The two youths fell silent.
This final choice effectively ant accepting Lin Hui's protection and living out a safe, peaceful existence—a fleeting life of less than a century.
"Think it over carefully. Battle and slaughter are always cruel—the winner lives, and the loser dies, without exception. Perhaps living out one's life peacefully as an ordinary person is a worthy path in its own right," Lin Hui said earnestly.
He left the courtyard and found a figure lingering near the entrance.
It was Weiwei.
She rarely ca here—perhaps to avoid seeing too many familiar faces. After the rest of the Clear Wind Dao from Tuyue arrived, her visits had grown even more infrequent. Even Lin Hui hadn't seen her in years.
She had clearly matured. After more than a decade apart, her once youthful face now carried the quiet marks of ti. She stood outside the door in a black martial artist's outfit, her expression distant and unfocused.
When she noticed Lin Hui stepping out, her body stiffened. A brief silence passed before she forced a small smile.
"Long ti no see."
"Changsheng has grown up. He doesn't need soone watching over him anymore," Lin Hui said gently. "Don't worry."
Weiwei nodded.
Lin Hui returned the gesture and left promptly, heading straight for the Moon Tower in the Inner City.
The accelerating pace of the Corruption had prompted the visit. He needed a comprehensive picture of the shifting conditions across the surrounding regions, and Black Cloud's intelligence center was the place to get it.
Over the past few years, he had been carefully studying the atmospheric qi dynamics above Erald Valley. His first instinct had been to extract and dispel the entanglent of the Corruption's aura—but that proved impossible.
The aura of Corruption was fundantally bound to living beings. The two were not rely intertwined; they had long since beco one and the sa.
The only path remaining was to reduce the friction between the auras of life and death, smoothing out the chaotic flow of energy. But after spending more than a month on that effort, the Star Breath Sword Canon showed no response—let alone the aura reciprocation of the Sacred Form of Heaven.
Lin Hui turned the problem over in his mories and understood precisely what was missing. The anxiety eased. He could simply imrse himself in cultivation and wait.
But the outside world was no longer willing to give him that ti.
He went first to the Moon Tower's archive to select several array formations he needed, then made his way to the intelligence Moon Tower, presenting his request to the Blood Ancestor who presided over the facility.
"Recent peripheral changes? Excellency, what tier of changes are you looking for?" The Blood Ancestor was a bespectacled, red-haired middle-aged woman with a asured temperant. Her back had nearly half-rged with the Moon Tower's wall. She was Black Cloud's intelligence director—Yalan.
"Changes at the Mistborn level," Lin Hui said.
"Understood. One mont."
The crystal between Yalan's brows flashed rapidly with multicolored light. A few breaths later, a beam of green light shot from it and sank directly into Lin Hui's forehead.
A torrent of intelligence gathered over the past eight years flooded his mind.
He closed his eyes and sifted through it, quickly fixing on several glaring anomalies.
The storms on the surrounding seas have repeatedly resisted all attempts at dispersal. Black Cloud's shipping lanes have been forced to reroute.
A massive frigid crystal sphere has appeared on the sea to the north of Black Cloud. It is blue and radiates a pale illumination. Any living creature struck by the light freezes into an ice sculpture within a minute, its mind-spirit extinguished completely. Even after thawing, the body remains a lifeless corpse. Only Mistborn have demonstrated the ability to endure exposure to the light for any extended period.
Next ca the Mistborn-level Corruption cases that had surfaced within the city over the last three years. Five confird incidents.
All stemd from the Corruption of powerful Blood Ancestors—so from the city's Extre Desire Heaven and Taisu Primal Disk, others refugees who had fled from outside after losing the communities needed to share their burden. The latter accounted for three of the five.
The frequency of these events made Lin Hui's chest tighten.
A Blood Ancestor couldn't last a single exchange against him now—but to ordinary people, they were absolute apex predators. In the past, Blood Ancestors had lived for hundreds or even thousands of years. That five had fallen in so short a span was deeply unsettling.
"What are the Corruption figures for martial artists and Called Ones below the Mistborn level over the past three years?" Lin Hui asked.
"The trend is sharply upward," Yalan replied without hesitation. "Compared to three years ago, we are now seeing roughly one to two hundred Corruption-related incidents annually. The age of onset is also declining. For ordinary people, it clusters around seventy to eighty. For martial artists and Called Ones, the age varies considerably—mostly because external injuries accelerate the process."
"The primary source of those injuries is the sea beast assaults along the coastline. Their strength keeps rising, and their polluting toxicity grows more potent. Over the past three years, fourteen new species of deep-sea Mist Zone monsters have erged—the majority exceeding the Divine Officer level in strength."
"Have the three City Lords not found a lasting solution?" Lin Hui asked.
"There is none. These shifts are systemic, and their root causes remain unknown. The pressure on Black Cloud compounds exponentially, and the Mist God pantheons are also in turmoil," Yalan said. "Black Cloud's foreign trade has declined steadily as a result. Most small and dium rchant fleets have ceased operations. Only the great fleets remain."
Lin Hui said nothing more.
He had suspected conditions outside were worsening. He hadn't realized how far they had fallen.
Swish!
A golden streak of light swept across the Mist-shrouded sky beyond the Moon Tower, then plunged in an instant into the tower's summit, rging with the great green crystal at its apex.
