The howling wind inside the Black-Crag Pass reached a deafening pitch, whistling through the narrow, ironstone cliffs like the shrieks of a thousand trapped souls. Swirling curtains of dark ice dust and white mountain snow danced across the frozen stone path, beating relentlessly against the colossal, fifty-foot black iron walls of the Blood-Iron Citadel.
Yet, despite the roaring gale and the oppressive presence of a thousand heavily armored rogue cultivators stationed along the high ramparts, the narrow gorge felt horrifyingly quiet.
At the absolute center of the citadel's gatehouse, the Blood-Axe Tyrant stood towering over his army. His massive, seven-foot frame was encased in obsidian-grade steel, and his hands gripped the six-foot blood-iron battleaxe with white-knuckled intensity. His blood-red eyes, burning with a mixture of raw excitement and deep-seated caution, were locked entirely upon the two solitary figures walking through the snow mist thirty yards below.
To any ordinary man, the sight was almost absurd: a solitary traveler in a dark, torn coat walking with his hands in his pockets, accompanied by a small girl carrying a flickering pink lotus lantern.
However, the Blood-Axe Tyrant was a Stage-5 High-Grade Sovereign who had survived fifty years of brutal warfare in the Western Continent. He could feel it—an invisible, abyssal pressure that emanated from the walking man! It was not a wave of spiritual Qi or a display of core energy; it was the absolute, crushing presence of a physical constitution so dense that even the surrounding atmospheric space seemed to curve subtly around his broad shoulders!
"He isn't stopping..." A Stage-4 elite captain standing beside the Tyrant whispered, his voice trembling as cold sweat soaked his inner armor. "Grand Master... he isn't even looking at our ballistas!"
"SILENCE, YOU COWARD!" The Blood-Axe Tyrant roared, his booming voice cutting through the howl of the mountain gale. He slammed the butt of his heavy battleaxe onto the iron floorboards, sending a ripple of crimson solar fire across the ramparts. "He is bluffing! His meridians are frozen by the Void-Piercing Needle! He is nothing more than a crippled lion trying to scare wolves with his shadow!"
The Tyrant raised his massive left arm high into the air, pointing his steel-clad finger directly down at Li-Wen's head!
"GRAND BLOOD-IRON SUPPRESSION ARRAY—ACTIVATE!" The Tyrant screamed with all his spiritual might!
HUMMMMM—!
The moment his command echoed across the gorge, three hundred deep crimson runes carved into the black iron walls of the citadel flared into blinding, blood-red light!
A massive, semi-transparent dome of blood-red gravity energy erupted from the fortress, instantly enveloping the entire three-mile expanse of the Black-Crag Pass! The air inside the gorge suddenly grew three hundred times heavier! The loose boulders resting along the cliff edges were crushed into fine powder under the sheer gravitational force! The very snow falling from the sky was smashed flat against the frozen stone path, turning the ground into a smooth mirror of crimson-tinted ice!
This was the ultimate trump card of the Iron-Blood Guild—an ancient, high-grade domain array designed specifically to lock spatial movement, suppress physical kinetic energy, and crush the heavy bone structure of any enemy caught within its perimeter!
Inside the crimson domain, the Blood-Axe Tyrant grinned savagely, his sharp teeth glistening in the red light. "Hahaha! How does three hundred times gravitational pressure feel, Northern Sovereign?! Even an ancient mountain earth-dragon would have its spine snapped under my domain!"
Down on the smooth, crimson-tinted ice floor of the gorge, Li-Wen's forward step did not tremble by a single millimeter.
His dark traveler's coat did not even flutter under the sudden three-hundred-fold gravity. His shoulders remained perfectly squared, his broad chest rising and falling in a slow, rhythmic breath. His hands stayed casually in his coat pockets, and his boot landed with the exact same, unhurried cadence as before.
To a man whose physical marrow contained the primordial density of absolute zero, three hundred times Earth's gravity was no more burdensome than a gentle autumn breeze resting upon a mountain peak.
Beside him, little Xiao-Yue blinked her large, clear eyes. The pink lotus lantern in her small hand flared with a soft, comforting ruby light that created a three-foot warm halo around them, effortlessly neutralizing the crimson array's suffocating pressure before it could touch her boots.
"Brother Li-Wen," Xiao-Yue said softly, glancing up at the sky which had turned dark red. "The sky looks like a big red tomato. Is it going to rain red juice?"
"It is not rain, Xiao-Yue," Li-Wen replied calmly, his voice flat and unyielding. "It is just rust."
