Su Qingyuan stood near the core of the Chi Lineage formation, her hands firmly resting on the nearly shattered Wheel of Cause and Effect. The Fate Soul light flowing around her was like a river about to be extinguished, struggling to maintain the last vestiges of order beneath her palms.
She had forcibly suppressed her gaze back to the center of the formation, but her divine sense inevitably swept over the edge of the ravaged battlefield, where Profound Heaven Clan cultivators were falling one by one. She saw an elder who had once joked with her at the clan's elders' table raise his hand to help his severely wounded disciple, only to be pierced through the chest by a golden-blue Origin-Returning Blade in the next instant.
Her entire being dissipated into particles of light; she saw a young member of her tribe turn back in terror, his lips trembling as he tried to call her name, but the Fate Soul mark on his forehead was stripped away by an invisible force first, leaving a gap in his figure. Then, like a piece of text that had been completely erased, he vanished silently.
She even saw a Profound Heaven Clan expert attempting to form the final star map protective array, but the starlight that had just been unfurled only shone for a moment before several Dao Shadow Soldier simultaneously cut in, and the entire star map began to collapse from the center, along with the Fate Soul that supported the star map, being recycled into the endless military formation.
Su Qingyuan's shoulders trembled almost imperceptibly. For a moment, the Fate Soul force within her surged up, almost breaking free of the array's core and rushing outwards, but she ultimately suppressed that impulse.
She had already entered the Chi Lineage and stood on the lifeline of the Chi Lineage's formation. If she lost control at this moment, the Chi Lineage's only remaining path to survival would collapse on the spot, and the thousands of disciples who were still desperately maintaining the formation would die even faster and more thoroughly than those people from the Profound Heaven Clan.
She slowly closed her eyes once, and when she opened them again, all her emotions were suppressed to the deepest recesses of her eyes. Even her voice was so cold that it barely rose or fell. "Stabilize the core of the formation. No chaos allowed. Whoever disrupts it dies." As her words fell, she poured all her primordial Fate Soul into the core of the formation without reservation.
That force pushed outwards layer by layer along the wheel of cause and effect, as if using her own blood and bones to hold up a falling sky. She could not leave the formation, nor dared to leave it. All she could do was become the last bone of this formation.
At this moment, the outer battlefield had lost all semblance of order. Hundreds of thousands of cultivators had been almost completely slaughtered by the Dao Shadow Soldier in a short period of time. There were no mountains of corpses or seas of blood on the ground, because the vast majority of people didn't even deserve to leave behind corpses or blood. They were simply dismantled into the most primitive particles by wave after wave of merciless golden-blue Origin Returning Waves.
Even those particles would be completely absorbed by the entire legion in the next instant. The Dao Shadow Soldier also suffered continuous losses in the battle. Some were torn apart on the spot by forbidden primordial divine powers, while others were forcibly shattered into source fragments by the extreme burst of the Mystic Void Realm · Supreme level. However, those losses were barely noticeable when thrown into the boundless army formation. The shattered soldiers would even reassemble within the rear domain.
They rose again, raising their Origin-Returning Blade once more, as if the "losses" on this battlefield belonged only to the cultivators. Soon, all the Dao Shadow Soldier simultaneously changed their direction of advance, utterly Annihilation the remaining Rogue Cultivator and alien races, like a flood that had already completed its outer cleansing.
Finally, they all turned towards the defensive formation of the Lineage. Hua Yanzhi stood in front of the Hua Lineage's formation, his face almost distorted by the blood-red runes, his throat filled with an uncontrollable metallic taste of blood, yet he still roared desperately, "Don't be afraid! Everyone hold on! If the formation breaks, none of us will survive!"
Ju Anran was also loudly suppressing the chaos in the area. His voice was already hoarse, but he forcefully used the rhythm to shake off the growing panic inside the formation. "Stabilize your Fate Soul! As long as the formation is still there, we still have a chance to escape!" When they said these words, even they knew how slim the hope was, but at this time, even if it was just empty words, they had to make their disciples believe it first.
However, what truly dragged everyone into the abyss of despair was not the Dao Shadow Soldier's relentless approach, but the annihilation that the Phoenix then unleashed. As it slowly spread its wings, the heavens and earth were not ignited by flames first; instead, the entire universe seemed to be gently pressed down by an invisible hand, and everything came to a standstill. It was not that time froze, but that "meaning" itself suddenly lost its place.
Virtue, Righteousness, Propriety, Benevolence, and Trustworthiness—these five fundamental words that had defined countless civilizations, countless orders, and countless value systems—slowly peeled away from her. It wasn't as if the words were falling from her body, but rather as if the very roots of the universe's concept of "how things should be" were being uprooted inch by inch. The first to fall was "Benevolence." The instant it detached, Su Qingyuan felt an extremely terrifying void simultaneously appear in the auras of several disciples within her formation.
They no longer knew why they had to protect those around them, nor did they understand why they had to shield their fellow disciples from an attack. The instinctive connection that was originally based on kinship, brotherhood, and fellow disciples lost its name at that moment. Several disciples stood there blankly, as if all the meaning of "connection" had been suddenly taken away, and in the next instant, they were taken away by the Dao Shadow Soldier's Origin-Returning Blade.
Next to fall was "righteousness." When that word left the phoenix, everything on the entire battlefield—right and wrong, factions, oaths, and responsibilities—began to waver. Some disciples in the Hua Lineage Formation suddenly forgot why they were fighting, and for the first time, a dangerous hesitation appeared in the eyes of many young disciples in the Chi Lineage's Wheel of Cause and Effect. They seemed unable to comprehend where the judgment that "we must defend the formation at this moment" came from.
