The wind ceased, the snow halted, and the bottom of the glacial rift was nowhere to be seen.
*Rustle, rustle.*
As the graceful red-robed figure descended into the abyss, several clumps of snow along the cliff's edge fluttered down into the darkness beneath.
Watching Li Qingyan's figure vanish into the darkness, Xu Yuan's eyes rippled with a crimson glow as his gaze followed her descent toward the bottom of this glacial rift valley with a hint of curiosity.
According to the chest-binding princess, there seemed to be markers left by the Beifeng Army down below.
The timeless, unending night and extreme cold had allowed the Land of Utter Darkness to form a thick sheet of ice reaching thousands of zhang deep.
For that reason, glacial chasms a hundred zhang deep like the one before them were not uncommon on this boundless ice sheet.
Whenever some wild behemoth lurking deep underground turned over or broke through the frozen soil, it could tear numerous rifts into the glacier.
Yet the rift before them was clearly artificial.
Dozens of zhang wide and hundreds of zhang deep, it stretched out like a long trench with clean, smooth cuts, as though cleaved by a hundred-meter greatsword.
His transcendent aberrant ghost body and newly awakened spiritual vision allowed Xu Yuan to perceive many things he could never see as a Soul Condensation expert.
The rift bore heavy traces of arts, with lingering fluctuations of Source Qi that had yet to disperse.
The phantom weapon manifested by a military array.
Thinking this, Xu Yuan followed Li Qingyan's descent all the way to the floor of the glacial rift.
The moment he saw the sight at the bottom, his brows furrowed slightly.
Corpses.
The rift below was choked with corpses!
The floor of the chasm was piled high with countless Barbarian corpses—severed limbs and mangled arms layered one atop another, where blue ice froze the despair in the eyes of Barbarian women and children for eternity.
A massacre.
Looking down at the scene, Xu Yuan subconsciously glanced around.
Beside the glacial rift stretched a flat expanse of snow. All traces of the past battle were completely buried beneath it, yet Xu Yuan could still envision what had taken place here over a month ago.
Amidst the wails of countless Barbarian women and children, the white-armored Beifeng Army, standing in grim, orderly ranks, systematically carried out a slaughter.
After the slaughter, they pushed the tens of thousands of bodies down into the chasm, letting them tumble down...
"Brat, is the dynasty behind you at war with the Barbarians?"
Luo Xiran asked suddenly, looking at the corpses below with flat eyes. "And by the look of it, the Barbarians are on the verge of extermination."
Xu Yuan did not hide anything and explained casually:
"You've seen what this Land of Utter Darkness is like. Living in a godforsaken wasteland like this, the Barbarians naturally wanted to push south. But our Great Yan would never allow them to, so war was inevitable."
"Inevitable?"
Luo Xiran glanced at Xu Yuan, having already deduced the general situation in her mind. "In that case, the power struggles within your Great Yan Dynasty must be quite severe?"
"If not for internal strife, the Barbarian King wouldn't have dared to make such a reckless gamble."
Xu Yuan knew there was no point trying to deceive an intelligent person, so he smiled faintly. "Unfortunately for him, the Barbarian King lost this gamble."
With that,
Xu Yuan pointed nonchalantly toward the chasm below.
"And having lost, he has to surrender every single chip he brought to the table."
Luo Xiran looked down in silence at the sea of corpses, her gaze turning slightly complex.
"And those chips are the extermination of an entire race...?"
Noticing her expression, Xu Yuan looked at her quizzically and chuckled. "Hey, Xiran, you haven't gone soft on these alien women and children, have you?"
"Pfft... compassion?"
Luo Xiran gave a charming smile, her dark eyes glittering as she looked back. "Brat, I have seen more dead people than you have seen living ones. Just now, I was only thinking that if our Human Race had lost the gamble ten thousand years ago, our fate would likely have been no different from that of these Barbarians."
