Myriad Rivers to the Sea

The forest floor of the Primal Howl Realm had been completely transformed into an apocalyptic meat grinder.

The sixty junior disciples of the Zhan Clan immediately tightened their defensive circle as the sky rained corrupted flesh and toxic blood. They were brutal disciples of a lineage that worshipped force, dense muscle and unbreakable bones. The group did not panic in the face of the overwhelming swarm; they simply dug their heels into the bedrock and raised their fists or weapons.

Zhan Ling stood at the vanguard of the southern arc as a massive mutated wolf with four extra limbs crashed through the canopy above. Its jaws were lined with foul black fluid but Zhan Ling did not step back to evade the attack. She stepped directly into the beast's guard as her fists glowed with the dense Qi.

She struck out in a rapid and blurring barrage as her knuckles slammed into the heavily armored ribcage of the wolf. The impact echoed with the deafening sound of a detonating mountain as the chest of the beast completely caved in and its spine snapped from the transferred force. The wolf was sent flying backward into three other falling monsters and the kinetic impact crushed them all beneath its ruined bulk.

Beside her stood another heavily muscled junior. He swung a massive unadorned warhammer and he caught a descending acidic serpent squarely in the jaw. The Zhan Clan weapons were designed for one singular purpose. They were meant for trauma, the hammer did not cut, it pulverized. The head of the serpent exploded into a fine mist of bone fragments and corrosive blood spraying onto the incoming enemies.

The juniors roared together and their voices blended into a singular and defiant battle cry that shook the ancient trees. They fought shoulder to shoulder as they covered each other's blind spots with seamless and practiced efficiency. A twisted avian claw deeply gashed the arm of one disciple and two others immediately rotated into his position to cover him. They crushed the grotesque bird under a flurry of heavy kicks while the wounded junior hastily swallowed a healing pill. He rejoined the line a moment later.

Despite their ferocity, the volume of the mutated swarm was suffocating. A large multi-headed bear threatened to break the eastern line of their formation. A blur of blue intercepted it before it could shatter their defense. It was the Qi clone of Li Yu.

The Qi clone launched a barrage of abyssal javelins to assist the struggling cultivators, destroy beasts and create space. The clone acted as a dynamic and high speed plug throughout the formation. It rushed to wherever the defensive perimeter was buckling under the weight of the horde.

Higher up in the twisted canopy, the two escort elders and the remaining stationed guards fought a desperate battle as well. Their goal was not to win though. It was impossible to kill an endless tide even with their love for battle. They needed to act as a colossal sieve to reduce the numbers that reached the younger generation below, mainly targeting beasts that were too strong for those below to handle.

One of the escort elders was a towering man with a beard of braided iron. He roared as he rapidly expanded his body and he utilized a Zhan Clan art and swelled to over thirty feet in height. His skin took on the dark impenetrable sheen of polished rock as he waded through the falling tide of mutated beasts like a man walking through a heavy storm.

He did not bother to strike the weaker creatures, he simply clapped his massive hands together when the stronger beasts approached. The resulting concussive shockwave rippled through the humid air and it liquefied the internal organs of hundreds of monsters in an instant.

The other elders utilized similar physical techniques. They threw condensed spheres of Qi that sucked in dozens of beasts and then went to smash them all at once. Yet for every hundred beasts they pulverized into red mist, another hundred or more poured from the sickly purple rift tearing across the heavens.

Zhan Chen hovered directly above the juniors and he acted as the ultimate and unbreakable floor. The Sovereign level heir of the clan was a terrifying sight to behold on a battlefield as he was pushing himself to lessen the burdens of others. His body was a self contained weapon of mass destruction.

His fighting style was completely devoid of flashy moves, focusing on direct and fierce attacks. He floated in the sky with a cold calculating expression as his eyes tracked the strongest and most dangerous beasts descending toward his squad.

A Sovereign level mutated wyvern dove straight for the center of the defensive ring and its scales wept a highly corrosive acid that burned the air itself. Zhan Chen did not move to intercept its flight path. He pulled his right arm back and threw a single straightforward punch upward.

