The bloody reality showed them just how laughable and fragile backbone, dignity, and loyalty were before the Emperor Lords of the Seventh Heaven.
Disobedience meant death!
And a miserable end in which their entire sects were exterminated and their legacies severed!
For a time, the Fifth and Sixth Heavens fell as silent as cicadas in winter.
The factions that had still been hesitating, or had planned to comply outwardly while defying in secret, all changed their attitudes.
They no longer dared gamble on whether the Purple Cloud Palace could withstand the Seventh Heaven, much less stake the lives of their entire sects on testing the Emperor Lords' patience.
"Enough... enough... even ants cling to life."
"Perhaps... the Seventh Heaven really can win?
They do have twelve Emperor Lords, after all..."
"We have to survive before we can think of a future..."
With complicated, humiliated hearts, more than seventy percent of the surviving factions in the Fifth and Sixth Heavens chose to submit under the Seventh Heaven's threats and inducements.
They began gathering manpower and resources as ordered, though their hearts brimmed with unease and resentment.
Upon receiving the report, the Black Baleful Emperor Lord nodded in satisfaction. "They should have done this long ago. Ants of the lower heavens never know how high the heavens are or how deep the earth is until they're taught a lesson."
As the one-month deadline approached, a force cobbled together from the various factions of the Fifth and Sixth Heavens, numbering over a hundred thousand but suffering from low morale and mismatched equipment—a "coalition army" in name and "cannon fodder" in truth—
finished assembling in the void at the boundary between the Fifth and Fourth Heavens, under the "supervision" of several Emperor Venerables from the Seventh Heaven.
Meanwhile, the Seventh Heaven's true main force—the