353: Chapter 353: All Obstacles Cleared

"Don't stop."

Xiao Ran swept his blade horizontally through the air; his voice was not loud, yet it clearly cut through the clamor of the entire battlefield.

"Those from the Western Region, those from the Dragon Palace, leave none alive."

Li Changsheng didn't speak, but the jade-colored longsword in his hand had already shifted direction.

The Law spiritual light on the sword left an arc in the air, like an invisible dividing line drawn across the wasteland, splitting the entire battlefield into two zones.

The northeast belongs to Xiao Ran, the southwest belongs to him.

The next two hours were an unequal massacre.

Xiao Ran, with Man Shan and a few true core powerhouses of the Eternal Night Demon Sect, pushed horizontally eastward.

The Yao Beast herd of the Western Region was like a paper dike before him; within the range covered by the Guixu Vortex, all Demonic Qi was shredded, devoured, and turned into powder.

Those ancient Yao who had lived for thousands of years were ground into Spiritual Qi debris, skin and bones, before they could even cast their Evasion Technique in the face of the power of Law.

Three Void Realm ships of the Dragon Clan descended before Xiao Ran.

Xiao Ran leaped onto the prow and smashed the keel with one strike; the power of Guixu spread along the Dragon patterns, bursting the entire Void Realm ship from within into a pile of broken iron.

At the same time.

Li Changsheng took Ling Jianxin and several Elders of the Supreme Dao Palace to harvest the southwest battlefield.

The Cultivators of the remaining clans in the Southern Territory scattered into sporadic teams after losing their backbone, and were encircled one by one by Li Changsheng using his Law Domain, their Spiritual Roots stripped, and their Cultivation levels shattered.

His methods were more "refined" than Xiao Ran's.

Every strike was as precise as surgery; the Cultivators whose Spiritual Roots were stripped would not die, but they could never Cultivate again.

At dusk, the wind and sand on the wasteland finally began to subside.

Hundreds of corpses were piled up on the battlefield, mostly Yao Beasts, remnants of the Southern Territory, and Dragon Clan spies, along with a small number of Righteous and Demonic Path Cultivators who had been caught in the crossfire.

Xiao Ran and Li Changsheng had tried their best to draw a clear line between the feint and the harvest, but in the chaos, there were always a few unlucky ones who couldn't dodge in time.

The living were all still standing, but most of them had a shared look of bewilderment on their faces.

"Who exactly were they fighting against in this war?"

This is the sorrow of the small fry.

They would only obey the summons, but they never knew for whom this war was fought.

The Righteous Path and the Demonic Path, which were originally incompatible, could smile and forget their grudges because of a common enemy.

This is the Great Cultivation War.

...

In the next half month, the Cultivation World experienced an unprecedented purge.

Xiao Ran took Man Shan, Poison Lady, and the core elites of the Eternal Night Demon Sect westward.

The strongholds of the Western Region Yao Race were scattered among the Gobi and sand dunes stretching for thousands of miles, each hidden behind Formations and natural barriers.

But under the dual pressure of the Divine Sense of the Integration Stage and the power of Law, those nests had nowhere to hide.

Every time he found one, Xiao Ran would uproot the entire Immortal Cave from the Spiritual Vein with the suction of the Guixu Vortex, and then catch all the Yao Beasts hiding inside in one net.

"The sixth one." Man Shan stomped a hole in the sand and wiped his sweat.

"Alliance Leader, how many more?"

"According to intelligence, there are three more."

Xiao Ran squatted in front of a pile of overturned rubble, pinched a wisp of Demonic Qi stuck in the crack of the stone with his fingertips, and sniffed it.

"One thousand two hundred miles west in this direction, there is a Spiritual Vein intersection deep underground; the rest are likely there."

Poison Lady stood not far behind him, arms crossed, not speaking.

She had been unusually silent along the way, and her attacks were thirty percent more ruthless than before, as if she wanted to vent something unspeakable through slaughter.

Xiao Ran occasionally looked back at her, but asked nothing.

Su Qinghan followed at the back of the team, looking at Poison Lady's back, and understood in her heart.

