Chapter 1305: Carnage and Blood Beneath

Darkness spread through the ravine and swallowed all twelve Wardens before their attacks could reach him.

The Void rolled over them in one soundless black tide, thick enough to erase the frozen ravine itself. Sight vanished first, devoured so completely that even the pale glow inside the Wardens’ eyes disappeared from one another. Sound followed moments later, every scrape of claw, rush of breath and crack of ice sinking into the hollow dark until the silence became oppressive enough to feel physical.

Their other senses began betraying them.

The cold beneath their feet seemed to shift from one direction to another. Nearby bodies appeared impossibly distant before suddenly feeling close enough to touch. Spiritual perception bent upon itself, returning warped impressions and phantom movements until the Wardens could no longer tell whether Phei stood ten meters away, directly behind them or somewhere outside the darkness entirely.

They remained fully conscious through it all, which only made the experience worse. Their minds still worked, their instincts still screamed and every sense they depended upon simply fed them lies.

One Warden reacted to movement it thought belonged to Phei and swung its weapon with enough force to split the air.

Metal struck flesh.

A furious screech tore through the darkness from one of its own companions.

Somewhere beyond their useless senses, Phei winced: "That’s unfortunate."

True Void Steps swallowed him before the first Warden could even understand what it had struck. A heartbeat later, something cold passed through a throat and a head rolled across the frozen ground. Phei disappeared before the corpse finished falling, reappearing beside another Warden as his blade whispered through darkness and separated a second head from its shoulders.

The remaining Wardens unleashed everything they had.

Ice blades ripped outward. Claws tore through empty blackness, great waves of frozen essence exploded in every direction and carved trenches through the ravine, yet blindly destroying the space around them achieved very little against someone who no longer needed to cross that space normally.

Phei moved through the hollow dark as though it were part of his own body, entering one patch of Void and emerging from another before his victims could even register that he had arrived.

A black blade entered the back of one Warden’s skull and burst from between its jaws.

Phei vanished with the weapon still wet.

Another turned toward the faint disturbance and lost both arms before it completed the motion. The creature screamed, stumbled backward and immediately collided with a companion that drove a frozen claw through its chest by mistake.

Farther away, another Warden finally abandoned the attempt to fight and rushed toward what it believed was the edge of the darkness, only to smash headfirst into a thick wall of Void-Ice Phei had already raised around the ravine.

It staggered away from the impact.

Phei appeared behind it; his sword entered beneath the skull.

By the time the darkness finally receded, twelve bodies lay scattered across the frozen ravine in ugly silence. Several had died by Phei’s hand. Others had mutilated one another while desperately attacking things their ruined senses insisted were there.

Blood steamed faintly against the ice before the cold began taking it.

Phei stood among them and looked over the carnage.

He had learned the beginning of that trick from what the Void had done in Anactica.

What happened there had been infinitely more horrifying.

That darkness had swallowed more than sight and sound; distance itself had become meaningless inside it and power had gone silent where World Transcendents had been reduced to souls trapped inside a black nowhere and uncertain whether their fate.

Phei could reproduce only a miserable shadow of that nightmare, yet even that shadow was vicious enough. Within a limited region, he could drown sight, sound and spiritual perception beneath Void, corrupt every attempt at orientation and then move through the same darkness with True Void Steps while everyone inside it stumbled through a world that had stopped making sense.

Against enemies near his present level, that was already grotesquely unfair.

Still, trapping a dozen creatures inside the Void and butchering them one by one was hardly the most efficient answer to the army waiting farther ahead.

Scale was.

Phei had range now.

Real range.

He could turn blood suspended kilometers away into weapons with barely more than a thought. He could drag storms from the frozen essence saturating the Primordial Frozen Zone, raise forests and mountains of Void-Ice beneath an advancing army and send attacks through hollows from directions ordinary perception could barely understand.

The deeper he travelled, the less the Frozen Zone felt like hostile territory around him.

It was becoming an arsenal.

Every glacier offered him ice, every blizzard brought more frozen essence into reach, the dead beast left blood behind and shadowed fracture, cavern and hollow gave the darkness and shadow another mouth through which Phei could attack.

He was learning how to make their own world help kill them.

