In the end, Wei Junyang was unable to kill the False King Lord he had been targeting. Although the False King Lord could only exert seventy to eighty percent of a true Ink Clan King Lord's strength, he had still reached that level, making it exceedingly difficult to slay him in a single strike.
Moreover, Wei Junyang himself hadn't been a 9th rank for very long. His accumulated foundation was even a notch below Luo Tinghe's. Had he reached the peak of his 9th rank, the outcome might have been entirely different.
At that moment, Wei Junyang found himself somewhat envious of Yang Kai's Space Abilities. If Yang Kai possessed his level of strength, killing a False King Lord would have been a trivial matter. Under spatial restraint, the enemy would have no chance of escape at all — unlike the grueling pursuit he'd had to endure, which still ended in failure.
It wasn't that he didn't want to continue the chase. He simply ran out of time.
The entrance to the Chaos Furnace was about to vanish, and he had to return there to hold the line and oversee the broader situation. If humanity's powerhouses entered the Chaos Furnace without him in place, unforeseen complications could arise.
Though he hadn't managed to kill that False King Lord, he had severely wounded him. In the short term, that False King Lord would likely have no choice but to retreat into an Ink Nest and slumber to recover.
With Wei Junyang personally stationed there, the situation around the Chaos Furnace entrance quickly stabilized. Just like in the Qingyang Domain, human powerhouses flooded into the Chaos Furnace in waves, and then, under the Ink Clan's onslaught, deliberately allowed a batch of Ink Clan fighters to pass through.
The situations in the two major domains where 9th rank humans held the line were proceeding precisely as planned, moving forward in orderly fashion.
In those remaining battlefield domains where humanity was at a disadvantage, the efforts were not entirely without gain either.
The human powerhouses who had been designated to enter the Chaos Furnace had long since received Mi Jinglun's instructions. They were now relentlessly battering the Ink Clan's defensive lines, breaking through from multiple directions and surging into the Chaos Furnace.
In the Qingyang Domain, even with humanity holding the upper hand, they couldn't block every single Ink Clan fighter. Conversely, the Ink Clan couldn't stop every human either.
As they watched human powerhouses charge into the Chaos Furnace and vanish one after another, those Ink Clan experts who had been in the dark could no longer remain ignorant of what was happening.
Since the Chaos Furnace's projection had first appeared, the Ink Clan had maintained a strategy of responding to each development as it came. This time was no different.
If humanity wanted to enter the Chaos Furnace, then they would go in as well.
In those battlefield domains, the Ink Clan already held control over the Chaos Furnace entrances, so their forces could enter without facing any obstruction.
However, they soon encountered the same situation as the humans. As their own powerhouses flooded into the Chaos Furnace, their previous advantages gradually evaporated...
All told, among the various Chaos Furnace entrances, the Void Domain was the Ink Clan's stronghold, while the three domains the Ink Clan had abandoned served as humanity's strongholds.
For the remaining entrances, the balance of advantage between the two sides was constantly shifting, with the battlefield situation changing virtually in the blink of an eye.
Three brief days finally passed. The Chaos Furnace projection, which had solidified across all locations, suddenly shuddered violently. Before anyone could react, it burst into countless motes of light and dissipated completely into the heavens and earth.
With the Chaos Furnace projection gone and the entrances vanished, the impact on the various battlefield domains was tremendous.
Both clans had been waging their great battles around the Chaos Furnace's projection, which had naturally imposed all manner of constraints — for instance, whichever side held the advantage had to deploy their forces carefully and guard the entrance.
Now the projection was gone, the entrances had disappeared, and all those constraints evaporated with them.
Wei Junyang exhaled a long breath, feeling as though an invisible set of shackles had fallen away from him. In an instant, his spirit soared and his mind cleared. He leveled his long spear forward and bellowed, his roar echoing across the entire domain: "You Ink Clan mongrels — are you ready to die?!"
Previously, he couldn't unleash his full power without restraint. As the human 9th rank stationed at this location, he had to consider many things — otherwise, he wouldn't have abandoned the chase of that severely wounded False King Lord just to return and hold the line at the Chaos Furnace entrance.
But now, nothing stood in his way any longer. Today, in this very domain, the Ink Clan would forever remember one name.
His name — Da Zhan Tian, Wei Junyang!
On the other side, Luo Tinghe likewise threw off all restraints and charged headlong into the Ink Clan army. The Yin-Yang Fish seemed to materialize into something tangible — the vast, mysterious diagram swallowed an entire million-strong Ink Clan force whole. The twin powers of Yin and Yang ground against each other, reducing those million beings to a pool of blood.
In Mi Jinglun's original calculations, he had considered whether one of humanity's two newly promoted 9th ranks should be dispatched into the Chaos Furnace to safeguard those human powerhouses competing for opportunities inside.
But after deliberating with Xiang Shan, Mi Jinglun ultimately abandoned the idea.
Once the Chaos Furnace appeared, the all-out war between the two clans was certain to erupt. The previous agreements and pacts would hold no binding power whatsoever. Having both 9th ranks fighting on the battlefield was far more valuable than sending one into the Chaos Furnace.
As for what lay within the Chaos Furnace, there was no need for a 9th rank to intervene. Opportunities, after all, always came hand in hand with danger. If even the contest for such opportunities required a 9th rank to serve as bodyguard, then all those years of human cultivation would have been for nothing.
Besides, the space within the Chaos Furnace was vast beyond measure. Even if a 9th rank entered, their impact might be negligible.
At that point, Blood Crow, who had been listening from the side, drawled in his leisurely manner: "I don't know whether a 9th rank can even enter the Chaos Furnace, but the last time it opened, no 9th rank or Ink Clan King Lord went in. It might be a coincidence, or perhaps the Chaos Furnace places cultivation restrictions on the beings that enter it."