Chapter 189: The Grinder Descends and the Sealed Valley
The Northern Continent slept, plunged into its usual and false sense of security. Thousands of kilometers away from the noisy commercial cities, the palace intrigues of the empires, and the territorial disputes of the hegemonic families, the Valley of the Seven Peaks rose majestically.
It was an equal parts geographical marvel and deadly trap. An immense natural bowl, vast and deep, surrounded by seven steep mountains, sharp as primordial needles that pierced the clouds. The bottom of the valley and the inner slopes of the mountains were perpetually drowned in a thick, impenetrable "Purple Mist," a Saint-Grade poisonous array cultivated for centuries that melted flesh, corroded meridians, and drove mad the mind of any intruder daring to take an uninvited step.
It was the impregnable home of the Violet Cloud Sect.
Or, at least, it had been until tonight.
Five kilometers from the main entrance of the valley, where the night breeze was still clean, space warped violently. There was no deafening thunder announcing the arrival, nor a flash of divine light; only the aberrant sound of reality itself tearing was heard, like an immense piece of old silk ripped by invisible claws.
From the spatial fissure, propelled by the perfect coordinates extracted from the Underworld of Aethelgard and channeled by the Portal Key, emerged Grand Marshal Vexia.
Her heavy military boots touched the rocky earth with a dry crunch. Behind her, the abyss spat out an endless tide of metal and death. In an absolute, terrifying silence, the twenty-five thousand cyborgs of the Dead Blood Guard, led by the colossal armored figure of General Orion Alpha—the entity that was once the Demon King Xaloc—marched into the outside world. The armor forged with Cold Star alloy absorbed the scarce light of the waning moon, turning the immense army into a stain of absolute darkness, a gravitational well that blemished the landscape's geography.
Vexia stopped at the edge of a high cliff that dominated the panoramic view of the valley drowned in its lethal mist. She adjusted her glasses with her middle finger, her splintered lenses reflecting the purple sea that swayed peacefully beneath them. She closed her eyes for a moment and took a deep breath, filling her lungs with the cold night air.
"Smells like stagnant fear," Vexia murmured. A clinical smile, devoid of warmth and deeply sadistic, curved her lips. "They are terrified by what happened in the tomb. They believe that by tightly closing their doors and raising their shields, the monster won't come in to devour them. How adorable and pathetic they are."
Patriarch Samael had been very clear with the directives of this mission: Total annihilation. No survivors to tell the tale. No witnesses to mourn the dead. No distress messages to alert the other factions to prepare a defense.
Vexia raised her right hand toward the firmament. From her spatial ring, she extracted a small black metal sphere that pulsed with an energy defying mortal comprehension. It was an array artifact forged with the Patriarch's authority and the clan's massive resources.
"Deploy absolute perimeter isolation network," Vexia ordered, her voice cutting through the cold wind.
From her spatial ring, rivers of blinding light began to flow. Twenty thousand Low-Grade Saint Crystals shot into the sky in a torrent of absurd, obscene wealth. Twenty thousand pure crystals. It was an amount that could have bought two entire empires in the outside world, that would have provoked bloody decade-long continental wars if anyone had seen them. And Vexia simply used them as firewood, as mere fungible fuel to ignite the black sphere.
The twenty thousand crystals vaporized instantly in the air, sacrificing their pure laws and concentrated spiritual essence to feed the dark artifact.
"[Void Quarantine Array]."
The black sphere detonated at the zenith of the night sky. It produced no light, no heat, no sound. Instead, it fired an invisible shockwave, a conceptual disturbance that expanded at the speed of thought. In a blink, the wave covered the hundreds of square kilometers encompassed by the Valley of the Seven Peaks.
When the wave touched the ground around the seven mountains, a colossal dome rose, completely transparent and undetectable to the naked eye or the divine sense of ordinary cultivators. Space and time at the edges of the dome sealed hermetically, disconnecting from the universe's natural flow. The quarantine was absolute and dictatorial. If a disciple inside tried to send a voice transmission message talisman, the message would simply cease to exist upon touching the barrier. If an Elder tried to use an emergency teleportation scroll, its coordinates would collapse on themselves, shredding them in the void.
