Chapter 190: The Collapse of the Illusion and the Sect's Cry
The vanguard of the legion reached the limits of the Purple Mist. They stopped dead in their tracks, forming a wall of black iron surrounding the valley, awaiting the next order from their Marshal.
Meanwhile, in the heart of the Valley of the Seven Peaks, the tension was so thick it could be cut with a knife.
In the Great Mist Hall, located at the summit of the central peak, Patriarch Feng, "The Deceitful Wind," paced in circles. The deep dark circles under his eyes and his disheveled hair betrayed weeks of insomnia. The sect was in a state of total lockdown. Ever since they received the news that five of their Peak Lords—five powerful True Saints—had been mercilessly massacred at the entrance of the Saint's Tomb, paranoia had consumed the high command.
"Still no news from the spies on the border?" asked Feng, his voice heavy with poorly concealed anxiety.
"Nothing, Patriarch," replied one of the two remaining Vice-Masters, a Stage 1 Grand Saint who nervously checked a jade board. "The neighboring sects are just as frightened. Whoever killed our elite did so with a brutality that does not belong to the other families or sects, and there is no information that any of them or our enemies have made a move. That is why keeping the Miasma Shield at maximum is our only option. No one, not even a group of Grand Saints, could navigate our Purple Mist without dissolving or being driven mad by the illusions."
Feng nodded, trying to convince himself that the defenses which had protected the sect for a thousand years would not fail now. They had ten thousand disciples pumping Qi into the array. They were safe.
Suddenly, the heavy doors of the Mist Hall burst open. A Head Deacon (Semi-Saint) came running in, pale as a corpse and stumbling over his own robes.
"Patriarch! Vice-Masters!" shouted the Deacon, falling to his knees in the center of the hall. "The Life Slip Hall... a catastrophe has occurred!"
"Speak clearly, scum!" roared Feng, grabbing him by the collar of his robes. "What happened? Did someone die?"
"The beasts!" the man stuttered, his eyes wide with panic. "The life slips of the guardian beasts on the outer perimeter...!"
"What about them? Did someone kill a couple of wolves? Send a team to check the traps!" interrupted one of the Peak Lords (True Saint) who was still alive.
"It's not a couple!" sobbed the Deacon, trembling uncontrollably. "All of them! The five hundred life slips of the guardian beasts... went out."
The silence in the Great Hall was absolute and sepulchral.
Patriarch Feng released the Deacon, taking a step back as if he had been physically struck.
"Five hundred...?" whispered Feng, feeling his heart beat painfully against his ribs. "That is impossible. There would have to be an army of thousands of cultivators assaulting the mountains. The divine senses of the beasts would have alerted the valley! The blood formations would have erupted!"
"I checked the formation panels, Patriarch!" shouted the Vice-Master from the jade board, his hands trembling violently over the monitoring runes. "No intruders detected! The outer array reports no disturbances! The Qi density in the forest is normal! No energy signatures, no spatial fluctuations! NOTHING!"
Terror seized the executive command. An unknown force had exterminated five hundred elite monsters in a matter of minutes, in complete and absolute silence, bypassing the sect's best Saint-Grade surveillance formations. It wasn't an attack; it was as if a god of death had walked the perimeter erasing lives with an invisible eraser.
"Summon all disciples to the central courtyard!" roared Patriarch Feng, his voice cracking with panic, unsheathing the Weeping Cloud Sword. "Awaken the elders in seclusion! Send a death squad immediately to the outer peaks to investigate, NOW!"
Chaos erupted in the Violet Cloud Sect. The emergency bells, which had not rung in three hundred years, began to toll hysterically, tearing through the dense purple mist.
Thousands of disciples, from the humble Mortal Realm to the arrogant inner disciples of the Origin Realm, poured out of their pavilions, confused and frightened, gathering in the immense jade plaza in front of the main peak. Flying swords buzzed in the air, and elders shouted contradictory orders, trying to form reconnaissance squads.
But just as Patriarch Feng was about to order his deacons to leave the safety of the mist to investigate the dead forests, the world stopped.
It wasn't a physical attack. It was a voice.
A feminine voice, crystalline, devoid of any emotion and absurdly sharp, resonated directly from the sky. It didn't care about the thick Purple Mist. It didn't care about the immense isolation array of the Seven Peaks. The voice pierced the formations as if they were made of wet paper, amplified by a Qi so dense and heavy it made the water in the valley's ponds vibrate.
"Alright, pay attention, scum."
