The cut brass stump of the flagship’s main mast still reflected the pale, sweat-slicked face of Celestial Envoy Bai Ming. All around the quarterdeck of the Radiant Solar Sovereign, the golden-armored guards remained on their knees, their will to fight thoroughly put out by the whisper of a willow twig.
Gu Qingfeng was already leaning against the starboard bulwark, leisurely unscrewing the wooden cap of his wine gourd to take another sip of Thousand-Breeze Plum Wine. The old swordsman paid no further attention to the sky judge. In his eyes, the battle had finished the exact split second the comms banners fell into the clouds.
Bai Ming, however, didn’t possess the martial dignity of a true sovereign.
Panic, ugly and wild, clawed through the judge’s high-born mind. Eight hundred years of luxurious court banquets, flattering royal ministers, and easy power over trembling mortal sects had not prepared him for the raw, plain terror of total vulnerability. His immortal training, artificially raised to the Pseudo-Body Integration realm through endless vats of hoarded origin pills, felt hollow and brittle inside his shaking spirit veins.
I have to get out of here, the thought screamed through his skull like a scalded cat. The rift! The space-folding boundary is only three miles up! Once I cross back into the Third Heaven, the Grand Chief Judge will mobilize the Imperial Astral Legions! We will burn this entire terrible continent to cinders!
