The golden light leaking from the western ridge was not a sunrise. It was an incendiary fuse.
Five miles away, Sovereign Yuan Ming was dragging his mangled, one-armed body into the upper air, suspended by the ragged leftovers of his shattered Late Nascent Soul.
His eyes burned with blinding, crimson lunacy.
“If the Great Yan can’t possess this province...” Yuan Ming’s voice shrieked, carried across the valley by the dying embers of his divine mind, “...then no heretic shall walk upon its stones!”
*
He wasn’t trying to escape.
The Patriarch was diving toward the Dragon’s Throat. The main deep-rock convergence point five miles south of Seven Star Pass where the continent’s central spiritual vein surfaced before dropping into the deep earth-shaking belt.
He was going to ignite his leftover four hundred years of life essence directly into the vein’s core.
