Chapter 600: Seizing the Heart of the War-Touched Ancient Tree

The strategy chosen by the Sky-Domain AI was nothing short of perfect. Through a combination of effects, just a single “Blood Judgment,” empowered by the “God of the Hunt’s Weakpoint Mark,” unleashed unimaginable damage on the War-Touched Ancient Tree ahead.

Not only was every shred of the tree’s outer life force wiped out, but a massive hole was punched straight through its towering trunk.

“Hou hou hou!”

The ancient tree’s branches shook wildly, making the whole starry sky seem to tremble. An unearthly, mournful wail echoed through every corner of the void.

A moment later, the Seventh-Tier War-Touched Ancient Tree stirred again. Chaotic laws swirled atop its trunk, and in an instant, a gigantic, ethereal cross appeared at the tip of its leafy crown.

“War Judgment!”

Song Chi recognized the cross mark immediately and knew how terrifying this divine ability from the War-Touched Ancient Tree was.

Its function resembled the “Timepiece Chessboard’s” Time • Chessboard effect. It could subject any designated target to an inescapable, chaotic trial. If the judgment succeeded, then just like a creature pulled into the high-dimensional space of the “Timepiece Chessboard,” all their power would be forcibly dropped by an entire major rank.

But this skill, unleashed in utter frenzy by the Seventh-Tier War-Touched Ancient Tree, was about to face its greatest challenge yet.

Buzz, buzz!

You heard it before you saw it.

A sharp sword cry rang out across the battlefield, and the next instant, a massive spectral blade came streaking from the distance.

This phantom blade was woven from spatial and light elements. Its speed defied description as it shot through the cross-shaped judgment mark summoned by the War-Touched Ancient Tree, splitting it apart mid-flight.

Right after, the cross imbued with chaotic laws shattered completely. Only then did a dark purple mist projection above the mirror warship finally flicker into view.

Within that purple mist, sword energy whirled ceaselessly. It was clearly the Flying Sword Form secret art, the very one Song Family had obtained by chance from the Sha Sword Secret Arts Inheritance Stele on the Red Star Continent.

But it didn’t end there. After smashing apart the War Judgment, the quasi-Eighth-Tier Omniverse Market Projection—under Song Chi’s direct control—attacked again.

The sword’s avatar sped forward, this time unleashing not the Sha Sword Chant but Sword Light Split.

The sword beam split into nine shards, each one forged from a fusion of elemental laws, and pierced the Seventh-Tier War-Touched Ancient Tree’s trunk with ease, one after another.

After this onslaught, the War-Touched Ancient Tree’s vitality was depleted to the very brink.

This ancient starry tree had grown for over a hundred thousand years, yet it was nearly destroyed in an instant. To Song Chi, though, this outcome seemed only natural.

After all, the force at work was the Market Projection. By its very nature, its rank exceeded most myth-level beings. Even if its projected strength lagged by half a tier compared to its full power, it still boasted true quasi-Eighth-Tier might—far beyond what a mere Seventh-Tier star plant could endure.

Just as Song Chi prepared to end it for good, the War-Touched Ancient Tree made a move that sent chills down his spine.

Chaotic energy and law spiraled all around. At first, nothing seemed off, but as they intensified beyond a certain point, Song Chi, viewing through the Market Projection, instantly swept his gaze to the surroundings.

He saw chaotic power and law layering thickly in every direction, cutting off all routes in and out of the battlefield. At the same time, the War-Touched Ancient Tree—though its life force was nearly exhausted—gathered more and more chaotic law into itself.

“This isn’t right. The domain’s sealed, the chaos is going wild… This tree’s about to self-destruct!”

The thought had barely formed before Song Chi took action. First, he linked his mind to the mirror warship and ordered the Sky-Domain AI to activate the Pusa Zen Seal.

He wanted to use the Zen Seal: External Time Stop effect to buy a second or two, while his own purple mist energy kept surging toward the War-Touched Ancient Tree, aiming to finish it off in the gap.

