That’s called an artifact spirit. An aerial stronghold is also a supreme magik artifact. When the artifact spirit comes out and fights, that basically means that the fight's done for

, Mao Ba’er said with a solemn tone.

According to my observations, all the White Tiger Hall’s cultivators pulled back into the main palace, four hours ago. What I’m going to say can’t be said to be wrong, but just a little while ago… I was playing around with a pomeranian that didn’t leave, but she ran off.

Xu Yangyi was somewhat twitchy. 

And this is something related to the White Tiger Hall?

No!

 Mao Ba’er said certainly. 

You might not know, but there are too many house pets and stray cats and dogs around here that didn’t have time to leave. They really admire a handsome, young guy like me. I’ve been trying to subdue these guys and create my own Fireshadow Village. I even thought up a name for myself, I’ll call myself the first generation Fire Shadow! My last name will be Uchiha! Man, thinking about this really is a little embarrassing!

Mao Ba’er.

Ahem… 

The familiar realized he’d strayed from topic as usual and coughed dryly. 

What I mean is… just now, a group of cats and dogs came from even farther away. And on top of that, all of them plus the anbu and jonin I was fooling around with ran away. 

[1]

Not waiting for Xu Yangyi to reply, the husky followed up through their link, 

I suspect… they were scared over by someone.

Only several armies have passed through. They were only then scared over

, said Mao Ba’er.

Who? 

Xu Yangyi mumbled to himself as he finished speaking. All of a sudden, his eyes flickered and he stood up. Oddly, both he and Mao Ba’er spoke out at the same time.

The Linghu Clan!

This thought was merely like a flash of lightning, yet it immediately took root in his mind!

That’s right… it’s them, it’s definitely them!

 he confirmed without almost any hesitation. 

The Linghu Clan… their about to fall, and they’re about to lose their command plate. If they want to keep this game going, there’s only one way!

And that’s to run over and snatch our Fireshadow Village! 

the husky quickly continued, 

The first-generation Fireshadow Village cannot allow a plot like this!

Xu Yangyi had no time to ridicule Mao Ba’er. Immediately, a few strings in his mind drew together.

Previously, the White Tiger Hall had pulled back its cultivators, possibly to centralize their power for a final fight. But even more likely… was they were playing a devious trick, fooling the heavens in crossing the ocean! Masking their true intentions with false actions, like the story of Chencang captured in the night!

[2]

Has the ground been shaking?

No.

Are there signs of the enemy?

None.

Xu Yangyi nodded. The more the situation developed this way, the greater the certainty that he had that the Linghu Clan’s true elites were not just those previous hundred cultivators! All the Screaming Wind Legion’s captains and as well as the Linghu Clan’s true geniuses were hard at work, the moon’s glow draping over their shoulders and beaming down on their faces as they toiled away. They were storming straight to the Xingtian Legion with die-hard killing intent!

After all, exchanging a Linghu Clan captain for him was not the best path!

Whether the Xingtian Legion was aware was basically a non-factor. What was important was that the other clans didn’t know.

“What bold resolve.” He took a deep breath. Since the beginning, the Linghu Clan had dared to dispatch a hundred elites to devour him. They had then drawn the Reincarnation Puppet and launched a counterattack. Xu Yangyi knew at once that their mindset for risk-taking was extremely great. Such a mentality had already crept into the bones of the Linghu Clan cultivators below, as well. Through their conduct, the greater whole of their operations was visible.

He quickly stepped out of his room and arrived at the great hall. After seeing Chu Zhaonan and Lord Zhao, he said, “Gather everyone straightaway and enter war preparations.”

“Why?” Chu Zhaonan looked outside suspiciously. “You sure there’s no problem with your intel? I’ve sent five scouts from the Hidden Dragon Legion outside, and there hasn’t been the slightest feedback.”

“I don’t risk being certain.” Xu Yangyi licked his lips. “But the probability is extremely great!”

Chu Zhaonan didn’t ask again and took out a set of jade slips. As he opened them, five names on the surface were awesomely shining.

“They haven’t died,” Chu Zhaonan muttered. “I’ll call them to return first.” He made a strange seal. Five seconds passed, and a crease formed between his brows. He made the seal again. Another three seconds passed, caution already on his face. “They didn’t die…” he gritted out, “but they’re unable to answer me!”