The outside world noticed absolutely nothing. For the rest of the continent's inhabitants, the Valley of the Seven Peaks was still there, unchanging and serene in the distance. But, in reality, the territory had just been surgically excised from reality. It was now an immense slaughterhouse cage, and Vexia held the only key.
"The door is locked." Vexia lowered her hand, her eyes shining with mathematical coldness through her lenses. "General Xaloc. Initiate the clearing of the outer perimeter. Let not a single guardian beast remain breathing. Harvest the materials. The grinder must feed before the main course."
The colossal three-and-a-half-meter cyborg nodded slowly. His immense figure cast an unnatural shadow over the cliff. The void crystal in his visor flashed an intense crimson red, transmitting the extermination directive through the unbreakable Networked Mind.
In less than a millisecond, the twenty-five thousand soldiers of the Dead Blood Guard responded.
"[Movement Technique: Shifting Dune Steps]."
It was a vision taken straight from a god's deepest nightmares. Twenty-five thousand heavy metal colossi, whose density should have made the earth tremble and caused small earthquakes with every step, completely nullified their friction with the environment. The solid rock, the dirt, and the undergrowth beneath their heavy boots suffered a visual alteration, beginning to undulate rhythmically as if matter was decomposing into billions of invisible grains.
The entire army "melted" against the rocky terrain. They didn't march or run; they glided flush with the ground like a furious ocean of black tar at breakneck speeds. They traced perfect curves and lateral turns so clean it seemed an underwater current was towing them. They didn't kick up a single speck of dust. They didn't snap a single dry branch. They were a silent avalanche.
The extensive periphery of the outer mountains was plagued with lethal spiritual beasts that the sect had bred, fed, and tamed for millennia as their first line of defense. There were formidable Grade 3 Wind Wolves lurking in the dense bamboo forests; Grade 4 Miasma Toads camouflaged perfectly in the poisonous ponds; and lethal Illusory Cloud Panthers resting in the high branches of millennial trees. All these beasts were tied to the sect's runic alarm formations; if even one roared in pain or detected an intruder, the entire valley would go on high alert.
But they couldn't roar. They didn't even realize they were dying.
The Guard's cyborgs flowed through the forest like inescapable physical shadows. When a platoon of ten soldiers clad in black armor passed by a pack of twenty Wind Wolves, the golems drew their heavy sabers in terrifying synchrony.
[Sword Art: Phantom Gale Slash].
Upon gripping the hilts, the cyborgs' runic system instantly created a vacuum bubble around the scabbards. The "click" of the mechanism and the violent hiss of steel cutting the atmosphere were eliminated from the laws of physics.
The wolf pack only saw a faint, illusory silver flash crossing the forest's gloom like a line of water. The technique's Acoustic Void swallowed the horrifying sound of tearing flesh, splitting bones, and snapping tendons. The heads of the twenty enormous wolves fell to the damp ground simultaneously, and their bodies collapsed heavily before their bestial brains had the time to register the pain or send a signal to their vocal cords.
The Morningstar soldiers didn't even halt their frantic march. As they glided over the undergrowth, their metallic hands extended with surgical precision, ripping the raw spiritual cores from the severed necks mid-motion. Simultaneously, the small runic extractors embedded in their gauntlets drained the vital blood essence directly into the storage flasks on their belts.
It was a choreography of purely industrial slaughter. There was no passion in their strikes, no war cries to instill courage, no emotional cruelty or gloating. Only absolute efficiency.
Nearby, a giant Miasma Toad tried to inflate its immense purulent throat to croak a massive alert when its compound eyes registered the black soldiers emerging from the mist. But before the air could leave its lungs, the space in front of it compressed. General Xaloc's immense steel hand caught the amphibian's jaw and, with a simple, cold squeeze that unleashed the force of a Saint King, pulverized its skull as if it were rotten fruit, extracting the valuable, intact poison core from amidst the brain matter.
