Volume 4: Super-Tier Awakening & The Ancient Capital Calamity
Chapter 340
Night Descends, But a Greater Catastrophe Approaches
A faint, sickly dawn leaked through the thick, turbid sea of blood clouds hanging sluggishly over the sky of the Ancient Capital, casting a desolate, crimson hue that reeked of dried slaughter. The third wave of the undead horde—the most bloody and frenzied onslaught since night had fallen—had finally been completely shattered across all four city walls. The majestic ramparts that had stood proud through centuries were now webbed with fractures, stained with the black gore of countless fallen soldiers and fiends. Tens of thousands of corpses, skeletal fiends, and wandering wraiths littered the base of the wall, piled mountain-high and exhaling a sickening, putrid miasma.
Yet, even as the shrieking tide of undead receded and temporarily quieted, not a single mage upon the ramparts dared to let out a breath of relief. On the contrary, the suffocating pressure weighing down every inch of space felt heavier than a thousand colliding mountains.
“Clang... clang... clang...”
Ancient bronze bells tolled from the deepest bowels of the earth, ringing out ceaselessly from forgotten, nameless crypts. Each murky, subterranean chime reverberated not merely as physical soundwaves, but struck directly into the minds of the defenders like an invisible sledgehammer battering the souls of every mage holding the line. Low-tier mages turned deathly pale, stumbling and collapsing to the ground, clutching their heads in agonizing shrieks as blood trickled from the corners of their ears.
Inside the command headquarters, the atmosphere was as heavy as molten lead. Magic projection arrays cast their light over a massive electronic sandbox map at the center, but the gazes of all the high-ranking officers, major generals, and tower elders were locked tightly onto the subterranean seismic scanners and energy monitoring devices, which were flashing with frantic, ear-piercing alarms.
“Beep... beep... beep...”
Crimson warning lights pulsed in rapid succession, beating with a frantic rhythm that threatened to stall the heartbeats of everyone in the room.
A disheveled seismology expert, his eyes bloodshot from days without sleep, tremblingly raised a hand clutching a stack of files toward the main screen. His voice was choked, stuttering and incoherent:
“Reporting... reporting, Lords... The subterranean scans have been verified tenfold! In the ancient cemetery region exactly twenty miles south of the city... the underground tectonic layers are collapsing en masse on a scale unprecedented in history!”
Before the words even faded, a tower elder with an ashen face chimed in, his voice trembling with unconcealable panic:
“It’s not just geological collapse! The quantum and resentment energy measured in that sector has surpassed the limits of a Commander-tier by hundreds, if not thousands of times! It... it has completely broken every natural law, touching and crossing the threshold of a... Monarch Tier!”
The moment the words “Monarch Tier” dropped, the entire briefing room plunged into a deathly silence. One could practically hear the rhythmic dripping of cold sweat onto the cold metallic table.
Archmages—veterans who had dominated battlefields and single-handedly wiped out tens of thousands of fiends in life-or-death struggles—felt their spines turn to ice, a bone-chilling draft rushing from their heels straight up to their brains.
An Undead Monarch! An existence perched atop the apex of the undead food chain, a horrifying creature capable of manipulating life and death, summoning winds and rain, possessing power on par with a destructive natural disaster!
“Investigate... exactly who has awakened?” Major General Lu Chen stepped forward, his hands clenching into fists so tight his knuckles popped and blue veins bulged across his forehead.
Right at that moment, the main screen magnified the feed from long-range magical reconnaissance cameras. At the epicenter of the ancient cemetery, a colossal pillar of black light mixed with blood-red radiance pierced straight through the cloud cover, stabbing into the azure firmament. At the heart of that pillar, an immensely massive silhouette was slowly rising from the abyssal depths of the earth.
It was a colossal monolith forged from tens of thousands of ancient warrior skeletal remains, fused with millennium-old rock and towering resentment. Upon its head rested a rusted crown of pure gold, and in its hand, it gripped a massive bone greatsword dozens of meters long. Within its sunken eye sockets, two emerald-green wisps of necromantic fire flickered with chilling, cruel malice.
“The Mountain-Cleaving Corpse Monarch! It’s really it... The primordial Undead Monarch guarding the ancient imperial mausoleum of the previous dynasty!” an archaeological scholar screamed in despair, tumbling backward out of his chair.
The Mountain-Cleaving Corpse Monarch! A name that had sown nightmares across the entire southern region for millennia, a creature that had single-handedly buried hundreds of thousands of lives in a single night of blood-red moonlight. Now, after a thousand years of being sealed and worn down by time, it had officially awakened, bearing an unquenchable blaze of hatred and fury to descend upon the mortal world once more!
Major General Lu Chen stepped back half a pace, his face completely drained of color as his parched lips trembled:
“A genuine Monarch... Not a hypothesis, not a weakened remnant soul... This is a peak Monarch in its complete state! Even... even if all Advanced mages, and even if we gathered every single Super-tier powerhouse in the Ancient Capital to fight to our dying breaths, we could never halt its advance by so much as a single step!”