But the limits of the War Domain were still a real problem. Even if the quasi-Eighth-Tier Market Projection was mostly unaffected, those limits were not completely ignorable. The mirror warship’s built-in powers were unrelated to the market projection’s abilities.

In the end, the Sky-Domain AI was the fastest to react. Calculating that its attack alone might not stop the tree, it triggered a Projection Emperor Stone on the mirror warship even while launching its own attack.

It also unleashed the Zen Seal · Internal · Time Acceleration on the stone. Within an instant, under the mirror warship’s coverage, the projection of the Heavenly Ruin condensed above the ship.

With mind and will as one, not a moment was wasted. The Heavenly Ruin’s projected warship formed fully, and Song Chi immediately activated its Timepiece Chessboard component.

Or, to be precise, the “Flow of Time • Prison” ability of the Timepiece Chessboard.

This mythic trait activated with a speed far eclipsing the Pusa Zen Seal’s external time stop.

After all, gold-tier components were still seriously hampered by the War Domain, while mythic-tier components remained unaffected.

Almost the instant the Heavenly Ruin’s projection appeared, the Seventh-Tier War-Touched Ancient Tree—on the verge of exploding—was sealed away with the power of time and vanished from the starry sky.

Its ultimate fate, naturally, was to be imprisoned within a higher-dimensional, closed-off realm of time.

With a window of opportunity, Song Chi had the virtual sea projection of the Heavenly Ruin shoot forward—or rather, activate Neutron-Star Fission to approach the War-Touched Ancient Tree’s original position—before unleashing the High-Energy Particle Storm effect.

The motive behind all these moves was quite simple.

Prevent the War-Touched Ancient Tree’s self-destruction.

Only this way could he secure the War-Touched Ancient Tree Heart. All his previous efforts wouldn’t be in vain.

When he finished his preparations, Song Chi released the Flow of Time • Prison. The Seventh-Tier War-Touched Ancient Tree, still locked in its final self-destruct pose, reappeared in space.

But this time, while it was still caught on the brink of detonation, the tree was enveloped in a surging torrent of high-energy particles. Under this onslaught, with its life force already a mere thread, the last sparks of vitality were scoured away by the particle storm.

The moment the War-Touched Ancient Tree died, its self-destruction was canceled, and the battlefield’s domain dissolved as well.

Before the mirror warship could catch up, the virtual sea projection of the Heavenly Ruin had already made its next move.

The projected warship, previously without substance, quietly solidified into reality.

After Reality-conversion, Song Chi himself acted fast, digging out the War-Touched Ancient Tree Heart. He also claimed the Seventh-Tier Life Crystal within the trunk, a resource all such plants develop to boost their growth and survival.

Besides those, there were twelve War Fruits snapped up as well—the only fruits this ancient tree had ever borne in its long history—all taken by Song Chi.

As for the twelve War Fruits, Song Chi planned to keep them as a special resource, or maybe put them up for sale in the market. After all, they were rare items that let creatures directly comprehend the Law of Chaos—if he got lucky, someone who truly understood their value might show up.

Song Chi didn’t even waste the tree’s massive trunk. Using the Superbody Compression Plate component, he shrunk it drastically, and then the now-solid Heavenly Ruin projection carried it back to the family fleet.

Although the trunk had lost both its heart and its Life Crystal and was worth a tiny fraction of its whole, it was still an enormous Seventh-Tier starry plant, packed with a hundred-thousand years of stored energy. Even as a corpse, it contained significant reserves.

Song Chi planned to extract its Dominion Soul and send the trunk into the Cultivation Sanctuary. That realm contained many rare transplanted plants, and this War-Touched Ancient Tree’s remains could boost the sanctuary’s energy and fertility, speeding up all cultivation inside.

As for Dominion Origin Blood—that simply couldn’t be extracted from star plants. It was unique to flesh-and-blood creatures, just as they could not produce a Star Plant Tree Heart.

Once this was done, the main Heavenly Ruin on the Song Family fleet suddenly opened its hatch, and a mini-sized Flamewrath Giant emerged from within.

It looked ready to activate its Tome of Divine Will and recall the mirror warship, but it finally paused and abandoned the idea.

