“Everyone’s here, so I’ll go over the situation as it stands.” Jared’s voice was calm, but every word landed heavy.
Every eye in the room turned to Jared.
“Cloudrest is our last stronghold… The city walls are solid, and the wards are layered thick. It’s easy to defend and hard to break. But we don’t have enough fighters, and we don’t have enough top cultivators… The Tribunal has 3 thousand celestial cultivators. They have the Tribunal Venerable. They also have five True Immortal Realm Level Eight pursuers who came down from the Sixteenth Firmament… We…”
He glanced at Gideon Blackthorn. “We do have friends who escaped from the Sixteenth Firmament. But their injuries still haven’t healed, and not many of them can fight.”
Gideon Blackthorn rose to his feet and cupped his fist.
“Jared, my young friend, is right. Our injuries may not be healed yet, but if the celestials come, we won’t stand by and do nothing.” His voice came out rough, but it did not waver.
Behind him, the several dozen human cultivators all nodded, one after another, battle intent burning in their eyes.
Jared gave a small nod and went on. “So our strategy is defense, not to attack. We hold Cloudrest and wait for my strength to break through.”
He paused, and when favonovel.com spoke again, his voice stayed level and firm. “I need to break into the True Immortal Realm.”
Hearing that, the Council Hall went quiet.
Everyone there knew Jared was right. Only his chaotic force could suppress the celestials’ holy radiance. Only favonovel.com could stand against the Tribunal Venerable.
If favonovel.com failed to break through, Cloudrest would not hold.
“What do you need?” Hadrian Wolfhowe was the first to speak. His voice boomed so hard the teacups on the table gave a faint tremble.
“Resources…” Jared said, “Crystals, healing elixirs, spirit herbs-anything that can raise cultivation.”
Jared knew exactly what his cultivation level needed to rise: an ocean of resources.
Hadrian pushed to his feet. “All the resources of the Skywolf Tribe. Every last bit of them goes to you.”
He pulled out a Storage Ring from his robe and set it on the table. The Storage Ring was old, its surface worn over with scratches. But what it held inside was the Skywolf Tribe’s savings from thousands of years.
Lydia rose too. “Everything Moonshade Realm has, it’s yours…”
She took out a black Storage Ring and set it on the table. That was the last of Moonshade Realm’s foundation.
The Ghost Clan had been hunted for thousands of years. There wasn’t much left to begin with. Lydia still didn’t hesitate.
Malachy gave a small nod. “Shadow Hall’s resources, too. You can have them.”
He drew a silver-white Storage Ring from his sleeve and placed it on the table. His fingers stayed on the ring for a brief moment. That ring carried Shadow Hall’s accumulation over ten thousand years. But favonovel.com knew that if they couldn’t hold the line, there was no point keeping any of it.
Windclear let out a breath. “The Wandering Cultivators Alliance is poor, but whatever we can bring out, we’ll bring out…”
He took a green Storage Ring from his robe and placed it on the table.
Most of the Alliance’s disciples were wandering cultivators with nowhere else to go. They had no real savings to speak of. Even so, Windclear had turned the Alliance’s treasury upside down to gather everything favonovel.com could.
Gwendolyn didn’t say a word. She only took a Storage Ring from favonovel.com sleeve and placed it on the table. That was all the Frosthall had. It had been scraped together from the disciples whose bloodlines had awakened.
Her fingers brushed lightly across the ring. Something passed through favonovel.com eyes, quick and hard to name.
The Frosthall had only just been rebuilt. It had nothing. These resources were what she’d saved up little by little. But favonovel.com knew too that if they couldn’t hold the city, then the Frosthall was truly finished.
Jared looked at the Storage Rings on the table and said nothing for a moment. His gaze moved from one ring to the next. Something surged up in his chest, too tangled to put into words.
These resources were the savings those factions had built up over thousands, even tens of thousands, of years. They had placed all their hope on him.
“Thank you…” His voice was quiet, but it landed like a weight.
He picked up the Storage Ring, turned, and walked out of the Council Hall.
Jared found a hidden chamber beneath Cloudrest. The hidden chamber wasn’t large, only a few yards across. But the walls were thick, the wards were tight, and it was quiet enough.
