Azure Cloud Gorge, on Qingzhou's border.
It was an immense natural rift stretching between the Hundred Thousand Mountains and Qingzhou's heartland. Its towering cliffs rose into the clouds, as though hewn by blades and axes. It had always been the vital choke point barring the Demon Race of the Hundred Thousand Mountains from advancing east.
Now, however, this once-formidable natural barrier had become a flesh-and-blood millstone of unspeakable carnage.
"Boom! Boom! Boom!"
The earth trembled, the mountains shook. Ancient Demon Beasts blanketed the landscape as far as the eye could see, surging like a black ocean, carrying a sky-high wave of foul stench and ferocity as they battered the already devastated defensive wall at the gorge's entrance.
Above the wall, the light screen of the City-Guarding Grand Formation had dimmed to a dying candle in the wind, ready to gutter out at any moment.
Severed limbs lay everywhere. Human cultivators' blood mingled with the green blood of Demon Beasts, pouring down through cracks in the wall like waterfalls and staining all of Azure Cloud Gorge a horrifying dark red. The reek of blood hung so thick in the air that it seemed almost solid, enough to make anyone retch.
Zhao Lie, a subordinate general of the Qingzhou Grand Commandant's Office, knelt on one knee amid the ruins atop the wall, gasping for breath.
His once-imposing silver plate armor had been torn beyond recognition. His left arm hung limp, and a horrific claw wound stretched from his left shoulder to his right abdomen, exposing bone beneath grotesquely curled flesh.
"General! The Third Defense Zone is about to fall! There are too many Demon Beasts, and the men have completely exhausted their spiritual power!"
A blood-soaked officer scrambled up to Zhao Lie, his voice trembling with undisguised despair and tears:
"We used