"This grotto-heaven's suppression is this intense? Seems like a bit of a nuisance."
"No matter! In essence, we are of the immortal rank after all. No matter how bizarre this grotto-heaven might be, it is still not of the immortal rank. In the past several thousand years, how many have we encountered who could contend with the immortal rank through Scenery Command alone?"
The massive skeletal frame shifted, its joints clattering noisily. "There was one! I remember her! Her name was Xihe! Back then, that sword of hers hacked me into sixteen pieces!"
"Xihe fell long ago. Rumor has it she died at the hands of the Pure Land as well."
"Then I have nothing to worry about, hahaha—wait, why did you say 'as well'?"
The red-haired girl paused, muttering to herself, "Right, why did I say 'as well'?"
"Think about it when we get back. Fengling retained more memories; maybe it'll know. Right now, let's fight!"
The girl stretched languidly. "No rush. As long as we win, it's fine. Only by making that old geezer outside lose a few more grotto-heavens will he obediently spit out more land—a mere six thousand li isn't even enough to feed me."
Before she could finish, she suddenly felt the skeleton stiffen, seemingly trembling!
Heavenly Bone's divine sense condensed into a pair of eyes staring intently at a glint of sword light on the horizon, its joints knocking together in continuous clatter.
"Xihe?!" The red-haired girl's expression shifted drastically.
At this moment, the surrounding world shifted continuously. The continent below receded slowly into the distance, while streaks of flowing light fell from the sky like tassels, cordoning off this tract of heaven and earth. The realm-heaven was constructing a battlefield, shaping an advantageous environment for its side while preventing collateral damage to its interior.
Yet the two Dharma Gods stared fixedly at the sword qi on the horizon, paying no heed to anything else. At long last, the red-haired girl breathed a sigh of relief. "It is merely Xihe's sword, not Xihe herself. From the looks of it, it is only a wisp of Xihe's remnant divine sense fused into a sword spirit."
Hearing it was only a sword spirit, Heavenly Bone's killing intent flared. "Then we can fight it?"
"We can!"
Heavenly Bone only now noticed the changes in their surroundings, and then discovered four other battlefields far in the distance. Enraged at once, it roared, "Right in front of us, not only do you wish to keep your grotto-heaven, but you dare take on other enemies at the same time?!"
Eight hundred-zhang bone blades abruptly snapped out from its body. With a gentle sweep, they drew streaks of black fissures across the air!
Wei Yuan immediately felt the grotto-heaven suffer damage, its aura dipping almost imperceptibly. At that moment, Xihe appeared. The immortal sword suspended in the sky blazed with frigid light and flew down to strike Heavenly Bone!
The moment the strike was unleashed, Wei Yuan felt the realm-heaven's Dao power dip slightly once more. Normally, when drawing upon the power of several great grotto-heavens, Wei Yuan could not feel any drop in Dao power whatsoever; this time, he finally felt it. It seemed Xihe was holding nothing back.
Heavenly Bone gathered all eight bone blades before itself, combining their strength to block the strike!
Sword light flared with blinding brilliance, illuminating half the sky. The massive Dharma God was knocked back a thousand zhang by the blow, deep notches gouged into two of its bone blades, nearly severing them.
Yet Heavenly Bone was ecstatic. "Blocked it! I actually blocked it! She really isn't Xihe!"
"So this was where his confidence to challenge us came from. Hmph, if that's all he has, he couldn't possibly be our match. And he dares attack four other grotto-heavens at the same time? Heavenly Bone, destroy the battlefield first!"
With a sinister grin, the ribcage on both sides of Heavenly Bone swung open, spewing a vast swath of deep-azure decay-light. This viscous, luminescent substance could erode everything around it without fail—whether vital essence, spirit power, Dao power, or even the space of the realm-heaven itself.
Wherever the decay-light swept, space trembled and distorted. The battlefield Wei Yuan had constructed immediately faced the risk of utter collapse. If that happened, the mere shockwaves of their battle could devastate Central City, claiming untold numbers of lives within the realm-heaven.
If even a single patch of that decay-light fell into the ocean, a thousand li of waters would turn into a dead zone in an instant!
Dharma Gods were indeed formidable in grotto-heaven warfare; the divine abilities displayed right now were exceptionally lethal against the foundations of a grotto-heaven.
Yet Wei Yuan simply rallied the realm-heaven's power and slammed it down in heavy suppression. In an instant, the Dharma God's aura plunged by another twenty percent. Heavenly Bone's skeletal frame groaned under the unbearable weight, creaking and popping.
