Fighting the enemy in their home world was the worst possible choice.
But with the enemy at their gates, it was too late to move the battle elsewhere.
The Otherworld ancestors could only grit their teeth. After the battle, they would march on the Nine Provinces and take an entire world to make up for the damage to their own.
As heaven and earth shook, vast swathes of black mist poured down from the Ninety-Nine-Layer Stone Steps, wrapping the battlefield layer upon layer until it vanished within.
The stone steps were the supreme treasure that protected the Otherworld.
Years ago, Lu Zhan and the others had been grievously wounded and near death. They had survived only by lying upon these steps.
Now the steps gave everything they had. Black mist surged into walls to contain the shockwaves of the Kings' clash and keep their home world from collapsing altogether.
"A cornered beast's last stand."
The three Kings' attacks closed in, but Wang Xuan's face remained utterly calm.
However they roared or fought for their lives, he saw them as no different from three ants thrashing their legs.
Boom.
He stepped forward.
Wisps of power spread from beneath his foot, and the divine laws of the heavens answered with a thunderous roar.
Eternal Instant!
Past, present, and future, joined as one!
This was the mightiest path of time and space he had grasped after his strength reached its pinnacle.
At a thought, time and space stood still.
He forced a passage between past and future in that instant.
In less than a ten-millionth of a moment, his figure stood before all three Stone Kings at once.
He spread his fingers and traced the River of Time upstream, finding the moments when each ancient ancestor had been weakest or most feeble with