Descent [2k]
Translator: CinderTL
Using the Life Mother Tree's Mind Power as a medium, Li Chunjun performed the profound technique of replacing the will of Heaven with his own heart. In an instant, his Divine Sense merged with the world's vibrations.
As these vibrations spread, both the Life Mother Tree's awareness and Li Chunjun's own perception expanded rapidly. From tens of thousands of miles, they surged to hundreds of thousands, then millions, until encompassing the entire Wood Spirit Minor Thousand World.
Only after fully comprehending the state of the Wood Spirit Minor Thousand World did Li Chunjun realize the Wood Spirit Clan was truly on the brink of collapse.
In just six months, their population had plummeted from trillions to tens of billions—a staggering ninety percent loss.
Nourished by the remaining Wood Spirits, the newly awakened Heart Demons were growing at an alarming rate.
Scanning with the Life Mother Tree's Mind Power, Li Chunjun detected over a dozen Heart Demons whose auras far surpassed the others. These were already restored to Upper Tier Ultimate Forms, equivalent to the Second Layer of the Mind Realm. Several leading Heart Demons had even reached the threshold of the Third Layer.
If these Heart Demons continue to devour the Wood Spirits, it's only a matter of a month or two before a top-tier, fully-fledged Heart Demon equivalent to the Third Layer of the Mind Realm inevitably emerges.
And when that happens...
Even Li Chunjun might be powerless to stop it.
"Have they already... completely fallen?" the Life Mother Tree sighed in resignation.
Li Chunjun ignored the Life Mother Tree, his gaze fixed on the distant depths of the cosmos.
The Wood Spirit Realm, teeming with hundreds of billions of souls, was already on the verge of birthing a top-tier Heart Demon comparable to the Third Layer of the Mind Realm. Over a hundred Lesser Chiliocosms had crashed into this Starfield.
Even excluding the Titan and Divine Races, whose innate abilities suppressed Heart Demons, these malevolent entities could still overwhelm half of those worlds. Among those fifty compromised realms, there were bound to be Wood Spirit Minor Thousand Worlds with populations surpassing even the Wood Spirit Clan's.
Given the Heart Demons' rapid resurgence...
In some of these Lesser Chiliocosms...
Top-tier Heart Demons equivalent to the Third Layer of the Mind Realm might already exist.
Moreover, unless he swiftly purged all the Heart Demons from these worlds, waiting another year or two could easily lead to the emergence of Ultimate Heart Demons at the Fourth Layer of the Mind Realm or beyond—an entirely plausible scenario.
At that moment, as if sensing the Life Mother Tree's profound connection to the Heavenly Vault, the Heart Demons that had been secretly recuperating suddenly raised their heads and stared directly at the celestial dome.
In the next instant, hundreds of Heart Demons that had corrupted Fifth-Tier Wood Spirits seized control of their puppet bodies and surged skyward. More Third and Fourth-Tier Wood Spirits, controlled by the Heart Demon seeds they had spawned, followed closely behind, taking to the skies in droves.
Tens of thousands—nearly a million—Third and Fourth-Tier Wood Spirits formed a massive, sun-obscuring dark cloud as they raced toward the Imperial Capital.
Because these puppetized Wood Spirits were all controlled by Heart Demons, their combined aura coalesced into a unified, terrifying presence. That overwhelming force materialized as towering mountains and crashing tidal waves, bearing down on the Imperial Capital with suffocating pressure.
The moment news of this reached them, Imperial Minister Fara and the other Wood Spirit leaders paled with shock.
"They're launching a full-scale assault! The rebels are launching a full-scale assault!"
"We're doomed! How can we possibly withstand such a massive invasion?"
"They must have discovered our alliance with the Human Race and sensed the danger! They're trying to crush our kingdom before the human armies arrive in the Wood Spirit Realm!"
Panic gripped the Wood Spirit Clan, fear etched on every face.
Even the Life Mother Tree, sensing the terrifying aura of the hundreds of Heart Demons leading the charge, felt a profound sense of helplessness.
