Front Line Seven, Battlefield No. 00321
This was not a normal battlefield. The entire purple sky was black, not from night, but from wings.
The 7th front was completely occupied by nether bats.
Millions of them moved together like a single black cloud. Each bat was the size of a warhorse, with skin like cracked stone, eyes burning red, and mouths full of serrated teeth that could chew through spiritual armor, in normal times they looked more normal but in battle they took their bat forms to fight. When they screeched, the sound alone shattered the eardrums of Star Lords and below.
The strongest humans here were only at the Star Sovereign realm. That was the apex allowed on a mid-level battlefield.
And they were losing, really badly.
The reason for the madness had spread through the nether ranks only a few days ago. One of the nether bats' own Galaxy Sovereign ancestor, dark bat sovereign, tried to spy on someone in the Red Lotus Galaxy. That person had not even moved. He had just snorted once.
That single snort had ruptured the Galaxy Sovereign's internal organs. The ancient bat had vomited black blood across the cultivation room like crazy and was now locked in deep confinement, trying to heal his wounds .
Humiliated and furious, the Bat leader, Mystic Sovereign had given a simple order: Slaughter humans, as fast as you can . And even kill them so so brutally that their shame washed off their heads.
Now the humans were paying the price.
Unlike the bats, the human powerhouses were scattered all over the broken continent. There were no formations, no unified army. Mercenary squads fought alone. Sect disciples guarded only their own flags. Star Emperors and Star Saints tried to hold small hills by themselves.
The bats did not fight like that. They hunted in swarms.
A group of a hundred thousand bats would dive together, forming a spinning drill of wings and teeth. They would slam into a human Star Venerable's shield, and the shield would hold for three seconds, then crack.
What happened next was horrifying.
The bats would pour into the cracks, not biting to kill quickly, but tearing. They ripped off arms first, then legs, while the cultivator was still alive and screaming. Their sonic screeches prevented the humans from self-detonating their cores. They wanted the fear.
On the eastern ridge, three human Star Sovereigns tried to work together. They released their domains, three blazing suns in the dark sky. For a moment it worked, burning tens of thousands of bats to ash.
Then the Bat King, a peak Star Sovereign bat with a wingspan of a kilometer, screeched once. The sound wave folded their three domains together like paper. The bats swarmed in and covered the three Sovereigns completely. From the ground, all you could see was a writhing black ball in the sky. When it broke apart seconds later, only bones fell down.
On the western trench, a squad of fifty Star Kings huddled behind a formation flag. The bats did not attack the flag. They flew over it and dropped their acidic saliva. The liquid melted through armor, flesh, and soul. The soldiers died melting from the inside out, clutching their throats.
Everywhere, the same scene. Humans were alone. Bats were together.
The human commanders were shouting on the communication channels, their voices desperate.
"Hold the line! Anyone at Star Venerable or above, converge on point C!"
"Point C is gone! They took over point C!"
"Retreat! Retreat to the tower!"
But there was nowhere to retreat to. The sky was already black with wings.
Front Line Seven was about to fall...
At the exact moment Front Line Seven was about to break, when the human command channel was full of screams and the sky was so thick with bats you could not see the purple anymore, everything changed.
A wind came.
It was not a natural wind. It was sharp, clean, and cold. It swept across the entire eastern ridge in a single breath, and it carried with it millions of green willow leaves.
Each leaf was only the size of a finger, glowing with a soft jade light. They did not flutter randomly. They moved with terrifying precision, like an army that had trained for ten thousand years.
The nether bats shrieked and tried to scatter. A hundred thousand bats broke formation at once, flapping in every direction. It did not matter. The leaves turned in the air, locked on, and cut through them one after another.
Shing. Shing. Shing.
The sound was endless. A leaf would touch a bat's stone-like skin, and for a half-second nothing happened. Then the leaf turned from green to a terrifying crimson fire.
"Willow Leaf Sword Intent, 2nd Form: Nirvana Leaf Tornado!"
The voice was calm.
In the very center of the black cloud of bats, standing alone in the air, was Lin Feng.
He wore the white uniform of the Eternal Sect, clean and untouched despite the blood rain around him. From his waist hung two tokens side by side — the black iron battlefield token, and the golden Holy-level Eternal token that made commanders kneel.
His sword was unsheathed in his right hand, but he was not swinging wildly. He held it loosely, tip pointing down, and with every small flick of his wrist, another ten thousand leaves were born from the sword intent.
The bats tried everything. They used their sonic screech to shatter the leaves. The leaves absorbed the sound and burned hotter. They tried to dive into the clouds to hide. The leaves followed them through the clouds. They tried to swarm Lin Feng directly, to bury him in teeth. The moment they got within a hundred meters, the tornado of leaves around him sped up and turned into a wall of crimson fire.