In less than twenty minutes, the entire immense forest perimeter of the valley was swept and sterilized. Five hundred spiritual beasts, from low-grade guardians to formidable Grade 4 beasts that normally would have required entire squads of sect elders to tame, were turned into simple logistical resources. Hundreds of glowing cores, thousands of liters of distilled blood, and valuable pieces of claws and bones were systematically stored in the legion's spatial rings to feed Vexia's future forges.
But the silent carnage was about to become deafening.
As the black tide advanced toward the inner walls, the earth trembled. The true masters of the outer courtyard, the Bestial Royalty, awoke.
From the depths of the ravines, caverns, and boiling ponds, ten colossal silhouettes emerged. They were the ten Grade 5 Monarch Beasts, entities equivalent to True Saint Realm cultivators, formidable existences that had touched the Laws of the universe and dominated their own territories within the sect. Their mere presence made the air buzz and the purple mist swirl chaotically around them.
Vexia, observing from the top of the cliff, didn't show an ounce of concern. On the contrary, she nodded, her lips curving into an anticipatory smile. With an elegant wave of her hand, she twisted the laws of space around her, condensing rock and energy to form a dark floating throne. She sat down, crossing her legs, resting her cheek on her fist.
"Good, the logistical warm-up is over." Vexia's voice transmitted directly into the legion's hive mind. "General. How you handle these creatures is your job. But do not disappoint me, because if you force me to step down from this throne to fix your mistakes... it will be much worse for you."
Despite being soulless machines, devoid of emotions and stripped of the biological concept of fear, the very code of the Tyrant Dragon Codex integrated into their cores registered Vexia's warning as an apocalyptic threat. An artificial shiver, a primordial urge for slaughter. The twenty-five thousand crimson visors shone with a nuclear intensity, fixing their gazes upon the ten monarch beasts with the coldness of a meat grinder turning on.
The beasts, possessing near-human intelligence, were stunned for a second. In this ecosystem, they were the absolute predators. Yet, facing these black metal invaders, they felt like they were the livestock. Their survival instincts flared, and the ten monarchs unleashed a collective roar that would have shaken the sky if the Quarantine Array hadn't muffled it.
Xaloc stood at the front, immovable as a mountain of iron. He, with his Stage 1 Saint King power, and the legion's non-commissioned officers (Generals Feng Wu and Lian Hua, and the four armored Saints) stood aside. If they intervened, the battle would end in a minute, and the grinder couldn't be calibrated. It was time to test the heavy infantry.
The General calculated the variables in a millisecond and dictated the order. The immense army divided with a terrifying geometric fluidity, separating into ten perfect squads of two thousand five hundred soldiers each, isolating each of the ten beasts into tactical pockets.
They were not feared individually, but as a networked collective, the Morningstar soldiers were a catastrophic storm.
Battle I: The Phalanx Against the Plague
The First Squad surrounded their target: the Three-Legged Plague Toad.
It was a monstrous three-meter-tall amphibian, standing grotesquely upright on its two thick hind legs. Its skin was a brilliant emerald green, covered by thick plates of crystallized amber resin that emitted a dense, corrosive vapor. Its immense neon purple eyes, with runic mandalas spinning in the pupils, locked onto the infantry surrounding it.
Sensing the overwhelming killing intent of the little metal men, the toad roared with indignation.
The squad, moving as a single organism, did not retreat. The vanguard soldiers took a unanimous step forward and bashed their heavy hexagonal shields together with a deafening CLANG! that tore the air.
"[Iron Phalanx Formation]."
As the metallic edges locked together, the runes carved into the defenses lit up in a deep amber color. The air directly in front of the shield wall physically densified, becoming thick and vitreous. The breathing of the two thousand five hundred soldiers merged through the Tyrant's Network, creating an impenetrable molecular barrier.
The toad, underestimating the defense, unleashed its supreme attack: the [Acid Sublimation Tongue].
With a hypersonic whip, it fired its immense bifurcated tongue loaded with acidic blood. The impact didn't seek brute force; it sought corrosion. Upon colliding against the shields, a dull explosion occurred—Boom, boom, boom!—and dense clouds of green smoke began to devour the formation's Qi.
