[V6C19 – Sorrow of a Silent Parting]
Moments later, Qianye and Song Zining sat down in the study. Too many things had happened lately, be it in the Iron Curtain, the empire, or Blackflow City. The two had experienced a fair share of things and would likely require over an hour to catch up .
Song Zining’s situation was pretty good. He had even gotten in touch with the werewolves Qianye had subdued on his western expedition. The Sharp Fang Tribe was affected by the b.l.o.o.d.y battle, and only a third of its former population remained. In the end, they had no choice but to leave their ancestral land, Green Peak Mountain.
The werewolf viscount Brudo became much more vigilant after his setback with Qianye last time. He had kept his forces concentrated within his core territory and didn’t quite get swept into the b.l.o.o.d.y battle. This left him with a fair bit of military strength. They also took in the remnants of the Sharp Fang Tribe.
Qianye remembered William after hearing this news and couldn’t help but sigh inside his heart. Although Song Zining was back in Blackflow City at the moment, he had set up numerous defensive positions in all of the regions he had swept through. After the b.l.o.o.d.y battle had ended and the dark races from the upper continents had left, those places would be incorporated into the Blackflow war zone sooner or later.
At the same time, the humans would eventually start to flock over—people like those merchants on the streets, adventurers, and all kinds of people seeking survival. Perhaps one or several new cities would pop up over the next few years. However, this meant that the living s.p.a.ce for the dark races would contract. The general situation would change very little even if Qianye tacitly allowed them to stay in his territory.
This was the essence of the war between daybreak and evernight. Land resources were a deciding factor in the survival and development of a race.
But what Song Zining was more interested in was the profits brought about by the war. According to him, resources and people signified more trade opportunities which would only multiply as the population grew. As such, a neutral region would be a fairly good development strategy.
Qianye felt dazzled as Song Zining blurted out a string of numbers. According to him, the income from the imperial rewards and those offered by the aristocratic families were just about equal to the Ningyuan Group’s profits, the recent transactions they had grasped the opportunity to engage in.
Qianye laughed as he recalled the Song clan. He also came to understand why that enormous family would slowly reach its current state. The profits from trade were simply too vast—so vast that people started to forget what the cornerstone of business was. They forgot that goods came from resources, that justice was born of strength, and furthermore, that the opposite might not hold true.
Comparatively, Qianye’s gains from the b.l.o.o.d.y battle were simple. They were all rare materials he had obtained from the Zhao clan, with no shortage of rare medicines required for a champion’s cultivation. But unexpectedly, Song Zining told him that he had no use for them because he had never used supplementary medicines to advance in rank.
Qianye was quite surprised. There was no such thing as cultivation medicines when the humans awoke origin power thousands of years ago. However, throughout the long pa.s.sage of time, medicines and machines used to bolster one’s combat strength had almost become second nature.
At this point, Song Zining asked, “Did you find any other cultivation arts in the Song Clan Ancient Scroll apart from the Mystery and Glory Chapters?”
Qianye replied, “There are four or five more chapters, but I simply can’t find the origin power routes and nodes mentioned in there.”
“Oh? How come?”
Qianye recalled the origin power circulation and control methods he had seen in the Song Clan Ancient Scroll. Later on, he simply produced the jade booklet and activated them one by one for Song Zining to see.
Qianye suddenly discovered that the activated secrets within the scroll had increased. He stared puzzled at the jade leaflet for a while before looking up at Song Zining. “I remember you telling me that only those who have awakened Venus Dawn can cultivate the Song Clan Ancient Scroll.”
Song Zining flipped through the words on the jade leaflet in great detail, then said without looking up, “Isn’t that exactly what your talent is?”
Qianye was stunned. He opened his mouth a bit but actually had no idea how to respond.
The initial Venus Dawn was an imitation arising from the golden blood energy, but the latter had been refined by the Song Clan Ancient Scroll. Although he didn’t see his own visual phenomena back at the Zhao clan’s Marrow Cleansing Pond, the talent inspection array and the Zhao clan’s divine champion experts all concluded that it was Venus Dawn. Were they all mistaken? Even he himself wasn’t too sure at this point.
“But back then, you said that you had a master calculate…”
Song Zining broke into a laugh and pointed at himself with great satisfaction. “Isn’t yours truly worthy of being called a master?!”
“You mean, you…” Qianye was completely dumbfounded.
It was already past midnight when Qianye and Song Zining left the study.
Song Zining didn’t rest immediately upon returning to his room. He leaned on the bed for a good while, seemingly deep in thought, as he tossed a jade tablet up and down in his hand. The tablet’s color was rather dim and looked ordinary on the surface. But on careful observation, one would find that its splendor was contracted within and that it was no ordinary item. Surprisingly it was made of the same material as the Song Clan Ancient Scroll.
The jade tablet was tossed up once again, and this time, it flew so high that it was almost touching the ceiling. It began disintegrating on its way back down and shattered into motes of l.u.s.trous brilliance, which then vanished into Song Zining’s palm.
The room was immersed in the colors of the night and devoid of any light source. However, a certain radiance flickered several times during this split second.
The light specks in Song Zining’s palm had more or less disappeared, but what remained of them were still reflected upon his handsome face and outlined his gentle silhouette.
