Sun Heng, the late city lord of Three Mountain City, had launched the first campaign to clear the ferocious beasts.
At the moment of his death on the summit of the Upright Brush, his final thought was a second campaign against the beasts.
He peeled back his own skin and draped it over his son, covering the boy with the Kun Drum — all for the sake of this very day.
And his wife, Dou Yuemei, inherited his last wish. She took up his city lord's seat, and with it the immense burden that had weighed on his shoulders.
On the peak of the Upright Brush, could he truly close his eyes in peace?
The Killer Rock Bees that had defied generations of cultivators at the foot of Jade Balance Peak were to become history this very day.
And everyone standing before Jade Balance Peak were witnesses to it.
Sun Xiaoman had already cried herself into a mess. She had always held her younger brother in frustration, feeling that since their father's death their mother had spoiled him rotten, pampering him into a dreadful state.
But precisely because of that, she knew how much he dreaded pain, how timid he was.
Yet he listened so well.
The stingers of the Killer Rock Bees were venomous and vicious; a single sting was pure agony. What kind of pain would such a dense barrage of stingers bring?
"Your father favored you unfairly, so I had to give a little more love to Xiaoyan." Dou Yuemei said, pausing, as if she too could barely hold back her feelings, a sob threading her voice: "You always say your mother is partial. Do you think she wants to be?"
"Mother! Let me go back! Let me go back... wuwuwu... I'm dying of pain!"
Wave after wave of Killer Rock Bees fell; wave after wave of stinger attacks came on.
Sun Xiaoyan had cried himself hoarse. He was, after all, only a child of thirteen.
"Mother! Sister!" he wailed.
Dou Yuemei suddenly shouted at the top of her lungs: "Sun Xiaoyan, turn yourself around and charge forward!"
"Don't forget whose skin you're wearing!"
"Your father never once retreated!"
She seemed to pour every last ounce of strength into it, so much so that she swayed when the shouting was done.
No one had expected what happened next.
For Sun Xiaoyan did turn around.
He charged forward, sobbing.
He was brave, and he was terrified.
He hurt and he cried, and he yelled and he ran.
Everyone watched this in silence.
Watched this little fatso charge the Killer Rock Bees alone.
Before this, having witnessed the death-defying courage of the Three Mountain City cultivators, Jiang Chen had found it hard to understand what the plague of beasts truly meant to this city.
Now he vaguely understood.
"I want to figure out where these beasts come from."
Only by knowing where the beasts came from, how they bred, and where the source lay, could they wipe them out completely.
"Who knows?" said Li Yun.
Rock-cave after rock-cave they swept through. Sun Xiaoyan stumbled on, enduring fully five shichen — from broad daylight to dusk. The cultivators clearing the Killer Rock Bees changed shifts a dozen times or more.
The once horrifyingly dense swarm finally dwindled to a sparse scattering.
And Sun Xiaoyan could no longer even cry aloud. His plump body sagged like a lump of mud.
Dou Yuemei dashed over the moment it happened and gathered her son into her arms.
Felt his warmth. Touched his heartbeat.
Kissed his forehead. Wiped away his tears.
"Charge forward! Sweep clean Jade Balance Peak!"
She ground out the order.
The entire Three Mountain City Dao Academy took part — from instructors to students, from the dean to the newest disciples — two hundred and eighty-seven people in all.
Added to those were nearly a hundred cultivators from the Three Mountain City garrison.
All of them acted of their own will, refusing the bounty.
And more than a hundred cultivators from all over, drawn by the fat reward, had also come.
In total, over five hundred cultivators, under unified command, advanced up Jade Balance Peak wave by wave.
Every kind of Dao art hurled blazing light in every color. Wherever they passed, mountain stone shattered, trees snapped, beasts fell dead, and a mountain road took shape.
And Sun Xiaoyan had already sunk into sleep in his mother's arms.
He was too tired.
...
Jiang Chen was amid the charging ranks of cultivators. Their squad had been scattered; each man fought on his own.
