Chapter 171: External Missions Branch (2)

At the center of the place, a natural observation platform rose, where a man wearing segmented armor made of dark bone plates and red metal examined a large scroll.

He was bald, with a face marked by scars that looked like maps of ancient battles, and his rust-colored eyes lifted as soon as Kyrian entered the hall.

The energy around the man was dense and heavy, but nowhere near comparable to Dong Zhen’s. He was clearly in the Spirit Awakening realm, perhaps in the middle or late stage of the realm.

“Oh. If it isn’t the prodigy boy of the Main Branch.” The man’s voice was rough.

“We’ve met before, but I didn’t have the chance to introduce myself. You can call me Elder Goran. What does the Main Branch want with my operations yard?”

Kyrian approached, ignoring the curious and distrustful looks of the other branch members who stopped their activities to watch him. Almost all of those present were older, the younger ones seemed to have gone out on missions.

“I want missions,” Kyrian said, straight to the point.

“Specifically to places where strange situations have occurred, such as inexplicable hostile phenomena, like waves of beasts that appeared out of nowhere.”

Goran frowned, studying Kyrian. He listened to the first sentences without changing his expression, but Kyrian’s last words stirred something in his memory. His eyes narrowed, examining the boy with new intensity.

“Abnormalities… inexplicable waves of beasts…” Goran repeated, his rough voice carrying a new tone.

“That’s a very specific description. Do you already know something? Are you aware of the situation?”

Kyrian kept his face impassive, but a spark of interest lit up in his carmine eyes.

“What do you mean?”

Goran let out a low grunt and rubbed the scar that cut through his eyebrow.

“In the last few months, there have been strange reports. Not only here in the far north, but on several edges of the territory. Small outbreaks, beasts acting outside their patterns, coordinated attacks as if… as if something were guiding them. Or as if they were fleeing from something.”

He leaned forward over the scroll he had been studying.

“But the most glaring case is current. A smaller allied force, the Screaming Cliffs Sect, sent a desperate distress request five days ago. A wave of beasts, massive and apparently without reason, emerged from a wilderness region near a small country… then swept everything in its path. Entire cities crushed.”

“Now the tide is returning toward their territory. It’s a situation of annihilation.”

Goran paused, his piercing gaze on Kyrian.

“Half of my available personnel left at dawn today to try to contain the tide and evacuate whatever they can. It’s a damage-control mission, not a victory. Something in that wave is wrong. Beasts of different species, some natural enemies, are acting in unison.”

A cold wave of certainty ran through Kyrian.

It was exactly how the Black Masses acted. It had to be. The description matched perfectly.

Pure hostility corrupts and drives wildlife, creating chaos without apparent reason. The same pattern he had seen before, but on a far more catastrophic scale.

“What is the exact location?” Kyrian asked. His voice was more urgent than he intended.

“I’ll go there.”

Goran raised a scarred eyebrow.

“Boy, did you hear what I said? It’s a beast tide. My men are veterans. They went because they have a chance, however small, of making some difference. You are strong, yes, but this…”

“The location,” Kyrian insisted, his gaze sharpening, not yielding an inch.

For a long moment, Goran measured the silent determination emanating from the Main Branch disciple. Finally, with a sigh that seemed to carry some weight, he pulled a small marked scroll from his spatial ring.

“Here,” he said, handing it to Kyrian.

“Coordinates and the last recon route of the tide. The Screaming Cliffs Sect is here.” He pointed to a spot on the simple map.

Kyrian took the scroll, his eyes scanning the lines in a fraction of a second, engraving every detail. Without a word of thanks or farewell, he pivoted on his heels and marched back toward the tunnel entrance, his red cloak fluttering.

Goran watched him leave, scratching his chin in perplexity.

“In a hurry to die? Or does he really know something…?” he muttered to himself. With a nod of his head, he returned to his scroll. Other people’s madness was not his problem, as long as it didn’t interfere with his operations.

…

Kyrian was already in the air before Goran finished thinking. The black-winged horse, responding to its master’s urgency, flew at full speed, tearing through the gray skies beneath the dark clouds toward the southeast.

The wind howled, but Kyrian’s mind was more focused than ever. As he flew, he studied the scroll more closely.

The Screaming Cliffs Sect. It was a small force that could not yet even be compared to a 5° level force. Specialized in mining and refining spiritual ores.

The location was the Lamentations mountain range.

The beast tide’s approximate origin was in a region near the small country of Aramoor. The tide had emerged approximately ten days ago, moving in an erratic pattern but with a general northwest direction.

The cause was unknown, the beasts’ behavior was absolutely aggressive.

The threat level was catastrophic for forces below the 5° level.

The pattern the scroll described was unmistakable. He had seen the irrational fury of the black mass in the small fox, Luz, transforming her into a beast filled with hostility.

He had felt in the Scarlet Sun Sect disciple a will to destroy everything that was alive. That tide had to be that same fury, amplified several times over, infecting thousands of beasts.

It seemed like a calamity. But for Kyrian, it was an opportunity.

The book in his mind remained a silent mystery, but its hunger for the black masses was one of the few things Kyrian knew about it.

They were the key to accelerating his growth and strength and to reducing the time limit between his breakthroughs.

Kyrian was in a hurry because he did not want the others from the external missions branch to deal with it before his arrival.

They would contain the tide, kill the beasts, and perhaps even find and destroy the core of the anomaly. The Black Mass… Without understanding what it truly was. And he would lose the chance to absorb that unique energy.

“Faster,” he ordered the horse, even though the creature was already at the limit of its sustainable speed.

The journey would be two days without stopping. But Kyrian knew that even a beast of the Core Formation Realm had its limits if it flew at maximum speed.

He would allow short stops, just enough for the horse to catch its breath and recover a bit of energy, feeding it with some of the mid-grade spirit stones he possessed. Every hour counted.

The two days of travel were an ordeal of endurance, both for the winged horse and for Kyrian’s patience. The stops were minimal, just enough for the beast to recover its breath. Kyrian fed it mid-grade spirit stones without hesitation.

The landscape below changed from red canyons to forested hills, then to a land of gray rocks and cutting winds. The Lamentations mountain range.

At the end of the second day, the first sign was not visual but auditory. A distant roar, composed of thousands of bestial voices, a sound of fury and fear mixed together, reached Kyrian from the heights.

Soon after, a dark stain appeared on the horizon, moving like a cloud over the land. It was the tide.

Kyrian drew closer, and the scale of the disaster became apparent. It was a living river of beasts, roaring and dragging itself along the base of the mountains, crashing against the defenses of a fortress built on an imposing cliff.

The Screaming Cliffs Sect.

The sight was terrifying. Beasts of all sizes and shapes, from wolves the size of horses to absurdly gigantic insects with gleaming carapaces, all moving with sinister coordination, their eyes glowing with a sickly red fury.

Before he could get any closer, shadows detached themselves from the mass below. A group of flying beasts, birds of prey with jet-black feathers and serrated beaks, their eyes equally injected with fury. They detected him and rose toward him with furious screeches.

Kyrian did not even slow down. His eyes, which were a vigilant carmine, changed in a blink. The pupils, previously not visible through the carmine, transformed and were replaced by two geometrically perfect snowflakes within a sky-blue iris.

The air around him dropped dozens of degrees instantly. A silent, freezing wind burst from his body.

The flying beasts, only a few meters away, simply froze in the air. There was no struggle, no drama.

The moisture in their feathers, the blood in their veins, the very Qi that propelled them. Everything solidified in an instant. They became sculptures of opaque ice, their momentum lost, and began to fall toward the ground, shattering against the rocks or into the mass of beasts below.

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