But the cyborgs felt no pain or panic. In the microsecond the tongue stopped, believing it had dissolved the defense, the Phalanx's second line acted.
Through the tiny geometric gaps calculated between the shields, the second line thrust their long spears. Imbued with the brutal hardening of the Black Iron Scales, the tips cut the air with a dull snap, brutally piercing the toad's acidic tongue and pinning it to the rocky ground.
The monarch amphibian let out a guttural shriek, a RAWWW! full of pain and fury. Making a desperate leap and tearing off part of its own tongue, it broke the shield formation through sheer inertia and activated its desperate defense: the [Cryogenic Stasis Veil].
The toad exhaled a cold, white vapor that altered the molecular laws within a twenty-meter radius. The air became as thick as molasses, slowing the movement of the cyborg vanguard until they almost stopped, intending to crush them one by one with its enormous mass. It sent them flying with strong tail swipes, their metallic bodies crashing against the trees.
But Vexia, from her throne, watched with disdain as the squad simply absorbed the damage. They didn't emit a single groan. Thanks to the Black Iron Scales and the legion's indestructible shared mass, the strike of a True Saint was diluted across two thousand five hundred bodies. They stood up in perfect synchrony, their armors unscathed, only emitting steam from overheated joints.
And then, the squad went on the aerial offensive.
The two thousand five hundred soldiers leaped simultaneously into the sky, breaking gravity with an explosion of igneous Qi that lit up the forest.
"[Sky-Piercing Phoenix Spear]."
At the zenith of the jump, the air contracted. The warriors flipped their bodies and dove, aiming their burning spears. The atmospheric friction and their fire energy condensed, manifesting two thousand five hundred Phoenixes of crimson and golden flames that shrieked in the air.
The toad, sensing imminent eradication, detonated its final skill: the [Amber Scale Eruption]. The crystallized warts on its back burst, releasing a dense cloud of poisonous micro-crystals designed to freeze and rot the meridians of anyone who inhaled them.
It was useless. The burning spears' passive, the Phoenix's Song, generated such a monstrous thermal distortion that the amber spore cloud incinerated and was reduced to gray ashes before even touching the soldiers' armor.
The Phoenix fall struck. The spears pierced the beast's tough emerald skin, pinning it to the ground. A volcanic deflagration swept the clearing. But the cyborgs didn't stop there; they applied the lethal Setting Sun Thrust. With a hypersonic cadence, the thousands of mechanical arms executed three consecutive thrusts into the toad's vital points, injecting tiny motes of condensed energy inside it.
With a sharp, unanimous twist, the cyborgs withdrew the spears.
Thousands of white light motes, dormant within the toad's body, exploded simultaneously. The impact didn't break the beast from the outside; the igneous vapor and nuclear force shattered its organs and core from the inside, erupting in a fountain of boiling blood that was instantly evaporated by the fire. The three-legged toad fell, charred from the inside out, dead before the smoke cleared.
Battle II: Immortal Silk and the Dance of Frost
A few kilometers away, the Second Squad faced a different horror: the Eternal Night Spider.
This beast didn't charge. It walked upright on its hind legs forged in shadows, with an abdomen that looked like a piece of a dead galaxy. Its eight red eyes blinked, while purple miasma dripped from its chelicerae.
The spider, with the intelligence of an ancient assassin, didn't approach. It fired its [Event Horizon Threads]. Thousands of black silk filaments, almost invisible in the darkness, crossed the battlefield. If these threads touched prey, they anchored to their mass; the more the target struggled, the heavier the chains became until they asphyxiated their Qi. At the same time, Arachne exhaled its [Umbrial Amnesia Mantle], a colorless mist that induced sweet euphoria while erasing the victim's muscle memory and techniques.
Any human cultivator would have died smiling, trapped in an inescapable web, forgetting how to hold their sword.
But the Morningstar Clan cyborgs were not human. They had no limbic system that could feel euphoria, nor biological brains that could suffer amnesia. They were living hard drives with the slaughter software downloaded directly from a Saint King.
The squad ignored the mist completely. Instead of fleeing from the silk threads, they advanced drawing their short swords, executing the lethal and elegant [Lunar Frost Waltz].