At this moment, they were unaware that 500 meters away from the Featherwood Guard there were five camouflaged cultivators nailed to a wall by a spirit beam. Qi light was slowly absorbing their life force, leaving them unable to cry out. Their spiritual sense and spiritual force were unable to move, but there was no chance of them dying!

Their eyes were gazing ahead in fright.

An asphalt road was originally there, but now there were countless nearly transparent shadows on top. They were like the underworld’s army, racing across the ground as if they were stars in pursuit of the moon!

With each charge, the ground slightly trembled. Until now… this had already passed for ten minutes! 

A great army of no less than a thousand!

The moonlight was misty. These shadows were all transparent. Even though the shadows passed in front of the five cultivators, they could only see the slight fuzziness of space. On the ground, moreover, there wasn’t the slightest sound! And that wasn’t to speak of sensing qi!

After ten-odd minutes passed, the phantasms left… but the ground had actually been forcibly depressed by a centimeter!

Something had come… A cultivator of the Hidden Dragon Legion painfully closed his eyes.

In addition, the number of people was many! A standing army equipped with the finest assets!

He raised his head in distress and glanced at the White Tiger Hall, the structure on the verge of collapse and still bracing for death. His heart had already become a field as bright as snow.

These shadows… were all the Linghu Clan’s remaining elites!

Outside, the resistance against the three clans’ joint attack was fake. It was this hidden ploy that was real! 

Nonetheless, the Linghu Clan’s elites wouldn’t know that as they hurried towards the Xingtian Legion, fast as lightning, the Featherwood Guard was already bustling!

“All formation stakes need to be protected with all power! Chu Zhaonan and Lord Zhao were commanding each person under their control to take talismans of all kinds and black magik artifacts. All over the Featherwood Guard these objects were being buried.

Xu Yangyi didn’t command. At this moment, he was weaving seals with every fiber of his being. In front of him was a massive scroll slowly bobbing up and down in the night wind. It was a full ten-plus meters long, and red talismans on its surface flashed repeatedly. In the middle, there was surprisingly an odd black vortex of qi.

In the wake of his hand seals, rays of black qi flew out and extended from the black vortex, like tendrils. In the sky, they filed out and materialized, shockingly transforming into black chains. At the center of these chains, though, were dazzling talismans and magik artifacts. As the chain spread, it went over each place.

Each talisman and magik artifact carried a majestic qi that caused late Qi Condensation cultivators to pause in their hearts. But with the flight of each treasure, the red runes on the scroll gradually became fewer! If now looked at from the sky, the shape of the Featherwood Guard’s chains was now in the form of a round Taiji!

Iron chains encircled the stronghold!

“How much longer?” Xu Yangyi looked at the sky grimly.

From a breadth of darkness, he could smell the heavy scent of blood.

Black clouds were like banners, and the moonlight was like a wash. The austerity of black and white shrouded space.

“Soon,” Li Zongyuan approached his side and said. “Master… something is indeed wrong. Perhaps others wouldn’t pay attention, but the hearing and sight of us demons is several times greater than ordinary cultivators. I just took note to listen, and far away… the sound of fighting in the air and the illumination of spirit light is getting weaker. Fuzzy.”

There was not another talisman on the scroll, and Xu Yangyi cautiously joined his hands together. In a flash, a black radiance, so weak that it wasn’t visible, cloaked the entire Featherwood Guard. It was merely an instant, and the stronghold immediately regained its original appearance in the next second.

“This is a grand mountain-protector array?” Zhao Wuye looked all around in amazement. There wasn’t any change. Well, except that the scroll had shockingly become a plate of the Eight Trigrams and floated a little discernibly around Xu Yangyi. 

Xu Yangyi looked around as he asked lowly, “What does this mean?”

“This means…” Li Zongyuan licked his lips, his voice somewhat tense. “An… extremely large formation… is encroaching over with extreme speed. It is very careful. If you don’t look carefully, you basically wouldn’t be able to sense it. Someone… wants to shut us in.”

Xu Yangyi’s hand was placed on top of the Taiji at the heart of the Eight Trigrams, and he said coldly, “A wrestling arena.”

“Eh?”

