The sacrificial rune blood formation had unexpectedly transported over a Wind-Breath Sea Bird.
For a time.
The entire place fell silent. No one knew what to say.
No one knew how much time passed before, under everyone's watchful eyes, the exhausted and bedraggled Wind-Breath Sea Bird feebly flapped her wings. Using the last of her strength, she rose from the sea, flew crookedly and unsteadily toward the shore, then finally toppled headfirst onto the beach. Unable to control her body, her tiny form rolled twice across the sand. Her soaked feathers became covered in countless grains of bloodstained sand, making her look utterly miserable.
Fortunately, the little thing had made it ashore and retrieved her tiny life.
Had she remained at sea, perhaps the next wave would have drowned the poor little creature on her last breath.
"Cough, cough!" The lion-headed, human-faced leader finally snapped out of his daze and hastily coughed twice, forcing out a smile. "Th-this little bird may be the pet of one of the ten Sovereign Lords. It came to give us some sort of hint. Cough, yes, that must be it!"
He did not dare imagine the grave consequences if the spacetime vortex had swallowed the ten Heaven Realm Sovereign Lords because his blood-sacrifice rune formation had been imperfectly constructed. Although traveling from the Heaven Realm to the Heaven-Piercing Tower was no longer a problem, especially through this Receiving Rune Blood Formation... which greatly increased the success rate of teleportation, the spacetime rifts and vortices that normally devoured at least half the stowaways could, with this Receiving Rune Blood Formation, ensure a passage rate of over seventy percent. Martial Realm warriors with the strength of Sovereign Lords had an unharmed passage rate of over ninety percent.
Originally, this had been the best possible assignment. So