"It seems we're too late," she lamented.
The intervention of external forces had clearly shattered the Heart Demons' patience for gradually devouring the Wood Spirit Clan.
"Too late?" Li Chunjun smiled faintly as he observed the spontaneously gathering Heart Demons and puppets. "Not at all! It's perfect timing!"
"Hmm?" The Life Mother Tree sensed the confidence in Li Chunjun's words, but couldn't understand his reasoning.
"Maintain this state to provide me with the coordinates!" Li Chunjun declared, withdrawing from his state of merging his heart with the will of Heaven.
Meanwhile, billions of miles away...
In the Azure Star Minor Realm, Li Chunjun stepped out of his cultivation chamber and materialized above the Golden Crow Battleship—or rather, outside the Azure Star Minor Realm's atmosphere.
His gaze pierced through the immense distance to fix upon the Wood Spirit Minor Thousand World, his Heart-Mind resonating with the coordinate point provided by the Life Mother Tree within that realm.
After carefully attuning himself to this resonance, he gradually began channeling his Essence, Qi, and Spirit into the Scarlet Sky Sword, which had been fused with his body.
As the infusion of Essence, Qi, and Spirit reached a critical threshold, the Scarlet Sky Sword materialized from within him, slowly orbiting him.
Countless Spatial Mysteries surged forth from the Scarlet Sky Sword.
The power of Void Dao patterns and Shattered Flowing Gold radiated outward in concentric circles, distorting the surrounding space and threatening to collapse and shatter the Void within dozens of meters.
As the Void Dao patterns and Shattered Flowing Gold reached their peak, Li Chunjun abruptly seized the Scarlet Sky Sword. Leaping into the air, he thrust the blade toward the Wood Spirit Minor Thousand World, billions of miles away!
The sword struck!
Buzz! Buzz!
An invisible ripple seemed to surge through the Void.
An imperceptible "crack" echoed in his mind...
The Void shattered.
Li Chunjun, now one with his sword, plunged into the collapsing space.
In the Wood Spirit Minor Thousand World, the puppets controlled by the Heart Demons moved with astonishing speed.
The Wood Spirits stationed elsewhere were of little concern, as they were already outside the Imperial Capital. The twenty-odd Heart Demons, who had been besieging the Life Mother Tree within a thousand-mile radius, led an army of over a hundred thousand Third- and Fourth-Tier Wood Spirit puppets in a tsunami-like assault on the Imperial Capital's Defense Array.
Elsa, acting decisively, activated the Imperial Defense Formation to its maximum potential, enveloping the capital in a vibrant green barrier that radiated a thousand miles outward from the Life Mother Tree.
But...
The sheer number of Wood Spirit puppets was overwhelming.
Under the relentless assault of over a hundred thousand puppets, the Imperial Defense Formation trembled violently, as if on the verge of collapse.
Especially since...
The Heart Demons excelled at manipulating minds.
Faced with the overwhelming force of the puppet army, the defenders not only felt overwhelming terror, but the Heart Demons also amplified their Mind Power, dredging up the fear of the defending Wood Spirits. As the defenders crumbled under this psychological assault, they surrendered in droves.
If not for the desperate reinforcements led by Fifth-Tier Wood Spirits like Fara and Raven, who tirelessly patched the breaches in the formation, the Imperial Defense Formation would surely have been breached, leaving the capital's billions of citizens vulnerable to the Heart Demons' predation.
Despite the valiant efforts of Fara, Raven, and others to reinforce the Imperial Capital Formation, a wave of despair washed over them as a second wave of over a dozen Heart Demons arrived from the horizon, leading a horde of over a hundred thousand Third- and Fourth-Tier Wood Spirit puppets.
"How can there be so many?"
"The lands beyond the Imperial Capital have already fallen... This city alone can't possibly hold out..."
Fear spread like wildfire through the Imperial Capital.
They had foreseen this scenario.
They had calculated that the Imperial Capital would crumble under a full-scale rebel assault.