The ten thousand disciples, the elders, and Patriarch Feng froze in their places. Ten thousand pairs of eyes looked up to the sky.
There, floating lazily above the sea of Purple Mist, oblivious to the corrosive poison that should have melted her skin, was a solitary figure.
It was a woman of such overwhelming and unreal beauty that she seemed like a mirage carved by the gods themselves. She wore an impeccable black military uniform that clung to her curves, accentuating a lethal and perfect figure. Her long hair waved gently in the toxic breeze, and elegant crystal glasses rested on her face, giving her an air of cold, clinical authority. Behind her, the darkness seemed dense, but the disciples, blinded by the array, could not see the army of twenty-five thousand iron monsters waiting at the edges.
Vexia looked down at the mass of cultivators crowding the plaza like frightened ants. Her gaze behind the glasses was pure contempt.
"Disciples and elders who wish to abandon the Violet Cloud Sect and renounce their loyalty have exactly ten seconds to leave the valley," Vexia announced, her voice booming like a judge's gavel on an execution block. "Those who cross the mountain and leave their weapons behind will live. Nine... Eight..."
The sepulchral silence reigned for exactly three seconds in the valley. And then, human stupidity and pride overcame the survival instinct.
No one moved to flee. Instead, surprise turned into indignation, and indignation transformed into the typical arrogance of a millennial sect.
"Who the hell do you think you are, you arrogant bitch?!" shouted one of the inner disciples, pointing his sword at the sky. "You are in the Violet Cloud Sect!"
"She's just a woman! She probably used a stolen artifact to fly over the array!" mocked another deacon, gaining confidence upon seeing that she appeared to be "alone".
The murmurs turned into shouts, and insults began to rain down. However, while the elders tried to decipher Vexia's cultivation level (which was perfectly hidden), many of the young disciples let their eyes wander over the Marshal's body.
The tension of the lockdown and Vexia's dazzling beauty created a toxic cocktail in the minds of the weakest.
"Hey! If you come down now and kneel before our Patriarch, maybe we'll let you live to warm our beds!" shouted an arrogant disciple of the Transcendence Realm, unleashing some nervous but lecherous laughter among his peers. Several of them literally began to drool, their minds clouded by perverted thoughts and the absurd idea that ten thousand men could subdue a single beautiful woman.
In the sky, Vexia's bored and clinical expression tensed. Her sadistic smile faded, replaced by a grimace of genuine disgust and irritation. She adjusted her glasses, and a flash of pure lethality shone in her eyes.
The countdown stopped.
"Zero," Vexia said.
The coldness in her voice made the temperature in the valley plummet, instantly silencing the disciples' laughter. Patriarch Feng, sensing the immense killing intent that suddenly radiated from the woman, knew in that instant that they were all dead.
Vexia extended her hands, looking at the crowd with the disdain of someone looking at a plague of insects before stepping on them.
"Since you did not accept my kind offer, you can all die." Vexia's decree cut through the air, resonating with the authority of a god of war. "And when you are rotting in hell, say hello to the King of Hell. And tell him that the ones who sent you as a gift... were the Morningstars."
After Vexia uttered those words, and her death ultimatum and disdain for the false pride of the Valley of the Seven Peaks resonated in every corner of the sect, silence fell over the crowd. It was a dense, heavy silence, the kind of stillness that precedes absolute denial.
The thousands of disciples, deacons, and elders processed the information for a long moment. A single woman, floating in the sky, daring to condemn one of the greatest forces of the outer regions?
Suddenly, a burst of laughter broke the stillness. Then another. And in a matter of seconds, the immense jade plaza and the pavilions erupted into a chorus of hysterical laughter and maniacal mockery. They laughed like crazy, convinced that they were witnessing the suicidal act of a lunatic who had managed to sneak in using some spatial artifact.
The sea of Purple Mist covering the foothills of the mountains swirled violently, splitting in two to make way for the sect's top leadership.
Ascending into the sky, walking on flying swords and clouds of condensed Qi, the leaders appeared. At the head was the Patriarch, Sect Master Feng "The Deceitful Wind" (Stage 7 Grand Saint), his robes billowing majestically, although the dark circles on his face betrayed his recent paranoia.
Flanking him were the Two Vice-Masters, the remaining pillars of the sect (Stage 1 and 2 Grand Saints). Normally, these two men never left the safety of their defensive pavilions, as one controlled the deadly wind traps and the other operated the mist's toxins, but the intruder's insolence had forced them to show their faces.
