"How much longer can you hold?" Yang Kai asked.
Miao Feiping replied immediately, "Ten breaths at most!"
After ten breaths, the protective formation would break. When that happened, Dawn would have no defensive capability whatsoever, and all thirty-something squad members would be left exposed to the Ink Clan's attacks with their lives hanging in the balance.
"That's enough!" Yang Kai responded. He ceased expanding his gains and quietly produced a jade token, secretly channeling his power into it, ready to activate its force at any moment.
He was not the only one doing this. Every squad captain had done the same.
High above the battlefield, the Ink Clan Royal Lord lurked within a mass of dark ink clouds, gazing down below.
As a Royal Lord, his perceptions were extraordinarily sharp. The humans' behavior this time was somewhat unusual. The Ink Clan's main forces, positioned behind the battle lines, might not have noticed yet, but he commanded a view of the entire field—how could he fail to spot it? The human squads seemed to be carving up the battlefield, segment by segment. From the start of the battle until now, these humans had focused entirely on evasion and maneuvering, showing no intent to kill. That was different from before.
Whenever something was amiss, there was surely a scheme at play.
A vague sense of unease stirred within the Ink Clan Royal Lord. He couldn't shake the feeling that the humans were about to unleash some sort of conspiracy. Every member of the Ink Clan had learned firsthand just how cunning humans could be.
Had he been free to act at will, he would have had no fear of whatever petty tricks the humans might devise. With his transcendent cultivation that dominated all under heaven, any scheme or stratagem would be utterly futile.
But he could not act freely. That old monster inside Biluo Pass had his aura locked firmly onto the Royal Lord. The moment he made a move, a devastating counterstrike would follow. At their level of cultivation, losing the initiative was a serious problem. He could not afford to give the human ancestor that opportunity.
But what exactly were the humans trying to do?
The answer came swiftly.
Just as the Dawn's vessel was on the verge of its defenses collapsing entirely, a Divine Sense transmission erupted in the ears of every human on the battlefield: "Now!"
It was Zhong Liang's transmission!
Already prepared, Yang Kai did not hesitate for even a moment. He activated the jade token in his hand and unleashed a beam of mysterious light toward a point ahead.
The light pierced into the void and vanished, but in the next instant, an enormous black hole materialized out of thin air. The moment it appeared, it expanded rapidly, and from within it came an incomparably powerful pulling force.
The surrounding space—both the Dawn squad and the Ink Clan army—had almost no time to react before they were engulfed by the expanding black hole. Some Ink Clan members sensed the danger and tried to escape the black hole's range, but the tremendous gravitational pull left them powerless.
The black hole appeared in an instant, expanding to its maximum in a mere three breaths, then abruptly collapsed and vanished.
Gone along with it were the Dawn squad and some three to four thousand Ink Clan soldiers nearby!
It was not just Dawn that experienced this. Across the entire battlefield outside Biluo Pass, this scene played out everywhere—black hole after black hole appeared, expanded, and vanished in an impossibly short time.
Vanishing along with them were the nearby humans and Ink Clan alike.
The very instant those black holes first appeared, the Ink Clan Royal Lord finally understood the source of the unease he had carried for so long.
The humans had laid an enormous number of traps outside Biluo Pass, and the foundation of those traps was none other than the Blessed Lands and Holy Lands that human Open Heaven cultivators had left behind upon their deaths over countless years.
When those Blessed Lands and Holy Lands were suddenly activated, they expanded into massive black holes—perhaps aided by some formation as well—and upon collapsing, they sucked in every human and Ink Clan member in the vicinity.
The Ink Clan Royal Lord had never imagined that something left behind by the dead could produce such an effect.
In the previous great war, the Ink Clan had encountered nothing like this, nor had they ever faced anything similar before. What was certain was that this had to be a human preparation made within the last century.
But if the humans possessed such means, why hadn't they used them before? Why wait until now?
The Royal Lord could not figure it out. All he knew was that he had miscalculated this time. The Ink Clan would suffer devastating losses—losses beyond imagination.
With his strength, he had the ability to put a stop to all of this. Each massive black hole took several breaths from its appearance to its disappearance. The Ink Clan members being pulled in were powerless to resist, but the Royal Lord could have intervened.
Yet he dared not. The aura of the human ancestor inside Biluo Pass had grown even more razor-sharp, like a ravenous beast poised to strike at any moment, ready to deliver a fatal blow.
So he could only watch helplessly as his armies were swallowed by black hole after black hole.
"Hmph!" The ancestor inside the Pass let out a cold, displeased snort. This Ink Clan Royal Lord was quite the one for restraint—willing to watch his own armies suffer rather than give him the slightest opening to act.
But the outcome was already sealed. Biluo Pass would undoubtedly enter a long period of peace, and during that time, the Ink Clan would likely be forced to cower in their corner.
The once-chaotic battlefield, following the sudden appearance and disappearance of those countless black holes, had been left eerily empty. A few lucky Ink Clan members had avoided being pulled in, but they were few in number. The abrupt upheaval had left them completely bewildered as to what had just happened, and before they could so much as make sense of it, the city walls on all sides erupted with the overwhelming might of massive formations and Artifacts, pounding down upon them and sending them scattering in every direction.