Four hours, six hours, ten hours, fourteen hours...
Time trickled by. The slaughter lasted from afternoon until dusk, then raged through the night until dawn.
The entire Soul Hunting Forest remained shrouded in the thick stench of blood. The fighting never ceased for even a moment.
Qian Renxue kept moving, circling the Imperial Carriage where Xue Beng sat, slaughtering her way around it again and again.
She deliberately kept changing the terrain of the battlefield, shifting the fighting from place to place and throwing the Heaven Dou army's encirclement into utter chaos.
Endless slaughter unfolded on every side. Fallen soldiers littered the ground, their bodies piled layer upon layer across the forest floor.
At the center of the encirclement, Xue Beng, Xue Xing, and their entourage could hear the unending screams and sounds of death all around them. They could sense their forces dwindling rapidly, yet had no way to count the actual casualties.
Panic devoured everyone's minds, little by little.
Dawn broke, and the first light of morning emerged. Cold sunlight pierced the thin mist between the trees and spilled over the ravaged battlefield, laying bare every detail of its horror.
A high-ranking Soul Master dressed in a Soul Emperor's robes, his armor caked in blood, staggered through the deathly still battlefield. His expression was frenzied as he desperately pushed through and stumbled up to Xue Beng, his knees buckling until he nearly collapsed to the ground.
"Your Majesty! Disaster!"
"On the prince's orders, I spent the night surveying casualties across the battlefield. The forest for miles around is littered with corpses!"
"By a rough count, our dead... already number more than a hundred and fifty thousand!"
A hundred and fifty thousand!
Those words exploded like thunder beside Xue Beng's ears, hammering mercilessly at his mind.
Xue Beng's body