Behind them, surrounded by ethereal swords, rose the remaining Six Peak Lords (Mid and High-Stage True Saints, from 4 to 8). These men and women were physically exhausted, their Dantians aching from keeping the Sect's Shield active day and night without rest, knowing in the depths of their souls that they were next on the tomb assassins' list. And, floating slightly lower, leading the troops from the air, were the Ten Head Deacons (Semi-Saints), the sect's field officers.
The entire elite of the Violet Cloud Sect deployed in the sky, radiating an arrogance that attempted to mask their own fear.
"Surrender now, you arrogant whore!" spat one of the Peak Lords, pointing his sword at Vexia. "Kneel in the air, cut your meridians, and beg for our Patriarch's forgiveness!"
"Maybe, if you crawl like a dog, we'll let you live!" added one of the Vice-Masters, his eyes sweeping over the Marshal's body with a disgusting lust.
In their heads, the death threats were just a formality. What they were really thinking, what their power-corrupted minds were plotting, was how they were going to break her mentally. They thought about tying her up in the mist dungeons, subjecting her to all kinds of perverted humiliations, and using her body as a dual cultivation furnace until her Qi was completely sucked dry. Vexia's dazzling beauty had only awakened the basest instincts of a sect that believed itself untouchable.
Patriarch Feng, however, was slightly more cautious. He noticed that the woman did not emit any fluctuations of fear, not even in the face of the combined pressure of several Grand Saints and True Saints. Feng raised his hand, ordering absolute silence from his elders.
"Who the hell are you?" asked Feng, his voice laden with power and cutting wind. "What do you mean you'll kill us? And who are these damned 'Morningstars'? We don't know of any force by that name."
Vexia adjusted her glasses with her middle finger. Her cold gaze swept over the men floating before her, looking at them as if they were a failed experiment.
"Allow me to educate the dead," she replied, her Qi-amplified voice resonating in the bones of every cultivator in the valley. "I am The Grand Marshal of the Void. The First Sword and loyal servant of Samael Morningstar, the Patriarch and absolute head of the Morningstar Family."
The name "Samael" told them nothing, but the title of Marshal made Feng frown.
"And why are you here, invading our territory?" the Patriarch demanded to know, preparing to unleash his Law Domain if she made a false move.
Vexia smiled, a twisted and lethal smile.
"It's very simple, scum. You coveted something you were not worthy of possessing in a certain Saint's Tomb, something the patriarch himself had decided would be the training ground for the youths of the clan. And what is worse... with your pathetic blockade at the entrance, you dared to deny passage to our people. Obviously, our people massacred them all effortlessly for such insolence. And since the supreme law in this world dictates that it is always better to pull weeds out by the roots, we were not going to sit around and wait for you to come knocking on our door seeking revenge. So the Patriarch reconsidered... and decided to get ahead of you to return the courtesy with a surprise visit."
Patriarch Feng's eyes widened. Icy terror replaced indignation. "The tomb! It's them! The monsters who massacred our five Saints!"
"No one who messes with us gets away unscathed, even if it takes us years to achieve it," continued Vexia, her voice turning deep, resonating with the echo of the abyss. "But luckily for you, we like immediacy."
Vexia raised her right hand, her palm open to the sky, and her eyes flashed with the pure intent of a massacre.
"End of discussion, scum. Are you ready to die?" shouted Vexia, her voice breaking the sound barrier. "Dead Blood Legion, attack! Leave no one alive except the Semi-Saints and the Saints, and I want them half-dead! The rest of these bastards can die, their corpses will serve as fertilizer for our Clan's Tree!"
The order was given. The apocalypse was unleashed.
The elders of the sect blinked, confused. Who was she giving orders to? She was alone in the sky...
But the horror didn't come from outside. It came from within.
During the time Vexia had been "distracting" the sect with her speech, the infiltrated cyborgs who had scaled the slopes using the [Shifting Dune Steps] had already positioned themselves. On the seven mountain peaks, entire squads of the Dead Blood Guard had located the defensive pavilions, the very heart of the Seven Peaks Array.
At the exact instant Vexia lowered her hand, they attacked.
There was no warning. The black armors fell upon the guardian disciples of the peaks, crushing them in complete silence. Their heavy weapons shattered the jade cores and runic formations in a single second of synchronized fury.
They attacked the seven cores at the same time.
In the sky of the valley, a deafening sound of shattering glass resonated. The great main array of the Violet Cloud Sect, the invincible shield that deflected any external attack, flickered violently and then collapsed into a rain of inert spiritual light. The sky above the valley, previously distorted by protective runes, was suddenly exposed to the cold night and Vexia's Void Quarantine.
