Lu An clearly knew that Biluo Pass would send someone to search for him, and that person would undoubtedly be Yang Kai—only he could move freely through the chaotic void of this rift.
It wasn't that he hadn't tried to break free, but alas, even an Eighth-Grade Open Heaven cultivator, once swept into a place like this, was helpless without a sense of direction. Moreover, he had sustained serious injuries during his life-and-death battle with that Domain Lord and could no longer muster his peak strength.
Rather than searching blindly for a way out, it was better to sit tight and wait for rescue—which was exactly why Yang Kai had been able to find him so quickly.
Finding Lu An and retracing their steps back cost Yang Kai no great effort.
When the two of them appeared, Zhong Liang, who had been waiting in the outer chamber, couldn't help but breathe a sigh of relief. Eighth-Grade Open Heaven cultivators were the backbone of humanity's fight against the Mo Tribe, and their numbers at any given pass were never large. The fall of any single Eighth-Grader was enough to make one's heart ache.
Lu An had been seriously wounded and went off to tend to his injuries.
Yang Kai and Dawn set off on the journey to the Forward Outpost.
The Forward Outpost had already been driven deep into the Mo Tribe's heartland. In this great war between the two races, Biluo Pass had achieved brilliant results—the Mo Tribe's staggering losses were enough to prevent their recovery for a thousand years. But whether the source of that recovery could be utterly strangled would depend on the Forward Outpost's subsequent performance.
If the soldiers of Biluo Pass could establish an unshakeable foothold at the Forward Outpost and suppress nearly half the Mo Tribe's living space, then the Mo Tribe would never again have hope of recovery.
But if the Forward Outpost fell, the gains of this war would be drastically diminished.
Thus, the Forward Outpost's existence was pivotal, and defending it naturally could not rely on passive defense alone—they needed to take the initiative and strike.
During the initial expedition, Biluo Pass had deployed twenty thousand soldiers, and now over ten thousand more had been dispatched, traveling swiftly to reinforce via the two Transit Heaven and Earth Grand Arrays that Yang Kai had set up.
Present-day Biluo Pass had essentially emptied itself, leaving only the bare minimum of personnel behind. After so many years of passive defense, the moment to take the offensive had finally arrived, and the high command's decision was brimming with boldness and daring.
There was no need to worry about Biluo Pass being attacked either—the Mo Tribe in this war zone could barely look after themselves, let alone spare any strength to assault Biluo Pass.
The Mo Tribe from other war zones couldn't come to their aid either—they had their own enemies to deal with, just as humanity couldn't mass-reinforce other passes. The Mo Tribe in each war zone fought their own battles, and the humans at each pass fought theirs.
While Yang Kai had been setting up the Heaven and Earth Grand Arrays, the soldiers at the Forward Outpost had been conserving their energy. Once Biluo Pass's ten-thousand-strong reinforcement arrived, the grand strategy of scorched earth was finally set in motion.
Small squads radiated outward from the Forward Outpost in all directions, hunting down the Mo Tribe on every front, while the Eighth-Grade Open Heaven cultivators also struck frequently, suppressing the Mo Tribe's room to maneuver as much as possible.
The Mo Tribe certainly wouldn't sit and wait for death. Large-scale clashes wouldn't occur, but small-scale ambushes played out nearly every day—the squads that marched out of the Forward Outpost were precisely the Mo Tribe's targets.
Humanity and the Mo Tribe waged a struggle lasting hundreds, even thousands of years in the space flanking the shipping lanes between Biluo Pass as the starting point and the Forward Outpost as the destination.
On the whole, humanity held an absolute advantage.
Given that the Mo Tribe's Domain Lords dared not deploy lightly, human squads equipped with warships enjoyed an overwhelming advantage when facing small numbers of Mo Tribe warriors. If they encountered too many enemies and couldn't win, they could simply retreat—the warship's defensive formations provided the squads with robust protection, and the Forward Outpost's Heaven and Earth Grand Arrays gave them an extremely convenient means of withdrawing from the battlefield.
So as long as one's luck wasn't terribly poor, there was essentially no risk to one's life.
In the void, a warship darted back and forth with agile precision. From its decks, brilliant beams of light lashed out—the Mo Tribe warriors who attempted to approach had no way to withstand such devastating attacks and burst into mists of blood in an instant.
Around the warship, several figures leaped and wove through the air, their secret techniques unleashed to harvest the lives of straggling Mo Tribe members.
Before long, over a hundred Mo Tribe warriors had been completely wiped out.
Miao Feiping flickered back aboard Dawnbreak, his expression calm—neither pleased nor alarmed. After dozens of battles, large and small, the baptism of blood and fire had long since tempered him. He was no longer the flustered, excited, and nervous young man who had first faced the Mo Tribe.
Under normal circumstances, a Sixth-Grader like him wouldn't leave the warship to engage the enemy—the formations aboard the vessel were where he belonged.
But the current fighting was different from the defensive battles at the pass. All they encountered were scattered Mo Tribe members, and that left room for Sixth-Grade Open Heaven cultivators to contribute.
During the pass-defending battles, the Mo Tribe had been numerous and formidable. Although a Sixth-Grade Open Heaven cultivator wasn't weak, surviving on that chaotic battlefield was extremely difficult, so they only needed to operate the warship's formations.
The hundred-odd Mo Tribe members they had just encountered included only one Lord-class warrior. Once Feng Ying had struck first and eliminated him, the rest scattered like loose sand. A few Sixth-Graders couldn't hold themselves back and charged out of the warship to fight, and Yang Kai didn't stop them.
Battles like this were ubiquitous throughout the void. The soldiers at the Forward Outpost called this sort of operation "hunting," and hunting it truly was. After several successive great campaigns, the Mo Tribe had been wounded to the bone. Fearing that the human army would continue marching toward the Royal City, they now concentrated their heavy defenses in that direction—the space between Biluo Pass and the Forward Outpost was entirely ignored by any Mo Tribe powerhouses.
"Captain, time's up," Feng Ying reminded him.
Yang Kai nodded. "Let's head back. We've been out long enough."