“All troops, hear my order! Bypass the battlefield ahead and charge into the cells of the First Depth at full speed. Break the shackles and rescue the trapped cultivators of every kin!” Nathaniel raised his hand without hesitation and issued the command.
The Freevale warriors and the Sylvan vanguard immediately adjusted formation. One group after another swung around the frontal battlefield and rushed toward the passages on both sides of the stone door. They raced toward the cell blocks at top speed and began the rescue.
Behind them, the three hundred celestial guards saw the rescue force move and immediately tried to split off men to block them.
The Level Six commander let out a roar that tore through the passage. With both hands, favonovel.com raised the great ember-maul high, and holy radiance burst up around favonovel.com in a blinding surge. A crushing weight of power erupted from him.
He stepped forward, ready to cut off the rescue army before it could reach the cells. “You think you can save them? Kill Jared first, then slaughter the insurgents!”
The instant his body moved, Jared flashed. He unleashed Wayfarer’s Blink. One step could span 100 miles, and in that single breath favonovel.com crossed several dozen yards, appearing directly in front of the Level Six commander.
Jared moved so fast that not even an afterimage remained. The violet gleam of the Dragonslayer Sword swelled, wrapped in roaring chaos-flame. Its edge carried a sharpness that seemed to bite straight through the air.
The strike ignored the heavy defense of the cuirass. With terrible precision, it drove into the gap between the armor plates and pierced straight through the vital point in his chest.
Pow!
The harsh sound of a blade entering flesh rang out all at once.
The Level Six celestial commander’s pupils snapped tight. His face held the look of a man staring at the impossible and seeing the end arrive with it. His heavy armor had been unmatched in defense, and his strength had been deep enough to crush peers of the same level in close combat. Yet the body and cuirass favonovel.com had relied on most were no sturdier than paper in front of Jared.
He never even completed a single move. The war hammer in his hands had no time to fall before that one sword had already run through his vital point.
His life force drained away at terrifying speed. In the same instant, his saintlight nascence was swallowed by the chaos-flame and torn apart. His massive body froze heavily where it stood. Even in death, the result remained stamped across him: defeated in one move, fallen in a single instant.
Jared raised his hand and drew the Dragonslayer Sword back out. Golden blood slid slowly down the blade, fell onto the scorching ground, and vanished into steam the moment it touched.
“Kill!” The single word left his mouth, cold enough to cut.
Jared sprang forward and charged alone into the formation of the three hundred celestial guards. Violet blade-flare crisscrossed through the dim tunnel, flashing and bursting again and again in the dark.
With chaotic force pouring through the longsword, every chop, every thrust, and every sweep carried an unsolvable nascence dominion.
The celestial cultivators’ saintlight longswords, defensive arts, and saintlight shields all shattered before the violet blade-flare. None of them could withstand even one blow.
The sharp sword edge harvested one living life after another. Golden blood sprayed without restraint, staining the cold ground red and gathering into thin little streams. Screams, wails, the crack of breaking arms, and the blasts of exploding spells tangled together, ringing through the entire passage of the First Depth.
The three hundred celestial guards had numbers on their side. They sealed favonovel.com in layer after layer, joined their formations, and tried to trap Jared with a human-wave assault. But before the absolute gap in strength and the force of nascence counterforce, every struggle led nowhere.
Jared’s movement was light and fluid as favonovel.com wove through blades and sword light. He advanced and retreated at will, slipping past every encircling attack. Every sword strike took a life. Every move was a killing blow.
There was no extra flourish in his technique. Each sword was lean, brutal, and aimed straight at a vital point, with a killing efficiency that bordered on terrifying.
In only the time it took to drink a cup of tea, the three hundred celestial guards who had once packed the passage in dense, murderous ranks all lay fallen in pools of blood. Every one of them had fallen. Not a single survivor remained.
Corpses and shattered armor covered the ground. Blood soaked into the rock, and the thick reek of it spread in every direction, leaving the whole scene brutal to look at.
Jared drew his sword back slowly. The violet chaotic force around favonovel.com withdrew little by little, sinking out of sight, while his face stayed as calm as before. Not a trace of the killing favonovel.com had just done clung to him. It was as if the bloody slaughter moments ago had been nothing more than sweeping ants out of his path.
He lifted his eyes toward the dark passage deep inside the prison. Then favonovel.com stepped forward, light and unhurried, and walked at an even pace toward the prison’s Second Depth.
The blood battle in the First Depth had ended. But, the killing had not.
Across the vast cell blocks of the First Depth, one solid stone cell pressed close against the next. The place lay dark, damp, and cut through with biting frost energy, shut away from the sun year after year.
