369: Chapter 370 Breaking Through on the Spot: The Strongest High Priest Needs to Call for Help

The collapse of the Rotten Wood Forest lasted for four hours.

From the moment the central ancient tree fell, the chain reaction never stopped.

The withered trees, having lost the sustenance of the Law, collapsed one after another, from the inside out, circle by circle. Every falling tree would break the more fragile trunks beside it, triggering a new round of collapse.

By the third hour, the scope of the collapse had already reached the outermost perimeter of the Rotten Wood Forest.

The gray-white forest, spanning a radius of fifty kilometers, had completely fallen within four hours.

But this was not the end.

The fallen withered trees continued to decompose after contacting the ground. Without the energy of the Law to maintain their "half-dead" equilibrium, these trees, which should have rotted away decades ago, began to weather rapidly.

Wood fibers snapped, bark peeled off, and trunks crumbled into powder.

The powder further decomposed into even finer particles in the dry air, swept up by the morning breeze to form a low-hanging gray dust cloud.

By noon, on satellite remote sensing images, the dark green area originally marked as "Rotten Wood Forest" had turned into a gray-white circular depression with a diameter of fifty kilometers.

It was not a flat depression.

Because Lin Qi had extracted six large chunks of the Law sedimentation layer, and coupled with the countless voids left by the rotting roots of the faith channel, the geological structure of the entire area was severely loosened.

Large-scale sinkholes erupted around three in the afternoon.

Looking down from the sky, within the fifty-kilometer range, the ground seemed to have been pressed down by an invisible giant hand, sinking as a whole by five to eight meters.

By evening, after the gray dust had dispersed, the Rotten Wood Forest had vanished.

In its place was a light gray desert basin, the surface covered with a layer of fine powder, devoid of any vegetation.

The duty officer at the Federal Western Border Station issued the first anomaly report at four in the afternoon.

"Western Rotten Wood Forest area suspected of having a large-scale geological disaster, the entire forest area completely disappeared within six hours, currently presenting as a desertified landscape. Cause unknown. No traces of explosions or use of energy weapons detected. Requesting superiors to dispatch a reconnaissance team to verify."

The confidentiality level of this report within the military's internal System was manually set to the highest level.

Because someone remembered that beneath this Rotten Wood Forest, a suspected stronghold of the Church of Calamity had once been marked.

The words 'suspected' could now be crossed out.

Even the words 'stronghold' could be crossed out.

Because nothing was left.

Four thousand and three hundred kilometers away. The Northern Ice Rift Valley.

Eternal Frost stood on the peak of a glacier, facing north.

He was a man whose age could not be determined. His skin was pale to the point of being nearly transparent, his hair was completely white, and tiny ice crystals hung from his eyebrows and eyelashes. He wore a gray-blue robe, with a layer of thin frost that would never melt frozen onto the hem.

A translucent ice crystal panel floated in front of him.

Three nodes were displayed on the panel.

Eastern Mining Area. Gray.

That had turned gray over thirty days ago. The news of Cang Yan's death.

Western Rotten Wood Forest.

It had turned gray at 6:32 this morning.

And it didn't turn gray slowly.

It jumped directly from green to gray in less than four minutes.

There was no intermediate state.

Cang Yan's node had experienced a gradient process from green to yellow and then to gray at the time, indicating that he had struggled for at least some time before his death.

Ku Ye did not.

Four minutes. From the interruption of the faith channel to the node permanently turning gray, it took a total of four minutes.

Eternal Frost stared at that gray node for a long time.

A young man stood beside him. He was male, lean, with light blue skin and frost-white hair tied into a ponytail. This was his Disciple, Frost Thorn, a half-step Law-Rank ice-type ability user.

"Master."

Frost Thorn's voice was very low. "Ku Ye's channel has also been severed."

Eternal Frost did not reply. He shifted his gaze away from the panel and looked toward the southern skyline.

The Ice Rift Valley was shrouded in snowstorms all year round, and the sky was lead-gray, obscuring the distance. But Eternal Frost's perception of the Law could pierce through the snowstorms and extend over a thousand kilometers away.

