A silvery-white spatial rift tore open before Qi Wu. He stepped through, and the rift closed silently behind him.
A second later, he appeared above the walls of the North Gate.
Night wind poured out of the rift, blowing his white hair back. Rather than land immediately, he hovered in midair and surveyed the battlefield below.
The Imperial Capital's North Gate walls towered like a mountain range.
Every blue-gray brick had weathered a thousand years of wind and frost. Infused with spiritual energy, the defensive runes on the walls gleamed dark gold, packed densely from the base all the way to the battlements.
The walls stood a hundred meters high and more than fifty meters thick. This was one of the three great fortified cities whose construction the Human Emperor had personally overseen when Great Xia was founded.
An arrow tower stood every fifty meters along the walls, each topped with a spiritual-energy cannon aimed at the pitch-black plain beyond the city. Every charge lit a blazing white sphere against the night sky before firing with a roar, blasting a clearing of mangled flesh through the Demon horde.
But there were too many Demons. They surged from the far end of the plain, blanketing everything like a black tide. They filled the moat and climbed the outer walls, where the runes burned them to ash, only for more Demons to tread over those ashes and keep climbing. Their numbers were measured not in individuals, but in waves. One wave receded, and another rose, endlessly, as though the entire plain outside the city were itself a colossal beast, opening its jaws to swallow the Imperial Capital whole.
And at the very center of that tide of Demons, that thing drew closer, step by step.
A teleportation core, a flesh nexus!
Qi