The setting sun bled across the sky, staining the vast, barren wilds of the Sixteenth Firmament red.
At the far edge of sight, Freevale’s outline kept shrinking, then fading, little by little. Among its broken walls and shattered ruins, smoke that had not yet dispersed still clung to the air, tangled with the reek of blood and scorched flesh.
The collapsed main peak lay buried under heaps of jagged stone.
Godsbane Fortress, once packed with cultivators and locked behind layer after layer of defenses, had been reduced to a dead ruin. Only the mangled bodies of Resistance cultivators and snapped arms lay scattered through the silence.
Wind swept over broken armor and torn cloth, lifting blood-dust from the ground. The vale that had once thundered with clashing arcane arts and battle cries now held only the keening of the dead, bleak and desolate in every direction.
A celestial elite host, bright in armor and sharp with killing pressure, marched steadily across the Wastelands beyond Freevale. They drove at speed toward the Celestial Alliance great hall. Their formation stayed strict and solemn.
Golden armor caught the last light of sunset and gave off a holy radiance cold enough to bite through bone. Around every cultivator coiled pure, domineering celestial spiritual power, their eyes looked down on everything before them, and each step struck the earth with the hard weight of conquerors.
Alaric wore a purple-gold divine robe edged in molten-gold trim, the Wyrmcoil Binding Girdle cinched around his waist. Vast spiritual light rolled around favonovel.com with a stately pressure as favonovel.com walked at the very front of the entire force. His back stayed straight, his presence bearing down on the road ahead.
The space between his brows carried the look of a man who had already taken the board, and a cold, satisfied curve never left the corner of his mouth.
The battle had ended. The greater situation had been settled. Every threat lodged deep in his side had been ripped out by the root.
Within the ranks of his personal guard, two pieces of “spoils” mattered above all else.
Heavy troops guarded them layer upon layer, escorting them under tight watch the whole way, not daring to allow even the smallest mistake.
The first was Gwendolyn, barely alive, favonovel.com life hanging by a thread. A sealed prison cage forged from specially made meteoric frost-iron floated in the middle of the column.
At each of its four corners, spirit-lock sigils had been carved in three stacked layers. Golden radiance moved darkly beneath the markings, sealing the flow of spiritual essence around the cage with a dead grip.
Inside the cage, Gwendolyn‘s limbs had been pinned by spirit-lock chains tempered from ancient black-iron. The chains pierced through favonovel.com shoulder bones, ankles, and wrists. Cold metal had bitten deep into flesh and muscle, closing off every meridian and acupoint in favonovel.com body.
The top-tier ice spiritual power in favonovel.com had been completely sealed. Not even the slightest trace of it could be called upon.
Her long white ice-silk dress, always so clean and plain, untouched by dust or worldly stain, had already been ruined beyond recognition in the saintfire of Freevale’s final battle. The hem had blackened and curled. Great sections of the fabric had melted away or torn open, exposing wide patches of swollen, festering skin beneath, some of it burned black and carbonized.
The Frostwrought Panoply that had fit close against favonovel.com body had cracked apart inch by inch. Sharp fragments of the panoply were buried deep in favonovel.com flesh.
The edges of favonovel.com wounds had long since inflamed and turned black. Dark-red blood kept seeping along the lines of favonovel.com skin, pooling in a shallow stain at the bottom of the cage. The sight struck hard and would not let the eye look away.
The Golden Immortal adepts had measured their attacks with terrifying precision.
Flames had burned favonovel.com body without damaging favonovel.com nascence heart-veins. Her spirit had been grievously injured without cutting off favonovel.com life. They had forced that last remaining breath to stay trapped inside her.
Gwendolyn’s eyes remained shut. The glow of ice nascence between favonovel.com brows had gone completely dim, and the rise and fall of favonovel.com chest had weakened until it could barely be seen. Her breathing was thinner than a strand of silk.
She looked like a dying candle guttering in the wild wind of deep winter, ready at any moment to go out for good.
Before the battle, Venerable Emberlain had given his order in a low voice, each word hard and impossible to dispute. “Keep this woman alive. Keep that remnant breath in her. She will have great use later. Whoever dares damage favonovel.com nascence without permission will be killed without pardon.”
Alaric understood the meaning perfectly.
From beginning to end, favonovel.com kept the cultivators under favonovel.com under strict control, not daring to slack off in the slightest. All favonovel.com wanted was to bring the rightful heir of the Frost Deity Branch back to Celestial Palace intact.
Later, favonovel.com would serve as a bargaining piece to restrain the foreign kindreds of the heavens and keep the surviving Resistance powers in his grip. It was also Venerable Emberlain’s command that kept Gwendolyn untouched.