Any bat that touched that fire did not just die. It was purified. The crimson flame clung to their wings, ate through their cracked stone skin, and turned their entire bodies into ash in less than a second. No blood, no bones, just fine black dust falling like snow.
Below on the ground, the scattered human powerhouses looked up in shock.
Three Star Sovereigns who had been about to be overwhelmed on the eastern ridge suddenly found the sky above them clear. The black ball of bats that had been eating their allies was gone. In its place was a slowly spinning tornado of green and crimson leaves, and a single young man in white standing in the eye of the storm.
A Star Emperor in the western trench, his armor half-melted from bat saliva, dropped to his knees and stared. "What... what realm is that?"
The bats, for the first time in this battle, were not together. They were panicking, breaking apart, screeching in fear as the leaves hunted them down one by one across the entire front.
And Lin Feng just stood there, alone between countless bats, his sword cutting one after another without ever needing to move his feet.
While the eastern ridge was turning into a tornado of crimson leaves, the western trench was dying in silence.
The fifty Star Kings were gone. The formation flag was melted. The sky above the trench was a solid roof of nether bats, tens of millions of them, screeching so loud the rocks on the ground were vibrating.
They were about to dive for the final slaughter.
Then the void cracked open.
Not with light, but with green.
A shadow fell over the entire western front, so huge that even the Bat King on the east side looked up. A giant ancient pine tree, kilometers wide, had appeared out of nowhere in the middle of the sky. Its trunk was as thick as a mountain range, its bark was old and black like iron, and its crown pierced the purple clouds above.
And standing alone on the highest branch, right in the middle of the sea of bats, was Bai Wei.
He also wore the white Eternal Sect uniform. The Holy token and the battlefield token clinked softly at his waist as the wind from the bats' wings hit him. His face was calm, his eyes were cold.
He raised his right hand slowly, palm open toward the sky.
Behind him, the giant pine tree shuddered.
From its trunk, millions of palm forces condensed out of pure green spiritual energy. Each palm was the size of a house, with clear lines like a real hand, and each one glowed with ancient runes.
"Palm of the Ancient Pine, Second Form: Annihilation of Pine Tree!"
Bai Wei brought his hand down.
At the same instant, the giant pine tree moved. Countless branches that were kilometers long lashed out into the void like divine whips. They did not swing randomly. Each branch aimed perfectly, piercing through ten, twenty, a hundred bats in a single thrust.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
The millions of palm forces followed the branches. A palm would slam down on a swarm of bats, and the space itself would collapse for a half second. The bats inside did not get crushed. They were erased. Their stone skin, their red eyes, their screeching mouths, all turned into green light and vanished.
The nether bats tried to fight back. They gathered into their famous drill formation and charged the tree trunk directly, trying to chew through it. The ancient pine just shook its needles. A rain of pine needles fell, each needle turning into a small sword in the air. Wherever a needle touched a bat, the bat froze, turned completely wooden for one breath, then shattered into splinters.
Their formation, which had been perfect for hours, broke in less than ten seconds.
From the ground, the human survivors in the western trench could only stare up with their mouths open. They saw a young man standing alone in the void, surrounded on all sides by a black ocean of monsters, and behind him a world-tree was killing everything that moved.
A Star Saint who had lost an arm earlier whispered, "He's... he's alone. He's standing in the middle of them."
Bai Wei did not move from his branch. He just kept his palm lowered, and the giant tree kept killing. Every time a branch moved, a thousand bats died. Every time a palm force landed, a whole section of the sky was cleared.
On the east, Lin Feng's crimson leaves were burning the sky clean. On the west, Bai Wei's ancient pine was smashing it apart.
Front Line Seven, which had been about to fall, suddenly had two gods standing in the middle of the swarm.
Bai Wei stood on the branch of his giant pine, his white robe untouched, and looked down at the broken human army in the western trench.
His voice was not loud, but it carried through the screeching of the bats like ice water.
"Retreat! All who are already injured, retreat now!"
On the eastern ridge, Lin Feng flicked his sword once, and another ten thousand leaves turned to crimson fire. He did not even turn his head as he spoke.
"Do not worry about these filthy bats. We will take care of them. From now on, the Eternal Sect will take over the 7th front line."
The two sentences hit the battlefield harder than any attack.
The name Eternal Sect rang like a bell in everyone's mind.
A Star Venerable with a burned face suddenly stood up straight, his eyes wide. "Holy! A Holy level force has come to aid! We are saved!"
Another old mercenary, his voice cracking, shouted with his lungs out, "Eternal Sect! Is it the Eternal Sect of the past?!"
Everyone on Battlefield 00321 knew that history. Ten thousand years ago, there was an Eternal Sect. It was also a Holy level sect back then, but it had sacrificed all of its powerhouses in the Great Nether War just to buy peace for humanity. The sect had vanished after that, becoming a legend told to new recruits.
And today, another Holy-level Eternal Sect had suddenly appeared on the battlefield, with only two disciples holding the entire front.