V3C60: The Truth, Part 1

The next day came, and Wei Yi was prepared. Her House of Gold had been emptied of all extraneous nonsense and filled only with relevant talismans, pills and materials that might be useful to her in a confrontation. Her energy had been filled to the brim, leading to all of her meridians and her dantian to be aching form the great quantity of power that she attempted to force into them.

For all she knew, this would be unnecessary, but to take more action that necessary was usually better than to take too little, especially when this excessive action would not be punished in the slightest while the lacking action would.

Her planar anchor was still in the pulsing state, seemingly making no progress at all, although a careful eye would be able to identify that it was getting brighter and slightly larger, which was especially noticeable when viewed within the Kong Prison Realm. Her other cultivation pathways were also in the same place as the previous day, but she had taken the opportunity to practise with every single one of her forms of energy, every technique and any possible move that she could theoretically make within the office of Luo Lia Kun. Whether she would need to fight one or a hundred, she had some idea of how the battle could play out, and how she would need to handle it.

Obviously, she couldn’t say that she had thought of every single eventuality, but the little that her Endless Calculation was able to definitively conclude was taken into account to limit her necessary preparations. Although she had a skill as powerful as that one, it needed definitive, accurate knowledge, and that was not something that she could confidently claim to possess due to the extremely limited interactions that she had been able to record between confirmed members of the Remnants of Yin.

There were a few individuals that she had been able to label with absolute certainty as those that were under this secretive organisation.

Most of them did not appear to be particularly powerful nor interesting, so she had labelled most of them as lower members of the organisation that wouldn’t have much of an understanding of the truth, nor would they be able to exert much influence upon the final outcome of today’s confrontation.

The more powerful individuals clearly had more experience in matters like this, and so they had reasonable excuses for being in particular places at particular times, making it far more difficult to deduce whether or not they had anything to do with the Remnants, the Greats or even the third faction that had gotten involved with Luo Lia Kun, although some did slip up and give away some clue that allowed Wei Yi to be rather confident of her assessment of them.

Two such individuals were in the late fourth realm, but even they did not appear to pose any kind of serious threat or danger to her, since their techniques were far inferior to her own. When the fact that a stage of the Active Core realm was only twice as powerful as that of the Emergent Anchor realm was considered, her other strengths allowed her to bridge that gap with great ease.

Other than them, however, everyone else who came and went to the Brotherhood of Power could be from any faction and there for any reason.

It did not stop her from experimenting and contemplating one technique and tactic that could be used to deal with each traveller that had come and gone, just to be sure. That didn’t force her to create any more combat techniques, nor even any variations, but it had forced her to reconsider certain uses of individual methods in order to benefit more from each individual drop of planar or other forms of energy.

If she was to attempt to use techniques with insufficient refinement in the worst-case scenario, she would be almost certain to fail, especially if several of the Greats ended up showing up to forcefully induct all new members of the Remnants of Yin with their interrogation techniques.

Of course, that was unlikely. In her current experience, they tended to appear exclusively in twos, whether for some particular reason or just coincidentally, but if their number was limited to that during the meeting, she currently had the confidence of being able to escape them without significant personal loss, although she would greatly prefer to deal with them one by one, preferably while they were in some wounded and exhausted state so that they would be unable to provide much resistance to any of her actions. At this point, she wasn’t sure whether it would be best to take on more risk and kill a member of the Great Families, or if shattering most of the anchors of two of them would bring more benefits, but she was certainly not going to let them get away unharmed if they do appear.

She would ask whether the anchors could be regenerated, but the only person that would have a high chance of knowing this, Luo Lia Kun, would immediately notice something amiss if a person with no understanding of the Great’s methods asked whether or not their many anchors, of which she should have no knowledge, could regenerate.

The vice-leader of both the Remnants and the Brotherhood would also not be the most reliable when it came to this particular kind of information. If she was entirely honest, she may be unaware of have been tricked by some false intelligence or research, and if the Remnants of Yin were controlled by the Greats, then there would be no way that the truth of the multiple anchors would be revealed to Wei Yi, even if she seemed to be highly optimistic at the prospect of joining the Greats.

Perhaps even the Greats didn’t know whether they could recover their own anchors, as it might have been something that they hadn’t encountered for countless centuries.

Nonetheless, none of that mattered now. She had no more time for preparation, and so she descended to the office of the vice-leader with a calm outward expression, slowly joining a few others as they also gathered by the door.

