Chapter 191: Vexia, Order, and Chaos Dismantled
While the valley turned into an industrial slaughterhouse, Patriarch Feng, "The Deceitful Wind," understood that his sect was doomed. Terror had devoured his pride. Bleeding from a superficial wound on his shoulder and watching his formations fall one after another, he made the only decision he had left: awaken the monster.
Feng dove toward the forbidden mountain at the rear of the sect, dodging Qi explosions and invisible slashes. He arrived at the immense stone doors sealed with jade chains. Awakening Ancestor Ziyun prematurely was an absolute taboo; the old man was at a delicate bottleneck toward the Saint King Realm. Pulling him out of his seclusion would require mountains of resources to restabilize his flawed "Inner World," but the alternative was extinction.
Feng burned his blood essence, dyeing his hands crimson, and struck the door's seal.
"Ancestor Ziyun! Awaken! The Violet Cloud Sect is being annihilated!" roared Feng, sending his voice through the stone.
A deep tremor shook the mountain, indicating that the entity inside had opened its eyes. But before Feng could breathe a sigh of relief, a gigantic shadow eclipsed the moonlight above him.
General Xaloc landed heavily in front of the stone doors, cracking the ground. His crimson optical eyes locked onto the Patriarch.
"High-Value Target identified. Initiating capture protocol," synthesized Xaloc's metallic voice.
Feng gritted his teeth, unsheathing the Weeping Cloud Sword. The blade emitted a pitiful moan that disturbed the soul.
"Do not underestimate me, iron monster!" shouted Feng.
Xaloc attacked first, unleashing a blast of dark fire through the [Red Jade Manual: Sky-Piercing Phoenix Spear]. The immense spear of flames descended like a meteor, but at the instant of impact, Feng's physical body dissolved. His Law allowed him to turn his flesh into intangible mist. The explosion calcined the earth, but Feng reappeared behind Xaloc, delivering a venomous slash straight at the cyborg's neck joints.
The steel shrieked, but the Cold Star Iron armor was barely scratched.
The battle turned into a game of cat and mouse. For ten agonizing minutes, Feng used his intangibility to evade fatal blows that would have crushed mountains, materializing for only fractions of a second to attack the machine's supposed blind spots.
But Xaloc was no simple golem; he was a Saint King of the Primordial Era. Xaloc stopped attacking at random. He had calculated Feng's materialization pattern.
When Feng turned into mist to dodge a horizontal sweep, Xaloc didn't wait. He activated the [Shifting Dune Steps]. Instead of walking, the iron colossus glided through space with absurd and unnatural speed, positioning himself at the exact coordinate where Feng was about to reconstruct his body.
The instant the Patriarch's flesh became solid again, Xaloc's immense hand was already there, enveloped in the flames of the Piercing Phoenix. The extreme heat calcined the residual mist, preventing Feng from dissolving again.
"No...!" gasped Feng, feeling the scorching heat.
Xaloc did not hesitate. With a brutal and calculated movement, the General's heavy sword traced a crimson arc. A horrifying crunch resonated. Patriarch Feng's two arms flew through the air, instantly cauterized by the dark fire. Before Feng could scream, Xaloc spun on his axis and delivered a low kick that shattered the Stage 7 Grand Saint's knees, amputating both legs below the thigh.
The Patriarch fell to the ground like a broken doll, his Qi bleeding out, barely breathing, begging for mercy from a machine that did not know the concept.
A deafening explosion blew the mountain doors to pieces. From the darkness of the cave, an ethereal figure surrounded by a halo of solidified mist emerged. It was Ancestor Ziyun, "The Sage of the Broken Cloud," a Quasi-Saint King whose power distorted gravity around him.
Ziyun opened his eyes and looked at his valley. What he saw made his millennial heart stop.
His six Peak Lords were being dismembered by Lian Hua and the commanders. The pavilions burned with black flames. And in the center, his Patriarch lay amputated at the feet of a metal colossus. A thousand years of legacy, of construction and pride, were being trampled like trash.
The fury that invaded Ziyun was surpassed only by panic. He perceived that space was sealed by Vexia's Quarantine Array. There was no escape. If the sect fell, he would die.
A gleam of madness illuminated the Ancestor's eyes. If he had nothing left, he would use everything.
"If heaven wants my death, I will swallow the earth to survive!" roared Ziyun. His hands formed seals at lightning speed. "Absolute Sacrifice Array! Come to me, my disciples! Give your blood to your Ancestor!"
The valley floor began to glow with blood-red runes. Ziyun planned to devour the vitality of his eight thousand remaining disciples, use them as human batteries to force his breakthrough to the Saint King Realm and massacre the invaders.
In the sky, Grand Marshal Vexia adjusted her glasses. Her eyes flashed with a cold wrath.
