Chapter 1799: All Living Beings Perish

“No, of course not. Things are terrible for everyone here!”

At such a critical life-and-death moment, why did Island Master He have the leisure to greet him?

Wanqirang patted Luo Xie’s shoulder in displeasure. “Our lord is asking you a question!” he said.

“My grandfather died. And then Yu Village…” Luo Xie said dejectedly. “Only the three of us survived, stuck in a rock crevice.”

He Lingchuan understood: Miao Zhantian’s killing of the Four Immortals had implicated the people of Yu Village.

As soon as the Companion Hill Tower was built, Luo Xie had organized the entire village to relocate. It was a very wise decision, but the conflict between immortals and demons spanned too wide an area. When Miao Zhantian unleashed the space-time rift, the villagers of Yu hadn’t even managed to run five li before they instantly became casualties.

He Lingchuan could only pat his shoulder and offer his condolences.

Granny Zhu transmitted a message: “He’s incredibly resilient; even the space-time rift couldn’t kill him.”

It was also thankful it had withdrawn from the Companion Hill battlefield early; otherwise, facing the space-time rift, it too would have been unable to escape death.

In that sense, He Lingchuan had saved its life.

Before that thought had even fully formed, the large door before them suddenly slammed shut.

For a split second, it was pitch black.

But it was only for a moment; then, lights on the stone walls automatically illuminated, making the area bright again.

When everyone looked again, it was clearly a thick, natural stone wall. There was no sign of a door.

Two disciples stepped forward and touched it, realizing there wasn’t even a seam on the stone wall.

By this point, even the dullest person understood that Thousand Illusions had used his supreme divine power to rescue them from the threat of the Divine Fire Skyfall and transfer them to this unknown space.

The instant those two large doors closed, the gate tower and the guardian beast also vanished.

The cliff face was utterly bare, with nothing but withered vines, ancient trees, and solid rock.

Elder Liu raised his pen and, with a stroke on the stone wall, somehow conjured a sandbox.

The sandbox was covered by a transparent light dome, depicting mountains and rivers precisely as He Lingchuan had seen them in the Wenhui Pavilion of the Illusion Realm. Town residents, smaller than sesame seeds, scurried around within it. The only difference was that over a dozen dazzling points of light were descending from the sky, hurtling towards the ground.

He Lingchuan recognized at once that the sandbox simulated the real-time situation of Silver Pearl Island in their current realm.

He also located the Heavenly Palace team in the sandbox, positioned on the high ground north of Kidney Lake.

They hadn’t erected a lighthouse, but the army was still enveloped in golden light.

Elder Liu’s brows furrowed. The enemy’s barrier was no longer shaped like the Eye of Truth, but rather a colossal lotus platform.

Had Miao Zhantian switched divine powers?

He Lingchuan, however, noticed that as the colossal fireballs passed through the clouds and thick fog floating in the sky, the latter would briefly glow blue.

Although the clouds and fog were instantly vaporized by the intense heat, the fireballs also seemed to cool. Their scorching white light turned blood-red, indicating a drop in temperature. He Lingchuan even observed one fireball shrink in size, revealing its true form:

“An iron ball?”

It was a massive iron ball, largely smooth but with noticeable nicks and patterns on its surface.

How would one describe its shape? Dong Rui blurted out, “It looks like a peach!”

Granny Zhu corrected him, “Not a peach, but a lotus seed!”

It saw clearly that no matter its size, it was indeed a lotus seed, not a peach.

Elder Liu also stared intently at the sandbox, his brows nearly knotted in confusion. “It’s True Monarch Cangxi’s ultimate technique! How is this possible?!”

How could Miao Zhantian’s manifested form unleash such an incredibly energy-intensive divine power?

The situation appeared far more serious than he or his master had imagined.

Granny Zhu quickly transmitted a message to He Lingchuan and the others: “The clouds and fog in the sky seem to be Thousand Illusions’ divine power, intended to reduce the fireballs’ potency.”

True Person Thousand Illusions would naturally not idly await the enemy’s large-scale attack; he had to find a way to neutralize it.

Interception was impossible; only weakening their power was feasible, and He Lingchuan felt this approach was correct.

Unexpectedly, a flash of purple and gold light suddenly emanated from the massive fireball, so quick that He Lingchuan initially thought he was hallucinating. But then the fireball’s destructive aura surged, and it expanded once more.

Unseen by anyone, a flash of light suddenly emerged from the lotus lamp clutched by Miao Zhantian, who was surrounded by layers of Heavenly Palace guards.

Consequently, the colossal fireball streaking down from the sky not only regained its dazzling white light but also doubled its speed!

Undoubtedly, Thousand Illusions’ attempt to weaken it failed; the fireball instantly recovered its full power and speed.

Two breaths later, the “heavenly fire” descended.

The intense light produced by the explosion upon impact, even as depicted on the sandbox, forced everyone to avert their eyes and close them, unable to look directly.

It was unparalleled, a thousand times more scorching than even the midday sun.

The first meteorite struck the cliff with precision, not only leveling it completely but also causing a colossal mushroom cloud to rise.

The second obliterated a mountain five li away, followed by the third, the fourth… all of them raining down upon Silver Pearl Island.

By the fifteenth meteorite, fifteen mushroom clouds had risen over Silver Pearl Island!

He Lingchuan gazed at the scene in the sandbox, his heart filled with horror.

Each impact of the Divine Fire Skyfall caused the ground on Silver Pearl Island to quake violently. From the impact point, shockwaves rapidly spread in all directions. These were particularly noticeable as concentric circles of waves on the ocean surface, only truly dissipating at the edge of the Upside-Down Sea.

