Li Xiaoya and the others naturally had no idea that they were in serious trouble...
Had they known, Li Xiaoya certainly would not have stopped beside a continent tens of thousands of miles across to recover and heal.
As it turned out!
Under ordinary circumstances, traveling aboard the Skyvault Skiff should have been much safer than flying without a flying boat. Besides, Ailishan and the others were so severely injured that they could not possibly fly all the way back themselves. A flying boat was naturally their best option...
However!
Even aboard a flying boat, they had run into trouble. As the Skyvault Skiff passed through a certain area, they unexpectedly encountered cultivators of the Insect Race.
The Insect Race's way of fighting had actually been explained before. They alone brought Great Void Stage cultivators of their race to the Race Battlefield...
It was not really that Li Xiaoya and the others had been careless. Rather, the Insect Race cultivators had deliberately set this up. An unexpected turn of events had left the Insect Race last among the Four Great Races in merit, much to their displeasure, so they had dispatched numerous cultivators specifically to ambush and kill cultivators of other races...
Only by killing cultivators of other races could they reduce the numbers of their rivals and prevent them from earning more merit in the short term. In fact, the centuries leading up to each merit reward distribution, held once every ten thousand years, were when the Race Battlefield truly descended into a massive free-for-all. They fought for their races, for falling behind brought considerable penalties, while the rewards were naturally plentiful. Both had an astonishing impact on the development of an entire race...
There had once been a race whose total merit originally ranked first, only to fall