"What a daring old man. Trying to steal my Patriarch's nutrients right before my eyes?" murmured Vexia. "That blood belongs to the Stellar World Tree of the Morningstar Clan."
Vexia transmitted a single order through Orion's network: "Total Eradication. Accelerate the Harvest. Leave not a single drop of Qi for this parasite."
The 25,000 cyborgs of the Dead Blood Guard received the order. The entire legion synchronized into a single entity. They leaped toward the bottom of the valley, surrounding the eight thousand terrified disciples, and locked their shields together.
[Iron Phalanx].
It wasn't a static formation; it was a human grinder closing inward. The Violet Cloud disciples tried to flee from their own Ancestor's sacrificial runes, only to crash against an impenetrable wall of Cold Star Iron.
From behind the shields, thousands of sabers attacked mercilessly. [Phantom Gale Slash]. An infinite net of void cuts swept the interior of the phalanx. It was an inescapable industrial massacre. Arms, heads, and torsos were severed in absolute silence. The deacons who tried to resist were chopped to pieces before they could conjure their techniques. The blood formed rivers that were quickly absorbed by the cyborgs' harvesters.
Ziyun's "human batteries" were systematically annihilated. When the Ancestor finished his seals, the Sacrifice Array flickered and died. There was no one left alive to be sacrificed.
Ziyun vomited blood, the backlash of his own failed technique damaging his meridians. He looked up at the sky and saw Vexia floating with indifference. Wrath consumed him. That woman seemed to be the commander, the only one not covered in iron.
"Damned whore! You will die with me!" bellowed Ziyun, propelling himself into the sky like a toxic mist missile.
He unleashed his maximum power. Law Domain: Absolute Miasma Sky.
A sphere of corrosive mist and total darkness swallowed Vexia. Within this domain, the five physical and spiritual senses were instantly nullified, and the victim's Qi dissolved, rotting their core from the inside. Ziyun was confident that, even if she was powerful, without senses she would be an easy target.
Vexia, trapped in the absolute darkness of the miasma, didn't even blink.
"Pathetic," whispered Vexia, her voice cutting through the miasma's darkness. "Your so-called Law is a disorganized mess, a clumsy mortal attempt to bind incompatible elements. Let me teach you what the true order of the Heavens is."
Vexia raised a single finger. Her eyes shone, not with the light of ordinary Qi, but with the cold, absolute certainty of a Divine Concept. To a being whose soul and power had ascended to the heights of the Divine Realm, the universe was no longer a mix of rudimentary magics; everything was composed of the Threads of Karma and the Absolute Truth.
[Divine Authority: The Severing of the Dao].
Vexia did not attack with fire or brute force. In her superior vision, Ziyun's proud Domain wasn't a formidable attack; it was an atrociously poorly woven spiritual tapestry. Without the slightest effort, Vexia projected her will and directly "cut" the conceptual threads that forced the union of the poison and the mist.
The effect was immediate and catastrophic. The suffocating mist and corrosive poison that Ziyun had fused to create his Domain violently separated, stripped of their Law. The invincible Miasma was dismantled in fractions of a second, dissolving into harmless particles of ordinary water and inert dust. The Domain collapsed in silence, like a cheap illusion dispelled by the wind.
But Vexia didn't stop there. She applied the relentless Conceptual Rupture directly upon the Ancestor.
Ziyun, who was flying toward her to deliver the killing blow, suddenly felt something vital fracture deep within his being. The foundations of his Dantian and the karmic threads binding him to the energy of heaven and earth were cleanly severed by Vexia's Divine Concept.
All the massive Qi of a Quasi-Saint King separated from his physical body, as if the laws of the universe had expelled it, leaving him suspended in the air like an empty shell.
"W-What have you done to me...?" croaked Ziyun, unable to feel even a spark of magic in his veins.
Vexia appeared in front of him, moving at a speed that the old man's mortal eyes could not register.
"I have taught you your place," said Vexia.
And then, the physical punishment began.
Vexia grabbed Ziyun's right arm. With a sharp, clinical movement, she applied leverage. A wet, dull crunch resonated in the silent air. Ziyun's humerus bone snapped in two, and a sharp white splinter pierced his skin and purple robe. The Ancestor's agonizing scream tore through the night.
Without stopping, Vexia spun and kicked the left side of Ziyun's torso. The sound of five ribs giving way and breaking was like the crunch of dry branches under an iron boot. The old man's lungs partially collapsed, making him cough up pink froth.
Ziyun tried to retreat, crying in pain, a mortal pain he had not felt in centuries. Vexia grabbed him by the left leg and, with a brutal twist of her wrist, shattered his knee ligaments. A sickening, viscous tearing sound filled the air as the Ancestor's leg was left bent at an unnatural and impossible angle.
Finally, Vexia sank two fingers into the old man's stomach, right over where his Dantian used to be. She used no Qi, only crushing physical force. She pressed until she felt the main motor meridians and mechanically destroyed them.