Somewhat unexpectedly, she encountered several people that she knew and thought to not be part of the Remnants, although the ones that mattered, like Chao Ru, came and went quickly, leading her to conclude that apart from the day’s meeting, there was also quite a lot happening that she mostly ignored due to her attention being focused on something entirely different, namely the preparations for the inevitable combat encounter. Most of the events that occurred around her were recorded within her mind, as she never stopped observing her surroundings with her spiritual perception, but she would need to go over them at a later point in time in order to truly understand everything.

After a long period of time, in her perception of time at the very least, the doors to Luo Lia Kun’s office finally opened.

“I see everyone’s been waiting for me. I’ve just been making my office presentable. Please, come inside,” the vice-leader said after she took a look around and mentally counted everyone who showed up, before letting them into the room.

Wei Yi knew that she had been doing a little more than that, but obviously chose not to comment and stepped inside after a few of the more powerful cultivators did the same, finding that the vice-leader’s desk had been extended into a large table that made use of most of the room, allowing for two dozen people to be seated at it without much difficulty, and more if additional chairs were to be brought in and spaced out properly.

Seeing as the seating arrangement seemed to be based on one’s cultivation, seeing as those in the peak of the fourth realm sat nearest to Luo Lia Kun while those at the third realm chose to occupy the bottom of the table, Wei Yi followed their lead and sat at the furthest part of the table, near another woman in the first half of the third realm and opposite a man that was a stage above her, although neither one had a single perfected stage. Further to her right were a number of other men and women, some plain, others scarred and ugly, a few standing out with physical features or particular choices of clothing and jewellery.

In her eyes, however, all she could see were the elements that were shared between them, as those would be the ones that would indicate whether or not they were her of their own free will.

“It’s been a while, hasn’t it?” Luo Lia Kun said after a period of silence, in which everyone looked around at everyone else, some doubtlessly finding their friends and allies absent and new faces filling their seats, “I have set up the isolation array, so all of us can speak freely… save for Their title, of course.”

At that moment, most seemed to relax and let out a breath of relief, although a few were still rather tense. There were no obvious differences between one type and the other so far as Wei Yi was able to tell, but she still made note of this just in case, as that subtle difference in response might distinguish them as either allies or foes, or perhaps those that knew more about the situation than the others.

While she was quite on edge, everyone else quickly began to chat with one another, sharing small tales and anecdotes without a care in the world.

Their reaction wasn’t just understandable, but expected, since possessing a major secret and being part of a group that appeared to be at odds with the biggest force in the entirety of Yi City tended to weigh on people quite a lot. The moment that they were placed in an environment where they could discuss all but a single word without any repercussions, they would naturally do so, and if Wei Yi had been more involved in the matters of the Remnants of Yin without knowing the potential truth behind them, she might have reacted similarly, finding those with similar experiences to her own and sharing parts of her history with them.

She did pay attention to everything they said. They spoke of some encounters with the servants of the Great Families, some conversed about their more casual actions and adventures, but all the while she did not hear a single mention of any interaction with the Greats themselves. On its own, this wasn’t that strange, given that they were too powerful for any one cultivator to handle on their own, but this put doubt on whether any of them were truly contending with the servants of the Greats.

After personally encountering a case that put that question into her mind, she would naturally need to go over this with them if it turned out that most of the Remnants were truly being fooled by the vice-leader, or even the leader herself.

A few minutes went by without any words from Luo Lia Kun, nor without any ceasing to the chatter, but without any clear cause to her actions, the vice-leader suddenly tapped on the table and stopped all conversations. “I appreciate that all of us haven’t seen one another in some time, and that some have never even met before, but to ensure our safety, we will need to proceed with the induction ceremony as quickly as possible, after which the rest of the day can be devoted to whatever we like. If the three new members would rise…”

Wei Yi stood up readily, as did the man opposite her and a woman sitting closer to the middle of the table, who was within the early fourth realm. Those two turned towards the front of the table and approached it, seeming to have received some instruction prior to this, so she followed them, since nobody could blame her for making any mistakes if she just followed the lead of another.

Her choice appeared to be correct, since Luo Lia Kun nodded and stood up as well, waving one of them over to the back wall of the room, where the leader of the organisation supposedly resided.

“Place your hand on the wall, then wait for the leader to speak with you. Ask whatever questions you want with your mind, she shall answer some, and then you may accept the oath to side with the Remnants, not with Them.”

