"The ten of us arrived with hostility, yet Ink sensed nothing. Instead, it welcomed us warmly, showed us the scenery across its territory, and flaunted its accomplishments..."
Looking back, Ink had behaved like a child. It had something wonderful but no one to share it with. The rare visit from Cang and the others had been the perfect opportunity to show off.
The reason Ink had treated the ten of them differently was because they could resist the erosion of its Ink Force. Unlike other humans, who became its obedient servants the moment they were touched by the Ink Force, these ten remained unaffected.
For Ink at that time, what it needed was no longer servants—it wanted friends who could share in its joys and happiness.
"Ink considered us its friends. Faced with such an Ink, we didn't know what to do. We had originally planned to simply destroy it, but when the time came to act, none of us could bring ourselves to do it. The Ink Force was an innate power it had been born with. Its original intention was never to bring calamity upon the Three Thousand Worlds—it simply didn't understand what harm its actions would bring to the Human Race, or how they could lead to the destruction of this vast world."
"Furthermore, Ink's indestructible body left us at a complete loss. So our initial plan gradually changed. We discovered Ink's place of birth, set up the Grand Seal of Primordial Heaven here, lured it to this location, and combined the power of all ten to seal it within. We hoped to slowly find a way to neutralize its power—to discover a path that would both preserve its life and eliminate the danger of the Ink Force."
"Before we acted, we jointly severed the great domain Ink had occupied, preventing the Ink Force from corrupting more domains. At that time, both our ten and Ink's subordinates had gathered many powerful experts. When we imprisoned Ink here, it was naturally furious. It commanded its Ink Clan subordinates to launch an assault on the Human Race, and both sides clashed fiercely in the vast void. Who knows how many perished."
"At first, we could still sense the tremors of battle. But as time passed, the battlefield gradually expanded outward, and even we could no longer tell how the war was going."
The war had erupted abruptly after Cang and the nine others had imprisoned Ink. The Human Race needed to resist the erosion of the Ink Force and defend their homes. Ink, enraged by the betrayal of Cang and his companions, ordered its Ink Clan to slaughter every living being.
The Ink Battlefield was born in that era. The dangers the Human Race had to overcome during their expedition were all remnants of that time. It had been an utterly devastating war—the Ink Clan and the Human Race fought to the death across the vast Ink Battlefield, and neither side retreated.
"That war lasted nearly ten thousand years. Countless Human Race experts were killed or wounded, and the forces under Ink's command were nearly wiped out entirely. Just when we thought the threat of the Ink Force had been largely neutralized, Ink suddenly erupted. Over the course of ten thousand years, it had been accumulating power the entire time. The ten of us were caught off guard and nearly had it break free. Although we managed to seal it again through great effort, some of the servants it had created managed to escape from this place... If I'm not mistaken, you should call those servants Kingdom Lords."
Yang Kai's expression showed a sudden realization.
When he had previously extracted information from Ge Chen, the Domain Lord who had been trapped in the spatial rift, Ge Chen had mentioned that the Kingdom Lords had emerged from the source location, bringing their Ink Nests with them.
Now it seemed that those Kingdom Lords who had escaped were from that very batch.
Yang Kai couldn't help but feel a chill run through him.
What level of power must a being like Ink possess to be able to create so many Kingdom Lords!
And what level of power must Cang and the other nine have had to imprison Ink here!
He had claimed to be Ninth-Order, but how could a Ninth-Order cultivator accomplish such a thing? Was it really as simple as having walked further along the Ninth-Order path?
"Ink's intentions were simple. If it couldn't break free from the inside, then its only hope lay in its servants. Our ten seals were sturdy indeed, but if they came under attack from too many Kingdom Lords on the outside, they wouldn't hold for long. It wouldn't even take that many—just five hundred Kingdom Lords striking the seal simultaneously from the outside, and Ink would have a chance to break free."
"So when we saw those Kingdom Lords depart, we were deeply worried. If those Kingdom Lords came to dominate the Three Thousand Worlds, the resources of the Three Thousand Worlds would be more than sufficient to allow them to create an incalculable number of Ink Clan. With such a vast numerical foundation, given enough time, producing five hundred Kingdom Lords would not be difficult."
"But that worry never came to pass. No Kingdom Lord ever returned to help Ink escape. We knew then that the Human Race still had the strength to fight. That made us very happy. As the years passed and we kept our lonely vigil here, one by one our old companions could no longer hold on and passed away. In the end, only this old man remained—until you arrived!"
Through this lengthy account, Cang had presented three magnificent scrolls—the primordial, the ancient, and the late-ancient eras—before everyone's eyes. It allowed the many Ninth-Order cultivators to gain insight into secrets they had never before heard of, and to learn the true origin of Ink.
The war between the Human Race and the Ink Clan in the final days of the late-ancient era had been far too devastating. The Human Race's greatest experts had suffered catastrophic losses, and a gap had appeared in history. So even the Cave Heavens and Blessed Lands knew very little about events from those distant times.
If the expeditionary army had not come to this place today, they would still have had no idea where the source of their history lay.
Yet despite their ignorance, the tradition of resisting the Ink Clan had always been passed down. Because for the Human Race to survive, they had to resist the Ink Clan. To allow the Ink Clan into the Three Thousand Worlds would be to court their own destruction.
Over one hundred war zones, over one hundred passes—guarding the throat of the Ink Battlefield. For countless years, generation after generation of Human Race soldiers had charged forward, using their blood and lives to forge an impenetrable defense!
What a glorious war it had been. The struggle between the Human Race and the Ink Clan had deep roots, stretching from the end of the late-ancient era all the way to the present day.
And the reason the Ink Clan sought to invade the Three Thousand Worlds was to harness the prosperity of that realm to nurture more Kingdom Lords, then return here to free Ink from its prison.
After Cang finished speaking, the Ninth-Order cultivators all fell silent.
What they had learned today far exceeded their imagination, and they needed time to process it.
After a long while, one of the Old Ancestors finally asked, "Senior, our Human Race expeditionary army has arrived at this place. What must we do to completely destroy Ink? Please guide us—two million Human Race soldiers are prepared to fight to the death, and we will surely sweep away every last evil spirit!"
Cang slowly shook his head. "Ink was born in accordance with Heaven and Earth—it is a very special existence. With our strength alone, we can suppress it, we can seal it, we can weaken it, but we cannot destroy it."