A dozen or so Bright Suspended Lanterns of Mohist make floated overhead, casting a strong light that bathed all of Jade Balance Peak as bright as noon. By then Dou Yuemei had taken command. With the Three Mountain City Dao Academy cultivators as the core, she divided everyone into five teams that rotated casting their Dao arts, advancing the line steadily up the mountain.
A few experts were given freedom to act on their own. Like Li Yun, sweeping forward wrapped in a red tide of sword-light. Like Sun Xiaoman, swinging a pair of Mountain-Toppling Hammers, leaving nothing but a mush of flesh wherever she passed.
And like that mysterious woman from the State of Yun. With a casual gesture, she seemed to tear black clouds down from the sky, turning them into all manner of cloud beasts that slaughtered the fierce beasts. Such supernatural methods Jiang Chen had never seen. She alone was worth an entire squad.
The clearing made pleasing progress, unfolding smoothly. But an unease never lifted from Jiang Chen's heart.
If the beast lair were only this level, how could Sun Heng have fallen in battle? How could the squad led by Wu Shan back then have been annihilated, leaving only Li Yun?
In sheer perilous steepness, Jade Balance was no match for the Upright Brush. But its body was larger, and correspondingly it harbored many more beasts.
As they neared the mountainside, Dou Yuemei grew noticeably more cautious.
"Team B, fall back and rest. Teams C and D, hold the line. Teams E and A, form your seals and prepare!"
This was the first time two teams had been moved up to the front at once, and she had also shortened the rest time of the other two teams.
Soon everyone knew why.
"Hahaha!"
"Coo coo coo..."
One shrill, one low — two entirely different calls rang through the night sky at the same instant.
A twin-headed monstrous eagle shrieked in like a bolt of lightning. Its two wings spread a full zhang or more, as though an entire swath of night were in motion.
A Yin-Yang Twin-Headed Eagle!
Almost in the same moment it appeared, every beast around the mountainside of Jade Balance went wild.
Their pupils blazed crimson, roused to their most savage ferocity.
The two hundred cultivators of Teams C and D had hardly braced before they felt enormous pressure.
Once the Yin-Yang Twin-Headed Eagle began its shrieking, it would continue until the battle finished.
Back then, Sun Heng had carved through the beast tide, fought his way to the summit of the Upright Brush, and slain exactly such a beast — but he too had burned out his last strength killing the Yin-Yang Twin-Headed Eagle.
Now on Jade Balance, here was such a beast on the mountainside alone.
Dou Yuemei's heart sank straight down.
But before all these people, she could not let it show.
So she raised both hands, and a towering wall of stone rose, stretching almost all the way around Jade Balance Peak. Such was the Dao-art might of a pinnacle expert of the Soaring Dragon realm.
The tall stone wall held the beast packs firmly back, buying the caught-off-guard cultivators time to adjust.
But the beasts had gone mad.
A unicorn bull-shaped beast pounded the ground in a wild rush and slammed headfirst into the wall. Its single horn snapped clean off. Blood streamed down its head, yet it did not care — instead it drove its broken horn in for another strike!
Such madness!
Back on the Upright Brush, it was precisely this sudden, frenzied eruption of the beast packs that had collapsed the defensive line.
Would this scene play out again now?
"Fairy Ye, I need more cloud beasts to make a buffer!" Dou Yuemei shouted.
The cloud-beast secret art of the cultivator from the State of Yun suited this moment best. Otherwise they would have no choice but to fill the gap with human lives.
The mysterious cultivator, face veiled in thin gauze, ran her ten fingers like threading needles. Tigers, leopards, bears, bulls... this burst yielded a full hundred. Cloud beast after cloud beast raced down from the sky to tangle with the ferocious beasts.
But there were simply too many beasts!
The relentless, frenzied charge happened at that very moment to reach its breaking point, and the stone wall that stretched the entire circuit around Jade Balance Peak collapsed in an instant!
Beasts surged through like a flood.
The cultivator from the State of Yun was powerful, but she clearly lacked experience — or perhaps trusted the stone wall's defense too much, misjudging how long it could hold. She had just poured out every last measure in the previous burst, and now her strength was failing!