After Pan Xuan and the Twelve Ancestral Witches agreed on their plan, they did not set out immediately.
The Blood Sea was Minghe's domain, after all. He had cultivated his power there for countless ages, and no one knew how many hidden measures he had laid within it.
The Witch Clan was making this journey to investigate, not to provoke, so they naturally had to act as discreetly as possible.
Pan Xuan used the Primordial Heaven-Measuring Ruler's Xuanhuang Merit Light to conceal the auras of all thirteen of them beneath layer upon layer, then channeled his Vast Righteous Qi to lay an invisible barrier around them, cutting off all outside perception.
Di Jiang enveloped the thirteen with the power of space, making their figures flicker in and out of view within space itself. Even someone standing right beside them would have had difficulty detecting their presence.
Zhu Jiuyin used the power of time to disrupt the temporal traces they left behind, leaving any means of divining their movements with no foothold.
The thirteen turned into streaks of light, rising from the direction of Mount Buzhou and flying toward the deepest reaches of the Primordial World's lands.
The Blood Sea lay at the edge of the Primordial World. The farther they flew in that direction, the thinner the spiritual energy between heaven and earth became, replaced by a faint, elusive scent of blood.
At first, that scent was so faint that it was almost imperceptible unless they deliberately tried to sense it.
But as the thirteen ventured farther, the bloody stench grew stronger and stronger. Eventually, even the air seemed to turn pale red, and every breath carried a rusty, sickly sweetness.
On the ground, the vegetation gradually thinned, changing from dense forests to low shrubs, from shrubs to withered yellow