"RUST?!" The Blood-Axe Tyrant's face twisted in pure rage upon hearing his pride and joy dismissed as mere rust! "YOU ARROGANT FOOL! FIRE THE SOUL-SHATTERING BALLISTAS! DROWN THEM IN IRON!"
SWOOSH—! SWOOSH—! SWOOSH—!
Thirty colossal, fifty-foot iron ballista bolts—each as thick as an ancient oak tree and tipped with soul-corroding black poison—were released simultaneously from the high ramparts!
Driven by heavy steel springs and the full power of the crimson gravity array, the thirty giant bolts tore through the air with deafening, ear-splitting sonic booms! The speed was so terrifying that the friction ignited the surrounding air, turning the thirty iron spears into a descending rain of roaring, red-and-black fire meteors!
The one thousand rogue cultivators on the ramparts cheered maniacally, convinced that no living creature in the mortal realm could survive thirty soul-shattering siege bolts at point-blank range!
Facing the descending rain of iron meteors, Li-Wen did not dodge. He did not raise his arms to block. He did not even draw the heavy blade from his back.
He simply took another calm step forward with his boot.
STOMP.
A single, microscopic ripple of sapphire-blue light expanded outward from beneath his boot heel.
BOOOOOOM—!
It was not a explosion of spiritual Qi. It was a pure, unadulterated shockwave of kinetic absolute zero that erupted straight up from the stone floor like an inverted waterfall of solid frost!
The thirty fifty-foot iron ballista bolts struck the rising sapphire shockwave mid-air!
CRUNCH—! CRACKLE—!
The moment the iron bolts touched the sapphire ripple, the roaring flames coating them were instantly snuffed out! The fifty-foot shafts of solid iron snap-froze in a microsecond, turning from dark iron into brittle, pale-blue glass, before completely shattering into billions of microscopic, sparkling frost-crystals that drifted harmlessly into the wind!
Thirty giant siege weapons—atomized mid-air without touching a single thread of Li-Wen's coat!
"WHAT?!"
"MY GOD! THE BALLISTAS WERE SHATTERED?!"
"HE DIDN'T EVEN TOUCH THEM! WHAT KIND OF MONSTROUS PHYSICAL FORCE IS THAT?!"
The loud, arrogant cheers of the one thousand rogue cultivators on the ramparts vanished instantly, replaced by a wave of pure, bone-chilling horror! Many of the Stage-3 and Stage-4 elite captains stumbled backward, their hands trembling so violently that their weapons clattered against the iron floorboards!
The Blood-Axe Tyrant's eyes dilated to the size of pinpricks. His heart pounded against his ribs like a heavy war drum. "No... impossible! Even if his physical body is at the Sovereign Realm, without spiritual Qi, he shouldn't be able to project kinetic force fifty feet into the air!"
Li-Wen stopped twenty paces in front of the colossal black iron gatehouse.
He slowly pulled his right hand out from his coat pocket. His hand was broad, thick, and covered in light, pale scars from centuries of physical refinement. He did not make a fist. He simply held his palm open, facing the fifty-foot-thick black iron gate of the citadel.
Deep within his lower spine, the dark-violet Void-Piercing Needle twitched slightly, its void poison trying to seep out. But before a single drop of poison could escape, the microscopic shell of absolute-zero ice around it tightened, completely crushing the poison's reaction.
Li-Wen channeled zero spiritual Qi. He relied purely on the raw, primordial mass stored within his physical bone structure.
He pushed his palm forward.
It was a slow, simple, almost gentle push.
BOOOOOOOOOOM—!
A physical air-cannon—a compressed cylinder of absolute, vacuum-dense atmosphere three hundred yards in diameter—erupted from his palm!
The fifty-foot-thick gate made of solid black iron and volcanic granite did not merely break or crack.
Under the sheer, unimaginable impact of the compressed air physical shockwave, the entire front structure of the Blood-Iron Citadel was violently erased!
CRUSH—! SHATTER—!
The massive black iron gate, the fifty-foot stone ramparts, the thirty ballista towers, and the gatehouse were instantly ground into fine, microscopic dust! A massive, three-hundred-yard gap was blasted cleanly through the center of the colossal fortress, as if a giant invisible hammer had slammed down from the heavens!
The three hundred red runes carved into the fortress shattered simultaneously, causing the Grand Blood-Iron Suppression Array to collapse into a cloud of useless, fading red sparks!
"AAAAAHHHH—!"
"HELP ME! THE FORTRESS IS COLLAPSING!"
Over four hundred rogue cultivators who were standing on the central ramparts were caught directly in the path of the physical shockwave! They didn't even have the chance to scream before their heavy armor, their bodies, and their weapons were completely atomized into clouds of pale blue frost-dust that swept down the gorge!