The two thousand five hundred soldiers moved with a macabre grace, skating over the undergrowth. Every time they took a step, their figure flaked away, leaving behind Frost Images, exact copies forged in abyssal blue ice. Arachne, confused by her enemies' lack of biological souls, fired her threads and attacked with her immaterial claws against the silhouettes closest to her.
It was a fatal mistake. The ice copies the spider attacked didn't vanish; they exploded.
A concentric cloud of geometric frost needles burst, burying themselves deep into the spider's hind legs and its own black silk threads. The cold was not normal; it was an ice that stole kinetic energy. The lethal event horizon chains froze until they became fragile as glass, and the beast's legs went numb on the spot.
Unable to move, the spider let out a sharp, panicked hiss. But it was too late. The entire squad activated their manual's ultimate progression: the Blue Jade grade.
The cyborgs' irises flickered, igniting a flash of neon blue will-o'-the-wisp fire. In unison, they launched the [Frigid Midnight Slash]. The blades of their short swords became one hundred percent invisible and immaterial, leaving behind only a liquid trail that drew the shape of waning moons.
Thousands of silver moons sliced the air in silence. The immaterial edges passed through Arachne's thick silk and dark chitin without spilling a single drop of blood. However, at every cut point, massive cyan frost lotus flowers sprouted. The flow of acidic blood and the spider's nerve endings froze from the inside out.
In a millisecond, the colossal and terrifying Void Widow transmuted into a beautiful, pathetic statue of white porcelain and inert crystal, its eight red eyes going dark forever.
Battle III: The Colossus's Resistance
In the southern sector of the clearing, the Third Squad clashed against the Thunder Throne Ape.
A colossal gorilla with metallic blue fur that carried the brute force of a mountain and the speed of lightning. Finding itself surrounded, the ape wasted no time on subtle tactics. Its eyes, two storms of white crystal, ignited.
The Ape beat its own chest, emitting the [Sovereign Mandate Roar]. A roar that hijacked the brain's electrical impulses, designed to paralyze entire armies.
The sonic wave swept over the two thousand five hundred soldiers. But again, biology failed. There was no central nervous system to hijack. The cyborgs didn't even blink, continuing their inexorable march, surrounding the ape in a perfect circle.
The ape, furious at the lack of submission, broke its body's molecular cohesion, turning into pure electricity, and shot into the center of the enemy formation. Reappearing physically, it absorbed the environment's static into its immense biological metal knuckles and unleashed the [Compressed Indra's Hammer].
It struck the ground with a punch that carried the atomic weight of a violet lightning nuclear fission.
The electrical shockwave was catastrophic. The earth erupted, and the heavy bodies of the vanguard cyborgs were hit squarely by a force that should have fused their runic circuits and melted their Cold Star armors into slag.
But the Tyrant's Network shone. In the instant of impact, thick threads of golden and crimson energy appeared in the air, connecting the soldier who took the hit with the soldier fifty meters away.
The ancient law of the Tyrant Dragon Codex, Mass Indestructibility, activated. The lethal impact of a lightning monarch didn't destroy the ten frontline soldiers; it was divided equally into two thousand five hundred exact fractions.
Visually, the immense army simply vibrated. Crimson static ran across their armor, and from the joints of their mechanical necks, they exhaled a mist of hot steam. No one fell. No one melted. They absorbed the wrath of a thunder god without breaking formation.
The ape lifted its fist from the crater, its white eyes widening at the impossible. Its most destructive attack hadn't left a scratch.
That was its last sight.
Taking advantage of the fact that the ape had discharged its core and was anchored to the ground, the entire squad drew their sabers using the [Phantasmagoric Displacement] of the Gale Slash. Through the distortion created by the ape's own static, the soldiers displaced in a microsecond, leaving behind statues of air and perfect illusions.
While the beast launched a second blind strike against the frontal illusions, the true destructive force had materialized at its back and sides. Two thousand five hundred blades cut the atmosphere in a sepulchral silence, converging on a single geometric blind spot. The colossal thunder ape was dismembered and decapitated before its own thunder could echo in the valley, its body falling to pieces in a pool of sizzling blood.