Heavy black-iron cell doors were locked tight. Inside the cells, warding sigils covered every surface. Length after length of black, ice-cold godsbane-iron fetters pinned the prisoners by their limbs and throats.
Dense subdual arrays had been carved across every chain. Those arrays forcibly sealed a cultivator’s spiritual power, meridians, and spirit, grinding down the very foundation of their cultivation.
Nathaniel led the allied host into the cell blocks at full speed. Everywhere favonovel.com looked, the sight hit like a blade turned inward.
More than 300 human cultivators of many kindreds had been imprisoned here for years, worn down under torture. Their clothes hung in rags, their bodies had wasted to skin and bone, and wounds covered them from head to toe.
Their flesh had festered. Old injuries lay beneath fresh ones, layer over layer, until there was almost no untouched skin left. Years of seals pressing down on them, and years of torture tearing through them, had hollowed out their eyes.
Their faces were bloodless, their bodies barely held upright, and they looked less like living people than corpses that had not yet fallen. They had long since lost the strength to resist. All that remained was a blank, bottomless stillness where the will to struggle had been scraped away.
The harsh scrape of dragging chains rose and fell through the cells. Weak coughing followed it, mixed with low, smothered sobs, until the whole prison seemed to press against the chest. Then those prisoners, buried in darkness and pushed to the edge, saw armored soldiers of Freevale and the Sylvan Warriors rush in t in with wit arms in hand.
In eyes that had been dead a moment before, a faint spark suddenly flickered. Their vacant stares slowly found focus.
When they saw Nathaniel at the front, everything they had forced down through countless days and nights finally cracked open. Weak, hoarse voices broke one after another, each one catching in the throat.
“Lin… Chieftain Linford… Chieftain Linford is here… He is here!”
“We… We weren’t abandoned… Someone really came to save us…”
“We can live… We finally have a chance to live…”
Tears ran freely down withered, weather-beaten faces. In those eyes that had sunk to the edge of extinction, the will to live burned again.
Nathaniel looked at the clansmen before him, at the cultivators of his own bloodline and kind who had been tortured until almost nothing human seemed left.
The sight dragged up the countless lives of every kindred that the celestials had butchered. It dragged up the terrible price Freevale had paid, and Nathaniel’s eyes reddened at once as something hot and sharp crowded behind them. Tears kept gathering in his eyes, circling there without falling.
“M-My fellow kin, don’t be scared… We’re here. Freevale is here! Today, we break these cages, tear down these seals, and bring you back into the light!” Nathaniel forced everything surging inside favonovel.com down and strode to the door of the first cell.
With a roar, spiritual power gathered around both fists, and favonovel.com smashed them hard into the heavy black-iron door.
A thunderous boom shook the cell block. The cell door shuddered violently, sigils flashing across its surface, but it did not move an inch. The chains binding the prisoners had been forged from star-fallen godsbane iron. They existed for one purpose, to counter a cultivator’s spiritual power, and they were nearly impossible to break.
Layer upon layer of warding sigils strengthened them further. Brute force and spells from ordinary cultivators could not shake them in the slightest. Even when Nathaniel struck with all his strength, the blow left only a shallow white mark on the chains.
Unfortunately, it did nothing!
“Brute force won’t work. Move aside!” A cool, clear voice came from behind him.
Jared walked into the cell at an unhurried pace, his gaze settling on the black fetters clamped tight around the prisoners. He raised his hand and extended two fingers. With that light, almost casual grip, favonovel.com caught hold of the cold, heavy godsbane-iron fetters.
From his palm, violet chaos-flame slowly rose, faint and deep in the dark. The overbearing chaotic force raced along the fetters. Layer by layer, it ate into the warding sigils carved across them.
The godsbane iron, hard beyond reason, began to give way under the burn of the chaos-flame. It softened fast, then melted through, then split apart.
Crack!
A sharp, clean breaking sound cut through the cell. The shackles that had held favonovel.com through countless days and nights snapped at once and crashed heavily to the floor.
The moment the shackles broke, the seal collapsed with them. Spiritual power, bloodline force, and soul-nascence that had been pressed down inside his body for countless days and nights tore free of their restraints. They surged through him, roaring back to life.
The human cultivator who had been imprisoned for years shuddered from head to toe. The power buried inside favonovel.com for too long erupted all at once. His weakened body dropped hard to its knees. Both hands dug against the freezing floor as broken sobs tore out of him. Tears mixed with blood across his face.
He looked utterly ruined, and yet, for the first time in years, unbound.” “Benefactor… Thank you for saving me… Such kindness, such grace… I will never forget it, not in this life…”
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