All three of them nodded, the other woman being first to approach. She placed her hand on the wall just as instructed, and not too long after, a bright light emerged from her chest, prompting her to step away and seat herself at the table once more. The man walked up next, repeating the process, taking a little longer to acquire that same momentary light before also returning to his seat. Throughout this process, their facial expressions did not change, although Wei Yi certainly made sure to monitor every single small shift and movement within them, leading to her forming some conclusions.

Finally, it was her turn.

She approached the wall without much hesitation, as others would expect of her, and placed her hand on the wall. However, she had no intention to sign any kind of oath, even if it could be ignored, and instead wanted to confirm one single thing before acting.

It did not take long for a dense energy to reach out to her through the wall, coming into contact with her skin and trying to seep deeper into it. The energy was powerful, especially if it was to be compared with the average cultivator of the third realm, but not only was it unable to pierce her flesh as it pleased, it was also repealed for just a moment, during which Wei Yi learned exactly what she had been intending to find out.

“Third realm.”

Before the others could understand this sudden proclamation, she drew her left hand back from the wall and struck it with immense force, instantly shattering the dense material and breaking the boundary between the two rooms, finally revealing to herself and to the others what was present on the other side.

“You’re one of Their third generation, aren’t you? Great Luo family, correct?”

On the other side of the wall was a pristine white room with perfectly clean walls, floor and ceiling that did not have a trace of age nor decay. Besides a bed, table and chair, it was barren, and even those pieces of furniture were perfectly clean, although they were hardly simple. Each item, each tile of stone on the walls and even the sheets of the bed were extremely intricately designed, to the point that no item seemed to have a clear end to the complexity. It looked as if you could infinitely descend into any one of them, and continue to see new details.

The only person in there sat in the very middle, dressed in a white gown of similar detail. She had a balanced, beautiful body and a pristine face, chestnut brown hair crowning her head and highlighting her green eyes that made it clear that her surname was Luo.

“Indeed. Luo Zhong. You’ve made an unfortunate mess in my room, but you will be sure to clean it up shortly,” the member of the Great Family appeared entirely unphased, although the dense wall of mirage-like anchors around her clearly showed that she had needed to block the stone chunks and dust from landing upon her. She looked behind Wei Yi and said, “Servant. Get your band of idiots to subdue her.”

Luo Lia Kun immediately advanced upon her, alongside most of the others in the fourth realm, radiating power, but her face clearly contrasted with it.

“Wei Yi, I-”

“That feature that appears within all of your hearts is something that she can use to control, or, at the very least, force you to do what she wants, is that right?” in the moment before any of the attacks landed upon her, she turned her head and asked the vice-leader with an entirely different aura to what she usually displayed, “If you want to have even the slightest chance of being free, tell me everything that you know!”

After that, she would naturally not remain still, as even someone with her strength needed to fear the strikes of someone in the fifth realm, and the moment, she was facing one person in the Marked Core realm, twenty-three in the Active Core realm, and the rest were in the varying stages of the Emergent Anchor realm. Together, this group could certainly injure her severely even without the assistance of the Great Family member – who, perhaps deciding that she would rather sit calmly within her white room did not choose to participate.

When the vice-leader heard that request, she was stunned for a brief moment before she felt the familiar pain from within her heart, forcing her to do everything within her power to follow Luo Zhong’s instruction.

“Wei Yi…”

“Servant, what do you think you’re doing?” Luo Zhong asked, but it was this that helped the vice-leader to decide.

“You should know that from the very beginning, I’ve been doing everything in my power to understand the exact principles of this controlling method!” Luo Lia Kun suddenly called out, although her body continued to chase after Wei Yi, “You have instructed me to subdue her to the best of my ability, and I am doing that. Nothing is prohibiting me from saying every little thing I have ever learnt about your family of monstrosities! Listen up, Wei Yi!”

“You-”

“It’s something resembling a talisman nested in the heart. It follows a strict set of rules that cannot be broken, and when we near breaking them, it will cause pain as a warning, but will not kill without the express control of Luo Zhong. If she wished to use this while we are disobeying orders, the death will be instant, otherwise, it will take three minutes to activate, perhaps just in case, or perhaps to ensure that she wouldn’t kill anyone just by thinking about us. It is rather obvious she constantly contemplates killing everyone other than herself and her family, after all,” she began to speak even more freely.

“The talismans have no ability to kill you on their own?” Wei Yi asked, having confirmed that the mark on the inside of their hearts did indeed possess those kinds of properties.

