Thunder stirred in the nine heavens. Rain filling the sky turned to crystalline beads of ice and scattered across the level lake, ringing like clashing metal and stone.
Gales howled. The watery essence of a thousand acres gathered into a swirling cloud formation, raging through the night sky as its chill invaded ten miles of open plain!
Yang Huaxian stood suspended in the air, his long robe whipping wildly in the wind. In the instant he raised his right hand, a cloud half a mile across gathered overhead, wind and thunder converging within it like the eye of a typhoon pressing down upon the ten-mile Water Yin Array!
Xie Jinhuan stood with his long spear held crosswise. At the sight of such heavenly might, his eyes cleared somewhat. He raised a hand to put on the Vermilion Bird mask, then formed a seal with one hand and slapped the ground:
"Rise!"
Rumble, rumble, rumble...
Golden-red radiance spread from his shoulders into the ice beneath his feet. In an instant, eight walls of fire rose around him. Blazing True Fire, bearing the might to burn the heavens, sealed off the thirty feet around him into a forbidden realm of blazing sun that the freezing cold could not approach.
Empress Dowager Guo struggled to call upon the power of heaven and earth here. Facing the vast oceanic water essence converging from every direction, she held her sword upright before her. Scarlet flames surged over its blade, and supreme yang gang qi, condensed into tangible form, created another Vermilion Bird phantom within the Eight-Gate Burning Array.
But however powerful their divine abilities and spells were, they currently amounted to no more than mortal strength.
Yang Huaxian, meanwhile, used Chaochitai as a medium to harness the heavenly might of this region, with a virtually