Myriad Rivers to the Sea

The Koi Soul slammed into the iridescent surface of the Temporal Dao Stone bubble. Empowered by the Whale, the Water Buffalo and the Fisherman, the collision defied what everyone thought.

For a single heartbeat, the void held its breath. There was no thunderous roar or shockwave of displaced air. There was only the terrifying and conceptual sound of a fundamental law cracking.

A spiderweb of brilliant and blinding fractures spread across the surface of the massive anomaly. The temporal energy inside the bubble shrieked, a high-pitched vibration that rattled the very souls of the leaders watching from behind.

"He did it!" The Li Clan Patriarch breathed as his blurred form trembled with disbelief. "He shattered a Dao Stone."

But the triumph was premature.

The Dao Stone was a natural treasure possessing a vicious pseudo sentience. As the massive bubble began to shatter and fall apart, the temporal laws did not dissipate harmlessly into the void. Instead the anomaly retaliated. It reacted like a severed tendon snapping back, violently condensing all of its remaining energy.

The expanding shards of the bubble halted in mid air and began reversing their trajectory. In an instant, the sphere covering the trapped army collapsed inward. It shrank with terrifying speed and was wrapping entirely around the single source that had dared to fracture it.

It wrapped around Li Yu.

The Golden Koi thrashed wildly with its temporal powers flaring. It tried to fight back against the collapsing walls of time. The Whale pulsed with fury and Muddy braced its ethereal hooves. But it was entirely useless.

The energy that was meant to encompass an entire army was now concentrated into a sphere barely ten feet wide. The temporal pressure spiked many times over. The Nascent Souls were violently compressed and forced back into Li Yu’s body as the shimmering and impenetrable cage locked tightly around him.

"NO!" Zhan Tielan screamed as her love shattered her disciplined composure. The leaders realized the horror of what had just occurred. They surged forward and abandoned all caution.

Tielan reached the condensed bubble first. She swung Doom Cracker with a devastating, overhead strike. The blunt hammer struck the small bubble. It didn't even leave a ripple. kinetic force was perfectly defected and violently threw Tielan backward into the void.

The leader of the Leviathan Smashing Vanguard roared. His body expanded as he channeled the destructive Qi of the abyss. He struck the bubble with his bare hands, trying to tear at the temporal fabric. His fingers began to age and wither the moment they touched the bubble. This, forced him to pull back with a furious snarl.

The leader of the Golden Shell Phalanx drove overlapping defensive arrays into the barrier. He was trying to wedge the temporal laws apart. Gongsun Lian unleashed a torrent of sword arts and was attempting to disrupt the cycle of the stone.

Even Khaos moved. He summoned a vortex of void energy and was attempting to erase the surrounding space the bubble occupied. But the bubble was too dense, too heavily anchored in reality. It pushed back against his void laws. It was an immovable object of pure time.

They could not even get close enough to touch Li Yu. The energy formed an absolute barrier and was now isolating the young man in a prison.

The original space occupied by the Dao Stone trap was now empty. Because all the temporal energy had collapsed onto Li Yu, the army trapped within was instantly freed.

Thousands of elite cultivators, vessels and war beasts abruptly regained their senses and their ability to move. They fully expected to resume their desperate battle against the five enemy coalitions that had cornered them.

Instead, they found themselves staring at a graveyard.

The void was choked with the pulverized ash and shattered hulls of the Fiend Sovereign Armada and the Silent Oblivion Sect. And surrounding them was not an execution squad but a gigantic and unprecedented armada of allied forces.

At the center of the freed army stood a man radiating a commanding aura. Li Canghai, the immovable pillar of the defensive line. He was the first to regain his bearings and lowered his glowing Qi sword. His sharp eyes rapidly processed the impossible shift in the battlefield.

He immediately sensed the familiar presence of his wife nearby, along with the auras of the other leaders.

“Stay alert but do not move! Something has happened. Wait here for my command!” He ordered before going to see what had happened. He was piecing it together quickly.

Li Canghai shot forward and was flying toward the sealed dome that the leaders had erected. Sensing his approach, Khaos gestured. He parted the dark energy just enough to allow the general inside before shrinking the seal to encompass only the leaders, the furious Tielan and the ten-foot temporal bubble.

Li Canghai landed on the invisible floor of the sealed space. He looked around and was stunned.

"Tielan? VoidClaw?" Li Canghai said as his mind was processing. "You broke the blockade? How did you free us? I thought we were dead..."

His words trailed off. His eyes landed on the shimmering bubble floating in the center of the supreme leaders. He saw the young man trapped inside. The breath was knocked from Li Canghai’s lungs. A physical blow to the heart could not have staggered him more.

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"Yu'er," Li Canghai whispered as his face drained of all color.

The realization of everything that had happened hit him like a collapsing star. They hadn't just broken the trap. His son had been brought to the front lines. His son had traded places with him. Clearly his son was the key to them escaping.

"NO!" Li Canghai roared with a sound of such anguish it shook the sealed dome.

He lunged forward. His peerless Qi flared and instantly manifested a sword of brilliant light. He hacked frantically at the bubble. He was striking it over and over again but the temporal surface didn't even scratch. The feedback sent tremors up his arms. His attacks were cracking his own bones but he refused to stop until his Qi was completely spent.

He eventually fell backwards. Grief and rage consuming his mind now. He turned and his eyes locked onto the dark robed figure of Khaos.