She could feel a bit of Poison Lady's state of mind over the past hundred years.

Watching someone you care about give all their tenderness to someone else—that feeling is hard for anyone to bear.

But she had no extra empathy to spare; all she could do was stand at a distance that was neither too near nor too far, not showing off, not avoiding, leaving enough dignity for each other.

On the seventh day, Xiao Ran cleared the last Yao nest.

"What about the Righteous Path?" Su Qinghan asked, sitting on a sand dune drinking water.

Xiao Ran squeezed the message jade talisman and sensed it: "The remnants of the Southern Territory clans have also been cleared; now only the East Sea Dragon Clan is left."

...

Half a month later, outside North Town.

The corpses on the wasteland had been cleaned up, the pitted ground had been leveled, and the gullies cut by the bursting spiritual light had been backfilled with earth and stone.

The Golden Core of the Southern Territory old monster, the Yao Core of the giant Yao Beast, and the wreckage of the Dragon Clan's Void Realm ships were classified and collected into special storage Magical Artifacts.

The Spiritual Sha Qi inside those things was too thick to be discarded at will; it might take decades to slowly purify them in the future.

The camps on both sides were still pitched, but most of the flags had been taken down.

The Disciples of the Righteous and Demonic Paths were resting separately.

Su Qinghan stood on a newly built earth platform at the edge of the wasteland, looking at the distant skyline.

That layer of purple-gold clouds had obviously pressed lower this week, and the frequency of the electric patterns flashing at the edge of the clouds was nearly double what it was before.

Every flash carried a heat that made the air slightly scalding.

Footsteps sounded behind her.

"You're standing so high, it's windy." Xiao Ran walked up and stood beside her.

"Watching the clouds." Su Qinghan raised her hand and pointed to the north.

"It looks like it's about to come down."

Xiao Ran looked in the direction she pointed.

That patch of purple-gold clouds was indeed slowly sinking, like a Heavenly Gate closing toward the ground.

In the center of the clouds, a vortex-shaped depression was faintly visible, and the light emitted from the center of the vortex was no longer purple-gold, but closer to pure white.

It carried a gravitational pull that made people's Spiritual Roots vibrate spontaneously.

"The Spiritual Vein resonance has entered the final stage."

"The celestial phenomenon convergence is half a month ahead of schedule."

"When?"

"Within seven days."

Su Qinghan turned her head to look at him.

The sunset shone from behind him, cutting his profile into two halves of light and shadow; the bright half was those clear, bright eyes.

The dark half was the imperceptible arc at the corner of his lips.

"Seven days." She repeated, then reached out and held his wrist.

"Xiao Ran."

"Hmm?"

"After your Breakthrough, will you still be the Alliance Leader of the Demonic Path?"

Xiao Ran was stunned for a moment, then laughed out loud.

The laughter spread across the empty wasteland, carried by the wind in all directions.

"No, after the Breakthrough, why would I still be the Alliance Leader? Why would a Mahayana Stage Cultivator care about those trivial matters?"

"Then what do you want to do?"

He thought for a while, then turned his head to look at her.

The last glimmer of the sunset fell into his eyes, warming those eyes that were like deep wells.

"Travel the Cultivation World, and take you to see the snow lotus," he said.

"The kind from the Ancient Battlefield, growing in the cracks where Spiritual Qi and Death Qi interweave, white flowers with golden patterns on the petals."

Su Qinghan was stunned.

When he mentioned the snow lotus in the study a hundred years ago, her heart skipped a beat.

At that time, she thought it was a probe, a calculation, a precisely thrown bait.

It turned out that it was really just a sentence, something he kept in his heart, something he wanted her to see.

"Okay, I'll go with you."

On the distant skyline, that purple-gold Heavenly Gate was slowly closing.

The last wisp of heavenly light overflowed from the crack of the door, coating the entire wasteland with a layer of warm, honey-like color.

Xiao Ran turned around and faced north.

Li Changsheng should have already passed Canglang Ridge and could arrive at North Town within two days.

After the two met and finished off the East Sea Dragon Clan's business, then came the real, final Breakthrough.

Seven days later, no one in the world would be able to stand in their way.