"Close your eyes. Don't listen to the hoofbeats. Listen to the breathing of the companions beside you."
The National Preceptor's voice carried a strange rhythm, as though guiding some vast resonance between heaven and earth.
The commoners closed their eyes.
At first, their breathing was chaotic. Some panted rapidly, while others breathed faintly.
But under the guidance of the National Preceptor's Great Dao Heavenly Sound, a miracle occurred.
The breathing of tens of thousands of people gradually merged into a single rhythm.
One breath in, one breath out.
Like a colossal beast slumbering beneath the ancient earth, slowly awakening.
"Blood vitality shares one origin; Spirit Fetuses resonate as one."
"Use your bodies as the formation's core, and your blood as its formation patterns."
As the National Preceptor's words fell, a blazing red light lit up between every commoner's brows.
The scattered blood vitality of ordinary people, once fighting separately and without order, became completely linked at that moment through their tightly clasped hands and synchronized breaths!
Tens of thousands of pillars of blood vitality soared into the sky, wildly intertwining and merging above the plain.
A shocking surge of blood vitality, ten thousand times greater and ten thousand times more terrifying than before, erupted with a thunderous roar.
"Black Tortoise in the north, master of defense."
On the Imperial Academy's high platform, the National Preceptor formed a sword gesture with his fingers and pointed downward from afar.
The vast crimson ocean above the plain instantly churned and condensed.
A phantom Black Tortoise several thousand zhang tall, bearing an ancient totem-patterned shell, formed above the commoners' heads with a boom!
The Black Tortoise threw back its head and roared. Its heavy blood vitality transformed into an indestructible dark-red barrier that inverted over the battlefield.
The instant the barrier formed, the Spirit