City of the Sky Lake.
One had to admit, just looking at the name, it was an incredibly beautiful place.
And indeed, it was.
Stretching down from the ridge of the majestic Yulong Mountains, the terrain suddenly sank inward, forming an almost endless, massive basin.
The basin was filled with clear, shallow water. From afar, the earth looked as if it were embedded with a giant mirror, reflecting a deep, clear blue like the sky itself.
It was daytime now. The weather was clear and cloudless, and the sunlight was not blinding.
But the sky overhead was far from lonely.
Looking up, one could see the massive, shattered wreckage of 【S-002】 and its sky-blotting, colossal ring.
It stretched diagonally across the horizon, presenting an incredibly shocking visual spectacle.
What was most terrifying was that its massive, torn fissure had just rotated to the very center of the celestial body.
Like a cold, lifeless, giant eye in the heavens, it stared unblinkingly down at every blade of grass and tree on this earth.
Unbeknownst to anyone, the legendary Month of Divine Sight had quietly arrived.
This hollowed-out celestial body was casting a divine gaze down upon the mortal realm.
Below, within the orderly and silent City of the Sky Lake, a man and a woman were walking one after the other.
“Hiss... Hey lady, look at this thing. It's actually pretty creepy.”
The speaker was a man dressed in simple, ancient white robes.
He withdrew his gaze from on high and muttered toward the red-clad figure walking ahead, completely ignoring him.
“Coward.”
The woman in red kept walking ahead without turning her head, merely letting out a cold snort upon hearing his words.
With a stride of her long legs, she stepped heavily onto an arched bridge ahead, built from pure white marble.
“Have you stayed in the Deep Abyss so long that your courage has completely shriveled?”
“To think you'd be frightened by something that's been hanging over your head all this time.”
“Hey, hey, I'm not talking about 【S-002】,” the man in white quickly spoke up to interrupt, sounding unconvinced.
He followed closely behind the woman in red up the arched bridge, stopping at the highest point of the span.
“What I'm saying is creepy... is this city.”
His gaze traveled down the waterway beneath the bridge, which had been artificially dredged and reinforced.
On both sides of the waterway were dense clusters of beautifully constructed white marble buildings.
These crisscrossing waterways merged into a deeper, wider central main canal, cutting these beautiful buildings into extremely neat, grid-like sections.
There were even some modified vessels designed for navigating narrow waters moored on the surface.
But now, they were scattered sparsely along the canal, swaying gently in the dead silence with the ripples stirred by the breeze.
This was a city built entirely on the water.
Judging by the streets, which were so clean they didn't have a speck of dust, and the exquisite layout, the level of civilization and technology here was terrifyingly high.
Compared to the precarious Wilderness, the people who once lived here must have led incredibly prosperous lives.
But...
“Where is everyone?”
“Where did they all die off to?”
Having walked a good distance ahead, the woman in red noticed the man in white hadn't kept up. Turning back with some displeasure, she shouted:
This time, the man in white didn't fire back with his usual snark.
He simply stood at the top of the bridge with a somber expression, gently waving his sleeve.
Whoosh—
A palm-sized, pure white, and delicate porcelain bottle suddenly flew out from the side of his somewhat translucent body.
The small porcelain bottle drifted over the wide canal. Its mouth suddenly flipped upside down, pointing directly at the clear lake water below.
In an instant, the water that had been as calm as a mirror began to churn violently without any warning!
With the area directly beneath the bottle's mouth as the center, a dark vortex slowly took shape.
As the vortex expanded wildly, the water at the center was rapidly drained by an overwhelmingly powerful force, exposing the dark silt that had lain dormant at the bottom for who knew how long.
However, what was exposed to the sunlight, mixed with the silt, was not lake-bottom fish or pebbles.
It was countless eerie, grayish-white, completely shriveled limbs.
They were densely packed, twisted and tangled together.
They reached out from the muddy silt, frozen in their final, painful postures of life, feebly clawing toward the deep blue sky.
As far as the eye could see, these skeletons were so dense they looked like coral of white bone growing and spreading rampantly underwater.
They stretched along the entire orderly riverbed, extending wildly toward every corner of the city.
Beneath this clear water, beautiful enough to intoxicate anyone, lay a mass grave built from countless white bones.
Moreover, judging by the clarity of the water, this horrific massacre had likely taken place a very long time ago.
“See? The people are all here.”
The man in white spoke in a low voice.
“This city... no longer has any living people.”
A gust of wind blew by, making a sound like a low sob.
The woman in red stepped up to the bridge and glanced down, her face devoid of expression.
She reached out, grabbed the man in white by his collar, and dragged him forward with simple, brute force.
“I was asking where you went!”
