The moment nuclear bombs scoured the surroundings of Cloud-Raising Immortal City and tens of thousands of spell cultivators turned to ash, Xiao Linyue and Shen Longcheng almost simultaneously stopped fighting in the distant sky and turned their attention toward it.
"How could this happen?"
Sensing something, Xiao Linyue looked across the void and saw a young man in an alloy combat suit appear above Cloud-Raising Immortal City.
He wore an Artificial Body that unmistakably exuded the aura of a puppet and sat casually on a Mechanized Flying Chair resembling an Iron Throne, drifting like a little boat.
On either side stood a lovely puppet maiden with a sword at her waist, each watching the devastation below with an utterly unruffled expression on her cold, beautiful face.
Gales swept through the surroundings, dispersing the rising mushroom clouds. Below, craters large and small connected with one another, and stretches of earth had been baked into hardened slabs of ceramic. Many spell cultivator disciples had been erased from the world so thoroughly that not even their remains were left.
Only near the immortal city had several thousand people survived. They looked back at the rear army, frozen like wooden chickens, horror on their faces.
They neither fled nor cried out or screamed. They simply stared blankly, as though struck senseless.
"This is the cruelty of war. When cultivators fight in ordinary times, it is mostly a struggle over interests in the underworld. The interests within their reach and the people they encounter have already determined who their enemies will be."
"In an ordinary vendetta, you would not be left utterly powerless to fight back. At worst, you would be outmatched and your corpse left in the wilderness."
"But in wartime, no one can say what they will encounter. You might cultivate bitterly for