The concentrated force of his physical strength ignited the atmosphere. A massive and invisible pillar of energy erupted from his knuckles. It struck the wyvern with such devastating power that the beast did not just die. It was completely erased from existence.

The kinetic pillar continued upward and cut a perfect hole right through the falling wave of monsters. Hundreds of beasts caught in the wake of the punch were blasted into nothingness. The vacuum created afterwards sucked in the surrounding monsters and they were violently torn apart by the resulting pressure equalization.

Zhan Chen threw punch after punch. Each strike blasted a huge area behind his fists and carved out large voids in the endless swarm. He was an immovable mountain suspended in the sky yet his eyes kept darting around, keeping an eye on the others.

Then his eyes moved to one of the most eye-catching scenes happening on the battlefield. He watched his younger cousin and felt impressed. Zhan Chen noted just how utterly devastating the specific techniques of Li Yu were in such a dense and large scale battlefield.

Li Yu had fully taken to the sky to meet the enemies head on like Zhan Chen and the elders. Zhan Chen was an immovable shield blasting holes in the tide while Li Yu was a ravenous and mobile engine of death.

His four primary flying swords did not fly in complex separate trajectories to hunt individual targets. Pale Extinction, Whispering Frost, Firmament's End and Gilded Calamity were pulled into a rapidly spinning orbit directly around his own body.

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The four swords spun so fast they blurred into a continuous glowing cocoon of death around him. The Qi radiating from the blades merged into a localized hurricane. It was a literal drill made out of the strongest swords that Li Yu currently owned.

Li Yu flew straight into the thickest and most heavily congested clusters of the mutated swarm. He became the eye of a lethal storm. Destruction and carnage rained down from the sky everywhere he went. The spinning drill of swords shredded everything it touched.

Heavily armored beasts were sliced into dozens of ribbons before they could even register the pain. Mutated serpents were snap frozen by the ambient aura of Whispering Frost. They were then instantly diced into icy dust by the sharp edge of Firmament's End.

He kept Silent Bastion strictly out of the spinning drill. The rusted sword hovered closely in front of him so he could physically hide behind it. A beast would occasionally manage to launch a desperate long range attack or spit a glob of acidic venom. Li Yu simply ducked behind the broad surface of the ancient sword.

He sent Silent Bastion flying forward like a battering ram when he did not need it for direct defense. The heavy sword smashed into the skulls of larger beasts. It shattered their bones with a concussive force that mirrored the brutal unrefined style of the Zhan Clan. The elders watched the rusted slab of iron crush monsters with blunt force and felt a sense of kinship with it. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝙚𝔀𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝒐𝒎

A beast would occasionally prove too durable or too heavily mutated for the spinning drill to instantly kill. A massive rock armored tortoise with jagged corrupted spikes managed to weather the edge of the sword storm and it snapped its beak toward the legs of Li Yu.

Li Yu did not flinch or slow his momentum. He smoothly split the spinning formation and sent the four swords spiraling outward to carve up the surrounding fodder. This cleared the immediate airspace and he swung Star Crusher with both hands and channeled his Paragon level Qi. He brought it down on the shell of the tortoise with a devastating overhead strike imbued with destruction laws.

The impact rang out like a struck bell and the corrupted shell completely caved in. The beast plummeted from the sky and was dead before it even hit the forest floor. Li Yu immediately recalled his swords and reformed the drill around him as he pushed deeper into the swarm.

The true battle determining their survival raged at the zenith of the sky while Li Yu and Zhan Chen held the line below. Elder Zhan Mo was locked in a brutal desperate struggle against the Blight Maw Kraken. The scale of the conflict was mind numbing and the Supreme Exalt was a speck of brilliant light buzzing around a fleshy corrupted mountain of writhing tentacles.

Zhan Mo unleashed his full might as his fists moved faster and faster. They left blazing afterimages that lingered in the sky. He utilized a supreme body refining technique that coated his entire body in a layer of condensed Qi armor. He slammed into the bulbous head of the Kraken and unleashed a flurry of hundreds of punches in a single moment.

