Chapter 593 - 364: Holy, Holy, Holy

Unknown realm.

The sky overhead was not the familiar azure of the Imperial Academy, nor was it the gentle, starlit canopy of the central continent.

It was a bruised, suffocating twilight of curdled purple and sickly yellow, hanging low and motionless over a desolation that stretched far beyond the horizon.

There was no wind, no chirping of birds, and no rustle of leaves. Only a dead, deafening quiet that pressed heavily against the eardrums like stagnant water.

Qian Yunxi groaned, her head feeling like it was about to split as a sharp, throbbing spike of agony lanced through her temples, radiating down the back of her neck and into her shoulders.

Her vision swam in blurred, double images of grey and crimson.

The dimensional tear had violently scrambled her inner meridians, the turbulent currents of chaotic space having buffeted her celestial frame until her spiritual channels felt bruised and raw.

Her slender, pale fingers dug into her temples, pressing hard against her brow to force the dizziness back down into her core.

She drew a shallow breath through her teeth, but the air she pulled into her lungs burned with an acrid, stomach-churning stench.

It was the foul, suffocating odor of decayed meat, stale copper, and ancient rust.

Looking around, she found herself in a battlefield, rotting bodies around, rusted and broken weapons, blood flowing like rivers, and corpses piled up like mountains.

Her stomach heaved. Beneath her knees, the soil was not dirt, but a black, greasy sludge soaked through with centuries of congealed viscera.

Everywhere she looked, the carnage extended in grotesque, unending mounds.

Humanoid corpses in shattered, forgotten armor lay tangled with the carcasses of colossal beasts whose ribbed spines curved upward like ruined ship hulls.

Limbs were severed, skulls were crushed, and rib cages were pried wide open to the gloomy sky.

Some of the dead were withered to desiccated husks, their skin clinging dryly to gray bone, while others were swollen, black, and weeping putrid fluids into the sluggish, dark crimson streams that wound between the carnage like veins in an open wound.

Broken halberds, notched broadswords, and snapped spears were driven into the dirt like markers in an infinite cemetery, their metal eaten away by reddish-brown rust that crumbled into the gore.

Mountains of the fallen rose thirty, fifty, a hundred meters into the bruised air, stacked high like discarded cordwood, casting jagged shadows across the stagnant red rivers.

"Where is this place...?" She frowned.

At that moment...

Tap.

Someone tapped her shoulders.

The contact was light, but in this dead, corpse-strewn wasteland, it sounded like a thunderclap inside her skull.

She panicked, her survival instincts, honed through ruthless trials and life or death battles, flared into violent motion!

Her six golden wings snapped outward behind her back with a concussive boom of holy radiance, scattering the greasy sludge beneath her boots.

She whipped her body around on her heel, her right hand straightening into a lethal spear-hand coated in blinding, razor sharp sword intent, aiming directly for the throat of whatever abomination had dared to creep into her blind spot!

"Wait! Wait! Sister Yunxi, it’s me! Me!"

A frantic, terrified shout broke through the hum of her gathering technique.

A young man stumbled backward, his arms thrown up before his face in desperate defense, his boots splashing through a puddle of dark blood as he nearly tripped over the ribcage of an ancient war beast.

Qian Yunxi paused, the golden radiance dancing across her fingers flickered and pulled back into her skin, though her posture remained taut as a drawn bowstring.

Her eyes narrowed into cold, calculating slits as the blinding glare faded, revealing the disheveled figure scrambling for balance in the red mud.

It was Qing Yan.

His robe was torn in multiple places along the sleeves and hem, caked with dry grime and splatters of foul black fluid.

His hair hung loose and matted with sweat against his pale forehead, his chest heaved with ragged, panicked breaths, his hands still raised defensively as he stared at her glowing fingertips with genuine fright.

"It’s you..." Qian Yunxi frowned, "Why are you here?"

Her tone was sharp, flat, and devoid of the easy gentleness she typically showed her peers.

She did not lower her guard. In a place as alien and horrifying as this, finding an acquaintance was not necessarily a stroke of good fortune; it could just as easily be a trap spun from illusion arrays or mental corruption.

Qing Yan paused, but answered, "I was on my way to Boundless Sky City, and I happened to see you and wanted to help you."

He swallowed hard, his throat bobbing as he lowered his trembling arms by a fraction as he rubbed his bruised forearm, his eyes darting anxiously over the mountains of rotting flesh surrounding them.

He couldn’t really say that he was stalking her right? No matter how shameless he had gotten, it’s not to the point where he can admit that.

Qian Yunxi stared at him warily, her bright, blue eyes bored into his face, analyzing every subtle twitch of his jaw, the rapid pulse at the base of his neck, and the way his gaze continually flickered away from her direct stare.

She was no naive maiden sheltered in an inner courtyard.

Qing Yan’s sudden presence in the secluded southern forest was entirely too convenient.

His explanation sounded rehearsed, masking an underlying calculation that smelled foul.

Yet, as she looked across the endless expanse of gore, the rotting behemoths, and the alien sky that felt entirely detached from the mortal plane, cold pragmatism took precedence over immediate confrontation.

Even a suspicious companion was a shield, a second pair of eyes, and a source of information.

"Is that so?"

The three words dropped from her lips like cool stones falling into a frozen pond, carrying neither belief nor direct accusation.

She shook her head, looking around, "Let’s go and explore. I don’t know where that void threw us off."

She stepped forward, her white leather boots stepping carefully along a ridge of relatively dry, blackened slate to avoid the sluggish red rivers.

Qing Yan let out a quiet sigh of relief, quickly falling into step three paces behind her right shoulder.