With a forceful push, a burst of white light rose up from the Eight Trigrams all of a sudden. The trigrams’ shape lightened in color and instead became a screen of light. In an instant, though, a vast amount of endless red dots shockingly appeared on the screen!

“This! Enemies…” Just as Li Zongyuan was about to speak out, Xu Yangyi pressed a finger to his mouth.

Cold sweat dripping down his temples, Li Zongyuan took a careful look, and his heart began to chaotically pound! 

About a thousand… T-This definitely isn’t just a hundred! This is about a thousand dots of qi!

Furthermore… behind the qi dots was a red circle. As the qi dots approached, the circle rapidly drew closer to the Featherwood Guard!

“That’s their formation. They’re not leaving us the slightest escape route.” Xu Yangyi looked distantly away to the already-murky battlefield. “But they don’t have an escape route, either.”

He narrowed his eyes and began to laugh mysteriously. “A pity… they’ll have absolutely no chance to leave alive.”

“Master…” Li Zongyuan gasped coldly. Xu Yangyi approached the side of his ear and spoke. The toad-demon nearly shrieked.

“Sir, you… this… no…” he jumbled out a few words and looked at Xu Yangyi in shock. “You… are too willing to sacrifice…”

“There’s no sacrifice or not. Only worthy and unworthy.” Xu Yangyi calmly observed the light screen. On it, the red dots were only 200 meters away from the Featherwood Guard! But as he lifted his head and looked over, the surroundings were all the same as usual.

“Huh?” On a rooftop, a cultivator in charge of detection doubtfully extended his hand to feel around. “The wind stopped?”

At this time, all the elite cultivators inside the Featherwood Guard lifted their heads up.

The wind had stopped. One by one, black clouds in the sky came over to conceal. A kind of indescribable, inexplicable, and heart-racing mood honed in on the Featherwood Guard in a twinkling.

This was the flavor of war.

Swoosh! 

It was now that the night sky above the Featherwood Guard suddenly split open, and a tremendous red eye appeared!

Swoosh, swooooosh!

 Immediately, countless red eyes sprung into existence around the Featherwood Guard in the shape of a semicircle, no less than a radius of a thousand meters! In the following second, qi beams quickly spread forth from between all the eyes! The beams linked all the eyes together! Soon, the linked space solidified from nothingness! It was like a large glass bowl was being stiffly fastened to the ground!

Heralding its emergence was the isolation of all the world’s sound and qi from the outside!

“An Isolation Formation?” Zhao Wuye couldn’t contain his cry of alarm. “It’s actually an Isolation Formation?”

“What’s an Isolation Formation?” Li Zongyuan asked in confusion.

Zhao Wuye’s eyes were somewhat flushed red. “An Isolation Formation… points to the condition that those who set up the formation established. Only by achieving this condition can the formation be undone! Don’t you remember… that formation I used to block Qiao Wu in Danxia Temple is an Isolation Formation!”

“So long as the condition isn’t met, or the formation eye doesn’t die, breaking through is practically impossible unless you’re one great realm higher!”

“The Linghu Clan… is planning on going all out against us!”

Bayonets would see red!

Without wasted words, the beginning had directly reached a burning-white climax!

1. All these weird things Mao Ba’er is talking about is from a Japanese manga called 

Naruto

. Uchiha is one of the clans in 

Naruto. 

Anbu is ninja black-ops. Jonin is a high ninja.

2. There are two stories here. I may have explained one in the past, but I will do so again. “Fooling the heavens in crossing the ocean.” There was an emperor during the Tang dynasty named Taizong. To hide him from the enemy, his general had to get him somewhere else through the sea. However, the emperor had a fear of the ocean. So, the general tricked the emperor by getting him to visit a wise man in a hidden place. They then had a three-day-long feast. When the emperor checked the curtains, he saw that he was at sea the entire time. The general admitted he had tricked his emperor, but the emperor ultimately said “screw it” and finished the journey. Second story: “Chencang captured in the night”. Back in the old days of the end of the Qin dynasty, Liu Bang, who would eventually become the founder of the Han dynasty, was fighting against another rebel leader named Xiang Yu. To bamboozle Xiang Yu, Liu Bang built a bridge in the day time, but then sent his forces and captured a place called Chencang at night.

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