"Vice City Lord Lin—urgent intelligence just arrived," Yalan said, her voice dropping to a somber register.
"The Mingxin Society Master has officially opened the largest pollution channel in recorded history. Through a mass sacrifice of souls, he has fully connected the Sea Cry world to our realm."
Lin Hui went still. A mont later, as if sensing it himself, he turned his gaze toward the north.
Buzz!
The Moon Tower shuddered violently beneath his feet.
Then, without a sound, a brilliant pillar of blue light erupted from the depths beneath the earth, driving straight up through the heart of several Moon Towers across Black Cloud City. Countless complex runic symbols spun within it, and the phantoms of enormous, dragon-like creatures spiraled upward into the sky.
The pillar lasted only a few seconds before it dimd and went dark.
"Sea Cry power..." Lin Hui recognized the distinctive energy the Mingxin Society had shown before. His eyes sharpened.
He didn't know the ultimate purpose of this contingency that the Mingxin Society had buried here, but nothing about it promised anything but ruin.
Whoosh!
In the next instant, Zhang Yao and Gongsun Xinlian materialized in the air where the light pillar had just faded, their expressions grave. They had scoured the city repeatedly in the weeks prior, searching for the Mingxin Society's array and finding nothing—a failure that had weighed on them both ever since.
Now their worst fear had co to pass.
"Nothing seems imdiately different?" Gongsun Xinlian reached out with her senses, scanning their surroundings carefully.
"No—that was only the key," Zhang Yao said darkly. "Look up."
Gongsun Xinlian snapped her head back. Her pupils contracted sharply.
The grayish-white Mist that had blanketed the sky for countless years was slowly parting.
But what lay behind it was not open sky.
It was a massive blue-black rift.
Inside it churned an ocean of surging blue-black seawater, suspended upside down in the heavens—hanging there as though it might collapse at any mont and swallow Black Cloud City whole.
Whoosh.
Lin Hui flew out of the Moon Tower and lifted his gaze.
He felt it imdiately: the suffocating weight of that seemingly inexhaustible Sea Cry power pressing down from above.
Mingxin Society...
Boom!
In the distance, Gongsun Xinlian raised her hand and condensed a brilliant beam of green light, driving it hard toward the rift above. Dozens of ters in diater, the beam lit up the surrounding Inner City in stark relief—throwing into sharp contrast the pale, upturned faces of Black Cloud's citizens as they stared at the sky.
Pfft!
The green light struck the rift and vanished. As a stone dropped into the ocean, it stirred a few drops of blue-black spray—and nothing more.
"It's useless. The world rift is already open. We'll need a massive fortress to seal and suppress it—we can't block the channel with our own strength." Zhang Yao stepped in before Gongsun Xinlian could try again. "Contact Eldest. Tell him to return at once." His gaze stayed fixed on the rift overhead. "Otherwise monsters from the Sea Cry world will be pouring through soon."
"Right!" Gongsun Xinlian nodded.
This was no longer a contest between factions—it was a war between races and worlds. The Purgatory invasion, the Extre Cold Heaven incursion, and the Ash—all had unfolded the sa way.
In the distance, Lin Hui kept his eyes on the rift. He had only ever seen the sealed Purgatory and Extre Cold Heaven fortresses before. This was the first ti he was watching a world rift tear open in front of him.
"Brother Lin, we will need your help guarding the city," Gongsun Xinlian's voice ca through the Wind Chi. "My brother and I must first attempt to set up a blockade array in the sky to reduce the initial rate at which Sea Cry power bleeds through."
"What will the leaked power do?" Lin Hui asked.
"It will warp the environntal force field—suppressing our strength while amplifying the Sea Cry invaders."
"Understood. I'll cooperate."
"Judging by the Mingxin Society's thods, I doubt our city is the only one in the Federation dealing with a rift. This is almost certainly a simultaneous outbreak at multiple sites. What we're facing will be no less devastating than the Purgatory invasion." Gongsun Xinlian's voice held a weary edge.
"If the Sea Cry power spreads, will the Mingxin Society grow stronger as well?" Lin Hui asked.
"Enormously stronger," Gongsun Xinlian replied. "At the cost of countless lives. The Sea Cry's pollution of living beings is relatively mild as these things go—but it is irreversible. Even with an array in place, we can only slow the spread. Within half a year at most, the contamination will deepen and widen."
"And that's not the worst of it. No one knows what manner of creatures exist in the Sea Cry world. All we can say for certain is that they are stronger than us—considerably stronger. Otherwise, the Mingxin Society would never have chosen the Sea Cry. They could have opened a channel to Purgatory, Extre Cold Heaven, Ash, or any of the other realms with recorded intrusion histories."
"Perhaps he never cared about the lives of ordinary people to begin with," Lin Hui said quietly. Sothing settled cold and dark behind his eyes.
He had a feeling—one he couldn't quite na—that this world was like a hollow sphere riddled with holes. Countless people inside scrambled to patch the damage, while people like the Mingxin Society Master drove needles through the walls from within, hole after deliberate hole.
Could the peaceful life he wanted truly survive sothing like this?
I need to get back imdiately and start laying counterasures. And I need to accelerate the evolution of array formations targeting the various polluting powers...
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