"You!" Li Canghai bellowed at him. Just like Zhan Tielan had done before the battle began, he was pointing his trembling sword at the ancient warrior. "You promised! You swore to protect him! You were supposed to keep him safe and away from this slaughter! And you brought him here?! You let my son trade his life for mine?!"

Canghai surged forward and his Qi reignited as he prepared to strike Khaos down. He was now a spent force but it didn’t matter. Regardless of the difference in their power now, he was going to try.

Before his blade could fall, Zhan Tielan stepped into his path.

She caught the blade of his Qi sword with her bare hand. The sharp energy bit into her palm a bit and drew a bit of blood. It was clear he was a spent force after his furious rage at the bubble. She didn't flinch at all. Tears were streaming freely down her face but her eyes blazed with a fierce and uncompromising fire.

"Stop it, Canghai!" Tielan scolded as her voice was breaking but her grip was iron clad. "Do not strike the man who tried to save us! If you have that much rage in your heart, direct it towards the bastards who did this to him! Direct it at the main forces of the coalitions that brought that cursed stone to our doorstep!"

Li Canghai trembled and the Qi sword shattered into motes of light as he fell to his knees. He grabbed his wife’s hand and pulled her down with him as the two parents wept before the impenetrable prison of their child.

They had sacrificed everything and bore the guilt of abandoning him for years; all to ensure he would never have to shoulder the burden of this cosmic war. And now, he was paying the ultimate price for their failure.

Through it all, Khaos remained perfectly silent.

He did not defend his actions. He did not apologize. He stood with his arms crossed and his starry eyes locked unblinkingly onto Li Yu inside the bubble. No one knew what the ancient warrior was thinking. His expression was an unreadable mask of absolute stillness.

Behind the grieving parents, the blurred leaders of the two mysterious vanguards stood up. They had exhausted their supreme arts trying to break the bubble and their auras were erratic with barely contained fury.

The leader of the Leviathan Smashing Vanguard stepped forward towards Li Yu’s parents. His massive frame casting a long shadow.

"We are leaving," the Vanguard leader announced suddenly. His voice vibrated with a dark and lethal promise. He looked at Li Canghai and Zhan Tielan. "We are going to wipe out the forces that led to this. Every last remnant, every hidden base, every bloodline connected to the five coalitions. We will not let the Young Master's sacrifice be for nothing."

Li Canghai looked up from the void and his eyes were already bloodshot. He gritted his teeth, the strategist within him momentarily surfacing through the grief. "If it were that easy to wipe out those five forces, I would have done it before they ever managed to trap us! They are not so easy to deal with!"

The leader of the Golden Shell Phalanx looked down at the grieving father. Behind his blurred Qi shroud, his eyes narrowed. He wanted to say, “You failed because you are too weak.” But out of respect for the young man trapped in the bubble, he bit his tongue. He would not insult Li Yu’s father to his face.

Instead, the Phalanx leader spoke with a cold and terrifying calm. "You were fighting a defensive war, General Li. You were trying to maintain your troops, hold the territorial lines and preserve your supply routes. You fought with the burden of survival."

The Leviathan leader stepped up beside him. "We have no such burdens. We are completely fine with mutual destruction. We do not care about holding lines or preserving our troops. We will drag the enemy into the abyss with us and we will use their bodies and their blood as offerings to the Young Master on his path."

Without waiting for a response or asking for permission from the supreme commander, the two Vanguard leaders turned their backs. They walked directly through the boundary of the seal and stepped out into the open cosmos.

They appeared before their massive and hovering legions. The soldiers were waiting in silence. They could all feel the terrifying shift in their commanders' auras.

The two leaders dispelled their blurred Qi shrouds, revealing their true, battle scarred forms to the universe. They raised their fists to the heavens and their voices boomed across the void, echoing with the fanaticism of a holy war.

"Hear me! By the decrees of old!" The Leviathan leader roared as his voice reached every single soldier. "We will coat this cosmos in the blood of our enemies! Let them know our might! Let them tremble before us! It is time to finally bare our fangs and claws!"

He summoned an immense, blood red banner that unfurled in the void.

"Leviathan Smashing Vanguard! Leave no survivors!"

The leader of the Golden Shell Phalanx mirrored the action, summoning a massive golden banner that radiated unyielding resolve.

"Golden Shell Phalanx! Hold nothing back! Erase them from the annals of history!"

A roar that shook the very foundations of the surroundings erupted from the two legions. It was a realm shattering sound. It was the sound of rage and the foretelling of destruction to come. The elite soldiers, spirit vessels and war beasts surged forward as one after their leader. They had abandoned all defensive formations and were about to launch a suicidal and apocalyptic crusade into the enemy territories.

Inside the sealed dome, Gongsun Lian watched the two legions depart. She looked back at the shimmering temporal bubble. Her dark eyes lingered on Li Yu's frozen form. She turned and her dragon scale armor was clanking sharply.

"Where are you going, Lian?" Khaos asked softly without looking away from the bubble.

"To do my duty." Lian replied with her voice devoid of all warmth. It was the voice of the leader who had founded the Veiled Lotus.

She stepped through the seal herself and appeared before her ten elite fleets. She did not need to shout. She simply transmitted her intent through her divine sense to every soldier in her command.

"We follow the Vanguard," Lian ordered with her dark eyes flashing with lethal intent. "We too will pave a path in blood."

The Veiled Lotus fleets turned seamlessly and they too joined the apocalyptic charge. Three terrifying and before hidden legions had just been unleashed. They were driven by a single and terrifying purpose: unadulterated vengeance.