At the edge of the spatial rift, savage currents of void turbulence sliced through everything around them like countless invisible blades.
Yet before this deadly zone, where ordinary cultivators would have been ground to dust, dozens of figures radiating terrifying pressure hovered in midair like gods.
They were the Golden Core and Purple Abode Realm powerhouses who represented the highest military strength and authority of Qingzhou Prefecture in the Great Zhou Immortal Dynasty.
The Qingzhou Prefect wore purple-and-gold official robes, his expression as still as deep water.
The Southern Pacification General stood armored and armed, one hand resting on his sword hilt, his entire body exuding peerless killing intent tempered amid mountains of corpses and seas of blood.
Behind them, the patriarchs of Qingzhou's great aristocratic clans and sects stood ready for battle. The light of their magical treasures flickered around them as they prepared to confront any world-destroying demonic beasts that might charge out of this ancient fragment realm.
But when they finally saw the full extent of the fragment realm being drawn toward them, every one of these lofty powerhouses fell into deathly silence.
There were no abyssal demonic beasts blotting out the sky as they had expected, nor any barren, lifeless wasteland shrouded in poisonous miasma.
What met their eyes was an enormous, ancient black city.
Atop its walls and outside the city, hundreds of thousands of native cultivator troops, clad in heavy armor and bearing sharp weapons, stood in perfectly ordered, imposing formations steeped in the iron and blood of a hundred battles.
Although their cultivation levels varied, the fervent, death-defying aura of their united military soul made even the Southern Pacification General, a veteran commander of many years, feel his eyelid twitch.
And what struck them as even more unbelievable stood on the flattened mountaintop