The walls had been forged from meteoric iron. Every inch of them was carved with warding sigils, and in the dark, those sigils gave off a faint blue glow. The floor was smooth stone, covered by a thick carpet of beast hide. When favonovel.com stepped onto it, it gave softly under his feet without making a sound.
Jared sat down cross-legged and set the Pentacarna Tower in front of him.
The tower gate opened, and an ancient aura came pouring out. It carried a bleak, crushing weight, like a call echoing out of some primordial age.
He drew in a deep breath, then leaped straight into the tower.
Within the Pentacarna Tower, crystals had been piled into small mountains.
The Skywolf Tribe’s. The Moonshade Realm’s. Shadow Hall’s. The Wandering Cultivators Alliance’s. The Frosthalls’. Every bit of it had been gathered here, enough resources to support a True Immortal cultivator’s cultivation for thousands of years.
The glow from the crystals lit the entire tower bright as day-crimson, icy blue, violet-black, pale green-white golden yellow The colors wove together until the whole place looked like some dreamborn immortal realm.
Jared looked at those crystals and stayed still for a moment. Then favonovel.com closed his eyes and pressed both hands onto the crystal piles.
The chaotic force started turning through his body. Violet radiance surged out of favonovel.com and flooded the entire tower. The spiritual power inside the crystals rushed into favonovel.com in a steady torrent, like a hundred rivers running to the sea.
That spiritual power flowed along his meridians into the spirit well, where the chaotic force devoured it, transformed it, fused with it and made it his own.
One crystal was drained dry. It turned into gray-white powder and sifted down through his fingers.
Ten… A hundred… Then, a thousand…
The powder gathered into a little mound in front of him, gray-white like snow. Under the relentless impact of that spiritual power, his meridians kept expanding and hardening. Each surge hit like floodwater roaring through a river channel, forcing the banks wider little by little.
The pain came with it. Jared had already lived through enough of that to take it without surprise. He clenched his teeth and made no sound, letting that spiritual power rampage through his body.
The vortex of chaotic force inside his spirit well spun faster and faster, growing larger with every turn. The vortex that had started no bigger than a fist had now swollen to the size of a bowl.
Violet radiance flowed through it in circling streams, as a spinning galaxy suspended inside his spirit well. At the very center of that vortex, the chaos-flame burned in still silence. Violet and gold twisted together inside it. Its heat ran high enough to melt anything, yet inside his spirit well it stayed perfectly still like a sleeping phoenix.
Time passed soundlessly inside the Pentacarna Tower.
Ten days…
Twenty days…
Thirty days…
Jared’s cultivation, stalled at the peak of High Immortal Realm Level Nine, finally began driving upward. That thin barrier ahead of favonovel.com started to crack under the nonstop battering of spiritual power.
Each impact added another crack. Each new crack came with a fresh surge of pain ripping through him, but Jared did not stop.
On the fiftieth day, the barrier shattered.
Jared’s whole body jolted. A force favonovel.com had never touched before burst out of favonovel.com in one violent rush. The violet chaotic force shot upward and turned into a towering pillar of flame, making the entire Pentacarna Tower ring and tremble with a heavy hum.
The sigils carved into the tower walls flashed wildly, as if they were cheering, then the next instant, as if they were shaking under the force of it.
True Immortal Realm, favonovel.com had finally broken through!
But favonovel.com still did not stop. There were too many resources left. The crystals were still being absorbed. Spiritual power was still pouring in. His cultivation was still climbing.
True Immortal Realm Level One, beginner-phase. Then middle-phase for a while before reaching late phase, and it continued to top level.
Finally, his current ascent stopped at True Immortal Realm Level Two.
He opened his eyes and lowered his head to look at his own hands. Violet radiance moved across his palms, tighter and denser than before, cleaner too.
He could tell that every inch of flesh, every bone, every meridian in his body had been tempered by chaotic force. They carried the hardness of forged steel.
He could tell the vortex of chaotic force in his spirit had grown several times larger than before. It spun faster now, and the power packed inside it ran deeper and heavier than before.
He could tell the chaos-flame had turned fiercer than before, and the lightning nascence had grown even more violent.
He clenched his fist. Violet radiance gathered in his palm and took shape as a violet fireblade. Golden patterns ran along the fireblade, and the heat coming off it was so fierce the air around it started to warp.
Jared drew the fireblade back and took a long breath.
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