Chapter 64: Infernal (3)

Ye Jun stood frozen in his spot. He didn’t even want to move as the battle before him left him bewildered. He didn’t think he was supposed to witness something like this.

Hundreds of thousands of humans moved alongside the mighty Spiritual Beasts and collided with the endless army of haunting Infernal Creatures.

The sheer scale left his heart beating rapidly. But that wasn’t the only thing. They also used their powers in ways that shattered everything he thought he understood about cultivation.

No, he had read about things like this in novels, but reading was different from experiencing it directly. And he watched the battle unfold clearly before him.

Qi erupted from their bodies like volcanoes finally giving in after centuries of restraint. Ye Jun watched, mouth still agape, as cultivators he couldn’t even begin to rank unleashed techniques that reshaped the very land beneath their feet.

A single palm strike from one of the humans, just one among tens of thousands, carved a gorge so deep into the earth that he couldn’t see the bottom of it. The Infernal Creatures that fell into it never made a sound.

And that man wasn’t even among the strongest present.

’This is… goddamned hell.’

The Spiritual Beasts were no different. One of them, a serpentine creature whose body stretched so far that he genuinely couldn’t see its tail, coiled and then uncoiled with a force that sent a shockwave rolling outward across the battlefield.

It flattened Infernal Creatures by the hundreds, their burning bodies extinguished like candle flames in a storm. But even as they fell, more poured through the tears in space endlessly, hungrily, as if the void beyond had no bottom to it.

That was what gnawed at him. The tears weren’t closing. If anything, they grew wider with every passing moment, splitting across the sky and the earth and even the air itself, as if reality here was simply too exhausted to hold itself together any longer.

Through them, he could see nothing. Not darkness like the night sky. Something far older than that.

It was a place that had never once known light.

And from that place, the Infernal Creatures kept coming.

He watched the battle deteriorate slowly. Even with this impossible alliance of the world’s greatest forces, even with Spiritual Beasts whose single steps cratered the earth and cultivators whose techniques could reshape the world, the sheer attrition of it was beginning to show.

Humans fell.

He could see them now if he looked carefully, small figures swallowed between clashing titans, their Qi flickering out like dying stars.

The Spiritual Beasts weren’t untouched either. One of the smaller ones, still larger than any building Ye Jun had ever seen, collapsed under a swarm of Infernals that buried it completely. Its dying roar shook the plateau so violently that several soldiers around him stumbled.

However, none of them made a sound. They didn’t show grief, not even rage. They simply steadied themselves and stared ahead with those same hollow, resolute expressions that Ye Jun was beginning to find more disturbing than the battle itself.

’What is wrong with them? And why haven’t they entered the battle?’

The Seven still hadn’t moved.

They hovered above the carnage like observers watching something inevitable unfold, their features still impossible to make out no matter how hard he strained his eyes.

Whatever they were waiting for, whatever threshold had to be crossed before they finally descended, Ye Jun wasn’t sure the army below them would last long enough to see it.

’Is this a memory of someone?’ he thought faintly. ’Something left behind in that sphere?’

His head throbbed again, sharper this time. The tears in space, the flames, the sheer unending scale of it all—even experiencing it like this, at a distance, filtered through whatever strange mechanism had placed him here—was almost too much for him.

It felt like he wasn’t supposed to witness all of this. As if his soul wasn’t strong enough for it, yet something was protecting him. Clearly, it wasn’t working perfectly, as he still felt like something was crushing his soul.

He couldn’t imagine what it had felt like to actually stand in it.

To fight in it.

All of a sudden, the world changed its shade. The air froze as a terrible wave of harrowing presence washed over the entire world. It felt as if the world itself was struggling against something.

Then everything changed.

The Space Tears, which had been widening gradually, suddenly ripped apart all at once as if something on the other side had simply grown tired of waiting.

The sound it made wasn’t a sound at all. It was an absence of sound, a silence so total that it swallowed the entire battlefield for a single, breathless moment.

Even the Infernal Creatures stopped.

That alone terrified him more than anything else he had witnessed.

From the void beyond, something emerged. Ye Jun felt it before he saw it—a pressure so immense that it pushed down on him like the sky itself had decided to descend.

Around him, soldiers dropped to their knees. Not out of reverence. Their legs simply gave out beneath them. He nearly joined them but forced himself to remain standing.

Then he saw it and briefly wished that he hadn’t.

The thing was wrong on so many levels.

It was enormous in a way the other creatures weren’t. The other Infernals were large, terrifyingly so, but they were still comprehensible—still things that existed within the boundaries of what his mind could grasp.

This creature existed beyond that boundary entirely. Its body seemed to generate its own horizon, its upper half disappearing somewhere into the clouds above while its lower half crushed the earth beneath it into something unrecognizable.

The malevolent red flames that burned across the other Infernals were nothing compared to what consumed this thing. It burned like a dying star.

Like a world collapsing inward.

The heat radiating from it reached the plateau and washed over Ye Jun in a wave that made his vision swim.

The malevolent lord didn’t roar. It didn’t announce itself in any way. It didn’t need to.

It simply looked at the army beneath it and began to move forward, heaven and earth shaking with each of its steps… or perhaps they weren’t even steps at all.

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