Yet they never expected it to happen so quickly.
Elsa gazed in anguish at the densely packed Wood Spirit puppets swarming outside the Imperial Capital Formation.
These had once been her people.
Now, corrupted by the Foreign Race, they had become puppets, raising their blades against the sacred empire they once revered.
"We must break through," Elsa declared, her eyes fixed on the faltering City Protection Grand Formation. She turned to Yu Jin. "Lord Divine Envoy! I implore you to lead a portion of the Wood Spirit Clan to safety... Let them become our seeds, thriving in the lands of the Human Race. Let the Cosmos remember that there once existed a people called the Wood Spirit Clan..."
"Remain calm," Yu Jin said, showing no urgency. He had already learned from Dong Xuan about Li Chunjun's communication with the Life Mother Tree and understood his decision.
"The situation isn't as dire as you imagine."
"Not as dire as we imagine?" Elsa paused, then quickly realized what he meant. "The Human Race's Divine Spirits are willing to intervene?"
"Divine Beings..."
The Wood Spirit Clan, a vassal race of the Immortal God Race, was deeply influenced by their culture, referring to Seventh-Rank lifeforms and Void Refining cultivators as "gods." Yu Jin found this entirely unsurprising.
He offered no further explanation, simply stating, "You can wait."
"Wait... But the Human Race's world is separated from our Wood Spirit Realm by a vast, almost insurmountable interstellar gulf..."
"Distance is always relative," Yu Jin replied. "A journey of ten thousand li might seem impossible for mortals in a lifetime, but to us, it's merely a stone's throw away."
He gazed at the Heavenly Vault. "And for an unparalleled figure like Swordmaster Li, the separation between worlds might be no more than a short stroll."
"A short stroll?" Elsa was about to protest when Yu Jin suddenly sensed something. His eyes lit up with excitement and reverence. "He's here!"
Elsa opened her mouth to ask a question, but suddenly sensed a vibrant, rainbow-colored light erupting across the Heavenly Vault.
Before she could discern its true nature, the luminous streak tore through the fabric of reality like a divine sword cleaving the cosmos, slicing through the dimensional barriers of the Wood Spirit Minor Thousand World and piercing the atmosphere above.
The sensation...
It felt as if a planet-destroying orbital cannon had been fired from deep space.
Though the projectile had yet to fully descend, the sheer energy it radiated illuminated the entire atmosphere, bathing the sky in an otherworldly glow.
When the radiant streak finally slammed into the atmosphere, the air shattered like butter under a red-hot blade, erupting in a cataclysmic implosion.
Accompanying this celestial descent was an indescribably terrifying surge of energy that crashed into the ranks of over a hundred thousand Heart Demon reinforcements who had just arrived near the Imperial Capital Formation.
In that instant, the universe seemed to fall silent, as if a cosmic mute button had been pressed.
The Void shattered like a shattered mirror, fracturing into a thousand pieces without warning.
In the eerie silence, the destructive force of the fractured Void Power collided with the Void's innate restorative forces, creating a visible ripple in space that spread outward for thousands of miles.
Yet on such a vast scale, this ripple appeared merely as a tiny tremor in the cosmic sea.
Yet, from the perspective of creatures barely a meter or two tall, it was a tsunami of unimaginable power, beyond the capacity of any language to describe.
Within a hundred-mile radius of the epicenter, Third-Tier and Fourth-Tier Wood Spirits, along with Fifth-Tier Heart Demons controlled by the Heart Demon, were instantly pulverized into dust, like sandcastles swept away by the tide.
The destructive force surged outward with irresistible momentum, annihilating every living thing in its path...
Three hundred miles, six hundred miles, a thousand miles...
It resembled the fiery ring radiating from a meteor impact.
Everything caught within this spreading "ripple" was utterly crushed, reduced to ashes, and scattered to the winds.
Boom!
Only now, in the wake of the devastation, did the sound of destruction begin to ripple outward.
(End of the Chapter)
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