“That’s right. She is connected to every single one of us via her spiritual perception, and it isn’t something that can be blocked easily. I’ve tried, trust me,” the vice-leader said, a powerful strike from her just barely missing Wei Yi’s form, “That room of hers blocks spiritual perception only in one direction, and due to this talisman, it seems to be able to stretch out by an extreme extent. If you were to go to the Absolute Frost or the Glass Desert, you might get out of her reach, but she would have more than enough time to force our death if we were to try that.”

“Do you really believe that I won’t kill you?” Luo Zhong suddenly asked, her eyes glistening with a thin killing intent, “You said it yourself. Three minutes. Subdue her within that time, or else your entire group perishes.”

For a moment, the vice-leader’s eyes widened, as did those of most of her subordinates, but then they quickly narrowed in the same focus and anger as before.

“You think you can intimidate me and the Remnants of Yin just with that? Every single one of us joined because we despise you! Your families are the cause of the Western Continent’s suffering, and most of us even fought against you, knowing full well that any one of you could kill a hundred of us! If you think that your threats will be enough to cause us to bend to your will, you are very much mistaken! Wei Yi, do not-”

“Spiritual perception, is it? In that case, so long as you can endure the pain, you won’t have a single thing to worry about,” she announced, releasing her killing intent without any restrain to instantly fill the two rooms, now connected by a large hole in the middle of the wall between them, “Killing intent opposes spiritual perception and will, you see.”

All of the members of the Remnants of Yin felt their hearts relax, whether they were those that were in the organisation for a long time and were in full agreement with their leader, or those that had just joined and had some doubts on whether it would be worth it to lose their lives just to allow one woman to live. Now that this matter appeared to be solved, they were also unable to find any fault with Wei Yi, whose killing intent permeated the room and greatly intimidated all of them, even though she had not focused it on a single one of them.

Luo Zhong’s reaction also made it clear that the killing intent was truly effective.

She rose from the ground with gritted teeth, warding off the killing intent from advancing with her anchors, although their slight constant tremble under the pressure of the crimson light made it clear that this wasn’t effortless.

“Now, hold back, everyone. If this is the only one here, I can take her on all by myself,” Wei Yi stated when she saw the others attempt to muster their strength towards the member of the Great Family. Although Luo Lia Kun was in the fifth realm, when it came to opposing the powers of the Greats, raw numbers weren’t as significant as they usually were. The power of numerous planar anchors surpassed simple planar energy, and could match the vice-leader’s power, if not surpass it.

Additionally, she had to be careful. If they fought against Luo Zhong together and all became exhausted, any other enemies would be able to take them out with very little effort, which would hardly be conducive to success. Finally, she was more used to fighting on her own, and didn’t want to watch out for others in combat.

‘The true reason, of course, is that I want to punch that bitch in the face a few thousand times…’ Wei Yi focused all of her killing intent on that barrier of anchors, forcing it to violently shake.

For this confrontation, no spiritual will could do. Only killing intent was appropriate.

“You think you can defeat me? You?”

“Yes, me! Ask the Ning and Chen family what they think about a crimson-haired woman with an absolute hatred for them!” she said, setting down her planar anchor onto the table behind her, instantly turning it to dust with the simple power of the impact, “I have waited for twenty-three years to cut off the head of one of your kind, and if you think that stupid threats will ever stop me, you couldn’t be more wrong!”

Her blinding anchor instantly caught the attention of those observing it, enemy and ally alike. For several moments, it was difficult to distract oneself from such a radiant sight, especially as planar energy appeared to constantly pulse within it, growing with their every breath.

More importantly than that, however, it instantly boosted Wei Yi’s energy by a fold, doubling it and stabilising the killing intent in the air, empowering it in the same way that it strengthened the rest of her forms of energy. It did not strengthen the natural effects of her bloodline cultivation, but the anchor itself was affected by that boost, causing it to be more stable and denser, making it far more difficult to inflict a single bit of damage upon it. In addition to that, the Remnants of Yin immediately surrounded it with their own bodies and various defensive techniques, understanding that they couldn’t allow the enemy to lay a single hand upon it.

“An insect dares to touch me! Die!” the member of the Great Luo Family exclaimed, condensing a number of glowing energy points around herself while keeping the anchor barrier steady.

“You call me an insect, and yet all of you use the same fucking techniques. It’s like you don’t have separate minds,” Wei Yi leapt towards the barrier of anchors and released as much of her bloodline power as possible to dull the impact of the point beams, for she had discovered that all five forms of energy do indeed follow a similar convention to the elements.