When the first two meteorites struck, the shockwaves decimated all ground structures in their path. The towns and villages depicted on the sandbox collapsed instantly into scattered rubble, like toppled building blocks.

The ghost civilians and ghost army on the ground couldn’t even endure the first two shockwaves; they were pulverized into dust and dispersed.

Hundreds of thousands of ghost soldiers vanished in an instant.

During the subsequent heavenly fire impacts, He Lingchuan could even observe the island’s tectonic plates shifting on the sandbox. Unfathomably deep fissures ripped open in some areas, from which red magma bubbled forth.

With a glance, he witnessed six or seven villages and towns swallowed by suddenly appearing chasms, or crushed by rapidly rising land. Even Sun Wheel City, at the center of Silver Pearl Island, was carved into the shape of the Chinese character “卅” by several abruptly emerging deep ravines.

Smoke and dust permeated the air. A sudden gust of wind, from an unknown source, temporarily cleared the gray smoke above the cliff.

He Lingchuan personally witnessed a vast mountain range vanish, replaced by a colossal pit fifteen zhang deep. The other side of the range had collapsed, and countless remnants of structures crumbled into the depths of the chasm.

After just fifteen Divine Fire Skyfall strikes, the entire topography of Silver Pearl Island was completely altered, with not a single structure left intact.

Then the sixteenth strike descended.

As the sole conjoined lotus seed in the lamp, this meteorite was twice the size of the previous ones, and pulsed with purple light as it tumbled.

Previously, the Stone Dragon Mountain Range had already endured three meteorite impacts, causing it to crack.

This final meteorite disintegrated in mid-air, splitting into two similarly sized meteorites. Separated by three li, they struck the fissure with wedge-like precision, triggering an intensely powerful yet profoundly muffled explosion deep beneath the surface.

He Lingchuan observed on the sandbox that the fissure was forcibly widened, and the entire landmass east of the Stone Dragon Mountain Range shifted a full five li towards the sea!

Although the Illusion Sect team, hidden within the unknown space, couldn’t see outside, their surroundings shook as if from a magnitude 12 earthquake. Huge, continuous roars were deafening, and countless rocks tumbled down, bouncing incessantly around their feet.

Everyone’s faces paled in horror. They had anticipated the meteorites’ immense impact force, but never imagined such devastating power. Had they remained outside, their deaths would have been certain.

On the sandbox, even the Heavenly Palace army was affected by the shockwaves.

Everyone saw that just before the heavenly fire struck, some powerful being summoned a massive stone bowl and inverted it over the hundreds of Heavenly Palace soldiers on the ground. Besides the lotus barrier, Bai Ziqi was clearly worried and wanted to add several more layers of protection.

However, by the time the final meteorite had struck, the stone bowl protecting the frontline troops shattered into two pieces.

Even immortal artifacts were utterly destroyed.

Even though Miao Zhantian and the four Heavenly Demons simultaneously maintained the barrier, and several protective artifacts were ruined, some soldiers still perished from the shockwaves.

If this was the outcome for armies protected by powerful beings, how many lives must have been lost across the entire island?

After these sixteen heavenly fire bombardments, nearly two to three hundred thousand ghost civilians on Silver Pearl Island were annihilated.

This was, by all accounts, a scene of the apocalypse.

“Divine Fire Skyfall!” Witnessing Miao Zhantian’s technique firsthand, Elder Liu’s face turned ashen. “It truly is True Monarch Cangxi’s signature skill, Divine Fire Skyfall!”

He Lingchuan and the others gazed at the sandbox with solemn expressions. This world, which should have been entirely under Thousand Illusions’ control, had nearly been transformed into a landscape of continental drift by Miao Zhantian’s sixteen immense divine powers.

“First a space-time rift, and now a Divine Fire Skyfall!” Granny Zhu exclaimed, filled with admiration. “How many more trump cards does Miao Zhantian possess?”

These techniques far surpassed the scope of typical immortal methods; each was a grand forbidden art, requiring astonishing energy to execute.

The elders of the Illusion Sect could move mountains and fill seas within the Illusion Realm, not through their own inherent abilities, but by borrowing the power of Immortal Venerable Thousand Illusions. Yet, Miao Zhantian, despite the restrictions of this realm’s rules, could still unleash such devastating techniques, a testament to the immense depth of her divine power.

She hadn’t even confronted Thousand Illusions yet and had already unleashed two major divine powers. Even Granny Zhu dared not imagine how many more trump cards this Great Heavenly Demon still held!

The power disparity among those beyond immortals is immense.

And the top three Lingxu True Gods truly lived up to their reputation; every angry strike caused the heavens to collapse and the earth to rend!

Wanqirang asked, perplexed, “With such powerful techniques, why didn’t she unleash them earlier in the Illusion Realm?”

“Too energy-intensive,” Granny Zhu replied, her eyes fixed on the sandbox. “Furthermore, her previous objective in releasing the space-time rift was to eliminate five Illusion Sect immortals in one strike. While these sixteen Divine Fire Skyfall impacts cause cataclysmic destruction, they are primarily area-of-effect damage, making it difficult to directly kill immortals like us.”

“Moreover, Miao Zhantian is only now using True Monarch Cangxi’s signature divine power, which suggests it’s not merely to annihilate the ghost soldiers scattered across the land.”

Although the ghost army was numerous and troublesome, Granny Zhu had always believed they weren’t worth such a significant expenditure of Miao Zhantian’s power.

Today’s True Gods are all seasoned veterans of countless battles; Miao Zhantian must have a more profound strategy in mind.