Beastmaster of the Ages

A true astral war involved no trash talk between the sides. Nobody would be able to hear a single word in a battlefield on a scale like this. Tianming only saw two golden eyes scathingly peering out toward him as the howls of wolves echoed through the stormy universe.

"Let's see who gains the upper hand and hunts the other!" He reckoned that an enemy like this understood nothing else but might and domination. Only by fighting more furiously than the foe would they stand a chance to win. Of all the times he could show mercy, this was on the very bottom of that list. If he allowed these animals to breach the two astralguard formations, they would go straight for the civilian residents of the sun and feast upon their flesh.

Faced with six hundred million skywolf specters, Tianming's Ninedragon Imperial Tomb seemed a little insignificant. Tianming piloted it and activated the divine astralship formation, covering the ship in nine layers of dragon scales. It was completely armored up and armed with threatening spikes! However, the spikes were no match for the Ninedragon Apotheosis.

The divine astralship accelerated, turning into a ray of nine-colored light and shooting out like a lance thrown from the sun! Not even the sun emperor dared to emerge from the Flameyellow Guard Formation, and for Tianming to do that showed how much trouble he would be for the enemy!

While Skywolf had received news of a divine astralship when they sent their own as probes months before, they hadn't heard anything about the Ninedragon Imperial Tomb, especially in its current form. The astralscape was largely filled with nothing, allowing most of the troops to see the ship suicidally charging toward them.

"Are you trying to die?!" Specters had perfected their physical bodies with a slant toward incredible toughness. Most of them were more than ten meters tall, and could even strengthen and grow themselves more! Not to mention, they were also capable of using abilities, which made them rather confident in direct confrontations. Seeing Tianming's ship charge toward them that audaciously only served to anger them. They howled and gathered together, intent on stopping the ship right there.

"Hold them back! Kill everyone inside it and take their divine astralship!"

Tens of millions of specters unleashed their abilities in one single wave. It looked like a flower of energy had bloomed in a corner of the universe, enveloping the Ninedragon Imperial Tomb in mere instants.

As it charged forward, the heads of the divine astralship gathered balls of different colored energy. All of them fused together into a huge nine-layered sphere that entirely covered the ship, giving off a light that was even brighter than that of stellunar sources. It looked like a minor sun of nine colors, shielding the ship from the abilities of the specters.

Colorful fireworks bloomed between the two stars, causing a commotion like no other. Even those that lived on the Flameyellow Continent saw a colorful vortex forming between the suns in their skies, the sound of which reverberated across the lower level of the astralscape and even shook the Flameyellow Continent itself. Countless mountains crumbled and the seas raged. Clouds were torn asunder from the sheer aftershock of an astral war between higher lifeforms. The shockwave alone seemed to threaten to end the world as they knew it.

Countless lives were shocked into hiding, reminded of the difficulty of survival. Life was precious, yet paradoxically insignificant at the same time. Perhaps it was a matter of difference between subjectively and objectively evaluating the value of life. Cold reality held no sentimentality for life, yet for Tianming, it was something he earnestly tried to defend.

"Ninedragon Apotheosis, fire!" The Ninedragon Imperial Tomb had entered the fray with the specter troops, unleashing its blast where the enemy was most numerous. A beam of colorful lights created an even larger vortex that exploded, contorting the space around it. Even the tough specters were reduced to nothingness from the blast, not leaving any ashes behind. Millions of specters had been extinguished just like that, unable to even cry out for their lives before they were eradicated. A void of death had been left in the wake of the blast.

Apart from the ones that were outright deleted from existence, there were many more who were maimed or wounded. Blood fell toward the sun like rain before it was burnt away by the Flameyellow Guard Formation. This was the most people Tianming had ever killed in one go. He felt a little disoriented from the rain of blood; he used to think that life was precious and believed that karmic laws regulated their taking. Yet there was nothing else he could do in the face of an invasion.

"In the face of war, good and bad karma doesn't exist. Or rather, perhaps good karma means defending our own while eradicating the enemy.... But who’d be held accountable for the loss of countless lives in war? The invaders? Or the circumstances the universe itself puts us in? Am I committing just as much of a sin by wiping out those from Skywolf?" The doubts gnawed away at him, yet he didn't let them stop him. Killing the enemy now was a role he had to fulfill. If he didn't, he would be the one to die, followed by those he was trying to protect. In fact, if the sun ended up perishing, life on the Welkin plane would wane as well from the cessation of spiritual energy from the sun. Mortal worlds didn't illuminate themselves, after all. Without light and spiritual energy, they were no different from dead stars. Tianming couldn't afford to back off, so he didn't even have the time to wallow in doubts.

Though the Ninedragon Imperial Tomb had managed to wipe out nearly seven million specters at once, that was mainly because they hadn’t understood the extent of the divine astralship's power. This time around, they scattered to minimize their losses. After all, space was high in abundance in the astralscape. That was a weakness of the Ninedragon Imperial Tomb.

Blood continued raining down from the sky and Lingfeng could see the endless souls fluttering about all over the place. Like Tianming, his eyes were bloodshot. Despite the sights, the thirty million elites in the ship cheered.