“Hey, hey, hey! Men and women shouldn't touch so freely! What are you doing? Let go of me!”
The man in white was instantly jarred out of his somber mood.
He protested loudly while struggling desperately under her iron grip.
“Hmph, you so-called orthodox sects are nothing but trouble.”
“It's bad enough with humans, but even a spiritual weapon that took human form is this prissy!”
The woman in red released her grip with some impatience, responding coldly.
“Wait, you furnace spirit, you're a woman at least.”
“Faced with an entire city of refined, vengeful souls, don't you have even a shred of sympathy?”
The man in white finally broke free from her grasp, grimacing as he smoothed out his disheveled Daoist robes.
“Sympathy? Are you kidding me?”
The woman in red shot him a cold, sidelong glance.
“Back when I was slaughtering everyone in my path, I wasn't called some 'fire-spitting furnace'...”
“My true name back then was the 【Fiery Sacrifice Demon Cauldron】.”
At this point, her tone softened slightly.
“The tragedy of this blood sacrifice... Pops and that broken sword who screams about hacking people every day definitely know it better than anyone.”
“I'm afraid... during the previous few world resets, the situation on the surface wasn't any better than this.”
“The Lord of the Sky Lake City is practically cut from the same cloth as the Immortal Sword Venerable of back then when it comes to ruthlessness.”
As she spoke, the woman in red shifted her fiery eyes, directing her gaze toward the most central area of the City of the Sky Lake, far in the distance.
The sight there was nigh-miraculous.
A portion of the extremely grand, white marble buildings with sturdy outer walls actually floated several hundred meters high in the air like a floating island, defying all laws of physics.
There were absolutely no mechanical devices like external thrusters or anti-gravity propulsion around it.
It was precisely this seamlessness that gave the entire scene an incredibly discordant, terrifyingly sacred aura.
Beyond the perimeter of that floating island, a strange light covered in runes would occasionally flash.
Like a massive, translucent energy dome, it tightly enveloped the entire city in the sky.
“Cut the chatter, we have more important things to do right now.”
The man in white had finally finished tidying his appearance.
He reached out his hand to recall the small white porcelain bottle hovering in the air, rubbing his somewhat stiff face.
He, too, locked his gaze onto the high-altitude floating island in the distance that defied gravity.
Drooping his eyelids, he wore an expression of intense irritation, his voice dropping completely:
“【S-004】... All-Heaven Stellar Array.”
“This thing... even if that unreasonable, broken sword recovered to his peak, he probably wouldn't be able to hack through it anytime soon.”
“This is going to be really troublesome.”
The man in white had a look of utter disbelief on his face, his tone carrying a hint of frenzy.
“No way... This damn Dharma-ending world clearly doesn't have a single drop of spiritual energy to squeeze out.”
“How on earth did that guy up there force open such a top-tier array? Where did he get the energy?”
Hearing this, the woman in red let out a cold, mocking laugh.
She stretched her neck and jerked her chin forward.
“How else? Do you think he kept the living people of this entire city around just for show?”
“If it weren't an array of this caliber, there would be no need for a blood sacrifice of this entire city.”
“Hurry up and do your job.”
Hearing this, the man in white stopped his chatter, his eyes narrowing.
Closing his eyes, his fingers danced in front of his chest like a blur, rapidly forming various hand seals as he muttered under his breath.
“Well? Did you find it?”
The woman in red crossed her arms, urging him with a hint of impatience.
“Ah, don't rush me! Do you think this is child's play?”
“The All-Heaven Stellar Array has a total of one hundred and eight hidden core nodes, all interwoven and endlessly regenerating.”
“This most central, most lethal fatal point right before us is hidden the deepest.”
The man in white retorted casually without looking up, his hands still rapidly changing gestures.
“If the blood sacrifice in the city hadn't just finished, making the resentment and blood energy here so heavy that it exposed a flaw in the array's path...”
“...then with just the two of us minor spiritual weapons, we would be facing a dead end with absolutely no way to find it.”
“So at least give me a bit more time to calculate, big sister.”
Seeing that he had indeed reached the critical moment of breaking the array, the woman in red curled her lip and stepped aside.
After a brief moment of thought, she waved her hand, directly summoning a simple, ancient medicine furnace that was entirely covered in burning, dark-red flames.
Leaping lightly onto it, she stood on the rim of the cauldron and flew a hundred meters into the air.
Standing at that high vantage point, she narrowed her eyes and scanned the surroundings.
From this perspective, the entire panorama of the City of the Sky Lake was finally laid bare before her eyes.
This grand city, built in the basin lake, actually presented a perfectly circular, giant disc-like structure in its overall layout.