At the scale of Splendor of the Many Realms, the realm-heaven's power was unfathomably vast. Even with the Dharma God's immortal-rank status, thirty percent of its power was forcibly suppressed away.
Sword qi swirled around the Fourth Sword Grotto-Heaven, unleashing one sharp beam after another that pelted the Dharma God head-on, carving countless wounds across its body in the blink of an eye.
With Xihe pinning down the Dharma God on her own, Wei Yuan seized the moment to arrange his offensive against the other grotto-heavens. Assessing the strength at his disposal, he mobilized the realm-heaven to scoop in yet another grotto-heaven.
In truth, Wei Yuan had originally set his sights on the Wise King of the Left's whirlwind-like grotto-heaven. That grotto-heaven had an extraordinary form and an exceptionally high nature; it was likely formed based on the power of the Winnowing Basket asterism of the Azure Dragon of the East, and was bound to contain a trace of primordial stellar power. If he could seize that primordial stellar power, it would be an immense tonic for his Seventh Grotto-Heaven.
However—
Wei Yuan also heard Immortal Monarch Yanshi's furious roar, so his claw tilted aside and hauled in a metal-phase grotto-heaven instead. Yanshi was the Palace Master after all, and could be said to have watched Wei Yuan grow up over the years. Wei Yuan couldn't very well leave his elder fighting a bitter battle while having only thin broth to sip on.
Within the vast skies of Splendor of the Many Realms, five colossal shadows now hung, serving as conduits to the five grotto-heavens of the Wise King of the Left. Wei Yuan had already erected barriers around the shadows, dividing them into separate battlefields.
In Central City, countless cultivators rushed back and forth, heading to designated armories to collect equipment and mission assignments before departing in different directions.
Five massive teleportation arrays had appeared in the city; stepping inside would transport cultivators directly to their respective battlefields. With the processing capability of Splendor of the Many Realms, tasks had been assigned well in advance and delivered straight to every individual cultivator.
Certain formidable cultivators were tasked with garrisoning the battlefields to prevent the enemy from breaking out of their grotto-heavens. The duty of most weaker cultivators was merely to enter the formations and serve as formation nodes—nothing more.
Each cultivator only knew their immediate assignment, so without hesitation, they stepped into the teleportation arrays in wave after wave.
With tens of thousands of cultivators acting in concert, the grand formations at the grotto-heaven battlefields were constructed at a speed visible to the naked eye. They completely enveloped the exits within their arrays, then began reinforcing the boundary between the two realms while encroaching upon the enemy grotto-heavens to suppress their power.
Meanwhile, chaos still reigned inside the Wise King of the Left's five grotto-heavens. In the best-organized one, several Scenery Command experts were desperately rallying their subordinates to prepare for battle at the boundary. Yet countless living beings and cultivators were in total disarray, not even having formed ranks, merely gathering in heaps, with only a few elite detachments setting out first toward the realm gate.
In a battle between two grotto-heavens, the location of the boundary opening was unfixed. How to open the realm gate right where one's own forces were heavily amassed and where the enemy's defenses were barren was an art in itself.
However, Wei Yuan's realm-heaven power was terrifyingly immense, far exceeding the sum of the Wise King of the Left's five grotto-heavens. A single grotto-heaven stood no chance against Wei Yuan's manipulation. Thus, when swallowing these grotto-heavens, Wei Yuan first relied on his formidable divine sense to pierce through the enemy's defenses, sweeping across their dispositions to gauge their strengths and weaknesses. Then, using his overpowering realm-heaven strength, he flipped the enemy grotto-heaven over, opening the realm gate at the weakest point of their defenses.
The Wise King of the Left's grotto-heavens were like ferocious beasts, yet every single one had now been flipped on its back by Wei Yuan, fighting with its soft belly exposed to the sky.
Only one metal-phase grotto-heaven, though modest in size, was of exceptionally high quality. Within it stood towering mountains of metal and iron reaching tens of thousands of ren into the sky, and its inhabitants were all innate metal-phase spirits. Though few in number, every one of them was at the perfection of the dharma idol realm, and five among them were at Scenery Command. Although these five Scenery Command spirits were only at the initial stage, beings naturally born of heaven and earth were inherently a notch stronger than cultivators of the same realm.
When these metal spirits used their movement techniques within the metal mountains, they could traverse a thousand li in an instant. Thus, no matter how Wei Yuan looked at it, this grotto-heaven's defenses seemed entirely devoid of blind spots!