Lust Reality would have been another horrifying answer if the creatures carried desires rich enough to justify using it. Most did not; Hunger Touch brushed through their souls and found little beyond primitive urges sharpened by this frozen hell: hunger, survival, territorial rage, obedience to the Zone Lord and the instinct to tear apart anything that did not belong.

Those desires could still be used.

They simply were not worth the trouble.

Why imprison one beast inside Lust Reality when Phei could raise a rain of Void-Ice and Primordial Blood and slaughter a hundred in the same span?

That was the problem the deeper armies presented.

Numbers!

Against one powerful cultivator, removing a soul from battle for a guaranteed minimum of four hours was obscene but against thousands of creatures trampling over one another to reach him, dedicating Lust Reality to one target while the rest continued trying to chew through his face felt almost courteous.

Phei had become many things during the past year.

Courteous preywas nowhere on the list.

The only part that made him regret ignoring Lust Reality was Soul Energy. The World Transcendents trapped within it had shown him exactly how valuable powerful souls could become. Killing through Lust Reality fed him far more Soul Energy than reducing a body to pieces outside it, and one sufficiently monstrous soul could provide what ridiculous numbers of ordinary beasts barely approached.

Phei looked toward another swarm descending through the distant storm, enormous shadows cutting through whiteout as their screams rolled across the glaciers.

"Shame none of you are worth the trouble."

The swarm answered with an enraged chorus.

Phei smiled wider. "Come prove me wrong."

***

The next several hours offered him very little opportunity for conversation.

By the time the Ice Dragon finally caught up, the endless white of the Primordial Frozen Zone had been drowned beneath red.

Bodies covered the plain for kilometers.

Some remained nearly whole, immense frozen shapes sprawled where Phei’s attacks had finally stopped them, while others had been dismantled so completely that wings, claws, skulls and armored slabs of meat littered the broken ice between them. Dark blood had soaked into the snow and frozen there in great glossy sheets, turning whole sections of the battlefield into crimson-black glass beneath the pallid light.

The place smelled faintly metallic blood beneath the cold.

At the center of that slaughter sat Phei.

He rested cross-legged upon the ice with his eyes closed and his shoulders were loose, strangely peaceful despite the carrion field surrounding him.

Blood Essence streamed toward him from every direction.

The Ice Dragon descended several hundred meters away, immense crystalline wings pushing aside the frozen air before her body settled carefully among the dead legion. The injuries she had suffered earlier were already hidden beneath newly restored scales, leaving almost nothing to suggest that Rimeleeches and Glacial Skyrays had once been tearing into her flesh and smashing her through frozen cliffs.

Phei did not move:

Blood Essence kept coming.

Thin crimson streams rose from scattered corpses and travelled toward him across the battlefield. Some came from blood still pooled beneath ruined bodies, while richer currents emerged from deeper within the dead, carrying the refined vitality of creatures that had spent their entire lives surviving a place specifically designed to kill almost everything born inside it.

The streams converged upon Phei until the air surrounding him looked threaded with veins.

He had learned months earlier that battlefields like this were almost cultivation grounds prepared specifically for Primordial Blood.

Where else could he gather this much powerful Blood Essence in one place?

More importantly, where else would the owners of the much ocean Blood Essence already be dead and therefore unusually cooperative?

Every large battle had become another opportunity to deepen his understanding of Primordial Essence.

Phei killed, drew what remained from their spilling blood and absorbed the Blood Essence to cultivate and temper his Primordial Blood to higher levels and understanding. As the battles grew larger, the scale of what he could command grew with them. Streams that once required deliberate focus now curled toward him with an idle thought, while blood scattered across kilometers could be divided into thousands of separate currents without Phei losing awareness of any of them.

Beside him rested the Blood Fiend.

Without Phei inside it, the twelve-meter abomination knelt upon one knee like some profane guardian left behind after an ancient massacre. Its dark-red armor possessed none of the stillness of ordinary metal. Every plate gave a faint, slow contraction, the surface tightening and relaxing beneath a rhythm disturbingly close to breathing. Black fluid crawled through the joints and beneath the overlapping plates, occasionally pushing outward in thin tendrils before retreating into the armor again.

The helm faced forward but its empty eye-slits remained dark.

Even seated and motionless, the thing looked as though it might turn its head at any moment.