While Jiang Ding was undergoing his tribulation, the Immortal Sect had defeated the Ancient God Alliance's allied forces and won the war for the domain!
"But..."
"Really, I truly don't want to say 'but.'"
Myriad Mechanisms said helplessly, "Those bastards are gutless as rats and sly as foxes. They quickly spotted another weakness of the Immortal Sect Fleet: it can't split into large numbers of smaller forces."
"Once they realized that, they avoided the main battlefield entirely."
"They began sending individual groups of powerful fighters to strike from every direction. One Void Refining cultivator would lead a number of Spirit Transformation cultivators to attack Immortal Sect territory, slaughter its local institutions, or sweep away every Immortal Sect force in a lesser world."
"Sometimes even Dao Integration Divine Lords joined these piecemeal guerrilla attacks."
"The Immortal Sect once tried attacking the Weaving Sky Spider Clan's homeland to force them to defend it. It didn't work. They refused to fight a decisive battle, watched us destroy their homeland, and evacuated their people ahead of time. The Immortal Sect Fleet came up empty-handed."
"While the Immortal Sect Fleet was away, several Dao Integration Divine Lords joined forces in a surprise attack and captured several of our intermediate worlds. We only recently retook them."
"This kind of roaming guerrilla warfare truly suits the Immortal Dao's powerful individuals."
"If nothing changes, the Immortal Sect can only keep building arrays across its intermediate worlds and expanding the Citizen Fleet. We'd have to station an army group's fleet in every key intermediate world and grind away, bit by bit, year after year. After tens of thousands of years, we might have some chance of occupying the entire Ancient God Domain."
"The citizen population on the homeworld is now growing toward twenty trillion. As long as we have