The first thing Yang Kai focused on was the battle between the Human Race Ancestor and the Ink Clan Royal Lord.
As far as his gaze could reach, tens of thousands of kilometres away, two figures were locked in fierce combat. The violent collisions of their energy formed shockwaves visible to the naked eye, spreading outward in all directions. Neither humans nor Ink Clan members dared to approach the vicinity of those two figures; they had long since cleared out.
Even from tens of thousands of kilometres away, Yang Kai could still feel the terrifying aftershocks of their clashing power.
This was the strength of a Ninth-Order Open Heaven master. This was the might of the Ink Clan Royal Lord — power that commanded one's awe and aspiration.
With his eyesight, he could not discern at all which of the two held the advantage. They appeared to be fighting evenly, perfectly matched.
Yet before long, the figures of the two gradually moved farther apart, slowly fading from his field of vision.
Not being able to observe their battle was certainly regrettable, but at this moment Yang Kai's heart settled with certainty — the Human Race Ancestor had gained the upper hand.
There was no other explanation. Only if the Ancestor held the advantage could he drag the battlefield away from their location, preventing the crossfire from endangering their kin.
If, on the contrary, it was the Ink Clan Royal Lord who had the upper hand, he would certainly pull the fight toward wherever the greatest concentration of people was, forcing the Human Race Ancestor to fight with restraint.
It was no surprise that things had turned out this way.
Although Yang Kai had personally verified on the battlefield that under equal ranks, the Ink Clan was slightly weaker than humans, at the level of a Royal Lord, one could no longer judge strength so readily. The Royal Lord had also accumulated countless years of cultivation to reach his current achievement.
The fierce battle half a year ago with the Human Race Ancestor had left both sides injured, which showed that the Royal Lord and a Ninth-Order master were essentially equivalent existences.
This battle had followed the same pattern as the Ink Clan's countless assaults on human strongholds throughout history. Barring any surprises, such a war would ordinarily last at least several years, perhaps even a decade or more.
But a surprise had come — and quite unexpectedly at that.
Yang Kai had sneaked out of Biluo Pass, hoping to break through his own limitations on the battlefield and advance to the Seventh Order. Upon learning of this, Zhong Liang had immediately borrowed troops from the Eastern, Southern, and Northern Armies to press the Western front, causing the Ink Clan forces on the western side to crumble under pressure and retreat steadily.
This had inadvertently placed the Ink Cloud — where the Royal Lord was recuperating — directly within the battle zone.
As it happened, Yang Kai, who had been charging alongside Feng Ying at the very forefront of the battlefield, had unleashed a divine ability that exposed the Ink Clan Royal Lord's whereabouts. Worse still, it had disrupted his recovery, causing the Royal Lord's injuries not only to fail to improve but to worsen further.
The Human Race Ancestor's injuries had certainly not fully healed either. Once a Ninth-Order Open Heaven master was wounded, recovery was an arduous process. But the Ancestor had voluntarily come out of seclusion — which was still far better than the Royal Lord, whose recovery had been forcibly interrupted.
With one side's strength waning while the other's grew, a gap had emerged between these two powerhouses who were originally evenly matched. This was why the Human Race Ancestor was able to pull the battlefield away from their people.
Moreover, barring any further surprises, the eventual outcome of their clash would absolutely be a victory for the Human Race Ancestor. Whether he could actually kill the Ink Clan Royal Lord, however, Yang Kai had no way of judging.
With the battle between the two supreme powerhouses now beyond sight, Yang Kai turned his gaze to the vast battlefield.
The situation was splendid.
The Ink Clan was in complete disarray, suffering casualties without cease, while the human powerhouses gave chase at their heels. On the battlefield, it was an almost one-sided rout.
Though this battle had not yet concluded, it could already be called a great victory.
Yang Kai had been positioned at the very forefront of the Western front the entire time and knew nothing of the situation on the Eastern, Southern, and Northern fronts. He naturally had no idea that the exposure of the Royal Lord's recuperation site had caused the Ink Clan forces on those three fronts to abandon their considerable advantages and rush to provide emergency reinforcement — only to be pursued by Ding Yao, Liang Yulong, and Shentu Mo leading their armies. During the chase, the Ink Clan army had suffered devastating losses, laying the foundation for the victory.
Wounded human warriors continued to return to the Pass, bringing back intelligence from the front. Within a single day, the Ink Clan army had retreated three hundred thousand kilometres. After two days, they had retreated a full million kilometres, and the human armies were still in relentless pursuit.
It was not until three days later that the human armies finally returned in triumph. In this battle, the Ink Clan had lost over half their total force — a blow from which their vitality was severely crippled. Such a result, viewed against the entirety of historical warfare, was exceedingly rare.
This was a true great victory. News spread among the humans of Biluo Pass, and the entire fortress was suffused with an atmosphere of jubilation.
Everyone knew that after this battle, at least a hundred years of peace had been secured.
Within a hundred years, the Ink Clan would have no strength left to mount another large-scale assault.
The Ancestor had not yet returned; no one knew how far his battle with the Ink Clan Royal Lord had carried them. The Eighth-Order Open Heaven masters who had returned from the campaign gathered together and held a brief discussion. Half would remain to garrison the Pass, while the other half would set out to follow the trail of the two supreme powerhouses' battle and search for them.
It was not that they feared the Ancestor was outmatched — rather, they hoped to seize this opportunity to assist the Ancestor in delivering a final killing blow to the Ink Clan Royal Lord, thereby eliminating the threat once and for all. If they could truly accomplish that, then the sector of the Ink Battlefield guarded by Biluo Pass would be secure for a thousand years to come.
On the Ink Clan's side, they would need to produce another Royal Lord before they could contest Biluo Pass again.
But the birth of a Royal Lord was far from easy. Just like a Ninth-Order Open Heaven master of the Human Race, one might not appear in several thousand or even ten thousand years. Both the Royal Lord and the Ninth-Order Open Heaven were the pillars that anchored their respective races.