The skies above the mines roughly fifty kilometers north of Swallow City was a mess of black and red now. Half the skies were one color and the other half another color. It was like two different-colored wings were spreading through the skies for a magnificent showing.

“Rumble...boom!!”

The earth was still trembling non-stop as something deep underground continued to move about. It was like an ancient beast was finally awakening from its slumber deep underground and was roaring loudly to scare the inhabitants of the earth upon the surface.

From where the red and black portions of the sky was deepening in color and mixing with one another, something was giving off a loud thundering rumble as if the sky itself was preparing to be torn asunder...

“Crackle...crackle...”

A rumbling sound ten times greater than any sound before came from the ground next. A tremendous crack opened up on the surface with a heaving shudder to pour out even larger amounts of red and black light!

“Boom...boom...boom!!”

The rumblings now were even deeper and more clear. Whatever the source of noise was...it was getting closer to the surface!

“Boom!!!”

The ground exploded once again, but this time, the explosion had taken place on the surface rather than underneath!

And at that, a nearby mountain came crashing to the ground in pieces!!

Or perhaps it was better to say it was reduced to rubble by something exploding within it!

The mountain was like a volcano that had erupted. Dust and stone flew up into the sky with amazing velocity before it succumbed to gravity and fell back down to the earth once more. The largest of pieces were practically the size of tiny mountains themselves—some of them enveloped in fire to boot—and came raining down onto the earth to sow destruction everywhere they landed on.

“Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh...”

While the mountain was exploding, a few streaks of light shot up from the ground by the edge.

They flew another five kilometers away out from the range of the ‘meteors’ and came to a halt to reveal a series of men all staring shell shocked at the sight in front of them.

A crater practically unmeasurable to them was all that was left of the mountain from where they charged out from. Rays of red and black light poured out from the holes in the ground to spray into the atmosphere and left plumes of energy to flow out everywhere like waves of water to quake the earth and send dust flying.

“How terrifying...that Jing Wuying was actually capable of this much power!! He’s fighting on equal grounds with the patriarch!!”

“Countless preparations were made, and none of them were of any use! Jing Wuying was easily able to get into the Soul Fusing Array, damn him!!”

“What a dastardly plan of Jing Wuying! He’s trying to steal away the energy meant for the patriarch! And not only that...he’s actually succeeding! How can it be?! Only the patriarch should’ve been able to take in that energy!!”

“How is the patriarch?! What harm would befall him if an intruder made their way into the array?! The two of them are fighting now, but it also looks like they’re both on the verge of making a breakthrough! What’s going to happen?!”

“The amount of elemental energy here...how terrifying. A battle like this is something none of us would ever hope to take part in! What should we even do now?!”

“......”

The people who had flown out from the hole in the mountain were the Soul Kings of the Qin. Each and every single one of these Soul Kings had hard expressions on their faces as they spoke to one another. Soon, their gazes all flew towards the still silent Qin He.

The look on Qin He’s face was even scarier than the rest. His teeth were pressed hard into his lips as he observed the battle in front of them.

“There’s...nothing we can do! We can’t hope to do anything in this battle but wait! The two might be battling on even grounds, but the patriarch still has that! Should all else fail, the patriarch should be able to take care of Jing Wuying without issue with it.”

The expression on his face hardened. “But in the end...it looks like our efforts were ruined at the very last step! A decade of meticulous and careful planning, a decade of labor built on the sweat and tears of our family...all for nothing! Curse him! Curse him!!!”

His last four words were roared out loud in fury. His entire person trembled violently as he vented out his anger towards the sky.

“There’s still Jing Wuying’s companion deep underground!” His head snapped towards the right of where they stood. “Find him...and tear his body limb from limb!!”

............

Roughly ten kilometers away from the scene of destruction was a tall mountain. Ripples of transparent energy appeared at the mountain top before several figures stepped out from behind them.

The figure leading the front was Bai Yunfei with Tang Xinyun by his right. On the other side was Xiao Nan and his wife, Zhao Jie. There was also another person, the wandering soul cultivator named Hu Sha.

“That’s...that’s the primal stone mines, isn’t it?! We’re here already?! By the heavens! Was that teleportation? And...and across a large distance like that!!”

It was a confounded Hu Sha that remarked about the area around him. The strange sight in the skies above and the seemingly endless chains of mountain ahead only served to confuse the man even more.

Like him, Xiao Nan was deeply startled by the sudden change in scenery. “We were teleported over fifty kilometers, weren’t we? How...were you able to do that, Yunfei?”

“By the means of a special space-type soul armament.” Bai Yunfei smiled.

“A space-type Soul armament?!” Hu Sha cried aloud, “Dear heavens...a soul armament that powerful exists?”

Bai Yunfei nodded but said nothing else about the matter to instead turn his head towards the sky.

The reason why Bai Yunfei came here was because he felt uneasy about this. He thought that the sight in the sky had to relate to Jing Mingfeng somehow and was determined to investigate. Xiao Nan wanted to come with them, so Bai Yunfei acquiesced, and Hu Sha was curious enough to want to come as well. It was faster to agree, so Bai Yunfei took him with them and used the Core Stone’s teleporting capabilities to immediately bring them here.

“These are some powerful energy waves...” Bai Yunfei murmured to himself as he watched the skies. “I wonder what’s going on...”

“This is the Emperor’s Phenomena!”

Xiao Fang’s voice rang through his mind as if to answer him.

“What was that? The Emperor’s Phenomena!?”

“Exactly. It’s like the King’s Phenomena where all the elemental energy in the world gets drawn in here, but the scale of the Emperor’s Phenomena is completely different. If anything, this should be considered to be a ‘small’ version of it. The amount of energy here is hardly enough to be considered enough. The amount of energy needed for one person to breakthrough is being taken in by two people, so neither of them should be able to breakthrough. An ‘incomplete’ Emperor’s Phenomena. It’s a first for me, how strange...”

The ‘strange’ explanation of Xiao Fang was spoken very matter-of-factly to Bai Yunfei, but Bai Yunfei’s eyes were completely wide-open at the weight of the subject matter.

“The Emperor’s Phenomena is like the King’s Phenomena?! Then doesn’t that mean...someone is becoming a Soul Emperor?! Who?! Someone from the Qin?!” His mind raced to connect the dots as he tried to look at the two figures fighting. “Isn’t...” The figures of one of the people there caught his eye, “Isn’t that person...senior Jing?!”

“Someone’s coming! A lot of them!!”

The startled cry of Hu Sha snapped Bai Yunfei out from his thoughts. His eye traveled away from the battle in the sky towards where several streaks of light were flying out from a nearby mountain.

These streaks of lights were for the most part Soul Exalts and Soul Ancestors. They were flying this way and that in panic as if being chased by a carnivorous soulbeast.

Many different auras were escaping from underneath, most of them sporting wounds on their person. Clearly, these people had undergone a battle while they had been stuck underground.

“What’s going on here?” Bai Yunfei had to wonder at the sight of so many people running away.

“Boom!!”

Another explosion suddenly rocked the earth as a mountain slightly farther away exploded into three separate lights; green, gold, and blue. There were another three sources of soulforce that could be felt from the explosion as well.

Bai Yunfei’s eyebrows flew up on his forehead when he saw the three auras.

“That’s...Mingfeng!!”