrific, bloody sight of absolute desperation.
As soon as the organs were severed, their bodies instantly went limp, falling lifelessly to the stone floor.
"Three drops of blood to cleanse the vessel," Yen Shui chanted as he rose higher into the atmosphere.
In his left hand, three drops of essence blood floated, spiraling simultaneously as they cleaved to one another. In his right hand, he held the two hearts the elders had just ripped from their chests.
"Having been cultivated for hundreds of thousands of years, the vitality within these organs alone is enough to blister an entire city," Yen Shui declared, channeling his energy simultaneously into the beating hearts and the essence blood.
Then, suddenly, from within the chaotic flames outside, a glistening, slender spear shot forward. It tore past the entrance of the main hall and impaled Yen Shui squarely in the chest, the sheer momentum carrying him flying past Mo Lingtian and violently pinning him deep into the far walls of the hall.
"Kill!" a voice echoed from the void.
Suddenly, a figure dashed through the hall toward where the Chief hung pinned by the spear, moving far faster than Yen Shui could even react. Mo Lingtian whipped around to see the armored figure lifting the Chief up by the neck, the spear still lodged through his torso.
"Bring him here," the same disembodied voice commanded the figure choking the half-dead Chief.
With a casual, almost mocking sway of his finger, a spatial crack ripped open behind the figure. He callously tossed Yen Shui inside, stepped in after him, and the crack snapped shut.
At the other end of the hall near the entrance, a second spatial crack tore open. Yen Shui was tossed brutally onto the floor, followed by the armored figure, who immediately dropped to one knee as if greeting an invisible sovereign.
"Come here," the deep, disembodied voice echoed once more.
Instantly, the spatial laws around them reconfigured. Everybody and everything were violently relocated into a vast, foreign world sprawling with endless chaos, fire, and destruction. Mo Lingtian quickly looked around as he bolted out of the hall. He was no longer in the Devil's Abyss. He wasn't even in the world of the three realms anymore.
This was far beyond teleportation; this was a direct, localized deletion of an entire region off the map of reality. The entirety of the Devil's Abyss, along with all the fighting, killing, and fire, had been abruptly trapped within this alien dimension.
Mo Lingtian looked back and saw the figure still kneeling inside the hall, offering his absolute submission to the sky itself.
Then, the thick, blood-red clouds in the infinite expanse of this world slowly parted. The physical form, the face behind the voice that had commanded the ambush was slowly revealed.
Covering the entire, massive expanse of the firmament was just a single eye. The physical form of this entity was too enormous to be fully comprehended; its left eye was the only visible part, large enough to eclipse the entire world.