The Perimeter Eradication
From the peak, Vexia checked her pocket watch as the massacre unfolded simultaneously across the ten sectors. The Morningstar Clan's industrial machinery was sweeping away the ecosystem's royalty as if they were annoying pests.
In the northern sector, the Monarch of the Dusk, the Shadow Wolf, tried to use its infamous Blink of Non-Being to jump into the cyborgs' shadows and tear them apart from the inside with its Corrosive Dusk Claws. Its intention was to rot the metal with the wear of ages. But it met the impenetrable wall of Black Iron and the Codex. Having no souls to corrode, the wolf's entropy bounced uselessly against the army's consolidated mass. Surrounded and trapped in its own gloom, it was crushed under the inertia of hundreds of heavy spears that pinned it to the obsidian floor, tearing its intangible form apart.
Further beyond, the Sovereign of the Fault, the gigantic tectonic core scorpion, tried to use its Absolute Compression Pincer to crush the infantry. But the Iron Phalanx, anchored to the mountain's ley lines, returned the gravitational force. The hexagonal shields acted as an immense collective hydraulic press, crushing the scorpion's pincers to ruby dust before a rain of fire fell from the sky and calcined its internal organs.
In the air, the Vulture of the Silent Void tried to deploy its Acoustic Death Domain, seeking to burst its enemies' eardrums and suffocate them by depriving the area of sound and oxygen. A devastating tactic against humans. A monumental stupidity against machines that didn't breathe. The cyborgs simply looked up, locked the ballistic coordinates, and projected spears of condensed fire that pierced the vulture's invisible wings, bringing it down like a dead comet.
The colossal centipede was dismembered leg by leg in a spectral silence. The volcanic beetle saw its magma horn shattered by the overwhelming kinetic force of two thousand soldiers falling like meteors. The illusionist mantis was frozen and sliced amidst its own mirrors by the Lunar Waltz practitioners. And the great bear, which tried to devour human vitality to regenerate, found that only cold fire and synthetic beast blood flowed in its attackers' veins; its bronze roots withered before its head was torn off by a clean slash.
Silence.
The battlefield was plunged into a terrifying muteness. Not a single roar remained. The extensive, leafy periphery of the Valley of the Seven Peaks was covered in craters, crystallized frost, molten glass, and dark blood, but not a single guardian beast was breathing. The ten monarchs, creatures that the sects revered almost as minor protective deities of the mountains, had been erased in less time than it takes an incense stick to burn.
The twenty-five thousand cyborgs shook the thick, acidic blood from their swords and spears in a perfectly synchronized movement, the sound of steel being cleaned bouncing like the tick-tock of a funeral clock. They stored the enormous, vibrant beast cores in their non-commissioned officers' logistical rings.
The immense General Xaloc, the faceless executioner, turned on his heels and walked slowly toward the base of the cliff where Vexia sat waiting on her dark throne. He knelt, the creak of his armor filling the absolute silence, and bowed his head.
"Outer perimeter secured and neutralized, Commander. No alerts have been triggered. Grade 5 resources have been harvested. The army awaits new directives."
Vexia stood up slowly from her throne, the dark structure dissolving into smoke and ash behind her. She walked to the edge of the abyss and looked into the valley, where the great runic doors of the Violet Cloud Sect rose majestically and ignorant of the tide of metal that had just ravaged their outer defenses.
Inside, thousands and thousands of elders, patriarchs, deacons, and young disciples slept in their luxurious pavilions. They slept under the false belief that their thousand years of history, their poisonous mist, and their guardian beasts would protect them from any evil.
Vexia adjusted her glasses one last time, the bloodlust radiating from her small body with such force that the General stepped back a millimeter.
"The warm-up and material harvesting have concluded. The yield is acceptable," Vexia decreed, her icy voice resonating in the hive mind. "Now, march toward the main sect. Wake the false immortals from their slumber, tear down their doors, and let them know... that calamity has just rung the bell."
The dark army stood up, their red visors glowing in unison, and began their final advance toward the heart of sleeping humanity.