Across the dozen or so provinces that had once belonged to the Harlan Empire, hundreds of immense magic teleportation arrays flashed continuously with dazzling radiance. Squad after squad of Nightmare Knights in gray armor, mounted on black nightmare beasts, and Nightmare Mages poured out of the arrays, following close behind the Dragon Mountain Empire's troops as they took possession of every right over this land.
The war fortresses left behind by the Longshan Legion were occupied by them, and the camps built by the Longshan Legion were filled with Nightmare Legion warriors. Lin Qi had deployed only thirty Imperial Legions to garrison the former Harlan Empire's territory, while the Nightmare Legion's forces sent to the surface included no fewer than a hundred legions of Nightmare Knights mounted on nightmare beasts, along with ten legions of Nightmare Mages.
For every ten Nightmare Knights, there was one mage assigned to support them in battle. The Soul Pantheon truly was extravagantly lavish to possess such a formidable mage corps.
Yet the Nightmare Legion summoned by Azi, the God of Nightmares, amounted to far more than that. Apart from the regular hundred legions of Nightmare Knights and ten legions of Nightmare Mages, he had also brought in several times as many auxiliary slave soldiers and logistical troops. Great masses of gray dwarves pushed wheelbarrows, transporting huge quantities of materials from the Abyssal worlds, including many magic-energy furnaces that had already been forged.
Ten legions of Nightmare Mages acted at once. Through their efforts, more than a thousand magic towers, each several hundred meters tall, rose in an unbroken line along the border between the Dragon Mountain Empire and the former Harlan Empire. Gray clouds shrouded the gray magic towers, and the cloud cover above those thousand-plus towers merged into one. Enormous magic halos slowly