He was "listening." He listened for ten minutes. There was nothing.

On the Law frequency band in the south, it was a blank slate. It wasn't quiet. It was the kind of blankness that meant "it had been cleared out."

In the direction of the Rotten Wood Forest, all traces of the Law had been wiped clean. This was what truly unsettled Eternal Frost.

When Cang Yan died, it took three days for the traces of the Law in the mining area to dissipate. Because the energy of the Law has inertia, it would not disappear immediately upon the death of the High Priest, but would slowly decay.

Over at Ku Ye's side, the traces of the Law had dropped to zero within a few hours. It wasn't decay. It had been artificially cleared.

Someone had completely formatted the traces of the Law that Ku Ye had managed for a hundred years, at a physical level.

"How long did it take for Cang Yan to die?" Eternal Frost spoke.

Frost Thorn replied: "According to the channel feedback, it took about twenty minutes from the moment Cang Yan was attacked until the node turned gray."

"And Ku Ye?"

"Four minutes."

Eternal Frost was silent for a moment. "Ku Ye is stronger than Cang Yan."

"Yes."

"Quite a bit stronger."

"Yes."

"Ku Ye died faster."

Frost Thorn did not respond. Eternal Frost turned around and walked down the glacier.

With every step he took, radial cracks would appear on the ice surface beneath his feet, only to be quickly sealed by the cold air.

"Contract all peripheral perception networks to within a three-kilometer radius of the Ice Rift Valley core."

Frost Thorn followed him: "Master, if we shrink it to three kilometers, the early warning distance will..."

"That thing," Eternal Frost interrupted him, "was able to pass through fifty kilometers of the perception network from underground and emerge right beneath Ku Ye's feet."

Frost Thorn's steps faltered for a beat. "Do you think the early warning distance is useful?"

Frost Thorn did not speak again.

Eternal Frost walked a few steps and then stopped again. "Reinforce the underground defense line to a depth of two hundred meters. Harden the ice layer to the seventh Rank."

"Yes."

"Lower the position of the Container by another fifty meters."

"Master, if we lower it any further, the sustenance efficiency will decrease, and the cultivation progress might..."

"Staying alive is more important than progress."

Eternal Frost resumed his pace. He did not look back.

But after walking twenty steps, he said one sentence. "Notify the Prophet, I need reinforcements."

Frost Thorn's steps faltered for two beats this time.

In the seventeen years since he became a Disciple under Eternal Frost, he had never heard his Master say these three words: Need reinforcements.

The Northern Ice Rift Valley was the most heavily defended of the three strongholds, and Eternal Frost himself was recognized as the strongest among the three great High Priests.

He was asking for help from above. This meant he had made a judgment.

If the existence that could wipe out Ku Ye in four minutes came to the Ice Rift Valley, he would not be able to hold it off alone.

The snowstorm howled above the Ice Rift Valley. The gray sky had no visible edge.

At the same moment. Tianhai City. Eastern District. A narrow alley without streetlights.

In the shadows deep within the alley, a person stood leaning against the wall. Their appearance could not be seen. Their build was ordinary, of medium height, wearing a gray hooded jacket with the hood pulled down low.

In his right hand, he held a coin-sized metal disc. A faint blue light pulsed on the surface of the disc. It was a tracker.

A highly precise spatial-type tracker capable of locking onto the biological magnetic field characteristics of a specific Physique within a five-kilometer range.

The blue light pulsed three times, then stabilized into a fixed frequency. Locked on.

The fingers under the gray jacket curled slightly. The metal disc was crushed into fragments in his palm.

The fragments slipped through his fingers and disappeared into a spatial crack that opened and closed silently before they even hit the ground. Leaving no trace.

Abyssal Fang walked out of the shadows and headed out along the narrow alley. Outside the alley was a busy street, with bright streetlights and hurried pedestrians.

He walked into the crowd, and within a second, he became indistinguishable from any ordinary passerby.

There was a note in his pocket. On the note was written an address. And a name.