Killing intent was perfect for subduing spiritual will, as it was madness incarnate consuming perfect reason. Spiritual will could oppose the feebler minds of those focusing on physique. Planar energy was far superior to killing intent in most circumstances and could subdue it easily. The physique of someone could overpower the bloodline of another and was demonstrated fully in the way that her physique had formed a far greater impact upon her blood than her other two bloodlines did.

Following on with that, it was only natural that bloodline power suppressed planar energy, for while it was still born of planar energy, it was the essence of this omnipotent force elevated by past deeds and the unity of physique and planar cultivation.

This allowed her to be somewhat less focused on the beams that rapidly formed within the air and shot towards her, instead giving her room to throw her hands into the air as per the necessary movement of her remade Ancestral Call. While the beams impacted the bloodline power and were instantly dulled by a certain extent, countless totems rose from the ground. Just before the many thin beams struck her form, she and all of the totems unleashed the energy of Eclipse Ire, detonating it in one go without bothering to charge it at all, for there was no intent to damage the other just yet.

The eclipse energy collided with the many beams, scattering most of their force and leaving little to land upon her. Everything that did touch her clothing or skin was effectively rendered null by her body or by the energy infused into her robes, resulting in no marks being made upon her.

“Fuck you!” Wei Yi shouted, her killing intent intensifying further as the totems filled with golden and white light, “Yang Elysian Storm!”

A boundless mass of storm surged from the totems, while her own body was crowned by raw, absolute energy. It coated her in a cosmic light, mixing with her bloodline power to make her resemble a celestial being made of stars and galaxies, all of which passed through her form as if she was naught but a portal to some other reality.

However, just as the previous two members of the Great Families that she had encountered before, this one was quick to adapt, and she wouldn’t just stand in place to receive her attacks. While the storm grew, she created one more point beam, focusing all of the energy of her thirty-five anchors on it, and at the same time she attempted to evade by seemingly teleporting to the side and then closer to Wei Yi, moving her many anchors to surround her rather than blocking the gap between the two rooms.

In the case of the typical attack, which was focused and greatly concentrated towards one point, such movements would indeed allow her to evade it, but in the case of the Elysian Yang Storm, evading it was impossible.

The very first time that it was used, the storm covered the entirety of a large arena, and now that they fought within only half of two tight rooms, there was even less space for her to avoid the enormous storm that filled their combat area quickly, only giving her the choice of blocking it with her anchors. Both of them knew that this wasn’t the best solution to the attack, since the quivering of the anchors was slowly getting more and more significant, but the Great Family member had no other choice or appropriate technique while the other would never suggest anything that could ever be beneficial to the Greats, and so watched how their stability was slowly decreasing while waiting for something else.

After a few moments, the denser beam was about to strike her, but as before, she shielded herself with most of her bloodline power, following it up with a move that was perfectly suited to dismantling any kind of complexity and devolving countless decades of work into the simplest force, at which point it could contend with it directly.

Her Absolute Force hit the beam, empowered by both the Yin and Yang Dao, as well as her Ascendant’s Dao, causing the Fifth Stage technique to function as if it was at the same level as Absolute Rupture.

It naturally didn’t stand a chance against a proper technique executed by one of the Greats, but it was the essence of the Dao that it had led to that was most important, for once it was imbued with her united comprehension of every move that she had used and created, it projected a small aura of the Absolute Dao that was unmatched by something that lacked a force of a similar nature to counter it. The moment the beam came into contact with the aura, the technique broke apart, leaving only raw planar energy.

Without the support of a Dao, such energy was as ineffective as the previous few beams.

“Was that… you wretch, how did you claim an actual Dao for yourself?” to her credit, Luo Zhong understood the event incredibly quickly and threw out a question that, perhaps, she wasn’t even sure that she would have answered.

“How long have your kind been around? Haven’t been able to get even a fragment despite your decades of dominance?” Wei Yi asked back, taking the opportunity to observe her own energy levels, ‘As I thought, Absolute anything will absolutely waste energy. I should hold back on that kind of thing unless absolutely necessary… and end this quickly.’

Although much of her technique collection consisted of energy-based, long range techniques, her preference from the start had been with more direct combat, especially when the Yin-Yang Ascendant physique allowed her to gather a variety of physique abilities for her own personal usage. The Titanic Demolisher, Cleaving Axe and even the Martial Aspirant physique abilities could be used without a single weapon, and since the Demon Killer was still broken and incapable of boosting her strength by absurd amounts, nothing suited her better than her fists.