Since the Morningstar and Song Family’s combined fleet was still on its way through the Tianpan Galaxy, it made more sense to let the mirror warship keep acting alone on the Serpent Eye Floating-Land than to call it back and sit idle.

As for the Tianpan Galaxy, it used to be known as part of the Five-Plate Galaxy Cluster, but that wasn’t actually true. The original name came from the fact that Torch Human Civilization controlled only five galaxies there, but in reality, there were six. The name Six-Plate Galaxy Cluster would be much more accurate.

Which six, exactly? There’s no need to elaborate—it was simply the addition of the newly conquered Chipan Galaxy taken by the two kingdoms of Tianpan.

Chipan had always belonged to the Torch Human Cluster. It was only used as a bridgehead by the Eight-Armed Serpent Demon Civilization. Now, with Chipan retaken, the two kingdom fleets were pressing into true Eight-Armed territory.

The actual border between the Eight-Armed Serpent Demon galaxies and the Torch Human galaxies was marked by a huge Void Belt, including the boundary between the Six-Plate Cluster and the Eight-Armed Demon’s realm.

Chipan sat at the cluster’s northernmost edge. Farther north began the heartland of the Eight-Armed Serpent Demon’s galaxy cluster, separated by a Starsea Void Belt tens of thousands of light years wide.

At this moment, the two kingdom fleets were racing through the depths of that starry void.

For battleships—especially dreads, dreads, and Star-Annihilator-class Ships—hundreds of thousands of light years wasn’t far. A handful of star jumps or so would cover it. But topping two hundred million ships, including countless regular warships, made the reality far more challenging.

Ordinary warships could only manage short-range teleportation, and not all of them even had that. For a stable and efficient advance, they had to set up stargates and logistics bases at every interval.

On that front, the Song Family made a killing—even before the war began.

Before the war, they got the scoop on the upcoming war a century in advance and were able to prepare ahead of everyone else.

Now, with Song Chi’s ability to freely move between the War Domain, Dragon-Spine Continent, and the Red Star Superdimensional Continent, plus massive storage devices like the Dimensional Spatial Stone and Flame God Clan’s space bracelets, it was easy for them to transport all kinds of supplies back and forth.

Thanks to this, the Song Family could sell strategic materials and logistics supplies at high prices—making a fortune even from their cut of the official division, not to mention that they performed outstandingly on the Chipan battlefield and secured 140,000 light years of territory for themselves.

Morningstar Kingdom and the Song and Luo Families’ joint fleet.

At the center of the Song Family’s formation, the Heavenly Ruin dreadnought stood tall.

Inside the ship’s control room, with a gentle shift in space, Song Chi disappeared from the warship.

He reappeared inside the Cultivation Sanctuary.

In hand, he held the Heart of the Seventh-Tier War-Touched Ancient Tree and approached the Silver Apple Mother Tree.

It seemed to sense him. The peak Sixth-Tier Silver Apple Mother Tree began shaking its branches vigorously the moment Song Chi entered, surging with energy.

Song Chi wasted no time and tossed the War-Touched Ancient Tree Heart to the Silver Apple Mother Tree.

It instantly acted like a magnet, pulling the heart into itself in a flash.

What followed was the merging of the War-Touched Ancient Tree Heart with the Silver Apple Mother Tree’s trunk—a process that lasted several days. Since the Cultivation Sanctuary had already reached Seventh-Tier, it was more than enough for the Silver Apple Mother Tree to advance, so Song Chi had no need to further reinforce the sanctuary.

At the moment, he lacked Dominion Souls anyway. Though several dozen could still be extracted from the War-Touched Ancient Tree, it wasn’t urgent to strengthen the Cultivation Sanctuary further.

There were no Eighth-Tier plants there for now—the Seventh-Tier sanctuary would suffice.

Three days later, a burst of wild energy surged through the Cultivation Sanctuary. Song Chi personally witnessed the Silver Apple Mother Tree grow from a few hundred thousand meters to over a hundred thousand kilometers tall—officially entering the ranks of Seventh-Tier plants.