Despair spread like a plague through the briefing room. The generals lowered their heads, their grips so tight their palms bled. The chasm between the Advanced tier and the Monarch tier was not merely a gap in magical potency; it was the chasm between mortals and divinities. Faced with an existence capable of leveling a mountain with a single strike, every tactical strategy and reinforced defensive array became as useless as scrap paper.
Just as the atmosphere sank into absolute helplessness and terror, a figure slowly stepped out from the corner of the room.
It was Lin Feng.
He wore a simple pitch-black combat robe without flashy magical artifacts, yet standing there, he resembled an evergreen pine standing firm against a violent tempest. His handsome face was cold and chiseled as if carved from glacial stone, his deep eyes devoid of a single ripple, save for an invisible battle intent burning fiercely within—sharp and piercing like a newly unsheathed divine blade.
Lin Feng stepped before the large tactical map, his gaze sweeping over the position of the Mountain-Cleaving Corpse Monarch as it unceasingly unleashed terrifying pressure toward the Ancient Capital. The corners of his lips curved upward in a faint, arrogant yet utterly steadfast smile.
“Major General Lu Chen.” Lin Feng’s voice rang out, calm yet carrying an absolute authority that commanded attention.
Lu Chen startled, snapping his head up to stare fixedly at the young man before him: “Lin... Lord Lin? What do you intend to...”
“What did you just say?” Lin Feng turned his head, his gaze as sharp as a lightning bolt flashing across the general’s pale face, speaking with serene indifference: “The mages of the Ancient Capital cannot stop it? Then... I will face it alone!”
The moment those words dropped, the entire briefing room went dead silent.
“What?! Alone?!” A senior general widened his eyes in horror, blurting out, “Lin Feng! Have you lost your mind? That is a Monarch-tier! A creature wielding disaster-level power! No matter how monstrous your talent, you are ultimately just a young mage...”
“Age does not define the limits of power.” Lin Feng cut the general off with a steady, overwhelming tone, “You have all fought tirelessly throughout the past night to defend this city; your vital energy is exhausted, your mental state battered by those bells. If the army were to march out against the Mountain-Cleaving Corpse Monarch now, the only outcome would be a meaningless death, feeding the undead horde.”
He paused for a beat, striding to the large window facing south—where the sky was being torn apart by the pitch-black beam of light. The howling gale outside rushed into the room, tossing Lin Feng’s dark hair and making his deep eyes burn all the more brilliantly.
“Therefore, that beast... leave it to me.”
Lin Feng uttered every word with absolute clarity, devoid of the slightest hesitation or fear. This blind-seeming confidence was not born of reckless arrogance, but radiated from overwhelming strength tempered through countless life-or-death battles.
Lu Chen stared fixedly at Lin Feng’s solitary silhouette, a complex, indescribable surge of emotion swelling within his chest. Astonishment, skepticism, shock, and finally, a fragile thread of hope spinning through the dark night.
“Lin Feng... Just what percentage of certainty do you actually have?” Lu Chen asked in a hoarse voice, his trembling fingers attempting to light a cigarette to no avail.
Without turning back, Lin Feng raised his right hand and gave a flick of his finger. A wisp of deep purple magical flame bloomed at his fingertip, radiating a terrifying heat that warped the surrounding space before instantly extinguishing.
“One hundred percent.” Lin Feng spat out three brief words, cold yet heavy as a thousand pounds. “Either it dies beneath my feet, or the Ancient Capital sinks into a sea of blood today. I do not have the luxury of choosing the second.”
Rumble... rumble... rumble...!
Before anyone could reply, a heaven-shaking explosion suddenly erupted from the south, violently shaking the entire world. The shockwave was so ferocious that the reinforced concrete walls of the briefing room sprouted web-like cracks, sending plumes of dust raining from the ceiling.
Everyone panicked, whipping their heads toward the monitoring screens.
The scene displayed upon them made the blood in their veins freeze solid. Twenty miles from the Ancient Capital, the flat terrain had suddenly split open into a colossal, pitch-black ravine five miles long and bottomless. Searing magma surged and spewed from beneath the fissure, fusing with the deathly mists to create a living hellscape.
And rising from that abyssal depths came a gigantic hand—composed of countless massive black boulders and bleached bones, towering a hundred meters high—that suddenly thrust upward!
That colossal hand slammed violently into the surrounding hillsides, shattering massive chunks of earth under its horrifying grip. Following that, a muffled, earth-shaking roar reminiscent of spring thunder erupted from the throat of an ancient demon king, shaking the heavens and earth and scattering the roiling black clouds overhead!
The pressure of a true Monarch swept across the land like an invisible tsunami, crushing every living thing within a radius of dozens of miles!
Lin Feng took a deep breath, a flash of extreme exhilaration igniting in his eyes. He turned and strode toward the door, leaving behind a single sentence echoing through the suffocatingly silent room:
“Wait for me to bring back its head for breakfast.”