"They have destroyed the cores from the inside!" shouted one of the Vice-Masters, coughing up blood due to his soul's connection to the destroyed array. "Impossible! No one crossed the mist!"
Seeing the shield destroyed and hearing the woman's order, the thousands of disciples in the valley went from bewilderment to blind fury. The pride of their sect had been trampled.
"Kill the intruder! Protect the valley!" shouted the Core and Inner Disciples (cultivators of the Origin and Transcendence Realms). They were a few hundred local geniuses. They had talent, yes, but they had never faced a war of extermination of this magnitude.
Invoking their Qi, these disciples launched combined attacks. Hundreds of flying swords of purple light crossed the air, heading toward Vexia and toward the black shadows that began leaping from the mountain peaks down into the valley. The magical attacks were dazzling, a storm of light and energy that cut the wind. They could be annoying, but they lacked real brutality, the killing intent forged in the slaughterhouse.
Meanwhile, the Mass of Disciples (between five and ten thousand youths ranging from the Mortal Realm to the Qi Sea Realm) drew their weapons, attempting to form basic battle arrays on the ground, shouting slogans to give themselves courage.
But when the dark silhouettes landed in the valley, reality hit them like a sledgehammer.
The flying swords of the inner disciples clashed against the bodies of the cyborgs... and simply bounced off, bursting into harmless sparks against the Cold Star alloys.
As chaos took over the lower masses, the Ten Head Deacons (Semi-Saints) tried to intervene. Seeing their disciples being crushed by black metal colossi, they panicked.
"Activate the earth formations! Raise walls of poisonous stone!" shouted the lead Deacon, channeling his Qi to support the cannon fodder.
But the Legion wasn't going to let them organize. In the center of the drop, the immense General Xaloc landed in the main courtyard, cracking the stone beneath his colossal weight. His crimson eyes scanned the battlefield in a microsecond. Like a Saint King processing variables, he took absolute control.
Xaloc communicated mentally with his troops. He activated the [Tyrant Dragon Art of War]. He became the sender, the server core, and linked the 25,000 infantry soldiers, Generals Feng Wu and Lian Hua, and even the four Saint-ranked commanders.
The aura of the entire legion merged into a single, dark, and terrifying breath. Orders flowed through the hive.
"Directive 1: Execution of Combat Formations," Xaloc's metallic voice resonated in the minds of the legion.
In perfect synchrony, the 25,000 soldiers activated the [Body Technique: Black Iron Scales]. Their bodies became even denser, heavier, and impenetrable.
Xaloc didn't send everyone against the leaders; the army was a machine of precision. Through the network, he detached exactly two thousand soldiers and sent them directly like a steel avalanche against the ten Head Deacons (Semi-Saints).
The deacons, confident in their Semi-Saint level, tried to repel them with wind techniques. But the two thousand cyborgs didn't fight one-on-one. They used the [Movement Technique: Shifting Dune Steps] to surround them at breakneck speeds, becoming a black hurricane that nullified any escape attempt.
From the center of the formation, half of these cyborgs drew their sabers and executed the [Sword Art: Phantom Gale Slash], launching nets of silent and invisible cuts that shredded the Deacons' shields. The other half, following the Red Jade Manual, channeled dark fire Qi and hurled the [Sky-Piercing Phoenix Spear]. Hundreds of flaming spears fell upon the Semi-Saints, overwhelming their defenses through sheer mass and unified damage, crushing them to the ground until they were left on the brink of death, ready for harvest.
With the field officers immobilized, Xaloc parceled out the enemy high command.
"General Feng Wu. Engage the Vice-Masters," ordered Xaloc through the network.
The fierce golem general, enveloped in his own destructive aura, nodded and launched himself like a meteor toward the sky, directly intercepting the Two Vice-Masters (Stage 1 and 2 Grand Saints). Their halberds clashed in the air, unleashing massive shockwaves as Feng Wu forced them back through sheer brute force.
"General Lian Hua. Commanders. Secure the Peak Lords," continued the cybernetic Saint King.
The elegant and deadly Lian Hua, armed with stellar steel whips that cut space, accompanied by the legion's four Saint Realm commanders, soared toward the Six Peak Lords. The six True Saints of the Violet Cloud, already exhausted from maintaining the array for days, suddenly found themselves fighting for their lives against fresh killing machines, fearless and perfectly coordinated by the Hive Mind.
