The Dawn of the New World

While the guardsmen's own spiritual energy felt like a nice and cool free-flowing stream of water, the foreign energy presented itself as a small fish made of pure light that was swimming through it.

Hao Xuan's spiritual sense reached out and entered their bodies without their knowledge. His own soul was strong enough to overpower them completely if he so desired but he chose to keep it on the down-low.

To the guardsmen, this invasion of their bodies did not appear outright threatening. All they saw was Hao Xuan's bright green eyes staring down at them in silence. They could not force themselves to look away and fell into a sort of a trance.

The surroundings became darker and darker while Hao Xuan's shadowy silhouette became larger in their eyes, bearing down at them like to a great mountain.

They felt weak and powerless in front of him. The difference in their soul power made them want to kneel down and kowtow in reverence. All of their secrets were laid bare at a single glance.

This was the difference in their realms. No matter how religiously they cultivated, how strongly they believed in their cause, it was nothing compared to the overwhelming power difference between them.

Hao Xuan was a tiger, and they were mere lambs in his presence.

They wanted to answer but Hao Xuan's invading spiritual sense left their minds wandering as it investigated their bodies in extreme detail.

He found numerous scars on their organs and an artificially made meridian system. It was quite obviously not their own. They weren't born with it but acquired it through outside means sometime later.

The blood vessels that carried the spiritual energy were new and bright red in color, even more so than usual.

'This is Dai Zhi's doing. A vampire's ability.'

Hao Xuan's hand slowly reached out and just when the guardsmen thought they were about to lose their loves he patted them on the shoulder one by one.

"You are natives?"

As the words left his mouth the pressure bearing down on the guardsmen popped like a bubble and they were freed from his grasp. It felt like an eternity to them but it had only been a handful of seconds.

Their foreheads were covered in sweat just like their backs while their heads bobbed up and down vigorously.

"Y-Yes, m-my lord," they stutteringly replied in unison.

"Hmm."

Hao Xuan said nothing else. Flashing a quick smile he walked past them with large strides, quite literally leaving them shaking in their boots.

He was quite happy that they weren't that strong just yet. If there were ordinary soldiers then the elite could not be stronger than him.

Hao Xuan walked past a staircase leading to the lower floors and peered over the edge of the roof to finally lay his eyes on the entire compound that left him flabbergasted.

The building he was on was a simple stone tower, the tallest one among six other much wider buildings to either side of it. To the front was a giant courtyard, or rather a stadium surrounded by rows upon rows of seats on three sides that acted both as its outer boundary and a resting place for the countless small ant-like figures that were filling its grounds.

The main grounds alone were approximately 1500 meters in length and 600 meters in width and filled to the brim with people.

It looked like an ocean of white from Hao Xuan's point of view. Each of them was draped in the same white garments that the guardsmen and the men from the other timeline wore.

At a single glance, there were close to 5,000 people here all combined.

Hao Xuan unwittingly breathed in a breath of cold air. Although he was looking at thousands of individual men and women, they presented as a single entity in his eyes. Each of their spiritual energy readings were almost identical to one another.

Rather than 5,000 different individuals, in Hao Xuan's eyes they looked like one giant organism with 5,000 different cells powering it.

Alone they might not be that strong individually but together, the mere presence they gave off was overbearingly suffocating. For a lack of a better word, it was akin to a tsunami of spiritual energy.

He had never seen so many people so in-tune with one another. Hao Xuan could not bear to look away.

'I was...wrong. This is...I can't...'

His thoughts were disturbed by the sound of footsteps coming from behind him.

89 walked up beside Hao Xuan and gazed down at the same scenery.

"Quite awe-inspiring don't you think? I am told Lord Dai Zhi came up with it himself. He trained them in such a way that their Qi's are completely in line with one another. Each one of them can borrow the other's spiritual energy so unless you kill all of them at once, it won't be easy to get an upper hand."