This hesitation lasted only a fleeting moment, but on a battlefield of this caliber, a single moment was enough to claim hundreds or even thousands of lives. Then came the "rites"—as they were stripped away, the last vestiges of precise coordination between the formations, maintained by rules, order, and position, began to loosen. The cooperation between the Hua Lineage and Shangguan Lineage became misaligned, and several rhythms within the Ju Lineage's sound sea even went completely awry.
The once-perfect, layered defenses instantly revealed large gaps; then, the "trust" fell, and the unity, promises, and trust on the entire battlefield evaporated almost simultaneously. Cultivators could no longer instinctively believe that each other would hold their positions, and many array nodes that were already on the verge of collapse completely lost their cohesion at this moment.
A large number of disciples were wiped out by the Dao Shadow Soldier who rushed in; finally, when the heaviest "virtue" was completely stripped from the center of the phoenix's tail feathers, the universe seemed to have been hollowed out from within by some kind of fundamental darkness, and all the upward support of civilization, morality, being a person, being a clan, being oneself, and being the world lost focus at that moment.
The disciples of the Lineage did not go mad or rebel because of this. They simply suddenly lost part of the basis for "why they should be themselves." Under such high-level pressure, losing the basis was equivalent to losing their chance to live. The whole world was eerily quiet. It was not peace, but a void deeper than the long night, left behind after even the word "peace" had been burned away.
In this long night where meaning was being gradually stripped away, the Five-Colored Realm Breaking Luan moved again. It existed there, yet never allowed anyone to truly see its form. At that moment, it seemed to appear simultaneously from the infinite distance, or perhaps from the depths of everyone's pupils, its five-colored, fragmented outline frantically switching between clarity and disintegration.
Anyone who tries to focus their attention on depicting, recognizing, or memorizing its form will shatter along with the act of observation the instant before they can "see clearly." A disciple of the Hua Lineage had just looked up, his pupils reflecting the colorful afterimage, and before he could even feel fear, his entire being silently disintegrated into a river of fine, five-colored dust. Not even the dust had a chance to truly touch the phoenix.
Then, just an arm's length away from it, the space vanished completely. Many disciples didn't even know what had happened; they only felt an incomprehensible, magnificent sight appear before them, and then they were gone. It shook its wings, but what it shed wasn't feathers, but fragments of its "form."
The fragments fell into the formations of the Lineage. The ground and space, the formation patterns and the physical body, everything with a shape began to blur, melt, and permeate each other. Several causal tablet shadows in the Chi Lineage's formation were the first to dissolve at their edges. Large areas of blood-gold patterns on the Hua Lineage screen were like ink that had been wiped away. The Ju Lineage's sonic barrier suffered large, invisible but fatal collapses in front of those tangible fragments.
Just as the two Primordial Chaos Origin Beast Huang were chipping away at the will and formations of the four Lineage to their Limit, the long-awaited Dao Shadow Soldier finally rushed forward. They were silent, orderly, and without the slightest hesitation, as if they had finally received the final order to annihilate them. Countless golden-blue figures pressed down on the remnants of the Lineage's formations from all directions. Wherever the Origin-Returning Blade passed, every layer of the formation's defenses was rapidly dismantled.
The Hua Lineage was the first to bear the brunt of the attack. The Blood Gold Book Curtain, already teetering on the brink of collapse under the combined influence of the Five Virtues Falling to Earth and the Formless Hua Yanzhi, was still desperately trying to get its disciples to stabilize the array patterns when a squad of Dao Shadow Soldier crashed into the edge of the book curtain like tearing through a tide. The life pattern walls formed by the disciples only lasted for half a breath before being neatly sliced open. Hundreds of Hua Lineage members were reduced to fragments at the same time, and the blood-red main pattern in the center of the book curtain also shattered at that moment. The entire Hua Lineage's grand array was the first to explode.
The shattered light waves sent the disciples in the back rows flying, and the Hua Lineage's formation instantly collapsed. The Ju Lineage followed closely behind. Their sea of sound had already lost its rhythm in the previous waves of attacks. Ju Junyao and Ju Muyao, both heavily injured, were barely holding on to their cores. But when the second wave of Dao Shadow Soldier cut in from the flanks, the melody that had been barely able to continue was completely disrupted. The entire sea of sound felt as if it had been choked from the center.
Instantly, it collapsed into countless scattered ripples, and large numbers of Ju Lineage fell, losing even the ability to maintain their rhythm. The Shangguan Lineage's spatial barrier then collapsed, and several layers of dimensional prisms were forcibly smoothed out by the Dao Shadow Soldier's Returning Origin Ripples. Shangguan Jinyan and Shangguan Xingci, who were already severely injured, were instantly shaken to the point of losing their Fate Soul under this impact.
Large numbers of disciples plummeted into nothingness along with the spatial rift. The Chi Lineage held on until the very end; the Wheel of Cause and Effect, thanks to the desperate efforts of Su Qingyuan, Chi Chengyu, Chi Ruoyao, and Chi Yueyin, barely maintained its outline. But then, a massive number of Dao Shadow Soldier simultaneously crashed into them from the front, flanks, and overhead.
As the oppressive aura of the two Source Beast pressed down again at the same instant, a massive crack finally appeared on the wheel, running the entire length of it. Chi Chengyu felt a sweet taste in his throat, and blood almost filled half of the array's core. Chi Ruoyao was thrown backward by the shock, and Su Qingyuan forcefully pushed her own source energy in another layer.
That's how the entire formation wasn't completely shattered in that instant. But everyone could see that the defenses of the Lineage were being torn apart one by one. The Hua Lineage collapsed first, followed by the Ju Lineage, then the Shangguan Lineage family, and the Chi Lineage was on its last breath. The entire outer perimeter of the Azure Wood Divine Forest had been forced to the brink of complete collapse.