The remaining six hundred cultivators on the outer flanks were thrown violently into the air by the secondary wind pressure, crashing onto the jagged rocks of the surrounding cliffs like broken dolls!
In less than three seconds, the indestructible Blood-Iron Citadel that had guarded the mountain pass for fifty years was turned into a smoking crater of crushed stone and frozen dust!
Silence—absolute, horrifying silence—returned to the Black-Crag Pass.
The howling wind inside the gorge seemed to have been silenced by the sheer terror of the blow. The thick curtains of snow and black ice dust cleared completely, revealing the clear, pale winter sky above.
At the edge of the crater, half-buried under a pile of shattered black iron, the Blood-Axe Tyrant crawled out frantically.
His obsidian-grade steel armor was cracked in a dozen places, his face covered in blood and dust. His six-foot blood-iron battleaxe had snapped in half, its crimson aura completely extinguished. He looked at the three-hundred-yard wide empty gap where his giant citadel had stood just seconds ago, his mind completely collapsing into pure, unadulterated madness and terror!
"Monster..." The Tyrant whimpered, his raspy voice shaking uncontrollably as he dragged his bleeding body backward through the freezing snow. "You're not a human... You're a primordial calamity... A walking mountain of death!"
Li-Wen slowly lowered his right palm and tucked his hand back into his dark coat pocket. He did not even look at the shattered ruins of the fortress or the hundreds of dead cultivators scattered across the gorge.
He turned his dark, indifferent eyes toward the bleeding Tyrant kneeling in the snow before him.
"You said your domain crushes spines," Li-Wen said softly, his raspy voice carrying a flat, unyielding coldness that cut through the winter air. "Your iron was too soft."
"SPARE ME! PLEASE! I WILL GIVE YOU ALL THE TREASURES OF THE WESTERN MOUNTAINS!" The Blood-Axe Tyrant screamed in sheer, pathetic desperation, pressing his bloody forehead against the cold stone floor, weeping like a helpless child! "I WILL BE YOUR SLAVE! JUST SPARE MY LIFE—!"
Li-Wen did not speak another word. He did not even waste a flick of his finger on the begging man.
He simply stepped forward, walking right past the kneeling Tyrant.
CRACK.
As Li-Wen's boot landed on the stone floor three feet away from the Tyrant, the residual physical cold radiating from his foot swept over the man's body.
The Blood-Axe Tyrant's frantic begging froze mid-word. His blood, his flesh, his Stage-5 core energy, and his soul snap-froze into a solid block of pale-blue ice before shattering silently into a small heap of harmless frost-dust that melted into the snow.
The ruler of the border mountains, the Stage-5 High Sovereign who had terrorized the realm for half a century—erased from existence without Li-Wen even bestowing a second glance upon him!
The remaining few hundred surviving rogue cultivators who were scattered along the high cliff ledges watched this scene with wide, glassy eyes.
Not a single one of them dared to breathe. Not a single one dared to hold a weapon. They pressed their bodies tightly against the frozen rocks, praying with all their hearts that the solitary man in the dark coat would not look up at them.
Li-Wen continued walking along the smooth, stone path that led through the center of the shattered fortress, heading straight into the open mouth of the western mountain pass.
Beside him, little Xiao-Yue took her light, rhythmic steps, her small boots clicking softly against the stone. She held her pink lotus lantern high, looking at the clear path ahead with a bright, joyful expression.
"Look, Brother Li-Wen!" Xiao-Yue pointed her small finger toward the exit of the gorge. "The sun is super bright over there! The big black wall isn't blocking the road anymore!"
Li-Wen raised his dark eyes, looking out beyond the narrow ironstone cliffs of the Black-Crag Pass.
Beyond the mountain pass laid the true heart of the Western Continent—a vast, breathtaking expanse of rolling snow-covered plains, ancient forested valleys, and towering white mountain peaks stretching endlessly toward the horizon. In the far distance, majestic silver plumes of smoke rose from the bustling trading cities and ancient martial guilds of the Western Realm.
The sun shone brightly over the boundless western horizon, casting a warm, golden glow across the snow-covered earth.
"Yes, Xiao-Yue," Li-Wen murmured softly, his voice carrying an unyielding, steady weight into the crisp mountain wind as his hand gently enclosed her small fingers. "The road is open."
Side by side, the solitary Northern Sovereign and the small girl holding her pink lotus lantern walked through the shattered mouth of the Black-Crag Pass, stepping forward with unwavering, steady strides into the vast, ancient realms of the Western Continent.
See you in next chapter...