Ziyun plummeted, his body shattered, his bones protruding from the flesh, his mind collapsed by trauma and pain. He crashed into the valley floor with a dull thud, alive, but unable to move a single finger, barely breathing in a pool of his own blood.
Vexia descended smoothly and landed next to him. She wiped an imaginary speck of dust from her glove.
"Pick him up," she ordered with disdain.
The battle was over. What was once the majestic Valley of the Seven Peaks was now a graveyard painted red.
"Group the prisoners," instructed Vexia, walking across the field of blood.
The cyborg soldiers dragged the enemy high command to a corner of the valley. There, piled like sacks of rotting meat, lay Patriarch Feng (armless and legless), Ancestor Ziyun (with all his bones broken), the two Vice-Masters, the six Peak Lords, and the ten Head Deacons. They were all half-dead, sealed, breathing agonizingly with bloodshot eyes, forced to witness the end of their home.
"Process the raw material," continued Vexia.
It was a job of macabre efficiency. The cyborgs' spatial rings opened. Ten thousand corpses of disciples of all levels were sucked in and stored in stasis to preserve their freshness. They were premium fertilizer; their blood and flesh would soon feed the roots of the immense Stellar World Tree in the Morningstar Palace.
While the bodies were being collected, entire divisions of soldiers dedicated themselves to absolute pillaging. They shattered the sect's vaults. They extracted hundreds of thousands of Spirit Stones, cultivation manuals, pills, and tons of exotic minerals and metals from the forges.
General Orion Alpha plunged his immense hands into the valley's earth, channeling his Saint King power to uproot the very source of the sect's wealth: the spirit veins. As if he were pulling glowing roots from the ground, he tore out three intact Heaven-Grade spirit veins, storing them in a spatial isolation container.
Vexia opened her mental panel and reviewed the inventory that the Networked Mind was sending her in real time.
"Ten thousand low and mid-level bodies. Twenty captured high-level experts. Three spirit veins. A mountain of treasures. And enough death Qi for the level of our base army to consolidate," thought Vexia, nodding in satisfaction. The cost of the Void Quarantine had been recovered many times over.
The Marshal channeled her energy and activated her access to the Portal Key that Samael had granted her. The space in front of her tore open, revealing a dark, starry tunnel that connected directly to the processing level of the mini-world.
"Send the resources to the Patriarch's vaults," she ordered. "And take these miserable pieces of meat to Lady Sienna's laboratory. Make sure they keep breathing until she puts them on her operating table. Their mutilated souls and bodies will make excellent Golems."
The prisoners were hoisted by thick black iron chains and dragged toward the portal. The muffled groans of Patriarch Feng and Ancestor Ziyun were swallowed by the void.
Once the last soldier crossed the portal carrying the loot, Vexia dissolved the [Void Quarantine Array]. The real sky and the stars became visible over the valley once again.
Only Vexia, General Orion Alpha, and the 25,000 cyborgs remained in the center of the empty, silent valley.
"The Patriarch said he wanted no witnesses. And I do not like ruins; they are too poetic a reminder." Vexia raised her hand toward the sky. "Leave nothing."
Xaloc drove his colossal sword into the center of the valley. The Networked Mind activated at its maximum resonant capacity. The twenty-five thousand Dantians of the legion beat like a single heart of pure darkness.
"[Tyrant Dragon Codex: Manifestation of the Apocalypse]."
The massive, dark Qi of the Dead Blood Guard, fed by the recent massacre, condensed in the sky. The solid energy formed cosmic scales, claws, and maws. The Dragon of the Apocalypse, a physical avatar of lethal and destructive energy kilometers long, came to life.
The black dragon descended from the clouds and coiled its immense spectral body around the foundations of the seven sharp mountains that formed the valley walls.
With a roar that produced no sound but generated a crushing implosion of gravity, the Dragon tightened its coils.
The geography itself screamed. The stone bases, reinforced for millennia by defensive arrays, shattered like glass under the pressure. The seven colossal mountains lost their foundations.
Slowly, and then with cataclysmic violence, the seven peaks collapsed inward. Millions of tons of rock, earth, and debris cascaded toward the center of the bowl-shaped valley.
Vexia and her army disappeared through the portal at the last second before the apocalyptic avalanche covered everything.
When the dust cleared hours later, and the first neighboring sects dared to approach to investigate the seismic tremors, they found an incomprehensible scene.
The impregnable Valley of the Seven Peaks no longer existed. In its place, there was only a vast, flat plain of crushed rock, so smooth it seemed polished by the hand of a vengeful god. There were no ruins. There were no corpses. There was not even a trace of the famous Purple Mist.
The imposing Violet Cloud Sect had not simply been defeated. It had been physically erased from the face of the Northern continent, as if a cosmic eraser had removed it from the maps forever.
The message was written with absence itself. The true predators had begun to hunt.