Crisscrossing artificial waterways cut frantically through the land, converging perfectly at countless precise geometric circular coordinates.
Like slicing a cake, they divided the entire city into countless arc-shaped grids.
Up in the sky, the woman in red let out a cold snort of disgust.
“He harbored ill intentions from the very start.”
Before her voice could fade, a sudden, thunderous boom echoed from the uniform white buildings in the distance!
Immediately after, the earth shook violently as a massive swath of beautiful marble high-rises collapsed like building blocks crushed by a giant beast, kicking up vast clouds of dust.
The woman in red knit her brows slightly.
She coldly withdrew her gaze, making no move to investigate the mysterious explosion.
Instead, she lightly tapped her toe against the medicine furnace beneath her feet, descending to the ground like a streak of flowing fire.
She landed beside the man in white, who was still frantically deducing with his eyes closed and hands forming seals.
“Are you done yet? From up there, it looked like someone has already started fighting.”
“If we move any slower, we're going to be the last ones to destroy our core node.”
“Ours is the most important core node, so of course we'd be the last... Alright, alright, stop rushing me! Look, I found it!”
Muttering under his breath, the man in white snapped his eyes open, locking his gaze directly onto a specific direction.
With a cold expression, the woman in red reached out.
Grabbing him like a little chick, she forcefully hauled the man in white onto her blazing cauldron.
“Hold on tight!”
The two of them completely ignored all obstacles in their path.
The giant cauldron kicked up a massive wave of air as it tore along the waterways of the wasteland, crashing headlong through everything and collapsing countless pristine white modern buildings along the way.
Finally, with a deafening crash that sounded like shattering mountains,
The giant cauldron brutally smashed a scorched, three-meter-high hole straight through a silent administrative building.
An entire load-bearing wall collapsed. Amidst the flying debris and rubble, the scene inside was revealed.
It was a very ordinary office.
Right in the center of the room, a small, blood-red triangular flag was planted quietly on a mahogany desk.
A pen holder sat neatly on the desk, alongside a thick, scattered stack of official documents.
Slumped over these documents was the corpse of a human in a defensive uniform, lying in an extremely bizarre, prone position.
He wasn't sitting in an office chair, and his body was suspended in midair, yet the corpse did not slide to the floor.
...This was because the small blood-red flag, serving as the core node's anchor, had been driven straight through the back of his head from above!
The sharp flagpole pinned his skull firmly to the wooden desk.
It kept his entire shriveled corpse “hung” right above the desk.
Pulling the man in white along, the woman in red leapt down from the cauldron.
Without a second thought, she waved her hand.
The giant cauldron suddenly erupted in flames, hurtling toward the blood-red flag on the desk with mountain-splitting force!
“Boom!”
An earth-shaking blast erupted within the enclosed office.
Yet, after the tremors subsided, the bizarre blood-red flag on the desk remained completely motionless.
The giant cauldron was stopped about three meters away from the desk by a strange force, unable to advance even an inch.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa! Good grief, what are you in such a hurry for!”
Seeing this, the man in white turned pale with fright and quickly yelled at her to stop:
“This is a core node that requires the full-force strike of a Gold Core expert to destroy!”
“You and I are just damaged spiritual weapons cut off from our spiritual energy supply. Smashing ourselves against it like this won't do anything except crack us open!”
The woman in red gritted her teeth. Feeling somewhat unwilling, she waved her hand to recall the giant cauldron.
“No shit! Do you think I don't know this is a Gold Core-level defense?”
Her expression was extremely displeased, her tone icy.
“How are the two of us, practically scrap-metal artifact spirits, supposed to deal with this thing?”
“That's why I said you hot-tempered furnace spirits just don't know how to use your heads...”
The man in white chuckled.
“Pops said we have to outsmart them.”
“Do you remember what he gave us?”
As he spoke, the man in white gestured to recall his small white porcelain bottle.
The bottle spat out a water sphere.
The water sphere appeared to be hollow, tightly compressing some sort of grayish-black solid powder inside.
The water hovered around it, never actually touching the powder within.
As the man in white took it out, his movements were incredibly cautious.
The woman in red knit her brows as she watched, her disgust clear on her face.
“What is this... thing called again? I can't quite pronounce those words.”
“Does this mortal powder... really have as much power as Pops said?”
“Sigh, how shallow of you. Don't look down on this stuff. Its name is...”
The man in white, on the other hand, was full of confidence as he spoke with absolute certainty.
“Highly enriched Uranium-235!”
“I heard that kid Evans got blasted pretty badly by this thing.”
“It's only polite to return the favor.”
“Let's give this All-Heaven Stellar Array a little taste of nuclear fission shock!”
Rate on N.U.
