Meanwhile, on the southern battlefield of Cloud Province.
Thirty Thousand Cavalry faced a hundred-thousand-strong allied army.
The cavalry surged like a tide and crashed into the formation.
The allied army's first shield wall was the first to break.
Three thousand heavily armored vanguard troops cut into it like a red-hot blade.
Their armored warhorses slammed into the shield line with the full force of their charge.
Shields shattered. Men in armor flew. A gap several yards wide was torn through the dense infantry ranks.
More than ten thousand cavalrymen poured through the breach behind them, thrusting lances and hacking with blades. Flesh churned like mud wherever they passed.
The second shield wall crumbled completely when Xiao Jin arrived.
He swept the Nine Nether Baleful Suppression Demon Blade through the air. A dark-red blade arc plowed a charred furrow several yards long across the ground.
Every shield bearer and armored soldier in its path was severed in two before they could even scream.
The line had been pierced clean through.
The allied troops broke on every side.
The hundred thousand had never been a single army. Kaoshan Sect's infantry could still grit their teeth and fight to the death, and Chiyan Valley's Death Warriors could battle on without retreating. But the private soldiers of the two Lineages, the wandering Rogue Cultivators who had joined them, and the remnants of minor frontier sects had dared stake their lives only because they had strength in numbers.
Now they watched Thirty Thousand Cavalry crush through their lines like dry branches and rotten wood.
They saw that no one could stand against the dark-red blade light. The string stretched taut in their minds for so long snapped.
No one knew who dropped his weapon first.
"Run!"
"We're going to die."
A shrill cry tore from