The news of Heaven's Reach city spread like wildfire through the Southern Province. A nameless servant had slaughtered the Lin Patriarch? An Imperial Envoy had been sent back to the capital as a broken shell?
To the Great Sects, it was an insult. To the oppressed, the rogue cultivators, and the "trash" with broken meridians, it was a beacon of hope.
Within three days, thousands gathered at the city gates. They were a ragged assembly of desperate souls—warriors with scarred faces, old men with fading cultivation, and youths who had been cast out of their clans.
Shen Yuan stood atop the city wall, looking down at the sea of desperate faces. Ye Fan and Ye Lin stood behind him like silent twin reapers.
"You come here seeking a miracle?" Shen Yuan's voice wasn't loud, yet it carried to the ears of every person in the crowd, vibrating with a cold, soul-piercing power. "You come here because you are weak, and you hope I will make you strong?"
A murmur went through the crowd.
"The Sect of the Eternal Void does not take 'disciples'," Shen Yuan continued, his black eyes scanning the masses. "We take survivors. I do not care for your bloodline. I do not care for your past glory. I only care for one thing: your will to devour the heavens."
He raised his hand, and the [Star-Iron Shard] flew into the air, expanding until it formed a massive, pulsating black sun above the city square.
"Behold, the Trial of the Void," Shen Yuan declared. "Step into the shadow of this sun. If your heart is soft, the darkness will consume you. If your will is tempered in hatred and ambition, you will emerge... reborn."
The crowd hesitated. The black sun radiated a chill that made their very souls shiver.
"I'll go first!" A man with a severed arm and a 3rd-layer Qi Condensation base stepped forward. He was a rogue who had lost everything to the Zhou family.
As he stepped into the shadow, he collapsed, screaming. The black energy began to coil around him like snakes, digging into his pores. The crowd gasped, many backing away in terror.
But the man didn't die. His eyes turned blood-red, and the black mist began to knit his flesh together. His severed arm didn't regrow, but a spectral limb made of solidified shadow formed in its place.
He stood up, his aura exploding into the 5th-layer. He knelt toward the wall, his forehead hitting the stone. "Master! My life is yours!"
Seeing this, the floodgates opened. Hundreds rushed into the shadow.
"Only three hundred survived," Ye Lin noted an hour later, looking at the chosen few who now stood in the square, their eyes glowing with a faint, dark light. The rest had fled or lay unconscious, their cultivation permanently drained.
"Three hundred is enough," Shen Yuan said, his gaze shifting toward the northern horizon. "The Empire will not wait. They are sending the Iron-Blood General, Zhao Feng. He is a Core Formation expert, and he brings a legion of ten thousand."
Ye Fan's grip on his polearm tightened. "Core Formation... Master, can we hold them?"
Shen Yuan looked at his disciples, then at the three hundred "Shadow Soldiers" below.
"In a fair fight? No," Shen Yuan replied, a dark, twisted smile crossing his lips. "But I haven't fought a 'fair' battle in ten thousand years. We won't meet them on the field. We will turn this entire province into a meat grinder."
He turned to Ye Lin. "Prepare the [Nine-Abyss Array]. We are going to feed the Earth today. And the blood of ten thousand soldiers will be the ink with which I write my declaration of war."
Somewhere in the North...
A massive army moved like a river of steel. At its head was a man mounted on a giant armored rhinoceros. General Zhao Feng looked at the report in his hand, his face a mask of boredom.
"A rogue sect in a backwater city?" he snorted, tossing the paper into the wind. "The Empress is being too cautious. I'll have the 'Sovereign's' head on a pike by sunset tomorrow."
He didn't notice that the shadows of his soldiers were beginning to stretch unnaturally long, even though the sun was at its zenith.