Still, the lack of blind spots was no problem—Wei Yuan could simply create them. Manifesting the realm-heaven's power into a shadowy tentacle, he wrapped it around the grotto-heaven and shook it violently, turning heaven and earth upside down inside and causing iron peaks to collapse!
Whether these metal spirits had eggs or not, Wei Yuan intended to scramble their yolks first. When the time came, dealing with a few scrambled eggs would be easier than beating a drowned dog.
The other four grotto-heavens were far easier to handle. In the fastest-acting grotto-heaven, several elite detachments rode the winds as fast as they could, barely managing to reach the two-realm gate only to discover that in just that brief span of time, the other side had not only erected an array formation, but even attached a ring to the gate so it could not be shut. At that moment, legions of heavily armored cultivators were marching in, unit by unit.
A terrifying realm-heaven aura rushed in like a hurricane, blowing frantically through the realm gate. The moment one detachment tried to approach, a gust of violent wind sent them flying a hundred li away!
Wherever the gale swept, the realm-heaven power of Splendor of the Many Realms permeated, overbearingly transforming the natural environment. It forcibly remodeled a grotto-heaven that was once brimming with vitality into an environment suited solely for humans. Under this new climate, even breathing was a crime for the Liao Clan and the grotto-heaven inhabitants; inhaling just a few extra breaths of spiritual qi poisoned them severely, causing them to collapse and drop dead on the spot.
All five grotto-heavens had been meticulously handpicked by Wei Yuan: three of the metal phase and two of the fire phase, precisely what Splendor of the Many Realms currently lacked. If he could assimilate them, it would be an immense supplement to Splendor of the Many Realms, perhaps allowing it to take another step forward.
While the strongest metal-phase grotto-heaven was having its yolks scrambled by Wei Yuan, the remaining two metal-phase grotto-heavens were less extreme and of lower quality, populated by ordinary cultivating beings.
Wei Yuan mobilized the cultivators within Splendor of the Many Realms to conquer those two grotto-heavens separately.
Bolstered by the realm-heaven's power, Han Li, Jun Weizhi, Fuyao, and Lei Ling were strong enough to contend with Scenery Command experts, even possessing the strength to slay initial-stage Scenery Command opponents across realms. Furthermore, cultivators within Splendor of the Many Realms were as numerous as ox hairs; in terms of numbers, both battlefronts enjoyed a ten-to-one advantage. The only reason more troops were not deployed was not a shortage of soldiers, but rather the narrowness of the front lines.
As for the two fire-phase grotto-heavens, Wei Yuan directly deployed the Central Earth Grotto-Heaven to suppress them. The moment the realm gates opened, billions of mirage demons surged in like a crawling, slithering mudslide, slowly yet resolutely crushing everything in the grotto-heavens!
Weak though mirage demons were, their numbers were downright horrifying. Being creatures of central earth, they were in their absolute element within fire-phase grotto-heavens, their strength surging drastically. Even if every being in the two fire-phase grotto-heavens could fight ten or a hundred foes, the demons pouring in outnumbered them by far more than a hundredfold!
Often, the fire-phase spirits would barely finish tearing apart several dozen mirage demons before being submerged entirely by the tidal wave of demons sweeping across the sky like rolling mud!
If the Wise King of the Left's divine sense were here, he would never have imagined how the elegant, elite mirage demon clan he once commanded had turned into this grotesque sight in Wei Yuan's hands.
Such was the advantage of controlling the battlefield and deploying several times faster than one's opponent.
Having handled the five grotto-heavens, Wei Yuan finally turned his gaze toward the Dharma God in the sky. At this moment, the sword qi of the Fourth Sword Grotto-Heaven remained incomparably fierce, continuously battering the Dharma God, but its Dao power had begun to dwindle; an assault of this intensity could not be sustained for much longer.
Heavenly Bone let out a thunderous laugh that shook the vault of heaven.
Amidst its roaring laughter, it deflected the remaining sword lights, then viciously slashed several bone blades toward the boundary of the battlefield, shouting, "You are no longer the Xihe of old, hahahaha! Once your sword qi is exhausted, let's see what you can use to stop me! Could you lot possibly find a second Xihe, hahaha—ha?"
Suddenly, a wisp of sword light arose from the depths below. Clear as water, pure and pristine to the utmost, it did not even seek to overreach, merely circling gently around one of Heavenly Bone's blades and cleanly severing it.
Chapter 1283