When news of the great victory on the front lines—the devastating defeats inflicted upon the Ink Clan by every army—reached the rear, the entire human race erupted in jubilation.
Ever since the Ink Clan's invasion of the Three Thousand Worlds, humanity had been forced to execute the Great Migration Plan. People across domain after domain were torn from their homes, abandoning their ancestral lands and generations of heritage, compelled to migrate into the Lingxiao Domain.
This was a wound upon the entire race, a humiliation shared by all of humanity.
Yet before they could even begin to heal from that pain and shame, what awaited them was a war for survival itself. Humanity was besieged across more than ten major domain battlefields, locked in ceaseless struggle against the Ink Clan. Thousands of years passed in the blink of an eye.
Throughout it all, the entire race endured in silence, diligently building up its strength.
Then, several hundred years ago, the Heaven and Earth Furnace suddenly appeared, shifting the stalemate between the two races and heralding the full eruption of their great war. Leveraging their intelligence on the Heaven and Earth Furnace, humanity fought a brilliant reversal, reclaiming vast stretches of lost territory.
But when the Ink Clan truly began to exert its full might, the war sank back into deadlock. No one knew how many more years it would drag on. No one knew whether they would live to see the final victory.
No one had ever imagined that victory would come so suddenly!
Battle reports poured from the Central Bureau, announcing to every soul remaining in the rear what had transpired. In those reports, people saw the staggering numbers of enemies slain, saw the progress of reclaimed territories, saw the dawn breaking on the horizon.
In a mere few months, twelve great armies had shattered the enemy on their respective battlefields. The Crimson Fire Army had even come close to annihilating their opponents entirely.
The whole race celebrated!
Another half-year later, large-scale battles had ceased. Humanity's twelve great armies dispersed completely, operating at the town level, spreading across every domain to hunt down the scattered remnants of the Ink Clan that still lurked in the shadows.
And so, the Three Thousand Worlds—lost to the Ink Clan for millennia—were fully reclaimed by humanity!
In this war that determined the fate of the human race, everyone committed one name to memory.
Yang Kai!
The Great Emperor of the Star Realm, master of Lingxiao Palace, the newest Ninth-Rank Open Heaven.
Only then, through various channels of inquiry, did people finally understand why this war had reached its conclusion so swiftly.
It was none other than the immense threat Yang Kai posed to the False King Masters—and the awe-inspiring deterrent of his extraordinary mastery of spatial divine abilities—that had forced the Ink Clan to recall all their False King Masters from across the battlefield back to the Returnless Pass.
Without False King Masters to lead them, the Ink Clan's armies were like tigers without fangs, crumbling at the first clash with humanity's forces.
And so, in this period, wherever humans still lived, one name was spoken with reverence…
At this moment, in the void beyond the Central Bureau's floating continent, Yang Kai and Mi Jinglun stood side by side. The latter wore a look of bewilderment, unable to fathom why Yang Kai had so mysteriously dragged him out here.
Since parting ways with Wu Qing, Yang Kai had been hurtling through space at great speed, hunting down Ink Clan stragglers along the way—and had accumulated a fair number of spoils. But with the Ink Clan remnants now scattered across every domain and lying low under the current circumstances, rooting them all out had become a difficult task. Yang Kai alone could no longer make a significant difference; that work had to be entrusted to humanity's twelve armies. Operating at the town level across various domains, they would periodically flush out hidden Ink Clan remnants.
He believed it would take only a few more years to purge every last trace of the Ink Clan from the Three Thousand Worlds. Only then would the Three Thousand Worlds truly be reclaimed.
Of course, the reclamation of the Three Thousand Worlds was more symbolic than practical for humanity. The current Three Thousand Worlds were a wasteland—everything had been destroyed, leaving virtually nothing behind except the floating continents drifting through the void.
So even with the territory truly reclaimed, those who had been driven from their homeland could never go back. It was a sorrowful truth, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.
Yang Kai didn't waste any more time hunting stragglers. Instead, he made his way back to the Central Bureau and sought out Mi Jinglun.
He had accumulated quite a collection of fine goods.
"Junior Brother, what are you planning?" Mi Jinglun couldn't help but ask.
Yang Kai raised an eyebrow at him. "Senior Brother, have a little patience. Let me show you something good."
So saying, Yang Kai reached into his robe and withdrew the sphere of compressed void—the condensed form of the River of Space-Time—and tossed it casually outward.
Mi Jinglun looked up to observe, his expression curious. He could see that within the tiny River of Space-Time, the power of the Great Dao was rich and abundant. Even as a Ninth-Rank cultivator himself, he couldn't help but feel a sense of awe.
He could sense how extraordinary this River of Space-Time was, and he understood all too well that although they were both Ninth-Rank, Yang Kai's mastery of the Great Dao's power was far beyond anything he could rival.
The River of Space-Time rotated slowly, like a loosened ball of thread, expanding slightly with each revolution—and the further it went, the grander its expansion became.
In just a short while, a colossal presence materialized before Mi Jinglun's eyes.