As they walked through the narrow valleys formed by mounds of slaughtered warriors, Qian Yunxi kept her focus inward, detaching a wisp of her divine sense into the core of her soul.

’System,’ she called out silently within the quiet sanctum of her mind. ’Can you establish a return bridge? Can you pull me back to the Falling Blossom Villa?’

A faint, cool chime resonated inside her consciousness, followed by the familiar, translucent blue text rippling across her mental sea.

[Sub-System Number 04 active.]

[Warning: Host is currently located outside the local coordinate grid. Spatial interference from the abyssal void remains dense.]

[Direct recall function is temporarily offline due to spatial anchor severance.]

Qian Yunxi’s heart tightened slightly, but she maintained a flat, untroubled expression on the outside. ’Then what can be done? Am I permanently stranded in this graveyard?’

The system’s mechanical voice responded with measured stability.

[Host need not panic. The Sub-System’s core tether is directly bound to the Main Host System held by Ling Luochen. While this one lacks the computational power to force a cross-dimensional passage, the Main System possesses the master anchor.]

[The Main System has detected the severance and is actively running high-dimensional recursive algorithms to locate your specific cosmic coordinates.]

[All the host needs to do now is survive, conserve spiritual energy, and wait for the retrieval bridge to lock onto this plane.]

’Wait, then...’ Qian Yunxi said quietly, exhaling a slow, steady breath through her nose.

Counting the time, then young master Haoran should already be back in the villa and must be aware of her disappearance.

His presence alone provided an immense, solid weight of reassurance.

If anyone possessed the terrifying, unreasonable might to tear through the boundary of an unknown realm and drag her back by the collar, it was that man.

All she had to do was keep her head on her shoulders until she was found and rescued.

With that, both of them continued their trek for another half hour.

The terrain never changed; it was an unbroken nightmare of rusted armaments, splintered banners, and rotting corpses of ancient soldiers who looked as though they had fallen in battle only yesterday, preserved in a strange, stagnant stasis.

But...

Just then, Qian Yunxi suddenly froze, her eyes staring at a massive hundred meter tall sword.

The colossal blade was thrust point-first into the summit of a towering mound of blackened bone.

It was immense—its broad, double-edged spine easily exceeding twenty meters in width, its flat surface rising over a hundred meters into the bruised purple clouds like an ancient, stone-hewn monument.

The metal was not rusted like the common sabers in the dirt; it was forged from an unblemished, deep grey unknown ore that seemed to drink in the dim light without showing a single scratch.

Carved deep along the fuller of the gargantuan blade were lines of sharp, angular glyphs that glowed with a faint, dormant silver luminescence, curling like coiling dragons along the edge.

"That’s... The Clear Universe Imperial Writing?"

Qian Yunxi’s breath caught in her throat, her boots stopped dead on the gravel, her pale eyes widening as she traced the intricate strokes carved into the iron.

Qing Yan blinked and turned towards her, "You know of it?"

His voice was laced with genuine surprise as he stepped up beside her, squinting up at the colossal weapon, but to his eyes, the markings looked like nothing more than random, jagged grooves scored by wind and lightning.

Qian Yunxi nodded, "Yes. It’s the ancient writing that is widely used in the Eastern Region hundreds of thousands of years ago. Which means, we are probably somewhere in the Eastern Region."

Her voice was solemn and certain.

Back then, hundreds of thousands of years ago, the Four Cardinal Regions, the Central Region and the Imperial Capital were six independent Empires.

But a certain emperor went conquered all six empires, and forming one unified empire.

As the heiress of the strongest force in the Eastern Region, the Spirit Hall, Qian Yunxi is very well versed in the region’s history and culture, so she can easily recognize the characters.

From the day she had learned how to read, the elders of the Spirit Hall had forced her to memorize the ancient archives, the forgotten treaties of the primordial dynasties, and the dead dialects of the prehistoric eras.

The Clear Universe Imperial Writing was the imperial script used by an ancient empire that ruled the eastern region.

It was an imperial language imbued with divine law, used exclusively on sacrificial monuments and royal war armaments.

For this blade to bear such script meant this ancient battlefield was tied directly to the forgotten sacred wars of her ancestral home.

"What does it say?" Asked Qing Yan, his curiosity overcoming his lingering terror as he leaned forward, staring up at the towering steel monolith.

Qian Yunxi frowned and observed it carefully.

She took a slow step closer, her six wings fluttering faintly beneath her skin as the holy light in her blood resonated faintly with the aura slumbering inside the great sword.

Her eyes traced the three central glyphs carved into the guard, then followed the smaller, flowing verses that trailed down the central fuller toward the bone mound below.

The characters were archaic, heavy with divine resonance, demanding a deep understanding of celestial phonetics to translate.

She parted her lips, reading the ancient declaration aloud in a clear, resonant voice.

"It roughly translates to: ’Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.’"

HUUUUUUMMMMM!

The moment she said those words, the sword suddenly glowed bright gold!

The silence of the dead battlefield was violently shattered!

A blinding, celestial pillar of pure, radiant fire erupted from the hundred meter blade, shooting straight into the bruised purple firmament like a divine spear.

The thick, stagnant clouds above were torn wide open, evaporating in an instant to reveal a boundless sea of golden light!

The dormant silver runes carved along the fuller burst into roaring golden flames, singing with an ancient, ear-splitting metallic chime that shook the mountains of bone to their foundations!

The greasy sludge on the ground hissed and vaporized into clean, white mist, and the thousands of rusted weapons driven into the surrounding earth began to tremble, humming in violent resonance with the sudden awakening of the sacred blade!