The Void Spirit Pearls weren't particularly difficult to refine — as long as you had Void Spirit Jade of sufficient quality, whether it was Yang Kai or Li Wuyi, either could mass-produce them. Yang Kai had already refined a great many while in the Demon Domain, distributing them across the various continents. This time, when fleeing the Demon Domain back to the Star Boundary, it was those earlier arrangements that had saved him a tremendous amount of time.
However, for all their convenience, the Void Spirit Pearls carried several unavoidable drawbacks. The first was that they operated on a one-to-one basis — a single Void Spirit Pearl was useless on its own; only paired pearls could connect to each other. That was why the intelligence hub of the Seven Mist Sea had several hundred people dedicated solely to gathering information from all fronts, each with a large collection of Void Spirit Pearls spread before them.
Han Zhengqing had carried two pearls on his person: one for communicating with the Seven Mist Sea's intelligence hub, and another for linking with the Beast Martial Guard.
The second drawback of the Void Spirit Pearls was even more obvious: anyone could use them. There was no need to Cultivate spatial power, no need to have mastered the Laws of Space — one only needed to channel one's own cultivation to activate them.
And with that came problems of its own.
Once a Void Spirit Pearl fell into the hands of the Demon Race, the demons could potentially exploit it to bypass spatial barriers and arrive instantly at the Seven Mist Sea's intelligence hub. Even short of that, they could use the pearls to transmit false intelligence, diverting the Star Boundary's attention and resources. They could even materialize directly beside a Beast Martial Guard and launch a surprise attack.
Over the past few years, the number of Void Spirit Pearls that had gone missing was considerable.
In the beginning, the Demon Race had indeed exploited these vulnerabilities to cause the Star Boundary no small amount of damage.
But Li Wuyi was Li Wuyi after all. Once he identified the issue, he immediately made changes to the Void Spirit Pearls. Every pearl distributed externally was specially modified. Take the two pearls Han Zhengqing carried as an example: the one linked to the Seven Mist Sea could only transmit jade slips — it could not transport living people. The one linked to the Beast Martial Guard had entirely lost its teleportation function and now served only as a spatial beacon that moved with Han Zhengqing, passively receiving transmissions from the Beast Martial Guard.
Along with the widespread adoption of various encryption methods and decryption protocols, the turmoil caused by the Void Spirit Pearls gradually subsided.
And in recent years, the pearls had even become a powerful war asset for the Star Boundary. Intelligence from every front could be relayed to the Seven Mist Sea at any time, and the Beast Martial Guard could deploy on a moment's notice to rescue isolated squads, significantly reducing the Star Boundary's losses.
In theory, Han Zhengqing's squad should have been rescued by the Beast Martial Guard. But since Yang Kai had appeared, and Li Wuyi couldn't spare any additional manpower, the matter naturally fell to Yang Kai.
Just as Li Wuyi had said — a mere ten thousand troops. As if they could block Yang Kai's path.
Heading south, exchanging words along the way, Yang Kai gradually gained a preliminary understanding of the Star Boundary's situation, and his heart couldn't help but stir with emotion.
War made people grow. War made the entire world grow!
Fifty-four army corps — each representing a million soldiers, each commanded by at least a Third-Order Emperor Realm master, with dozens of Emperor Realm cultivators under their banner. Yang Kai had never imagined that the Star Boundary possessed such power.
His time in the Star Boundary hadn't been short, and he'd traveled far and wide, seeing much of the world. But now it seemed that the Star Boundary he'd known was merely the tip of the iceberg. This was the true bearing of the Star Boundary — the depth and heritage that a great world ought to possess.
It wasn't hard to imagine that among those numerous Emperor Realm powerhouses, many were likely eccentric hermits and reclusive masters. The smoke of war had swept across the Star Boundary, and these hidden experts had emerged one after another from their seclusion, joining the Star Boundary's armies — grains of sand piling into a tower, rivers merging into the sea.
"What exactly is the Demon Heavenly Path?" Yang Kai suddenly recalled something and asked.
At those words, Fan Xin's expression darkened slightly, a look of disdain crossing her face. "A pack of trash and scum!"
When Yang Kai had first appeared before Han Zhengqing and the others, Han Zhengqing had stared at him and cried out the words "Demon Heavenly Path." At the time, Yang Kai hadn't pressed the matter — after all, his own identity had been in question, so asking would have been pointless. But now that he thought about it, he naturally wanted to get to the bottom of it.
Though he didn't yet know what the Demon Heavenly Path was, Yang Kai had vaguely guessed it was connected to the Demon Race. One look at Fan Xin's reaction confirmed he was right. Fan Xin was even-tempered by nature, and a woman at that, yet when the Demon Heavenly Path was mentioned, she'd immediately branded them as trash and scum without a moment's hesitation — which only proved that the Demon Heavenly Path must be something truly loathsome.
The Demon Heavenly Path was a group — no, a faction — that had only appeared in the Star Boundary in recent years.
Its roots traced back to the Shadow Kill Hall of the Western Region.
Before the Two Realms War had erupted, the Shadow Kill Hall had already been secretly preparing for the Demon Race's invasion, recruiting and cultivating a large number of followers. These people were hidden throughout the Star Boundary, and among them were even many who had reached the False Emperor stage.
When Yao Lin and Li Shiqing and the others had been captured, it was all the doing of the Demon Heavenly Path. It was just that at the time, they hadn't yet gone by that name.
When the Two Realms War broke out and the Demon Domain surged forward, the entire Western Region had nearly fallen in a mere three years. The Star Boundary had lost vast swaths of territory, countless lives had perished, and the Western Region had become almost a paradise for the Demon Race.
At that time, the various army corps of the Star Boundary were still being organized and established, and the Void Spirit Pearls hadn't yet seen the widespread use they enjoyed now. Without the Great Emperors taking action, the Demon Race's momentum was virtually unstoppable.