She exhaled softly and warned:
"There are at least nearly a hundred thousand bodies here. Leaving them grouped together like this instead of disposing of them, aren't you afraid of generating ghost mist? In a certain sense, yin ghosts are even more terrifying than aberrant ghosts."
"This isn't within Great Yan's borders."
Before Xu Yuan could reply, a voice echoed from beneath the rift.
It was Li Qingyan.
Li Qingyan leapt back up to the trio, looking at Luo Xiran as she said calmly, "If this mass grave truly spawns ghost mist, the Barbarians' present strength will scarcely allow them to deal with it.
"Low-tier yin ghosts may lack intellect, but they must devour living beings. As long as several pockets of ghost mist are created to compete with the surviving Barbarians for living space, their clash will keep the Northern Border secure for centuries."
Xu Yuan chimed in with a slight chuckle. "The Land of Utter Darkness is the Barbarians' homeland. All we need to do is break the spine of their race in one fell swoop and thoroughly obliterate their potential for war."
"..."
Luo Xiran gave the brat a slightly surprised look, not expecting to hear such ruthless words from his lips. Soon, however, her gentle voice adopted a cautionary smile: "Your scorched-earth plan may be effective, but it is easy to get burned playing with fire."
Li Qingyan's phoenix eyes remained calm. "Senior need not trouble herself over this. Our Great Yan Dynasty has our own calculations."
If yin ghosts truly replaced the Barbarians and thrived in this Land of Utter Darkness, ultimately turning the entire expanse into a frozen ghost domain, the threat would indeed far surpass that of the Barbarians.
Yet priorities had to be weighed; what the Great Yan Imperial Court needed right now was a Northern Border that would stay stable for a century.
The Emperor's critical illness had aggravated Great Yan's internal conflicts to a point where they could no longer be deflected outward.
"Heh, then this old antique overstepped."
Luo Xiran brushed it off gracefully, offering an elegant smile. "Your Highness, did you find anything down there? Judging by how long ago these corpses died, we should be close behind them, shouldn't we?"
"The secret runes below are already a month old, and their message is simple..."
Saying this, Li Qingyan lifted her phoenix eyes toward the northwest, her voice faint and deep:
"'Seven hundred li ahead lies the Barbarian Sacred City. All divisions seeing this message shall strike camp and muster on their own.'"
The everlasting night hung draped across the glacier.
Less than a day after the four flew off through the air, a figure abruptly appeared above the frozen rift.
He was towering and burly. A pair of icy, deep-blue eyes stared in silence at the corpses of his kin below.
In the days since escaping the underground palace, Chi Feng had visited the encampments of several of the Sacred Race's major tribes.
Yet without exception,
they had all vanished.
The women and children who had bustled and clamored to see him off when he marched the entire race south had all been reduced to ashes alongside their tribal settlements.
Their bones and corpses had been ruthlessly piled into mountains by the humans, or tossed carelessly into pits, or dismembered to build corpse pyramids...
Just like the mass grave before his eyes.
Looking at the despair frozen forever in the eyes of his clansmen down in the rift, Chi Feng's gaze remained utterly placid—so placid that it was completely devoid of life.
Because this place was very close to the Sacred City.
In other words,
that Great Yan God of War had already discovered the Sacred City.
In other words,
the Sacred City had already fallen.
In other words,
the hundreds of thousands of clansmen who had just escaped the bitter cold to live in the Sacred City had already been slaughtered to the last by those humans.
Wind and snow drifted; the ice lay in desolate stillness.
Lifting his eyes toward the direction of the Sacred City, Chi Feng stood silently, like a dead sculpture.
Suddenly,
without a word,
the burly figure standing by the rift vanished, just as abruptly as he had arrived.
A few breaths after his disappearance, the glacier shattered as if struck by the monumental power of heaven and earth. The thousand-zhang-thick, age-old glacier collapsed and crumbled like tofu, completely burying the Barbarian corpses below.
At the same time,
across the darkness-shrouded sky, an eerie blue streak of light quietly surged toward the northwest like a shooting star.
Chapter 314