At this moment, Yang Kai was already traversing the gateway.
He encountered no resistance along the way. Firstly, he had activated the Space Law to banish himself, suppressing all traces of his aura so the Ink Clan would have difficulty detecting him. Secondly, the Ink Clan's guard over the gateway was lax.
The Ink Clan had already pushed into the Void Domain—this was their battlefield with the humans. As long as they crushed humanity here, they could conquer the Thirty Thousand Worlds. Once that happened, the sinister nature of the Ink Force would allow the Ink Clan's strength to snowball until humanity could no longer resist.
So whether the gateway was guarded or not made no difference. The humans had no intention of seizing it either. Their goal was the same as the Ink Clan's—to annihilate the Ink Clan here once and for all.
As for actually occupying the gateway, no one had given it a thought. It would be entirely pointless.
In this state of affairs, Yang Kai's passage through the gateway was naturally effortless.
Su Yan sensed him at the same moment he sensed her. He looked up hastily, but caught no glimpse of her figure.
The distance was simply too vast.
Su Yan had already joined the battle.
When he had entered the Ink Battlefield all those years ago, Su Yan, Shan Qingluo, and the others had been taken to the Holy Spirit Ancestral Ground for training. By now, nearly a thousand years had passed.
If Su Yan was already fighting, then the Holy Spirits in the Ancestral Ground had surely all been drawn into this war as well. Understanding dawned on Yang Kai—no wonder he had seen so many Holy Spirits on the battlefield before.
Saying he wasn't worried would be a lie. Though a thousand years had passed, how far Su Yan had actually grown, he couldn't say. On this chaotic battlefield, even Eighth-Order and Ninth-Order cultivators could fall.
But things had reached this point, and his worry wouldn't change anything.
The battle in the Void Domain concerned the entirety of the Thirty Thousand Worlds. If this battle was lost, the Thirty Thousand Worlds would know no peace ever again.
Banishing the distracting thoughts, Yang Kai clenched his teeth against the splitting pain in his head. The aftereffects of using the Soul-Sacrificing Needles continued to plague him—recovery would likely require the slow nourishment of the Divine Spirit Lotus.
As the Space Law surged, the moment he stepped through the gateway, space seemed to stretch to infinity. He did not return to the Ink Battlefield immediately.
Instead, he remained within the gateway itself.
This should have been nearly impossible. Whenever anyone passed through the gateway, they would invariably travel between the Ink Battlefield and the Void Domain.
But Yang Kai had mastered the Space Law. His attainment on this Grand Dao had reached the pinnacle of perfection. By leveraging his own Space Law to distort the fabric of space within the gateway, stretching it to his will—that was child's play.
He was in no rush to return to Unreturning Pass. He intended to seal this gateway completely.
Just as he had done when traveling from the Black Domain to the Ink Battlefield years ago.
The Void Domain had been a hypothetical second battlefield conceived by human ancestors. They had long since emptied it with their methods. In other words, the Ink Clan could obtain absolutely no supplies within the Void Domain, and without supplies, the Ink Clan could not birth new clan members.
Their supplies now relied entirely on Unreturning Pass.
Large Ink Clan detachments had been dispatched to mine resources, transport them back to the Ink Nests, and have the Ink Nests nurture new clan members. All of the Ink Clan Royal Lords' Ink Nests were stationed at Unreturning Pass and upon those shattered human strongholds.
If he severed the gateway connecting the Ink Battlefield and the Void Domain, he could cut off the Ink Clan's supply lines and reinforcements.
Without reinforcements, every Ink Clan soldier lost in the Void Domain could not be replaced. Sooner or later, humanity would slaughter them all.
That wouldn't necessarily eliminate the Ink Clan threat entirely, but at the very least it would secure the Thirty Thousand Worlds and restore the situation to what it had been before the fall of Unreturning Pass.
It was precisely with this in mind that this gateway linking Unreturning Pass and the Void Domain had to be sealed.
No one else possessed the means to do it. In all the world, only one person could accomplish this!
The Phoenix Queen of the Phoenix Clan might also have such ability, but she was far too conspicuous a target. As a powerhouse standing on equal footing with the Dragon Emperor, she was constantly watched by two Royal Lords, making covert action impossible.
Yang Kai had conceived this plan long before the decision to assault Unreturning Pass, but he had mentioned it to no one.
If the remnant army could break out of Unreturning Pass, that was naturally his wish. If they couldn't, he could still use their counterattack as cover to make a solitary charge toward the gateway.
Originally, he had planned to begin sealing the gateway the moment he entered it.
However, what he had witnessed inside Unreturning Pass had made him adjust his plans slightly. Now that the remnant army had reached the Void Domain and human forces had arrived to meet them, the danger was significantly reduced. He had turned back to the gateway.
Under the surging waves of the Space Law, countless spatial currents were drawn in, clogging the gateway's passage.
He had done this once nearly a thousand years ago, so he was well practiced.
The moment he began sealing the gateway, anomalies appeared at the gateway's manifestation in the Void Domain. The manifestation had originally appeared as a torn vortex, but now it seemed as though some invisible force was smoothing away all that chaos.
The vortex's rotation was slowing, and the tears were rapidly knitting themselves together.
At first, the Ink Clan noticed nothing, but it wasn't long before the anomaly was detected.
Though they didn't know exactly what this meant, the gateway was tied to their supply lines and reinforcements—they couldn't afford carelessness. A Royal Lord immediately moved to investigate.
What the Ink Clan had noticed, the humans naturally picked up on as well.
The Phoenix Clan, who were particularly versed in the Space Law, saw at a glance the source of the gateway's transformation. Phoenix cries immediately rang out, carrying messages in every direction.