The impacts generated shockwaves that visibly rippled across the thick plated flesh of the Kraken. The density of the mutated beast was unnatural however. A normal Creation Lord beast would have been beaten into a bloody pulp by now but the Blight Maw Kraken simply shuddered and let out a terrible echoing wail. It swung three of its massive tentacles like skyscraper sized whips.

Zhan Mo crossed his arms and caught the brunt of the strike. The force behind the tentacles was staggering and the Supreme Exalt was physically pushed back. He skidded through the air and left twin trails of displaced and shattered space behind his heels.

The Kraken did not give him a single moment to recover though. It opened its circular maw and released another concentrated torrent of the deadly toxin. Zhan Mo roared and expanded his own localized domain.

His domain was focused on physical toughness and defense. It was a rejection of external influence that solidified the space immediately around him and did not let in Qi, poison or anything else in, effectively acting as a shield. The toxic blight washed over him as it hissed and popped violently while it tried to eat through his physical domain.

Both of them were starting to take serious damage. The armor of Zhan Mo was beginning to pit and corrode from the relentless exposure to the blight even with the domain and the edges of his robes were completely singed away. His knuckles were raw, bruised and bleeding from striking the impossibly hard shell of the beast.

The Kraken was not unscathed either. One of its milky eyes had been permanently ruptured by a precise strike from Zhan Mo. It leaked a waterfall of foul black fluid that rained down upon the forest. Deep craters covered its tentacles where the Supreme Exalt had managed to literally tear away chunks of its armored plating with his bare hands.

The elder was being pushed back and slowly losing ground with every violent exchange but he was holding on. He was the only thing preventing the Kraken from descending and instantly melting the entire hunting party.

Li Yu was working his way towards their battle and maintaining such a high output and devastating fighting style down below should have drained a Paragon cultivator completely dry by now even with double the amount of Qi reserves from his technique. The mental strain of the sword drill and the continuous fighting with his main body and Qi clone required an ocean of Qi.

Li Yu was able to keep going strong. The secret lay in the composition of the mutated swarm. There were a decent number of mutated aquatic beasts that had poured out alongside the Kraken. They were mixed among the other various beasts that were there.

The Koi martial spirit of Li Yu was practically humming with pleasure as it was absorbing their Qi. The invisible maw of his martial spirit opened wide and violently siphoned the Qi directly from their corpses. The energy flooded his dual Qi nodes and replenished a lot of what he expended.

It was a self sustaining loop of carnage, the more there were, the more he absorbed. Those that he or anyone else killed provided a burst of Qi that could be siphoned away instantly rather than the slower but constant drain with those that were still alive. The more Qi he absorbed, the faster and harder he spun his swords, used his javelins and other techniques. He was an engine of destruction feeding off the very wave trying to kill him.

Li Yu looked up through the spinning blur of his blades and he saw Elder Zhan Mo being pushed back by the blighted tentacles. He saw the armor of the elder slowly failing under the corrosive gas.

He then looked at the Blight Maw Kraken itself and continued to push towards it. This was the reason he split away from the group and was heading towards it. The volume of Qi radiating from its colossal Creation Lord level body was like a blazing sun to Koi martial spirit.

His passive siphoning rate would skyrocket if he could just get close enough to it for the effects to work. He would not just be replenishing his own reserves, he could actively begin to drain the Kraken and sap its monstrous strength over time. This would give the struggling Supreme Exalt the edge he desperately needed.

Li Yu tightened his grip on his heavy staff and kept adjusting the trajectory of his spinning sword drill. Shifting his momentum away from the main bulk of the falling swarm over time so as to not make himself too obvious, he didn’t want to draw the Kraken’s attention.

Li Yu ignored the wide eyed glances of the Zhan Clan elders as he pointed himself straight up. The raging storm of steel became a rising vortex of destruction and carved a bloody path upward through the sky. He was actively working his way closer to the aquatic horror dominating the heavens.