In a single breath, her left arm transformed into the killing will state, while her right was already covered by a gauntlet made with star metal, meaning that the empowerment of the killing will state would be of little benefit to it.

With two clawed hands, she charged forward to meet Luo Zhong, sparing none of her strength as she and the Demolisher behind her simultaneously struck down upon the anchor barrier around the member of the Great Luo Family. The barrier of anchor mirages caved in slightly, and a number of anchors audibly cracked, but she was able to evade the attack and headed towards the anchor.

“Don’t even think about it!” she called out, taking out a small arrow from the House of Gold before throwing it at her foe with the most force that she could muster.

There were a number of things that the member of the Great Luo Family expected, but it was never for this ordinary projectile to suddenly accelerate in mid-air, pierce and instantly shatter one of her anchors, and then impale itself into her flesh, missing her heart by a wide margin but still causing a major wound. What she expected even less was for her breath to randomly get caught in her throat, before her entire body just fell to the ground without a trace of life.

By the miracle of the Arrow of Artemis, one of the Greats fell that day, having failed to realise what killed her.

Almost immediately after, Wei Yi also fell to the ground, although her breath and pulse remained. Mid-way through the arrow’s flight, she had felt all of her forms of energy be drained at an immense pace, stopping once she had little more than a drop of each. Due to the way in which the arrow accelerated at the same time, and then successfully killed the member of the Great Luo Family, she assumed this to be one of the many rules and requirements vaguely alluded to within the weapon’s description.

Her initial plan was to throw it out as a distraction to either stop Luo Zhong or to force her to evade, giving her some time to use Eclipse Split or something of similar power, but she hadn’t expected the otherworldly gift to cooperate with her this once.

Even then, she was clear that if she tried to attack any more enemies, it would likely require the same amount of energy to kill them, if not the same lunar arrangement or something else of the sort. In other words, no matter how useful this seemed, she wouldn’t be able to use it again unless some kind of great coincidence occurred and permitted the otherworldly gift to showcase its full splendour even without an azure light.

In fact, it was likely that light that allowed its original user to bypass at least one set of conditions to freely kill the servants of the Great Families without much costs to himself.

Since her energy was almost drained, she didn’t hesitate to return the anchor to her dantian, where the nascent rift within it could begin to replenish her energy more readily, and when her extended spiritual perception felt a different one brush over it with a great deal of force, she also revoked it while retreating into the space where her anchor had just been.

“I think there’s another one!” she exclaimed, prompting the Remnants to immediately gather around her, “Your talisman marks appear to have disappeared, so even if this person can control them, you shouldn’t have any problems… If you can hold them off for half a minute, I-”

Her words were interrupted by the sudden collapse of the roof onto the chamber in which Luo Zhong had resided, followed by a man dropping in after the chunks of stone and wood that preceded him, landing on top of one particularly large chunk with surprising grace. Nobody needed to question his identity, for a dense barrier of mirage-like anchors surrounded him, alongside a number of floating talismans that were all pointed in the direction of the Remnants of Yin, alongside the fury of the man controlling them.

The man’s eyes first looked upon the corpse on the ground, then all of them with an even greater degree of hatred within his every action.

“You worms dare to kill my sister?” a man that she presumed to be named Luo Wu, based on the naming conventions of the Greats, questioned, all of his floating talismans releasing powerful beams of their own, shooting not at the individual Remnants but instead at the defensive techniques that were meant to protect her, and her anchor before her.

They pierced it in an instant, and as she wasn’t even able to release her bloodline power in time, they pierced her flesh and robes with horrifying ease. At the last moment, she was able to guide some of her hair to guard her most vital organs, preventing herself from perishing at that exact moment.

“Thirty seconds…” Luo Lia Kun muttered, glancing at her Remnants in the moment that the talismans were unable to shoot out another beam, “Everyone, attack! Throw all caution to the wind!”

Perhaps for the first time in countless years, one of the Greats fell by unnatural means, but it also happened right before them, directly due to the actions of a single woman that now sat behind them. Even if this was due to some miracle, even if it was something that could never be repeated again, they saw hope. It brought them courage that they hadn’t imagined they would be able to acquire in a time like this, and so not a single one of them had any doubt.

Together, they attacked.