Behind them, one hundred thousand feet below the cloud ceiling, the Canglan Continent had dug in for a painful war of economic attrition. Zhao Wuji had remained firmly stationed on the ground, fortifying the grand vaulted treasury halls of Azure Cloud Sect to command the land-wide logistics pushback. With the fraudulent Celestial Merit Scrip rendered worthless and the Grand Fortune Spirit Iron Standard anchoring country trade, someone with a ledger-keeper’s ruthless pragmatism had to ensure grain silos stayed guarded, foundry fires remained stoked, and merchant guilds stood unbroken against royal embargoes.
Above the air, the twelve huge Planar Suppression War-Citadels had locked into low orbit. Their ten-mile hulls cast black glass shadows across the provinces as their heavy siege lances charged to purge the sect. Rather than meeting that crushing armada head-on in suicidal flat combat, Lin Ke’s strike team had bypassed the blockade entirely. Guided by ancient upkeep charts salvaged from Sub-Vault Zero, they had slipped into an unmonitored sub-space water chute. A neglected high-speed exhaust channel used during the First Epoch to bleed excess spatial pressure from the land-wide core.
Riding that violent, blind-spot slipstream beneath the citadels’ sense outer edge, they had shot straight past the sky-high net before the fleet’s target beacons could lock on. Now, emerging onto a floating black glass shelf at the highest boundary of the lower world, they had reached the ultimate chokepoint between realms: the golden threshold of the Ascension Gateway.