Presently, a new origin vortex had appeared in Song Zining’s body. He was now rank-eleven.
The days that followed were a rare respite for Qianye, that was except for the overly clamorous streets outside of the base. In the end, he still couldn’t escape being dragged over to watch Hidden Spring’s performance. He did, however, manage to refuse the beautiful escorts Song Zining had so graciously offered him.
Qianye was feeling somewhat restless early this morning. He felt as though something was about to happen, and this sensation persisted into the evening. Finally, he decided to leave the city and take a look, also checking on the dark race army’s movements along the way. Song Zining didn’t protest. He also had this feeling, but he was quite certain that the abnormality wasn’t with the dark race army.
After leaving the city, Qianye began running through the wilderness and into the depths of the Iron Curtain. However, something made him stop dead on his tracks.
He looked down at the earth beneath his feet. Nothing seemed out of place at a glance, but the soil was suddenly moving about everywhere. The countless insects and rodents that had survived the war scuttled out of hiding. They climbed to the surface and were running about in complete disarray.
In the depths of the earth, a certain indistinct vibration was expanding outwards continuously.
This vibration was extremely weak, so weak that Qianye might have overlooked it had he not concentrated his perception. But when he tried to sense it, the earth shook violently and all the blood in his body almost froze up!
The moment that his consciousness came in contact with this vibration, Qianye seemed to have touched an incomparably vast will. It was cold, apathetic and ruthless, seemingly belonging to an ent.i.ty that had existed for countless eons. Before it, Qianye was even less significant than a tiny ant, and the difference between them was like a drop of water compared to the ocean.
This vast oceanic will didn’t react at all to Qianye’s touch. Perhaps it was too big or maybe Qianye was just too insignificant.
Qianye’s blood core and heart began to jump wildly. He immediately withdrew his perception, no longer daring to probe this odd vibration from the depths of the earth.
This brief moment of contact had drained Qianye greatly and consumed almost all of the essence blood he had in store.
Qianye was shocked. If his perception wasn’t wrong, this meant that there was an earth-shattering secret hidden in the depths of the Evernight continent. This was perhaps the true reason behind Sky Demon’s appearance and the deployment of the Iron Curtain—a means to announce his territorial claim over Evernight.
However, the contact from just now had clearly proven that this secret wasn’t something a person at Qianye’s level could pry into. That ancient will alone could crush him into pieces upon contact. It would, at the very least, require a divine champion to withstand that ancient will. If one were looking to truly confront it, perhaps only peerless existences like a heavenly monarch or a great dark monarch would have this right.
But why had that ancient will manifested at this moment?
Qianye shuddered in his heart as he looked up at the sky. He shockingly saw the all-encompa.s.sing Iron Curtain waning like the receding tides. It was being reborn in certain areas but most of it had vanished. The starry sky was gradually connecting together to form a single expanse.
Qianye watched in a daze. He could hardly believe everything he was seeing.
Had the Iron Curtain actually disappeared?
This signaled the fall of the curtains over the several-month-long b.l.o.o.d.y battle, which had claimed countless lives from both factions. But upon deeper thought, it probably wasn’t as simple as one would think.
The Iron Curtain was Sky Demon’s domain—retracting it perhaps meant that he had already found what he had been looking for. But according to the news William had leaked, the big shots of the Evernight Council probably wouldn’t allow Sky Demon to take that item away so easily. Since the top experts from the evernight side were taking action, those from the human race wouldn’t sit by and watch, either. They would surely think of a way to interfere.
That being said, wouldn"t the dissipation of the Iron Curtain mean that the experts of the two factions had begun fighting Sky Demon?
There was no need for tangible pressure; this thought alone was stifling enough.
At this moment, the ground beneath Qianye’s feet finally started to tremble with increasing intensity. One could actually see the ground billowing! At the same time, countless cracks extended through the earth and seemingly split the wilderness into numerous unrelated regions. The chasms weaved and warped through the land, growing progressively longer and wider.
An ear-splitting rumble erupted a thousand meters in front of Qianye as a segment of the land was suddenly raised. It shot straight upward for several hundred meters before coming to a stop. Just like that, a precipitous cliff appeared before Qianye.
Magma burst out from the cracks in the ground and shot a thousand meters into the air before gradually falling down. Large clouds of smoke surged into the air and covered up a small part of the sky.
Qianye spread his luminous wings and leapt up, rising high into the sky to look down at the land below.
The entire Evernight Continent—all the way to the extremes of his vision—was quaking. The numerous cracks were like terrifying injuries scattered in every direction. Some of them were already thousands of meters wide, hundreds of kilometers long, and so deep that one couldn’t see the bottom. Qianye saw some dark race cities split in two with earthen flames gus.h.i.+ng out from within.
Meanwhile, flaming clouds gradually appeared up high, replacing the Iron Curtain in enveloping the skies of Evernight. The flare dyed the entire land with an apocalyptic red hue which shattered the darkness of the night.
Beams of origin power surged from the depths of the void and pa.s.sed over Qianye as they rushed into the distance.
The origin power fluctuations in Qianye’s body actually formed a resonance with the Profound Combatant Formula which began circulating on its own. He wiped away the cold sweat on his hands but did nothing to stop it. Instead, he attached his consciousness onto it in a bid to follow the Profound Combat Formula’s rhythm and take control.