On December 19, the forces of Great Shun advanced from their fortifications. After a morning of fierce fighting, the airships at the spearhead could already see the outer walls of Youdu.
Having reached this point, they were finally in a position to launch a sustained, powerful assault on the city.
Great Shun concentrated most of its strength at the front, dispensing with the traditional strategy of surrounding three sides and leaving one open.
For an army whose martial artists held overwhelming superiority, there was no need for such caution. If the defenders dared venture out of their fortified city, Great Shun’s forces would inevitably run them down and wipe them out.
Seeing Great Shun’s airships emerge in the distant skies, Youdu immediately sounded the alarm. Plunged into extreme tension, they scrambled airship after airship from the mooring towers.
Ever since the war began, the city's three royal airship factories, along with four requisitioned civilian plants, had run their assembly lines day and night, churning out a steady stream of combat airships.
Yet the front line was like an insatiable black hole; no matter how many airships were produced, they could never satisfy the monster's appetite. Requisition letters continued to pour in from outside, piling high across desks.
Originally, Youdu, along with distant outlying cities and fortress clusters, formed an integrated defense system. However, such an arrangement required enough xuanji martial artists to coordinate and link each node for the whole network to function.
Now, the disastrous consequence of losing so many xuanji martial artists over days of heavy fighting was laid bare.
Fortresses built at staggering costs in resources and manpower, packed with esoteric rituals, could have delayed and held off several times their number in overlimit power if garrisoned by proper fighters.
Yet currently, only a handful of third limit martial artists and armed soldiers held them.
An ordinary martial artist from Great Shun was all it took to breach and uproot each stronghold.
Most of the defenders saw nothing more than a fleeting flash of light before losing their lives.
As large swaths of outer fortress clusters fell, several fortress cannons mounted atop Youdu's city walls began to roar.
These were semi-biological cannons commissioned by Youdu from "Ice Lake Evil Shark," a renowned armaments firm in the Noros Theocracy, integrating the glands and conduits of giant overlimit creatures.
They could discharge spiritual impacts akin to those unleashed by martial artists and could also fire specialized shells. Their power was immense—a direct hit could grievously wound even an ordinary martial artist.
The drawback was that they could fire only once every ten minutes or so, and required gorging on massive quantities of high-energy nutrients after six or seven shots. For now, they spared no effort in vomiting thundering blasts and brilliant flames toward the very positions where their own fortresses had once stood.
Amid deafening bombardments, the two airship fleets clashed once more. More than three hundred vessels engaged in a fierce aerial duel. From time to time, an airship plummeted toward the earth, erupting in roaring fireballs and seismic shockwaves.
The vast majority of these downed craft belonged to the Former Imperial House. It was not because their models or weapons were inferior; these airships had been constructed and fitted with advanced foreign technology, and their armaments were among the most cutting-edge available.
Rather, the severe shortage of xuanji martial artists made it impossible for them to gain the upper hand in such an engagement.
After the summons to defend the sovereign was issued, most of the xuanji martial artists who fell back by ceding vast tracts of land had already been squandered in the previous days of combat.
Worse still, the anomaly awakened at the cost of their lives had failed to achieve its intended effect.
The tactical gamble had collapsed, directly undercutting Youdu’s defenses across every front.
Seeing the battle turn against them, Youdu played another card, releasing a vast flock of "Jiaoying"—flying variants trained within the city.
These mutated creatures of the convergence zone possessed ferocious aerial combat prowess. Their shortcoming was that after short bursts of exertion, they required immense amounts of food to sustain their stamina.
Previously, when the front lines were distant, they could hardly exert their strength. Now, with Youdu at their backs, they were positioned to exploit their advantages to the full.
This surprise attack caused Great Shun some brief trouble. However, once the beasts' characteristics were confirmed to match intelligence reports, Great Shun's martial artists and the active conscious entities dispatched from the rear encircled and slaughtered them in droves.
In truth, had Great Shun not intentionally pursued a bleeding strategy, ordinary xuanji martial artists and these mutated creatures would never have had a chance to set foot on the battlefield in the first place.
Yet even knowing such tactics could not secure victory and merely squandered lives and war materiel, airships continued to lift off from the mooring towers, plunging straight into skies thick with cordite smoke and blazing with light and fire.
The skies were far too critical. They had to contest them; at least until their war resources were bled entirely dry, they would not stop.
Now, Youdu’s only hope was to hold out until nightfall. Once darkness fell, the advantage would tilt in their favor, and they could survive another day.
Past noon, the rumble of heavy artillery began echoing from Great Shun's rear.