In the air, Patriarch Feng "The Deceitful Wind" watched as his sect crumbled in less than five minutes. His squads of elders were being cornered, and his thousands of disciples were being slaughtered like wheat before a scythe.
Terror drove him to the brink of madness. If hand-to-hand combat didn't work, he would kill them with the environment.
"Close the lines! Condense the Purple Mist to the maximum!" shouted Patriarch Feng, channeling all the power of his Stage 7 Grand Saint cultivation into the valley. "Let them drown in the poison! Raise the Murderous Mirages!"
Under their Patriarch's command, the thick mist covering the valley floor began to boil. The poison concentrated until it became a thick liquid in the air. From the toxic haze emerged hundreds of illusory beasts with lethal claws and ethereal swordsmen that attacked the black soldiers.
It was the sect's ultimate trap: a miasma that rotted lungs, melted meridians, and an army of illusions that shattered the mind, causing invaders to kill each other unable to distinguish reality.
The Murderous Mirages lunged at the vanguard of the Dead Blood Guard. The illusory claws slashed at the cyborgs' necks... and passed right through, causing no effect.
The tactic was an absolute and catastrophic failure.
The Hive Immunity was absolute. The cyborgs had no individual minds to deceive; their brains were runes operated by Xaloc. Orion Alpha's Networked Mind processed the reality of the battlefield through the 25,000 visors simultaneously. For a processor with the power of a Saint King, the illusions of a Grand Saint were code errors, blurry images that they ignored with complete apathy.
The black soldiers walked straight through the illusory swordsmen without even blinking. And as for the suffocating poison... they had no organic lungs to rot. Their circulatory system was closed. Furthermore, the legendary Cold Star Iron coating their chassis laughed at corrosion. The purple poison splashed against their armors and simply slid off like water on glass.
The metal beasts ignored the mist and continued their inexorable advance, slaughtering the frightened disciples who thought they were safe behind the illusions.
In the sky, Vexia watched Patriarch Feng's pathetic attempts and sighed with boredom.
"I hate it when they play hide and seek. They clutter my field of vision," the Marshal murmured. "Clear the board. Take away their purple blanket."
The order traveled through the hive network.
The cyborg divisions still on the mountain slopes, observing the valley like stationed snipers, halted their advance. Thousands of them drew their sabers and, guided by the Blue Jade Manual, executed a synchronized and beautiful movement.
[Lunar Frost Waltz].
Waves of cold Qi, empowered by the relentless fusion of their Dantians in the Tyrant Dragon network, swept the air in an immense, downward arc. The temperature in the Valley of the Seven Peaks dropped brutally below absolute zero in a single fraction of a second.
An unnatural and sharp sound, similar to a colossal glacier splitting in half, echoed overhead. The moisture and poison of the Purple Mist—the impregnable shield that had protected the sect's arrogance for millennia—simply could not withstand the friction.
In midair, the thick toxic haze stopped flowing. It crystallized instantly.
It wasn't a slow process. In a single heartbeat, the purple ocean covering the valley transmuted into thousands of sharp fragments of solid ice. And then, gravity did its relentless work.
An unfathomable storm of heavy, toxic hail crashed down upon the sect. The deafening clatter of the poisonous crystals violently striking the pristine jade slabs of the main plaza drowned out the screams of the disciples. The blocks of purple ice shattered into a thousand pieces upon hitting the stone, physically grinding away the last traces of the magical mirages as if they were broken mirrors falling from the sky.
The incessant ringing of the ice against the ground was the valley's funeral march. The air, previously suffocating and murky, took on a sharp and frigid clarity.
The veil had been lifted, revealing the night sky in all its immensity, and with it, the raw and terrifying truth.
The protective blanket was gone. The thousands of disciples, elders, and deacons were suddenly exposed at the bottom of the valley, trembling not only from the arctic cold but from absolute terror. There were no barriers. There were no hiding places. There were no more illusory tricks.
They were simply bare flesh trapped at the bottom of an immense rocky bowl, surrounded on high by an army of black metal colossi watching them with relentless crimson visors; killing machines that knew neither exhaustion, fear, nor mercy.
While Xaloc, Feng Wu, and Lian Hua systematically dismantled the sect's top leadership, the rest of the imposing Dead Blood Guard advanced, tightening the encirclement, continuing the industrial extermination of the scum who dared to stand in the way of the Morningstar Clan.
The "Meat Grinder" had just fired up its engines to maximum capacity.