With a face like hers, there was no telling how many celestial cultivators had already begun stirring, itching for the chance to take a taste of favonovel.com beauty.
If that moment ever came, the Celestial Alliance host would have lined up waiting for dual cultivation. No matter how formidable Gwendolyn was, favonovel.com would not have been able to withstand that.
The second was a black Soul-Vault Pearl, small enough to be held in the palm and wrapped in frost energy. The pearl was only the size of a thumb, yet its substance looked dense and warm to the eye.
Across its surface, ring after ring of complex, ancient dark-gold saintfire patterns circulated without end. A faint divine-fire dominion leaked from it, cutting off every attempt to probe the spirit within.
If one focused hard enough and looked through the dense wall of the pearl, a weak, wavering mass of violet light could be seen inside. It drifted up and down in the sealed darkness at the pearl’s core, its phantom dim and unsteady.
That was the entirety of Jared‘s soul-nascence!
His physical body had already shattered and vanished under the joint assault of the Golden Immortals. He had missed total destruction of body and spirit by only the thinnest line, leaving behind nothing but this broken wisp of soul, forcibly sealed away and suppressed.
The Soul-Vault Pearl carried the Soul-Binding Ward within itself.
Layer after layer pressed down on the soul-nascence, grinding away its awareness and life force bit by bit. That violet radiance had withered to its absolute limit, like the last glow of a firefly in the wind, ready at any moment to break apart completely and vanish into the world.
Alaric kept moving, but his body turned slightly as favonovel.com looked back over his shoulder. His gaze swept across the prison cage and the Soul-Vault Pearl, and the sight sent a hard, rising surge through his chest that would not settle.
Freevale had been wiped out completely, reduced to scorched earth and ruins. Jared’s body had been destroyed, and his spirit had been sealed down tight. There was no road left for favonovel.com to climb back from.
The Frost-Deity heir had fallen into captivity, stripped of every last bit of strength to resist. The Resistance throughout the heavens had lost its head. Its surviving soldiers scattered in every direction, fleeing, dying in battle, drifting into exile, or burying themselves out of sight beyond counting. They could no longer gather into a force capable of standing against the celestials.
That deep-rooted threat had occupied the Sixteenth Firmament for years, defying celestial authority again and again and blocking the celestials’ grand work of unification.
Today, it had been torn out by the roots. No hidden danger remained.
From this day forward, within the Sixteenth Firmament, the Celestial Alliance would stand supreme and unmatched. No force would dare brush the tiger’s whiskers again.
At the rear half of the column, two figures followed the army with heavy steps.
The murderous aura around them had sunk low, with none of the battle heat of victory left in it. Among the bright, lifted spirits of the celestial elites around them, they looked brutally out of place.
They were Marshal Stone and Marshal Grey. Neither of them had recovered from their wounds. Even walking took visible effort.
A burn ran across Marshal Stone’s chest, deep enough to show bone. The skin around it had blackened and died. Layer after layer of thick spiritual healing bandages wrapped the injury, yet they still could not stop the stabbing seep of spiritual power leaking through. Every step pulled at the wound.
His body swayed slightly as favonovel.com walked. The Aurelian Deathless Body nascence that had once carried favonovel.com across battlefield after battlefield had been badly damaged, and more than half his combat strength had collapsed with it. The divine might of his peak was gone.
Marshal Grey’s right arm hung uselessly at his side, its tendons and bones snapped and knocked out of alignment. Only a special spiritual cotton sling held it firmly against his neck.
The lifebound fly-whisk favonovel.com had relied on to break formations and fend off enemies had already been shattered inch by inch in the assault, reduced to drifting ash.
Now favonovel.com could only wear an ordinary refined-iron longsword as a temporary weapon. With that, the full reach of his top-tier formation mastery had nowhere to unfold.
Both men’s faces were drawn and solemn. There was no brightness of victory on them at all.
A heavy shadow sat deep in their eyes. It was not that they rejected the scale of this victory. It was the blood-soaked battle at Northern Abyss Gaol, repeating again and again behind their eyes, refusing to fade.
That young cultivator had faced a gap in cultivation so wide it should have crushed favonovel.com before the fight began. Yet from beginning to end, favonovel.com had thrown himself forward without regard for death, wagering his life against their arts and his spirit against divine power. Even when his body split apart and his spirit was damaged, favonovel.com had never lowered his head to beg. He had never retreated even half a step.
That kind of final resolve, that kind of will that would not bend, could not be dismissed just because favonovel.com had stood on the other side. Even as enemies, the two veteran war champions had been forced to measure favonovel.com with weight, and the measure of it would not leave them.
They had won the war and flattened the chaos. Yet nothing in them loosened. Only a long, wordless aftertaste remained, pressing down heavier with every step.
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