Over the past several days, transport airships had disassembled railway cannons, ferried them to the front lines, and reassembled them on-site. Free from any aerial threat, they could now lob shells directly onto the battlements of Youdu.
Chen Chuan stood upon the deck of an airship in the rear, clad in his external implant, Xuejun Saber in hand. He glanced at the time displayed on his visor: two in the afternoon.
After several hours of fighting, most of Youdu’s airships and flying beasts had been wiped out. Only scattered remnants put up a stubborn resistance, no longer able to form any organized formation.
His body gently floated upward into the high sky. The spiritual glow surrounding him naturally diffused outward as he drifted toward Youdu.
Seeing this, the Dongxuan View martial artists aboard the various airships rose one by one into the air, following behind him and fanning out across the sky.
The brilliant light radiating from them resembled clusters of blazing stars, illuminating the canopy of the convergence zone with unprecedented radiance.
As they advanced, invisible fields and imposing auras expanded outward. A dull rumble seemed to reverberate through the atmosphere, and the ground outside Youdu trembled faintly in response.
Within Youdu, through the heavy, gloomy fog, people caught sight of those dazzling figures in the sky. Though none could discern their expressions, an immense, suffocating pressure blanketed the city.
Most terrifying was the figure at the very front, bathed in shimmering platinum aura, white vapor rising around him like pillars of smoke.
He seemed like a colossal sun brought over from the Old Continent—a sun that might descend at any moment to melt away and disperse the clouds hanging over their heads.
Chen Chuan looked down upon the sprawling metropolis enshrouded in thick, murky black clouds.
Just then, an extraordinarily massive variant creature lunged toward them from the distance at blistering speed. Yet the moment it entered the perimeter of their combined fields, it instantly lost consciousness and plummeted from the sky, crashing into the ground with a resounding thud that kicked up a huge cloud of dust.
Chen Chuan did not spare the beast a single glance. Extending a finger toward Youdu, he let brilliant light gather at the fingertip.
In the next instant, a beam of light that seemed to pierce straight through the heavens lanced down, striking the massive city in the blink of an eye. Instantly, layered field upon layered field manifested around Youdu.
The spiritual impact was continuously depleted across the overlapping fields, eroded by more than half by the time it reached the lower layers. Even so, it blasted a gaping hole straight through the pitch-black clouds, exposing the palaces and architectural complexes beneath.
Armed guards and commoners alike stared skyward in stunned disbelief at those radiant, godlike figures hovering in the light.
With a tremendous crash, a tall watchtower collapsed beneath the residual shockwave of the blast, and the final burst of light blasted a crater into the earth like a meteorite impact.
The clouds above gradually closed again, concealing the scene once more.
Chen Chuan assessed the reaction: at least a hundred rituals had responded simultaneously to that single strike, growing denser toward the inner layers.
Furthermore, it was evident that the greater the impact's force, the more rituals were triggered in response.
His brow flickered. Looking into every corner of Youdu through his Heavenly Eye, he made out vast phantasmal silhouettes standing in various positions. At a rough count, there were three or four.
These were likely the last remaining Dongxuan View martial artists in Youdu. He detected no aura of ancient gods; perhaps they had not joined the defense, though the possibility of encountering them in subsequent attacks could not be ruled out.
With esoteric rituals bolstered by such defenders, an aimless frontal assault was indeed ill-advised. After all, this defensive system had been cultivated by Youdu over more than a century, engineered from the outset to withstand strikes from multiple Dongxuan View martial artists.
Without identifying the right incision point, it might take ten days to half a month of wearing down the ritual fields before a breakthrough could be made.
However, possessing the blueprints changed everything.
At that moment, a transmission from Wen Mingzhong appeared on his external implant's boundary credential:
"Commander, during that strike, the revealed positions of the palace precincts and the sequence and scale of the ritual responses across the city almost completely matched the esoteric ritual intelligence you provided. Could you test and strike these specific locations? That will allow us to deduce and map out a viable path of attack."
As he spoke, several red markers appeared on Chen Chuan's boundary credential.
Chen Chuan signaled his acknowledgment.
However, he had no intention of exclusively targeting those specific spots; doing so would make his true objective far too obvious to the enemy.
Instead, he sent an attack signal via mental intent to all the Dongxuan View martial artists present, while quietly conveying the true target locations to only a select few.
The moment he issued the command, blazing patches of light flared across the gloomy sky one after another. Then, the entire world seemed to flicker violently as over a dozen colossal beams of spiritual impact surged straight toward Youdu below!
Chapter 1423