On the twenty-eighth day of the first month, at the Southern Foothills of Yi, on the front line where the armies of the Central Province and the Southern Wilds clashed.
Hastily piled earthen forts stood like burial mounds across a broad forest clearing. Felled trees lay crisscrossed among them, forming natural obstacles.
Here and there, fences rose, restrictions shimmered into view, and small formation arrays linked together like spiderwebs.
Amid explosions that rolled one after another like thunder, masses of Ape-Man Warriors armed with sabers and halberds charged the Southern Wilds' positions.
This was the Central Province's spirit creature army.
These ape-men were manifested spirit creatures that experts of the great sects had created and nurtured over long years before bringing them to the front and deploying them in battle. Although no individual Spirit Tamer controlled them as their host, their intelligence allowed them to understand signals and obey orders, making them dependable soldiers of exceptional quality.
Each possessed martial strength around the human rank fifth turn. Joined together in military formations, they could inflict substantial casualties even on human rank experts.
The Spirit Tamers of the Southern Wilds soon came under tremendous pressure. Spirit creatures and soldiers on both sides fell again and again, while those behind them surged forward, their battle cries shaking the heavens.
The Southern Wilds had also committed large numbers of manifested spirit creatures of three kinds: tree people, ape-men, and gray wolves.
But as pitch-black, fist-sized objects resembling lumps of coal came hurtling over, roaring explosions engulfed the entire position. Flames shot skyward, and searing waves of heat struck with violent blasts of air. Spirit creatures and even Spirit Tamers were repeatedly thrown off their feet, injured by the shock waves, or struck by stray projectiles.
The Southern Wilds army began to retreat, and